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If You Want to Influence People, Don’t Do This
It’s not easy to change people’s minds.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that social media causes us to lose our minds.
Doesn’t it make us love to hate? It isn’t exactly hard to come across angry and hateful posts directed at someone or something.
We see this trend on social media because angry sentiments spread more quickly and widely than sentiments expressing joy, sadness, or disgust. So, if you want to generate a response, anger is definitely the way to go.
The question is, why do we express our anger in the first place?
Is it because we love to feel validated by the attention we receive? Is it because we love tearing down other people’s ideas so we feel powerful and superior? Is it because we love the feeling of self-righteous indignation?
Maybe your answer to all these questions is “yes”. You certainly wouldn’t be alone if it is.
But, if you also have the goal of influencing people — of changing minds — which many of us like to think we do, don’t fool yourself: expressing yourself using anger isn’t going to cut it.
Anger Won’t Change Minds
The intention of angrily expressing an opinion is to influence minds, right? Whether for the person the anger is…
