Interlock PrayerNet

The current debate in the United States over judicial appointments and the lack of rational discord on both sides of the debate has led me to review the art of persuasion. My problem is that I am in love with logic. I admire anyone who can effectively argue their position, even if I would completely disagree with their conclusions. What has pained me over the years is the discovery that rational thought has been steadily losing influence over the power of emotional pressure. More time than not, thinking is being displaced by feeling as the final persuader.

Actually there are three primary obstacles that need to be overcome before someone would change their different point of view. These are known as the factual barrier, the ethical barrier, and the emotional barrier. The factual barrier is the first and generally, easiest to overcome. It states that we do not want to accept a new fact when it contradicts a truth we already accept. Obviously the longer we have held a particular idea, the harder it will be to convinced otherwise. The logical barrier is overcome when the new source of information is more credible than what has already been accepted.

The factual barrier is a logical one – superior logic wins the day.
The next two, however, are more psychological. When we are given information that goes against our own sense of right and wrong, it runs up against our ethical barrier. These do not necessarily refer to moral issues, although they certainly include them. It can be areas that as mundane as how we spend our time or money. I hate to waste time and my wife hates to spend money. We hardly ever persuade the other in those areas.

The biggest hurdle to persuasion, however, is the emotional barrier. Quite simply, we do not want to accept anything that could hurt us emotionally. It is amazing how this barrier can impact human behavior.

One of the pioneers in social psychology and its power to force conformity was Solomon E. Asch (1907-1996). He conducted a very simple experiment. He showed eight subjects a series of lines of different lengths (say three inches, four inches, and five inches) and asked the subjects to match them with another line (four inches). Seven successive people would claim that the three-inch line matched the four-inch line, which caused the last guy to be extremely confused. His physical reality was in conflict with the social reality. What he did not know was that the seven previous subjects were all actors, and he was the only true subject of the experiment. Amazingly, only 29 percent of Asch’s subjects refused to join the bogus majority. More than two out of three people choose to go along with the group, even considering that the issue is completely unimportant (the length of a line) and the other people are complete strangers. Their feelings of rejection from the group are a stronger persuader than what they can plainly see before their eyes.

But what if there is not such a strong group pressure, but simply a passionate minority? Today we are celebrating Mother’s Day, and a woman named Anna Jarvis started this event almost single-handedly. This simple woman lost her mother (also named Anna) in 1905, and wanted to honor her by establishing a day to recognize mothers. It took two years, but finally her church in Grafton, West Virginia decided to celebrate a Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, the second Sunday of May. She never stopped talking about the need for national Mother’s Day. She wrote to ministers, businessmen, and politicians in state after state to get them to support the idea. Finally, on May 8th, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the official proclamation establishing Mother’s Day as a national holiday that was to be held each year on the second Sunday in May.

One person who never quits can simply wear out those who do not care as passionately about the issue. The motivational guru Tom Peters paraphrased Frederich Nietzsche when he said, “anything that has ever been accomplished has behind it a monomaniac on a mission.