Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The canvasser's opportunity wasn't to implant something of their own... Rather, it was to pit some things going on inside them against other things going on inside them, to get them to re-rank these things.
Yes, you don't like immigrants, but you like that immigrant you know. Or you don't favor a pathway to citizenship, but you know what it means to be overlooked and shut out...”

“Deline and his fellow canvassers didn't think of themselves as being divided against their targets on the other side of the doors so much as they thought of their targets as being divided against themselves. They saw them as being lost, grasping. It was another way of saying what Shenker-Osorio had described about the swing voter being confused, not centrist.”

“They feel a lot of conflicting emotions. They feel cognitive dissonance. So changing your mind is not actually about flipping a light switch: one second you think one thing, and the next second you think another. Changing your mind is about navigating through this morass of conflicting emotions and trying to pick your way through it and come out somewhere that makes you feel a little bit more resolved.”

“ "When we are disagreeing with someone," he [Deline] continued, "and we say, 'Your facts are wrong. Here are the correct facts,' without intending to, what we are doing is telling people that what they are feeling is wrong, which is threatening on a much more deeply emotional level than telling someone that their facts are wrong." That is when people lapse into defensiveness and shut down.”

“" 'Oh, all of these answers we're trying to give aren't helping.' We can try to answer people's concerns with facts and information...there's no answer we can give that dispels these fears. They're actually in a place where they're wrestling with some deeply seated emotions. The thing that actually made a difference was inviting them to talk about their lives,.. their stories, and sharing our stories." ”

“Something in Deline flipped as he began to have more such conversations. "It just completely changed my sense of agency and ability to right-size the world, and right-size my understanding of people around me," he said. It made him think, "I'm not surrounded by bogeymen. I'm surrounded by people who are working hard,... made a bad choice, and they had a huge impact on me, and I have to... be honest with them." ”

“"The experience of just getting to talk about it with him and focus on it being not an argument but a conversation about what's going on for you, what's going on for me, just allowed me to shed my sense that he was the enemy, and that he was this bogeyman that I needed to be afraid of, and it was fundamentally different for me. And I think he too shed his sense that I was this enemy got and this bogeyman..." ”

“ "It came from a place of desperation and feeling like I had no other choice but to try to talk to the people who I didn't think I could talk to," he said. As a gay man himself, Deline felt that the movement was winning in the courts and legislatures. "But," he said, "if we cannot switch something in the hearts and minds of a significant number of people around us, we are blocked." ”

“The goal, as he understood it, was, "Let's go try and talk to the people who are voting against us. Let's go into the neighborhoods where we lost heavily and knock on people's doors and find out (a) if we can have a conversation with the people who voted against us; (b) if we can talk to each other honestly; and (c) if that's possible, if there's anything we can do to change those minds." ”

“The appeal of the personal-connections route is that it is easier to go from people you know, certainly people you care for, to embracing a politics that would ease their lives. But the power of the perspective-taking detour is that it universalizes. It takes the particular struggle of one group and de-exoticizes it. It makes it a timeless human struggle...”

“So to the person who knows no immigrants, you might ask, "Have you ever struggled in your life? Have you ever wanted to do right by your kids but been hindered from doing so?" To the person who doesn't really know what transgender means, you might say, "Have you ever been counted out or disrespected just because of who you are?" ”

“ 'This is my brother- in-law. He's just a regular person.' And the message that I was able to get across to her was, 'When you think of immigrants, sure, you're thinking of the border crisis or gangs or whatever the media wants to bring up that week. But it's not that. It's people like me.' ”

“What struck Cesar was how her hostility to immigrants lay on the surface but, right below it, was the seedling of another view. Yet it wouldn't sprout on its own. It needed watering. The woman needed help making meaning of her experiences. Though she had, in her own brother-in-law, a source of dissonance with her view of immigration, "she doesn't see him as an immigrant guy,... 'Oh, this is my sister's husband.' ”

“He was the guy who tried to tell himself what John Cook had argued: that the crazies weren't perpetrators so much as victims of a society awash in mis- and disinformation. The method Cesar was learning was built on assumptions that pushed back against widespread cultural beliefs: that persuasion in politics doesn't work; that people can't and won't change; that calling out... is a moral duty...”

“Cesar learned that the deep canvasser had to listen, truly listen, and keep listening, then listen some more, as the person on the other side of the door explained why they felt some kind of way about transgender people or undocumented people or minimum-wage workers. He had to listen without judgment and with visible curiosity even when they were criticizing or degrading people like him.”

