Mohamed Hussein studies how the psychology of persuasion and politics interact. He is an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. On the podcast, we talk about his work on “receptiveness,” or people’s openness to hearing out opinions they disagree with. (For more on receptiveness, check out episode 56, Receptiveness to Other Opinions with Julia Minson). But the research we talk about includes studies on how “you” versus “we” language affects how receptive we seem (Hussein & Tormala, 2024) as well as studies showing the costs of being receptive across political party lines (Hussein & Wheeler, 2024).
Transcript
Andy Luttrell (Intro): Okay, there are two people you need to know about for this story. You very well may already by familiar, but for the sake of getting on the same page…
Steve Bannon. Uh, how do we do this? Well I’ll give you a quote from a former congressman: “Bannon is the one who has basically authored where we are and what Donald Trump wants.” He was chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was former executive chairman of Breitbart News. He’s been at the center of a lot of alt-right, MAGA…stuff.
Then there’s Gavin Newsom. He’s the governor of California. He’s a member of the Democratic Party. He’s been widely predicted to run for president as a Democrat in 2028.
So we’ve got two people who, on paper anyway, seem about as politically different as you can get. And yet, earlier this year, Gavin Newsom featured an interview with Steve Bannon on his podcast. People weren’t…thrilled.
You can find roundups of social media reactions from people who thought it was just wrong to have this sort of conversation. And it’s not been Newsom’s only podcast episode like this. He also had on super conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, who in researching this intro I learned grew up in the same pocket of the country I did, which shouldn’t make me feel any which way, but it does. Anyhow, I just looked up Newsom’s Facebook post promoting the Kirk interview, and the top commenter called the whole thing “a profoundly disturbing turn of morality on [Newsom’s] part.”
And what’s a little weird about this kind of reaction is that it flies in the face of the virtue we often put on being receptive to a variety of viewpoints. Why aren’t people lauding Newsom for being so willing to listen? Is it so wrong to inform yourself on views that run counter to your own?
Now, I will grant you that this is a special case. It’s a powerful guy giving a loud megaphone to people with messages that strike a lot of people as dangerous. So, it’s not just allowing oneself to hear those messages, it’s actively letting those messages spread.
But what if it was just an everyday liberal-leaning person allowing themselves to hear out conservative messages? Do people see that as the sort of totally cool open-mindedness they seem to value? Well, as we’ll see, that idea of being “receptive” is complicated…
You’re listening to Opinion Science, the show about our opinions, where they come from, and how we talk about them. I’m Andy Luttrell. And this month, I’m excited to share my conversation with Mohamed Hussein. He’s an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. He studies the psychology of persuasion, politics, and how they intersect. I’ve been following his work for a while, and it was great to finally get the chance to talk with him directly.
We caught up on his research on receptiveness—or people’s openness to hearing out opinions they disagree with. For a great intro to receptiveness, you can check out episode 56 of this show with Julia Minson. But Mohamed and I talk about two areas in which he’s studied this. The first has to do with the language that signals our receptiveness to other people. What words do people grab onto as a sign that they’re being heard versus dismissed? And then we talk about his research showing that people aren’t too keen on people who share their politics being receptive to contrary political voices, ala the Gavin Newsom effect. As a quick note, loyal listeners of Opinion Science might have a little déjà vu because Christian Wheeler talked about this work when he was on the podcast a year ago. Mohamed and Christian collaborated on that work, and we get a little deeper into it with Mohamed.
Oh also, while I have your attention, Opinion Science is 5 years old! I just realized this. The first episode of this show was on April 15, 2020. This is Episode 107, but that doesn’t count 19 episodes of my science communication series, SciComm Summer, or a five-episode special series on the story of behavioral economics. Also, I started this list at one point, and it’s been a fun Excel spreadsheet, but I’ve interviewed 167 people to date for this show. Anyhow, thanks for celebrating this birthday with me, whether you were here 5 years ago or this is your first one.
Okay, to seamlessly transition back on task, one of the illustrious people I’ve gotten to talk to is Mohamed Hussein. And we’re going to jump into that conversation…right now.
Andy Luttrell: So, I think probably the way to frame everything is just to get on the same page about what receptiveness is. It’s not a concept that’s a stranger to this podcast, but one that maybe hasn’t come up in a little bit. And so could you maybe just give folks a sense of what does it mean to be receptive and why, why would we care about that?
Mohamed Hussein: We tend to think of receptiveness as capturing people’s willingness to seek out, attend to, and meaningfully engage with people and ideas that they disagree with. And the literature on receptiveness has really been fast growing over the last few years. It’s been studied as a felt construct, so feeling receptive to opposing views and what causes people to open up and feel receptive to ideas you disagree with.
