I like to read several books in parallel for cross-fertilization of my thoughts. I am now reading, among other things, How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and the updated edition of Robert Cialini’s classic book Influence – the psychology of persuasion.
In How Democracies Die, describes how it is not the institutions or the constitution that uphold democracy per se, but its soft guardrails – norms of Mutual Toleration, and Institutional Forbearance. This means talking to and about counterparties with respect and not exploiting various loopholes to temporarily gain the power of your own Political Party.
What we are seeing in Sweden is unfortunately a development where representatives of parties are using increasingly harsh rhetoric and exploiting loopholes to increase their own power and reduce that of others. The way back is to reduce this and not succumb to the temptation to increase one’s power with some kind of rationalization where the ends justify the means. This does not only apply to party representatives, but I think it applies to all of us in society. We are all involved in shaping private and public conversation, through what we say and what we do not say, such as not speaking up when someone violates these norms.
The book Influence is about various basic principles for influence, which can be used both ethically and unethically. It depends, among other things, on whether it is natural in a situation or if you stage something, and whether it benefits the person who influences one-sidedly or is a win-win.
One of the principles is “liking”, which can be increased in different ways. You like people who are similar to yourself, who give compliments and those we come into contact with repeatedly in a positive way. In experiments, they compared how meetings between students of different ethnicities went depending on the instructions they received. Those who were encouraged to look for similarities, began to like each other more.
He describes how well-intentioned attempts to integrate minorities fail by simply mixing, for example people in schools. Research shows that this is not enough. Repeated contact needs to be positive. Cialdini describes how teaching in ways which unilaterally favors competition (for the teacher’s favor, etc.) creates polarization and disapproval, while if you add elements of “jigsaw classroom”, where everyone needs to contribute together to reach the goal, creates liking. A positive side effect was that the minorities’ self-confidence grew, they liked school more and got better results on tests. The majority liked the school more and the test results were at least as good as usual.
You can also use compliments in an ethical way such as encouraging behaviors that you want the other person to live up to. They will like you mor and tend to want to do more of this behaviour.
Another principle Cialdini brings up is “unity”/”we-ness” – sharing identity in a clan-like way such as ethnicity, nationality, family, but also political party and religious affiliation. Research shows that you care about the group you belong to because it benefits you. Unfortunately, it can also make you want to benefit your own group so much that you rationalize lying to disadvantage the other group. Too much unity can thus go off the rails. He suggests that we come together as humanity, which means that you choose to share social/emotional experiences even with people outside your own group. This can be short-lived, but if you do this regularly, the bonds can become stronger and more important.
So, think every day about how you can contribute to nurturing our democracy through how you talk and with whom. You are an important part of our common democracy.
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