So what works better to change people’s minds? Calm, respectful, patient empathetic engagement that offers solutions and is open to compromise — or snarky, uncompromising anger?
I’m going to offer up a data point of one here — that data point being myself.
Back in 2010, I wrote a piece about body policing in popular culture, examining how celebrity gossip magazines give contradictory and impossible-to-follow messages about dieting and bodies, and how they applaud celebrities for staying rail-thin while at the same time gasping in horror about disordered eating. I titled the piece “Don’t Feed the Stars!: Celebrity Bodies and Gossip’s New Schizophrenia.”
I immediately got pushback on that title from more than one person, who complained that using the word “schizophrenia” as a pejorative was insulting to mentally ill people and contributed to their marginalization. One person in the conversation, Kit Whitfield, was very patient with me: they politely asked me to reconsider using the word; calmly explained why it was a problem; made it clear that they basically liked and respected me and just wanted to point out this one problem; stuck with me throughout several rounds of back-and-forth; and stuck with me even when I was getting snippy and defensive.
Sara K., on the other hand, just got angry — not only at my original post, but at my conversation with Kit. In a very snarky tone, she called me out on my privilege, and on how screwed-up it was for me to be telling a marginalized person how to talk about their marginalization with a privileged person. She made it clear that she basically liked and respected me, but she made it every bit as clear that she had lost some of that respect.
At the time, my reaction was to think, “Sara’s being a mean jerk! Kit is so awesome! It’s hard to hear people tell you you’re wrong, but it’s so much easier when they’re being nice and patient! Why can’t everyone be more like Kit?” (I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me. What can I say: I wasn’t as good at the social justice stuff back then.)
But in retrospect, it’s clear that both of these people were important in changing my mind.
I definitely valued Kit’s patience, their sympathy, their willingness to stay focused on the content and to overlook when I was getting impatient and snippy. But it was Sara who made me realize that this was important. It was Sara who made me realize that people were really being hurt by this — hurt enough to get angry, hurt about to get unpleasant with someone they basically liked and respected.
In the moment that this conversation was happening, I was getting that hot, defensive flush that you get when you’re doing something wrong and don’t want to admit it. You know — the Cognitive Dissonance Contortion Tango. So in the moment, of course I was happier with the person who was being all reassuring about how I wasn’t a bad person. But in order to take this seriously, I also needed the person who wasn’t reassuring me; who was forcing that cognitive dissonance on me; who was making me realize that I was not in fact being a good person, and that if I wanted to be a good person, I needed to change.
It took me a little while, but I am now being much more careful about using language that marginalizes the mentally ill. I am being much more careful about using words like “crazy” or “nuts” in a pejorative way, and about using words like “schizophrenic” to mean anything other than “having been diagnosed with the illness of schizophrenia.” And in fact, this conversation, and others like it, helped me accept the reality of my own mental illness. In realizing that my language was “other”-ing, and in working to not do that, I found it easier to not see mentally ill people as “other” — which made it easier to accept myself as one of them.
My point: “Good cop, bad cop” works.
Yes, in that hot, flushed moment when we’re doing the Cognitive Dissonance Tango, we respond more positively to the good cop. But that doesn’t mean the bad cop isn’t having an effect.
So when people are telling us things we don’t want to hear, the best reaction probably isn’t, “Why can’t you be nicer about it?” It’s an admission that we’ve lost the argument anyway: if all we can say is “You’d be more convincing if you were nicer,” and we’re not actually addressing their content, we might as well throw in the towel and not dig ourselves in deeper. (With our towel. Okay, I think I need to abandon that mixed metaphor.) But it’s also just not true. The good cops show us that we can be better people, and help show us how to do it. The bad cops show us that we’re screwing up at this “being a good person” thing, and they help show us exactly how. As uncomfortable as it is, we need both.
So belated thanks, to both Kit Whitfield and Sara K. I’m a better person now, thanks to you both.
Good Cop, Bad Cop is an abusive technique designed to create compliance regardless of truth, and was frequently associated with police torture. It’s no longer used by most police departments because it doesn’t achieve its goals.
Being a passionate advocate for the rights of the oppressed is not being a bad cop.
A big part of the challenge is the fact that we don’t by and large, do a very good job of recognizing the CDT when it’s happening. Regardless of what those who criticize us do (whether it’s yell or hand-hold – or both), it’s important for us to develop the skills to recognize what it looks like to be wrong but feel right. It’s to your credit that you were able to recognize it in yourself.
That’s important – a lot of these discussions get framed as ‘the good kind’ and ‘the bad kind’ of opposition to injustice, and that’s largely inaccurate.
I think part of it is that discussions about tone tend to conflate the aspects of forcefulness and spitefulness.
I suspect there is some perfect horizon convergence point where maximum ‘niceness’ and maximum ‘firmness’ meet.
But the point moves constantly and can never be identified ahead of time for a particular individual. Like a drunk walking a corridor we can bang into the opposite walls, or lean against one and bump into the doorknobs as we go.
I’m so working on a post about exactly this.
In my case, the “bad cop” treatment tends to cause me to either lash out defensively, or curl into a ball and hide. I might realize, later, that the person was right. But I am more likely to avoid the whole issue entirely then become a useful ally.
A patient explanation is more likely to change my behaviour. It might still take some time for new ideas to “cascade” and truly change my mind. I bounced off the concept of ‘Male privilege” 3 or 4 times, before someone pointed out that a particular problem I was having could be seen as a manifestation of “Female Privilege”. Then everything twisted around, and both became clear.
Personally, if someone gets verbally hostile to me without my having (personally, verbally) gotten hostile to them first, I simply treat it as a challenge — an invitation to fight. Which is fine, but remember that fights aren’t settled by the weight of your arguments, but by — literally or metaphorically — the weight of your fist, and as Elizabeth said their outcomes are always uncertain.
PS: content is largely irrelevant anyway, as far as fundamental assumptions go; that isn’t how human minds function. Cf. “Identity-protective cognition”. Or to put it another way, it’s opinions all the way down.
quints: actually, good-cop/bad-cop is like any other interrogation technique; it works well if skillfully applied and the circumstances are right. If clumsily used, or the circumstances are not right, it doesn’t work. Interrogation of a hostile subject is always a battle of wits and determination, a game of mutual psychological manipulation. The general situation is stacked in favor of the interrogator, of course, but a smart prisoner can play the game out for some time. Every case is unique.
It’s much less effective if the subject knows you’re doing it, for instance, though that doesn’t mean it won’t work at all. It’s a mild subvariety of “Stockholm Syndrome”.
The same is true of torture, for that matter. The reason torture is wrong is not that it’s ineffective; sometime it’s very effective (for a whole bunch of different thing, not just interrogation). Sometimes not. It’s wrong because (IMHO) it’s -wrong-.
Most of the arguments against the utility of torture are incoherent — that it doesn’t always work, for example. That’s true of every method. Or that people lie under torture; that’s also true, but they’ll lie anyway, and probably more effectively. Lying convincingly is a battle of wits, and one thing that torture can do is drive you literally insane for a while (or sometimes permanently).
One shouldn’t confuse utilitarian and normative arguments. There’s always a temptation to try and pile the one on the other for rhetorical effect.
[…] Tone Policing, and Some Thoughts on Good Cop, Bad Cop’, by Greta Christina (Greta Christina’s Blog) In that hot, flushed moment when we’re doing the Cognitive Dissonance Tango, we respond more […]