But there’s also been a growing literature on how might you be able to signal your receptiveness to others. Then, the question becomes, well, why should you want to signal that you’re receptive to others? And it turns out through my work and the work of others there are a lot of positive interpersonal consequences of being receptive to opposing views.
So, when you signal receptiveness to others. For example, some research has found that that opens up others to your ideas, kind of a reciprocity mechanism, and as a result of that, you can become more persuasive. Some of my work, I find that it can help you spread your message a little bit more and prevent it from getting blocked or censored by others.
Of course, people make positive attributions about people who are receptive to opposing views overall. So, we tend to think of them as more intelligent, more collaborative, the kind of people that we want to hang out with and get to know a little bit better. So, now that’s kind of roughly how we think about the construct and some of the downstream implications that have been validated empirically.
Andy Luttrell: Is it always opposition? Like is there a version of receptiveness that’s just like, I’m open to new ideas, like I’ll try anything for the first time. If you’ve got a new take on something, I’m open to it, even if I don’t disagree. Is that receptiveness or receptiveness implies this kind of like attitudinal tension, let’s say.
Mohamed Hussein: Originally, the way it was conceived as a construct was really an opposition. So, it was really about receptiveness to opposing views specifically, but I’m sure your intuition, that it’s equally interesting to look at receptiveness to pro-attitudinal views, for example, because you can imagine that what drives polarization is not just people being closed off or unreceptive to opposing ideas, but maybe also people being too open-minded or too receptive to extreme ideas on their own side.
So, I think there is something about expanding the construct beyond opposing views, but so far empirically really the literature has focused on the opposing views piece. Again, that makes sense when you think about kind of political context where oftentimes we’re trying to figure out why is it that there are increasing gaps across political divides, and how might we be able to bridge them.
Andy Luttrell: I think some of the question too comes from, I noticed that in some of the ways that you measure perceived perceptiveness, it’s almost blatantly open-mindedness. And so, I was wondering like, is it exactly the same thing or is there a meaningful difference? That like in everyday parlance, people don’t really differentiate, but there is some difference there.
And so one of those versions would be like, well, receptiveness is like specifically when it’s about, I disagree with you, but I’m like, I’ll listen to you. Versus open-mindedness is like, you tell me any story you want to tell and I’m all ears.
Mohamed Hussein: There’s also openness to experiences, as you know, of the constructs that people who are familiar with psychology would be familiar with. And it turns out the correlation between the individual level variable of openness to experience and the individual level of variable of receptiveness to opposing views as measured by Julia Minson, who’s done some tremendously impactful work in this area. It turns out that correlation is actually not super strong, so it seems that there’s something a little bit more specific about this willingness to engage with and attend to information and meaningfully engage with people on the other side.
But that certainly there’s a constellation of constructs in the space that are very relevant for each other. You might even think about empathy, for example, as something that still kind of lives in this area, being empathetic to someone who you disagree with. So, it’s kind of an exciting area in the sense that there are a few different constructs that are used to emphasize slightly different facets of the psychology, but ultimately it’s really about just being open-minded and being willing to listen to and take someone else’s ideas seriously, even if you disagree with them and wouldn’t be open to changing your mind to them, per se.
Andy Luttrell: That modest correlation with openness to experience is like sort of a personality trait that’s on the part of people who themselves are receptive or open and not that perception, because I almost wonder if there’s maybe some bleed when people are interpreting someone’s receptiveness as sort of this like generic openness. Just like maybe sometimes the reason why I think this person’s super smart is because we like attach a sense of like, oh, cultured people, and status and intellect, and sort of more broadly, I am curious because your work is more on the side of these perceptions, are the cues that people latch onto as cues to receptiveness the same as like the actual predictors of a person’s receptiveness.
Mohamed Hussein: They seem to be slightly different and there is some empirical work validating that point that what kind of receptive people actually say is not necessarily what people pick up on when they decide whether someone is receptive or not. Addressing what are some of the linguistic ways that you can communicate receptiveness, there have been a few different, kind of findings in that area. So, Zak Tormala, who is my former advisor from graduate school, and I have a paper together that’s a framework for trying to make sense of a variety of counterintuitive findings and the persuasion literature.
For example, past research has found that and when you express uncertainty, so saying something like, I’m not entirely sure, but I think X, Y, Z is true. Under certain circumstances, that can be more persuasive than expressing certainty saying, I’m a 100% certain that X, Y, Z is true. Some other literature has found that admitting mistakes can sometimes make you more persuasive than emphasizing only your successes and ignoring the mistakes.
When I was in grad school, I was really intrigued by these counterintuitive findings and I was kind of trying to figure out like what exactly is going on here? Why is it that these things kind of seem to work and improve persuasiveness? And one of the “aha” moments I had, and this is actually how I got interested in receptiveness as a construct, was thinking actually one thing they have in common is they seem to communicate to others that you’re someone who is open-minded and willing to be wrong and willing to listen to other ideas, even if you disagree with them or if they are new to you.
