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How do you persuade the people on the other side of a moral or political argument to see things your way?

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Cross the empathy gap.

New research by sociologist Robb Willer and psychologist Matthew Feinberg suggests the answer is in learning how to cross something they call the empathy gap.

When we produce arguments, we do so from within our own moral framework and in the language of our moral values. Those values rest on top of a set of psychological tendencies influenced by our genetic predispositions and shaped by our cultural exposure that blind us to alternate viewpoints. Because of this, we find it very difficult to construct an argument with the same facts, but framed in a different morality. Willer's work suggests that if we did that, we would find it a much more successful route to persuading people we usually think of as unreachable.

The full argument can be found here:

https://soundcloud.com/youarenotsosmart/088-moral-arguments

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