instead of arguing

If I have a decision to make, I often use a shortcut to finding the correct choice -- "If a choice feels right to me, then it's probably correct." This shortcut is handy and often necessary, but it can be wrong sometimes.

(Some examples. If I am choosing where to eat lunch, I don't want to spend effort analyzing my options, and my instincts will probably lead me to a happy choice. The same thing applies if I'm choosing whether to buy a bus pass or what movie to see. It's not worth my rethinking the full decision.)

(Some bigger examples. I have used this shortcut when deciding what school to attend, what to study, and what apartment to live in. I wasn't an expert on those things and did not want to make a big project of figuring them out, so I just chose what felt right.)

Often if a political idea feels right to people, it is clear that its supporters are not interested in learning the facts or listening to experts. The elephant examples of this are Trump and Brexit, but other cases are more blatant, where people reject facts much more directly. The simplest example is that some people don't believe in vaccines.

When you search "how to talk to anti-vaxxers," the results show an obvious lesson -- it is ineffective to just present facts to people. If someone thinks vaccines are dangerous, and they're presented with info showing that vaccines are good, they'll usually just be annoyed that a campaign tried to get in their face about it. Information does not help to change minds.

Two things help to change the minds of anti-vaxxers. One is if the medical info is received from someone they trust -- if a loved one insists on the importance of vaccines, or if a doctor shows compassion when giving vaccination advice.

The other way to convince people to vaccinate is to show them what it's like when kids get the measles -- especially by sharing the testimony of parents who had to deal with kids' measles. Anti-vaxxers have been moved by scary images of kids with autism, and they can be moved by scary images of kids with measles.

When people trust their emotions instead of reasoning things out, it is pointless to try and reason with them -- but you can still tell them something if you appeal directly to their emotions. Images and stories are much better than facts for this purpose.

This is a lesson that a lot of people forget when they discuss politics, or even when they get in personal arguments. But I think it is a very basic lesson in the world of marketing. Marketing is an entire field dedicated to the question of how to appeal to people, and it always gives the answer that images and stories are the best way to do that.

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(You may object that, if facts are useless to change people's minds, then a correct message loses the entire advantage of its own being correct. But this advantage might have never really existed. For correctness to be an advantage in whether people believe something, you'd need to be able to demonstrate that correctness in a very simple and direct way.)