So, going back to your question, how do people signal the receptiveness to others? We found that admitting uncertainty is one way you can do that. Hedging, so saying maybe, probably, perhaps instead of again kind of making broad statements, asking questions instead of making declarative statements is a great way to signal receptiveness. Similarly, two-sided messaging. So kind of saying, here are all the reasons why I think this view is correct, but there are also some reasons to think that this view might not be a 100% correct and even pronoun use. So saying something like “we” versus “you” or using different personal pronouns while you’re describing your argument or message, can also have different effects on perceptions of receptiveness.
So, it turns out there’s a host of linguistic factors that can really spark your perception that someone is receptive. And knowing this is really helpful because if you’re trying to go about your life and reap the benefits of receptiveness that past research has found, then actually knowing how to signal that receptiveness to others can be really useful.
Andy Luttrell: I wonder, it seems like there might be like at least two as always, ways in which this stuff operates. One is, what you’re saying is just that like, I am attentive to how receptive you seem to be, and I like latch onto that as a cue to be like, I can trust this person or I’m willing to hear that person out.
The other and this is maybe less in your wheelhouse, but I’m curious to get your take on it. The other is just that like maybe more receptive people are more skilled communicators, and they’re able to make their point better. Not necessarily because they seem more receptive, but because they like actually understand how to see an issue for multiple vantage points and present it in the right way.
Is there any sense that there’s this kind of like other side where like persuasion also is enhanced by actually receptive sources?
Mohamed Hussein: I think the emphasis has really been on the former, in the literature, and a big part of it has been taking advantage of the experimental toolbox that social psychologists and consumer psychologists are trained in, and being able to say, look, I’m gonna hold everything constant about the message except just those signals of receptiveness and see if that leads to any positive inferences and downstream consequences about my perception of the communicator, of the source behind the message. So, in that sense, I think it kind of lends itself naturally to being studied that way. And that gives us some confidence that it least the former possibility that you raise is operative under a wide array of circumstances.
Andy Luttrell: Okay, so let’s talk about where people are getting these perceptions from and you mentioned these pronouns. So, you have a set of studies that recently came out looking at pronouns that people might use and how they might signal more or less receptiveness. So maybe you could just sort of give us like the high level like summary of what the premise there is and we can dig into it after that.
Mohamed Hussein: The starting point for this project was noting that in the literature that we were just talking about on receptiveness, there was this very curious finding where the more you used “you” pronouns, the more receptive you perceived to be. And that seems really counterintuitive to me given kind of my experience of the world.
So, I became very interested in, that’s kind of an interesting finding. How come is it that “you” pronouns lead to more receptiveness? And the more we looked into it, the more we realized it actually kind of depends a lot on the context. So past research has looked at contexts that are mostly supportive or collaborative or at least neutral in nature.
Whereas oftentimes the reason we care about receptiveness, going back to the start of this conversation is in situations where there is opposition, where you are disagreeing with someone. So, we were kind of curious if you dial up the level of the conflict and you look at instances in which people are really disagreeing in pretty fundamental ways.
What happens in terms of how you can communicate receptiveness using pronouns? And it turns out that “you” pronouns signals a lack of receptiveness in such context. And instead of helping you come across as more receptive, it can actually backfire and make you come across as close-minded, as little bit aggressive and hostile even and so on and so forth.
And in contrast, “we” pronouns, which we know kind of can signal or communicate that we’re on the same side, we’re all part of the same team has the opposite effect. It can help you even in conflict leading context, communicate that you are on the same page and that you are open to the other person and to hearing what they have to say.
So, to kind of summarize it briefly there, our findings essentially are that “you” pronouns lead to perceptions of a lack of receptiveness. And in contrast, “we” pronouns seem to boost perceptions of receptiveness, and those tend to have important downstream consequences.
Andy Luttrell: I wonder maybe to make it a little more concrete if you could describe like kind of your go-to study that you go, like, this makes the point. In particular, like what is the context exactly that you’re talking about and like how are these pronouns being implemented in the messages that people are sending?
Mohamed Hussein: So, one of the things we started with was looking at this in the wild in particular we were really interested in censorship decisions because at the time that there was a lot of conversations societally about whether you know Democrats are censoring Republicans or Republicans are censoring Democrats, and so on and so forth.
One way we were able to study censorship in the wild was to go to Reddit which is an online website where people can post different posts. And there are political subreddits. These are groups where people discuss politics, and we figured it doesn’t get any more contentious than politics, right? If people are online talking about politics, this is as much of a context where you can find conflict as possible.