“Cook was trying to level the unfair playing field that disinformation tends to exploit. Human beings are understood to have two principal modes of thinking, fast and slow, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman famously called them. Fast thinking is reflexes. Slow thinking is reflection. Disinformation often appeals to the fast-thinking system. It plays to the gut, and the gut does as directed.”

“ "It's dark... the sun doesn't exist." Here the false belief itself is being mocked. But the people who succumb to these false beliefs are never mocked. Indeed, throughout the book, Cook uses a sleight-of-hand but well-meaning "we" for those who deny or minimize climate change: "We think of something as psychologically distant if we're not directly experiencing it." ”

“seriousness and sobriety... keeps them persisting at their fruitless countering of lies with facts... Humor, for example, has been shown to be an effective way to reveal the moves of science deniers, lowering the stakes of changing one's mind. Simplification can be effective, too, because it can reduce the shame feel in not understanding, a feeling that can foster proud many resistance to changing one's mind.”

“To make people feel stupid is to play back to them a version of themselves they don't recognize. But to appeal to them instead as critical thinkers who deserve to know how they are being misled this has the potential to work. And it works by harnessing one part of them—the deeply human desire not to be anyone's fool—against another part of them that has succumbed to manipulation. ”

“interpersonally or at the level of the system, Cook argues, the rather common practice of making manipulated people feel stupid is a terrible way to fight these forces. "Most people like to think that they are critical thinkers," Cook told me, "especially people who do, ironically, deny science or are conspiracy theorists." Never mind that they have allowed themselves to become the opposite of critical thinkers.”

“ "That if you've been exposed to this misinformation, you're a victim more than a malicious actor." Those in the reality-based world can be somewhat contradictory on this point-on the one hand, arguing that big, powerful institutions are abusing their power by aiding and abetting and spreading lies by exploiting victims and then, on the other hand, blaming citizens for falling prey to them.”

“Cook believes that the disinformation and manipulation problem is a shared social crisis, one that demands a collective answer. One basic shift he advocates... is in the attitude shown to those who take in disinformation. "The general avenue of approach I take is that people have been misled," he told me. "That if you've been exposed to this misinformation, you're a victim more than a malicious actor." ”

“Cook's idea about how to fight disinformation on a larger scale had resonances with Benscoter's vision: Don't fight disinformation with better information. Counter it by showing people how they're being conned.”

“And yet the emphasis of the existing literature was on priming people with facts to protect them from fake facts. What Cook was after was different. He wanted to vaccinate people's minds by showing them the moves disinformers make, the fallacies they employ to distort the facts, so that he might undercut their manipulations not just on one fake fact at a time but across the board.”

“the cult problem itself needed to be recast in the public imagination. This was a collective problem wrongly understood and experienced as individual family tragedies.... QAnon wasn't a problem... parents could sweet-talk their children out of, or, as was often the case, vice versa. If the country was to have any chance of solving it, it needed a public health response to a spreading pandemic of lost minds.”

“"It is time we stopped looking for some vague enemy called 'evil' which we will never find—and start looking at the real cause of extremism: human vulnerability." Any serious effort to defeat cults wanted to had to focus on interrupting the conditions that caused the buyers to buy, not just on clamping down on the sellers.”

“...attempt to displace... simply by planting a seed of doubt... He said that as he began to open his mind to the possibility that he just may have been lied to, another thought began to take over... He started to realize that it was possible that he just spent four years of his life working for a lie... The approach of displacement had broken through.”

“Among the attractions of a cult like the Moonies is that it offered a totalizing, all-explaining, all-inclusive home. Because it offers a logic to explain everything, everything suddenly makes sense.”

“Across the country an epidemic raged, a plague of grief without deaths. People mourned the lost living, whose minds had passed on to some strange beyond. Families cracked... An astonishing 17 percent of Americans were said to be QAnon believers now... It's one thing to help one person, or thirty, get out of a cult. But what do you do when your deprogramming target is forty-three million of your fellow citizens?”

“Among the newer difficulties Shenker-Osorio faced was that the modern right in America was no longer just animated by extreme ideas. An ever larger slice of it functioned in the manner of a cult, providing supporters with their own fully baked alternative reality, a world of fictions...This development added an epistemological aspect to the challenge of persuasion in an age of fracture.”