How do you cope with your favorite drunk rage uncle during Fesitivus?

Coping with your MAGA Relatives during the Festivus Season

Festivus is nearly upon us and Ye Olde Blogge is back up and running just barely in time to help us through the festivities, especially the Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strength. 2022 being an election year makes the Airing of Grievances particularly dicey and no one wants the drunken adult wrestling matches to be fueled by politically divided rage, do they? The Festivus pole is not a weapon. We don’t want to end our evening with visits to the emergency room, shootings, or the police being called. Seriously folks. We don’t.

To paraphrase Smokey the Bear, Only you can prevent Festivus from devolving into a smoking dumpster fire.

So, what insights does political psychology have for dodgy colorful spittle inflected, bits of Festivus meatloaf spewing, sweaty, vein bulging, red-faced political arguments that are bound to erupt this year?

This year we offer a unique solution to our frustrations with the irrational refusal to see reason and use facts that is MAGA, it is persuasion fatigue.

Persuasion Fatigue

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Lincoln Project’s Sucker Ad, Cognitive Dissonance, and Reason for Hope

Persuasion fatigue occurs when you’ve tried and tried to convince someone of your point-of-view. Typically, such attempts follow a pattern of using logic, facts, and emotion to demonstrate the correctness of your opinion. Typically, when these opinions are about divisive polarized issues, such argumentation not only falls on deaf ears, but invokes a highly emotional reaction. Essentially, you become emotionally and physically depleted by your efforts and it affects your cognition and behavior.

We’ve all seen our Festivus dinners wreaked by your favorite drunk uncle goading your least favorite cousin into a screaming match over the meatloaf and apple pie. As that great social psychologist, Leon Festinger, put it so many decades ago:

A man [sic] with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails

Persuasion fatigue is the flip side of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance coin. Cognitive dissonance occurs in your favorite drunk rage uncle as he clings helplessly to is illogical and unsubstantial positions that even the most casual of indifferent observer could see were WRONG!!1! It is the ability to justify the unjustifiable in the face of persuasive evidence against it.

Your least likable cousin is the one experiencing persuasion fatigue.

Persuasion fatigue is the inability to recognize the reasons your arguments are not succeeding in convincing the other side. It is an exhaustion induced tendency to blame the rampant ignorance and outright jackassedry of your opponent to see reason. !

It is that feeling of frustration that erupts the third or fourth time you present your side of the argument and drives you to emotional meltdown. It is the cause of the spittle inflected rage that overtakes many of our drunken tryptophan-laden Festivus celebrations.

Preventing Persuasion Fatigued Fueled Feats of Strength to the Death

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Polarized Politics: fMRI’s & Bridging the Gap

Fear not intrepid reader, science has some suggestions, specifically coming from Nathan Ballantyne, Jared Celniker, and Peter Ditto in their Scientific American Mind & Brain article, Persuasion Fatigue’ Is a Unique Form of Social Frustration. Here’s what they suggest based on their research.

FATIGUE. Knowing that you are likely to encounter persuasion fatigue, monitor your own level of fatigue. It helps to just label your emotional experience accurately, an emotional regulation technique known as affect labeling. Realizing you are entering the persuasion fatigue zone may help you temper your enthusiasm for making an argument that is likely to go no where and help you become more open to other options.

OTHER OPTIONS. Once you’re moving past the persuasion fatigue zone and considering your own behavior and thoughts — after all those are the only things you can control — you can begin to consider the following:

Changing the Body Politic

  • GOALS. What are your goals in this discussion? It is easy to set the bar too high. If you’re trying for total capitulation from your favorite drunk uncle, then you’re likely setting yourself up for a persuasion fatigue-induced funky sulk and you’ll miss out on the Feats of Strength again this year. Consider setting a goal of getting agreement on some of the assumptions that form the foundation for the topic. Agreeing, for example, that none of the other elections besides Biden’s was stolen may help lay the foundation for doubting the Big Lie in the future. Agreeing that vaccines have prevented measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella can help undermine some objection to the vaccines.
  • VALUES AND FEELINGS. We are emotional decision makers. We make all of our decisions emotionally and use our rational brains to justify them. Understanding the emotions that underlie the decision, helps you understand which arguments will be persuasive. It has long been known that we tend to present the arguments that have persuaded us convinced that they will persuade others and are stymied when they don’t. When people don’t share or values and moral opinions, #SceinceFact, we tend to think of them as being stupid and evil. No matter how obvious, it is often not the case. For example, vaccine hesitant parents love their kids just as much as vaccinating parents do. While vaccinating parents may be focused on fairness and science, non-vaccinating parents are focused on purity of vaccines and freedoms to decide. As Joshua Kalla and David Broockman have demonstrated, non-judgmental conversation is much more persuasive on polarizing issues than fact-based argumentation.
  • A ZERO-SUM GAME. We often approach our favorite drunk uncle with the assumption that there will be a winner and a loser. Using their values and feelings as outlined above can help reframe the zero-sum approach to being one of searching for an answer together. Do you really know everything there is to know about the topic? Could your favorite drunk uncle actually have something they could teach you?

Unfortunately putting these preventative measures to persuasion fatigue to use this holiday season might mean that you could find yourself in a position of needing to alter your beliefs, assumptions, and opinions. Are you willing to do that? If not, maybe steer clear of those hot-button polarizing issues during the Airing of Grievances and using kinder gentler Feats of Strengths just to avoid the emergency room, shootings, and the summoning of the police this Festivus.

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Image Attribution

“South Vietnam Exhausted Marine – 1967 press photo – by Frank Johnston” by manhhai is licensed under CC BY 2.0.