So, what we did is that we essentially scraped these comments as they became online, and then a few days later went back and figured out which comments were taken down and which comments were left up by the moderators. And this allowed us to have a way to measure censorship in the wild. And then what we also did is because we have the text of these comments, we can look at their use of pronouns. And what we found is that the more comments used “you” pronouns, the greater the likelihood that these comments were censored.
And in contrast, the more they used “we” pronouns, the less likely they were to get censored. Of course, when you look at a correlation result like this, you’re like, oh, okay, well maybe this is a whole other host of things could be happening here. For example, maybe “you” pronouns just naturally occur more with swear words, right?
You can sure think of a few different swear words where you pronoun is involved. It turns out even after you control for that, the results hold. Oh, maybe there’s something about emotionality, like you use “you” pronouns when you’re feeling particularly more emotional, positive or negative. Nope. Doesn’t explain the results.
Even after controlling for that, you still get it. And even when you look at within the same person when they post using “you” pronoun versus not, you still get a greater likelihood of their posts being censored when they use “you” pronoun. So that was the starting point of realizing, wow, there’s really something here about in this conflict environment, discussing political contentious issues online where pronoun use seems really important and can really lead to these differential effects.
Andy Luttrell: Sorry. I was just gonna say like, just to clarify some things about that. So, I think what’s really neat about that, that I didn’t appreciate is you were sort of anticipating that some of these posts would get taken down, right?
And so you’re grabbing them before they go away, and then you can just see like the next day. I mean are these pretty swift, like within an hour, within a day they’re gone. If they’re gonna be deleted, they’re gonna be deleted that quickly. And so you can just retrospectively go back and be like, which one survived? And we had the foresight to save so many of them that, that we can sort of look at those predictors
Mohamed Hussein: Precisely. So, I think in total we had 275,000 comments that we got from two different subreddits or a liberal and a conservative one. And that’s exactly right, kind of. As long as you save them before they get taken down, you can then compare the ones that got taken down with the ones that weren’t taken down and figure out what was different about the language of the two different types of posts.
Andy Luttrell: And I’m curious how big of a difference are we talking here? Do you have a sense of like, how much more likely is it to get taken down? I’m assuming the analysis is something like for every instance of the word “you”, the odds change, or is this just, if the word “you” is present, the odds change?
Mohamed Hussein: Yeah. It’s for the more you use “you” kind of the greater the odds are. I can’t remember off the top of my head in that particular study what it looks like. But in experimental study, which is I think where we’re going next in our discussion, it’s about three times more likely in the “you” condition for a comment to be taken down than compared to “we” recondition. So, it’s quite a big effect in that sense.
Andy Luttrell: And I’ll let you get there so you can go ahead. So just to sort of bring you back to, I think, the transition you’re about to make, right? Like you do this sort of big Wild West, let’s see what happens on the internet study. And then of course you go, well, there’s a billion reasons why something like this could happen. Could it really be that the word “you” is doing any heavy lifting on its own? And so what then is next?
Mohamed Hussein: So, then we try and kind of get at this from an experimental context.
So, we bring people in from MTurk and we ask them to imagine that they are a moderator of an online discussion forum where they have the power to either keep comments or remove comments, and then we show them a variety of comments about, 10 comments in some of our studies. And they have to make a decision, keep or remove for each of them.
And then, the key is one of the comments, the target comment essentially was randomly assigned to either contain “you” pronouns or “we” pronouns. So, everything else about the content of the comment is exactly the same. The only difference is the language that the pronouns specifically.
So, to give you an example, the “you” pronoun might say something like, you and people like you are causing a variety of problems. The world has become so polarized that you can’t even imagine living in the same state as someone else. Whereas the, “we” pronoun might say something like the world has become so polarized that we can’t imagine living in a state with someone that we disagree with, and so on and so forth.
So, that was kind of the key manipulation and what we found here is consistent with the results from the Reddit study is that when people read the comment with “you” pronouns, they were much more likely to remove that comment, censor it, if you will, compared to the “we” pronoun condition.
Now what’s nice about this setup is, since this is an experiment, you can also ask additional questions. For example, what kind of inferences were you making about the comment? What is your perception of the comment? So tying this back to our idea of receptiveness, people were kind of thinking that, wow, the “you” pronoun comments are really close-minded and attacky and a little hostile. They were not in the spirit of a discussion of an online forum.
This is kind of really attacking one person and signaling that you’re extremely closed off to being open or having a discourse around this issue, whereas the “we” pronouns didn’t really have that sentiment to them. If anything, they were seen as the opposite, as being particularly open-minded and being particularly lacking hostility.
So, in that sense, you can kind of see that there was this relationship between pronoun use perceptions of open-mindedness and also, the downstream consequence of censorship in this study.
