Two years of framing: my personal experience
I was first exposed to the concepts of framing and to Lakoff’s ideas when about two years ago, when I started participating in demspeak, a framing site that started after the 2004 elections. There I met an active community sharing ideas, frames, and their understanding of Lakoff’s work.
So ever since then, I have adopted many of Lakoff’s ideas into my daily conversations with people that I disagree with. As anyone would expect, some tools worked better than others.
Reframing helped me to think through what are progressive values. And I felt that this was probably the most important benefit that I have gotten out of it.
I also have found that repeating key phrases or frames to be especially useful. It makes one’s position clear in online conversation, especially when there is a high volume of posts.
Ironically, I was able to use framing very successfully to get online forum members to my side quite successfully while debating another person. Specifically, I was able to get people behind me when debating the responsibility of the government in Katrina. My opponent said that it wasn’t since he was focused on protecting Bush. I posted a poll asking people if they believed that the government has a responsibility to protect their citizens. The general response was, ‘what is the point of it if it doesn’t.’
Obviously this didn’t persuade my opponent. But then I found that persuading conservatives was hard, even when you tried hard for them to show them common ground. Moreover, <b>I discovered that it was even hard to persuade fellow progressives, not into taking my position, <i>but to agree to be respectful to each other’s different positions.</i> </b>
I found another thing: I learned that people with whom I had a successful conversation would often switch back to their oppositional behavior after a short period. Moreover, they would often be very suspicious of me afterwards. My guess is that these people are very focused on preserving their worldview, and conversations alone will not be enough to persuade them. They need to see concrete evidence, either our behavior or some events in the news.
Framing gives us a useful technique to reach out to other people. I think that it is good enough that I recommend it to other people. At the same time, it should be made clear to practitioners that framing is a very important tool, but not a silver bullet.
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Hi Hugo!
Not only is it hard to get conservatives to change their minds, it's jsut as hard to get progressives to change their minds. It seems especially hard to get people thinking and speaking about overarching values rather than issues. You can get through in one conversation, but then the next time its back to where you started.
Happy to talk to you again.
Role of Brains, Groups, and Emotions
I agree that perhaps the most beneficial thing I've learned from Lakoff's work is how to understand my own values deeply and clearly in a more powerful way than ever before. But my understanding of the difficulties inherent in persuading others with different worldviews to think in my terms has been broadened well beyond Lakoff's work.
For starters, Lakoff and Rockridge have expressed the need for repetition with consistent framing to strengthen neural pathways that associate the particular configuration of semantic content in a pattern that shapes thoughts at a pre-conscious level. In order to understand why this is necessary, I needed to move on to work by other cognitive scientists (many of whom have also influenced Lakoff). One of the most compelling sources was "Descartes' Error" by Antonio Damasio. Damasio is a brain scientist who studies the roles of body states, emotions, and cognition by conducting sophisticated psychological experiments with people who have brain mal-developments and damage to key areas. His discussions of the complexities inherent in neural connections and firing pathways reveals aspects of knowledge associated with the pre-conscious structuring of thought. His work also shows how many different regions of the brain are coordinated to construct semantic meaning (via metaphorical associations between body memory and abstract representations of knowledge). Another key work is "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence Deacon. His explanations of the complexity inherent in brain function is perhaps a bit dense at times, but does reinforce the challenges that exist in conditioning the brain to think in new ways after the macro-level structures are already more or less in place (as they are in the brain of an adult).
Damasio and others (including Samuel Epstein and Paul Slovic) have advanced compelling evidence that emotions play an essential role in motivating our thoughts toward one frame or another. Thus, conceptual framing is not purely in the realm of cognition, but is influenced considerably by what are called affective images. Affect is a term that describes the inherent bodily feeling of goodness or badness (gut feelings) associated with images, words, and other forms of representation. This is why words like "hate" and "treasure" evoke different feelings in your body when you think of them.
