Page 98 - The Social Animal

80 The Social Animal

Increasing Trustworthiness Clearly, trust is an important fac-
tor in determining whether a communicator will be effective. For ex-
ample, it may be that the crucial reason the more prejudiced
6th-graders in the Aronson and Golden experiment were less influ-
enced by the black engineer than by the white engineer was that they
simply did not trust blacks. If this is true, then if we could offer the
audience clear, independent evidence that a person is trustworthy,
that person should be a very effective communicator.
How might communicators make themselves seem clearly trust-
worthy to us? One way is to argue against their own self-interest. If
people have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) by con-
vincing us, we will trust them and they will be more effective. An il-
lustration may be helpful. Suppose a habitual criminal, recently
convicted as a smuggler and peddler of heroin, was delivering a com-
munication on the abuses of the U.S. judicial system. Would he in-
fluence you? Probably not. Most people would probably regard him
as unattractive and untrustworthy: He seems clearly outside of the
Aristotelian definition of a good man. But suppose he was arguing
that criminal justice was too lenient—that criminals almost always
beat the rap if they have a smart lawyer, and that even if criminals
are convicted, the sentences normally meted out are too soft. Would
he influence you?
I’m certain he would; in fact, I performed this very experiment
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in collaboration with Elaine Walster and Darcy Abrahams, and it
confirmed our hypothesis. In the actual experiment, we presented
our participants with a newspaper clipping of an interview between
a news reporter and Joe “The Shoulder” Napolitano, who was iden-
tified in the manner described above. In one experimental condition,
Joe “The Shoulder” argued for stricter courts and more severe sen-
tences. In another condition, he argued that courts should be more
lenient and sentences less severe. We also ran a parallel set of condi-
tions in which the same statements were attributed to a respected
public official. When Joe “The Shoulder” argued for more lenient
courts, he was totally ineffective; indeed, he actually caused the par-
ticipants’ opinions to change slightly in the opposite direction. But
when he argued for stricter, more powerful courts, he was extremely
effective—as effective as the respected public official delivering the
same argument.This study demonstrates that Aristotle was not com-
pletely correct. A communicator can be an unattractive, immoral