Andy Luttrell: Presumably, I hadn’t put my finger on this before, but the censorship outcome, do you think if this is something like fundamental about like, people wanting to censor unreceptive people or is it that like, well, your job is to foster a community and so it’s not censorship isn’t like conceptually linked to receptiveness. It just so happens that like your job is to maintain positive vibes in this community, and closed-minded opinions are not gonna do that.
Mohamed Hussein: I think it’s a really interesting question that gets at the core of what are some of the motivations that people have when they censor others. And frankly, I think the literature on censorship is very underdeveloped right now.
I think there’s only a couple of papers that talk about censorship from a psychological perspective, even though there’s been plenty of work in other disciplines on that concept and construct.
So, frankly, I think it’s an interesting question to kind of explore empirically a little bit more, which is when you give people the power to censor others, or at least to moderate contents in some capacity, what are their motivations and do they differ from their motivations as mere consumers of that content? And the reason this question is all of a sudden really relevant is, it used to be that censorship was kind of the area of emperors or kings or people who are heads of states, but every day people are weighing on censorship decisions all the time now.
I mean, if you are a user of Facebook groups or Reddit or Twitch, you can sign up to become a moderator of a group, and that gives you that power of deciding what content stays up versus down. So, in that sense, it’s a decision that more and more of us have the potential to make in everyday life. So, I think exploring the psychology of censorship is really fascinating and frankly underexplored topic.
Andy Luttrell: Interesting. So, a caveat to the results that you find is that you are able to make them go away, meaning the presence of those words, “you” and their similar pronouns doesn’t have to always result in these negative consequences, and when is that?
Mohamed Hussein: That’s exactly right. And this goes back to how we started this conversation about how.
There was this interesting finding in the literature about “you” being linked to more or greater receptiveness. So, I really wanted to kind of try and find a reconciliation between our results and these past results. How could both be true at the same time? And empirically what I end up finding is, again, the context really matters.
When you’re in a context where “you” is being pronounced, is being used, in an aggressive, and in a way that kind of fosters that conflict more, that’s when you get these negative effects. But when “you” is being used in a context where otherwise you seem very supportive or neutral. So, think about “you” around areas of agreement. So, I hear you. I see what you mean. Then actually “you” doesn’t have any of the negative consequences that we document. It turns out it behaves very similarly to “we” pronouns in that sense.
So, it’s really not about using “you” per se, it’s more about using “you” in adversarial or conflict within context that lead to these negative consequences that we’re discussing.
Andy Luttrell: Question one is, this has been framed particularly from the perspective of like, it is not great to say “you” in an accusatory way. That makes you seem really closed off to other ideas. But it’s always or at least it seems like oftentimes we’re looking at this in a relative sense. Like relative to saying “we” saying “you” signals less receptiveness. And so do you get the sense that like it’s “you” that’s doing the heavy lifting or is there some other bonus to the “we” kind of language that’s also contributing to this.
Mohamed Hussein: I had a very similar question and I felt it wouldn’t be a satisfying paper unless we got an answer to that.
One of the things we do in the paper is we include a different control group, namely the indefinite pronoun one. So you know how sometimes you can say one should do X or one should brush their teeth every day before going to bed or something like that.
Again, same setup as before. People are brought in. They are moderators or they can censor, but this time the comment can either have “you” pronouns, “we” pronouns, or one pronouns. And what we find is essentially there is an effect of both “you” and “we” pronouns relative to one. So they both exert their own directional effects. So, “you” pronouns make you less receptive and increases the chance of your comment getting censored relative to one pronouns.
But “we” pronouns makes you more receptive and less likely to get censored relative to one pronouns. So, in that sense, I think each of them exerts their own unique kind of ability to influence people’s perceptions of “you” and influence consequences as a result.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. I also was coming back to whether “we” pronouns can be adversarial. So, there’s a way of framing this where you’re saying sort of in adversarial contexts, the “you” stuff is bad and the “we” stuff is good. But I kept reading the messages with “we” and being like these just like I have trouble thinking of these as occurring within an adversarial context because they like have taken the adversary out of the equation.
So, I’m curious to get your take on like is it possible in that way that like, what is that pronoun doing in this kind of context? And is there a way to actually make “we” adversarial in a way that might sort of take its halo away?
Mohamed Hussein: I really like that question because it gets at understanding the context under which these effects emerge better, but also kind of pronouns in general and kind of our relationship with them. We take it for granted, but a really large portion of the words we use every day are these words like pronouns and indefinite articles and so on.
So, we take them for granted, but they’re very powerful. I think there are certainly contexts in which “we” pronoun could potentially come across as kind of adversarial or a negative. So, there’s one possibility that has been raised in press research, although I haven’t found strong empirical kind of follow ups on that, is the idea that when there is a power hierarchy.
Using “we” pronoun can potentially feel problematic or inauthentic. So maybe you are a researcher. You have an RA or a PhD student working for you, and you say, yeah, like, we are going to clean the data and we are going to do this and that, but it’s kind of implied that really only the person with less power is going to be all that work potentially.