It has also been found that there are many different kinds of emotional experiences. Of particular significance to efforts to shift a person's thinking (or, gasp, their worldview through effective framing), are intensely powerful emotional experiences that give extra potency to ideas associated with them. This kiind of dramatic shift in emphasis is pretty clear in the example of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Many Americans learned that we are vulnerable and are not immune to tremendous harm inflict by outsiders. This emotionally salient experience quickly and permanently altered the thinking of many people.
Another key factor that limits one's ability to influence the thinking of others is the role of ingroup. Ingroup is the bond of identification one feels with a group of people they feel they are a part of. Ingroup is defined relative to some cognitively compatible notion of an outgroup, or those that are opposed to what one stands for and identifies with. Sociologists and anthropologists have discovered powerful insights into the nature of ingroup identification. Confrontational claims made against one's group are met with suspicion, hostility, and defensiveness (not exactly the ideal context for changing one's mind). So it is not in the least surprising that you had a difficult time convincing Conservatives that their ideas are in need of modification. If they perceive you to be from the outgroup (or not part of their ingroup), they will not openly trust you. As the anthropologist Scott Atran has shown, trust comes from ritualized sacrifices that demonstrate commitment to the ingroup. As a progressive, you have "sacrificed" (given freely of) much time and energy. Other progressives likely recognize this and have become comfortable identifying with you as one of "us". Until those who disagree with you feel comfortable that you are one of "them", they will be biased towards suspicion that you may be deceiving them.
For these reasons, and many more, framing is not all of the story. It is a critical and necessary component, but will fall short of persuading those with different views without incorporating strategies that include emotional salience, a sense of comfort and goodness, and identification with you as a member of some common group.
I have also been studying framing (and, as you can see, other aspects of cognitive science) for about two years. There is a lot of great stuff out there and we need to incorporate as much of it as possible to bring our common Progressive Vision to fruition.
All the best,
Joe Brewer
Thanks for your feedback
Joe,
I also suspected that identity a big role, and I glad that the research that you quoted in your comment seems to be confirming that.
I don't know if this was done purposefully or not, but turning confrontation and hatred towards others as part of one's identity helps prevent people to see common ground. I remember how difficult it was to get conservatives to admit any defect about George W. Bush back in 2004. I even had people who denied that he was an alcoholic, <i>after I showed them a source where he admitted it himself.</i>
It was only after the two rough years that followed, Katrina, the high price of gas, and the never-ending Republican scandals that broke the emotional bonds that conservatives had with George W. Bush.
After the emotional link was broken, many conservatives seemed to be finally open to identified with the hated liberal. And they discovered that they weren't horrible. Hopefully liberals discovered the same about conservatives. :)
At this point I am actively working on persuading a small group of people who meet at an internet forum to respect each other and come work together. The problem is that there both groups look at each other with total contempt, especially the conservatives towards the liberals. And they are not willing to grant any respect to their opponents. This is very frustrating.
New! Not a silver bullet
Thanks for sharing this story, HugoEstrada. Along with everyone else at the Rockridge Institute, I feel that its important that people understand that framing is not a silver bullet. Frames are the structures that shape how we perceive the world, so framing reality authentically is crucial. However, it doesn't change things overnight, and it's not just a matter of slogans, as I'm sure you understand. In Thinking Points (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/thinkingpoints), we are pretty clear about this, especially in Chapter Three, which you can download, if you are interested.
The right wing has been working to construct deep frames for decades, and those deep frames are necessary for the surface frames to resonate with people. When a conservative argues that people affected by Katrina failed to exercise "personal responsibility," he or she is invoking a deep frame that the right wing has invested years in building: you are responsible for yourself and it's not the government's job to help people who fail to take care of themselves. Progressives have not been aware of the need to construct these deep frames, but doing so is critical to achieving our long-term vision.
I think that a lot of people can relate to your experience with framing, both the successes and the difficulties. Thanks again.
Evan