So that can sometimes, you know, that has been hypothesized to lead to kind of some negative consequences of using “we” pronouns. Again, I haven’t seen super strong evidence of that in the literature. And in fact, when we were writing this paper, we were very curious if there were some conditions under which we can have the opposite effect as well.
So, we kind of explored a couple of avenues but didn’t really find any encouraging or consistent results. We ended up focusing the paper more about kind of the relative strength of these different pronouns and the adversarial context piece. But I think it’s an interesting question and I think if there are grad students listening that are excited about potential ideas, I feel that could be a cool unanswered question there. Identifying the conditions under which “we” pronouns backfires.
Andy Luttrell: I had been wrestling with this question of like, what does the adversarial context mean for this “we” pronoun before, but it was only now that I was like, well, you know, it could be possible that you could use “we” in this kind of like, you implied way of just like there’s us and there’s you.
And so, the kind of “we” that you’re talking about in these studies is like a you and me inclusive. But I could also be talking about my team that you are not part of. And if I say like, you know, we have gotten everything right so far, and that implies like, you know, so come at me.
Like, that’s not a particularly receptive point of view for me to always like exalt my group. And so, it also comes to, I think what these studies reminded me of is I think a curious question about like, how we think of messages and the work that we do on them, which is there’s one way to study them.
And Daniel O’Keefe communication scholar talks about like, we should really be studying features. That are inherent to messages, but we often are studying like the psychological features that messages evoke. And so like, there’s really no such thing as a guilt appeal. Like a message can’t be guilty.
A guilt appeal is some message that for some reason makes the reader feel guilty. And so, I came back to that with this work too. Right? And it’s not so much the magic of these words, and as soon as they enter a message, they breathe this particular outcome into existence. But really you’re talking about like, what are really the experiences that these words can evoke?
And so, I just sort of went on a little diatribe, but I’ll throw it to you to comment on.
Mohamed Hussein: That’s exactly right, and I think that was really important for us to kind of highlight in the paper is, again, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about “you” versus “we” pronouns. It’s when it’s used in these context, in these social context as you are describing, that’s when you might get some of these negative versus positive consequences.
Again, I think, the broader picture was really to try and highlight, okay, we are starting to get excited about receptiveness as a construct. How else might you be able to signal receptiveness? because something as fundamental as pronoun use be kind of used to trigger people’s inferences about how receptive or unreceptive a person is.
And as a result of that, allow you to reap the benefits or the reward of coming across as receptive. But I agree with you. I mean, ultimately, I think that’s a very sharp distinction about the features of the message versus not. I’m gonna think of that a little bit.
Andy Luttrell: I’ll also take the bait because you just mentioned the benefits that come along with appearing receptive, but is it uniformly good for you to come across as receptive to other people?
Mohamed Hussein: For a long time, that was the consensus in the literature. There was kind of strong agreement among receptiveness scholars that receptiveness leads to positive interpersonal consequences. And no one had really identified any conditions under which it can carry reputational costs.
But in some of my work with Christian Wheeler, who’s my other advisor from graduate school we kind of challenge that view and we find that there are contexts in which coming across as open-minded can really backfire and can cause you reputational harm.
Andy Luttrell: When is it bad to do that? Because it does feel like, well, I’m an open-minded guy. Isn’t that great? When might that hurt me?
Mohamed Hussein: So, we looked at context where you know, like for a very long time, essentially people consume political information like in their home and in private. You’ve turned on your TV, you read your newspaper in your living room. But kind of more recently people’s political information consumption habits are becoming more and more public.
So, on Twitter, I can see who you follow, who you’re commenting on, who you’re engaging with. Same on Facebook, if you go to events that you attend or so on and so forth.
We’re just very curious about like when people are receptive to opposing political views, now that we can actually observe that receptiveness more, how do people react to it? And again, the hypothesis here based on the literature was we should like people who are receptive to opposing views. My own work, I found that receptiveness carries these interpersonal benefits and other scholars have found them as well.
But we were very surprised to see that when it comes to politics receptiveness was behaving very differently. In particular, we were kind of thinking about political polarization being on the rise in the United States and really people having very negative stereotypes about members of the other party.
And so, just to give you a couple of examples of how dire things have gotten, if you think back to 1994, like 20% roughly of Republicans had very unfavorable view of Democrats that jumps to 62% by 2022. And similar trends among Democrats. So, roughly 17% of Democrats had very unfavorable views of Republicans in 1994, and that jumps to 54%.
And it’s not just that people have negative impressions of the other side, but they also have very specific negative stereotypes about them. For example, they think that the other side is in the wrong morally and maybe even evil or immoral sometimes. So, we were very curious if these negative stereotypes could be sufficient to trigger negative consequences of receptiveness when people were being open-minded to opposing views in the domain of politics. And that’s exactly what we found.
Andy Luttrell: I was trying to think about this too in terms of like what is unique about politics, because that’s sort of the pitch. It’s like this is a domain in which receptiveness falls apart. But what is it about politics that is uniquely subject to this where like, I can’t abide by a person being open, even just entertaining opinions on the other side of this division. I assume it’s just the stereotype stuff, but is there a reason why politics is open to that stereotype?
Mohamed Hussein: I think, we could potentially find similar results in other domains where there are strong stereotypes about the morality of the information source as well. So, kind of what we find in the paper broadly, there seems to be strong evidence that the people who are displaying this aversion to receptiveness, to opposing views are people who tend to think of the other side as immoral.
So, when you’re open to them, then all of a sudden they’re like, that’s not cool. You should not be open to them and what I found was quite surprising. I really thought this was just gonna be about people worrying that if someone from their own party is being receptive to the other side, maybe they’ll lose them to the other party. So, maybe this is just a concern that you’re gonna change your mind or a concern that you’re gonna flip parties. And I don’t wanna lose people on my side, but we don’t really find any consistent evidence for that.
It really seems to be driven by such strong aversion to the other side because you think of them as immoral, that you can’t tolerate someone from your own side even listening to them or validating their ideas.
When we found these results, they really resonated on a personal level because when I was in college, there was a really big kerfuffle on campus around a speaker who came to give talk and people had really negative views of the speaker and thought that the arguments he’d made were immoral and problematic.
And I’ve really witnessed a lot of friendships break apart over whether someone attended the talk or not. I mean someone went to the talk and they just wanted to listen and actively argue, in fact, against what the speaker was going to say, but merely being open enough to attend and give your attention and validation to that speaker was enough to sever those friendships, at least in that case.
So those results kind of resonated on a personal level, I think.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah, I totally shared the hunch that this is about losing people to the other side, and to me, like the most troubling finding across all of those studies is the fact that that doesn’t explain it. Even if people are assured that like, no, this person is gonna stick to their guns and hold onto, they’re gonna stay on your side.
I still just have such trouble understanding, like, so then what is so wrong about just like living next to that view. Like without it having any potential to make a change. And is it just that like, it is just this like knee jerk morality thing just like you just can’t expose yourself to it and that it’s just wrong. It’s just bad to do that. Is that, is that what it seems like is happening?
Mohamed Hussein: Yeah, that really seems to be the pathway that we find the most consistent evidence for. And part of it is also, we’ve tested this across a variety of contexts and some of them were really effortful signals of receptiveness, like someone going to a talk or a rally where they disagreed with what was being said there. And maybe there you have the concern that this person could flip or switch or like it’s much more immersive environment.
But in some of our experiment, I mean, someone is being receptive by reading one article online that is written by someone from the other side. So, it’s very hard to believe that on a topic like abortion or gun control reading one article is gonna fundamentally change how someone views their world and their beliefs around it. And I think that’s part of what was really interesting is yeah, like people understand that and they don’t seem to think that that’s what’s going to explain.
That’s why they’re having that negative reaction. But they still continue to have that same negative reaction even in these fairly innocuous one-off low effort receptiveness attempts by other people around them.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah, it feels like some weird kind of like moral contagion thing of like you’re gonna catch this bug and it’s just like bad, in a way that, I mean, why I was asking about politics is I was trying to think like, how generic is this and is this like any form of receptiveness?
It probably is not subject to it, or I should say not every form of receptiveness is an example that came to mind is like, if I don’t like horror films, I’m not that bothered if you listen to someone talk about how they love that genre, because like I just don’t really care enough.
And I guess I wonder like do you actually seem better. Is it that receptiveness in those domains actually does seem good because you’re being open-minded and you get that warm glow because in these data, you never get the like intuited benefits of receptiveness. Is that right?
Mohamed Hussein: There are only a couple of places where we do find some benefits to receptiveness in our data. So, one of them is among people who don’t think that the other side is immoral. So you can look at variation across people. So not everyone thinks that the other side is immoral.
In our sample, it tends to be 60% or so people think the other side is immoral, the rest either is more neutral or maybe even think the other side is just as moral. And among those folks who don’t think the other side is immoral, then we see benefits to receptiveness. That’s one cue that it’s about immorality and one cue where, one location where we find benefits.
The other part was, it turned out it’s not really about the information they’re listening to either. It’s really about the source. It’s about who are you listening to that information from, and specifically, are they a stereotypical member of the other party or not. So, for example, we have some studies where we essentially hold the information that the person is being receptive to constant, but we just vary whether that information is being communicated by, say a politician from the other party, a politician from your own party, or a politician whose party you don’t know.
And you only find the backfire effect for receptiveness among the opposing party information source. When I know that this piece of information is coming from the other side, from those guys, that’s when it backfires and causes receptiveness to have negative connotations instead of positive ones.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. And that also is nicely consistent with the, like, I’m not worried that you’re gonna change your mind because it really has nothing to do with what you’re exposing yourself to. It’s that it’s coming from that person.
Mohamed Hussein: Exactly.
Andy Luttrell: And similar to what we were talking about with the pronouns, I was wondering in this case too, whether this is more about me not loving when people listen to the other side or how am I thinking of this? It’s like, which side of this dynamic is the important one? Because I was thinking like there’s one where I’m like, I really love it when someone sort of like closes themselves off to the other side.
Like that’s a real sign that they’re like with me, but I’m not actually that bothered if they are exposed to the other side. It’s just that like I think it’s kind of a badge of honor to say no to the other, as opposed to like, I really actively don’t like it when people are listening to the other side.
Mohamed Hussein: Right. So, another way of saying that is, is this really driven by disliking receptiveness or by liking unreceptiveness which is the flip side of that. And we kind of have some studies where we include a neutral control condition where the person is neither receptive nor unreceptive, they just describe the event and don’t state whether they were receptive or unreceptive.
And we find that it seems to be driven by disliking the receptive people instead of by liking the unreceptive people. So that seems where the action is, is more on the receptiveness side. And I think that is also nicely consistent with that immorality piece in the sense that if you really have this contagion to use your word kind of view on things, it’s like no, the moment you touch it, like you’re contaminated, right?
So, then in that sense, I don’t want the person who is open to it because by being open to it, they have exposed themselves to this pathogen or this potentially problematic viewpoint that I fundamentally disagree with and think is immoral.
Andy Luttrell: Is this what you imagined studying when you studied a PhD in a business school?
Mohamed Hussein: So, I’ve been interested in politics for a very long time just because, I grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a city of 20 million people, and when I was there, something very life changing happened, which is the Arab Spring. So, you can imagine like living in a place where you go from when people don’t care at all about politics one day to literally being in the street, willing to risk their own lives for politics. That got me really just interested in the intersection of persuasion, identity, politics, technology, social media.
So, in a sense, I was really fortunate to end up in a marketing department just because there are so many… it’s so interdisciplinary first of all. There are psychologists. There are economists. There are political scientists at the business school around us. But also, it kind of is the intersection of a lot of these topics.
Like social media and technology, but also persuasion, also identity. So, I wasn’t sure what I was exactly going to end up studying when I first started my PhD, but I’m really happy that I landed an area that kind of resonates with me on a very deep and personal level.
Andy Luttrell: So what’s next? You’ve got new digs. You’ve got feet planted at Colom Columbia. So what what’s next on the docket? Is it sort of more on unpacking receptiveness, or are there sort of new areas you’re excited to move into?
Mohamed Hussein: There are kind of two areas that I’m really excited about these days. One is, I think like when you think about kind of intersection of politics and psychology in the last few years, there’s been a lot of focus on partisan animosity and polarization for very good reason. I think that’s one of the biggest problems that we faced.
At the same time, I think now there’s kind of some interesting new emerging phenomenon that warrant our attentions, and one of them that I’m really excited about is this idea of anti-establishment psychology or anti elite psychology anecdotally, and there seems to be some data that’s starting to validate this intuition, it seems that people are kind of moving in a direction where they are snobbish towards elite credentials instead of necessarily thinking of them in a positive light.
So, I’m really excited to kind of dig into that and have a couple of projects in this area trying to understand kind of this anti-elite sentiment and its implications for politicians. For example, who wish to communicate their credentials without getting penalized for doing so.
And then very related to the receptiveness area, but thinking about it from more of a political campaign perspective, thinking about are there conditions under which crossing the aisle and disagreeing with your party publicly. You can kind of do that in a way that minimizes the risk of backlash from your own side.
So, we keep saying it would be nice for politicians to work together and so on, but when they do, evidence suggests that they tend to be punished pretty heavily. So, are there conditions under which you can do that while minimizing such penalties essentially?
So, those are some of the directions that I’ve been thinking about. So, it’s very much still related to the core of politics and receptiveness, but maybe taking the form of thinking about the implications that these psychologies have for political candidates and for people who are public facing in the political space.
Andy Luttrell: Well, that’s great. I’ll be excited to see that stuff when it comes down the pike. But in the meantime, thanks so much for taking the time to talk about all this work.
Mohamed Hussein: Thanks, Andy.
Andy Luttrell (Outro): Alrighty that’ll do it for another episode of Opinion Science. Thank you so much to Mohamed Hussein for taking the time to talk about his work. You can find links to his websites and the research we talked about on the episode webpage.
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