But while Americans may be yearning more and more for greater cooperation across the aisles, the question of how to get the parties to get on the bi-partisan bandwagon has no one answer.
Yesterday I mentioned a couple of promising solutions suggested by the new group No Labels (not the first by far to recommend them), all which would tweak the election process to deliver fewer extremists to Congress.
Today I want to try out some reforms that would nudge lawmakers toward collaboration once they've gotten into office.
Those ideas come - indirectly - from Robert Cialdini's "Influence," the 1984 marketing classic on the six "weapons of influence" - that is, how to get people to say "yes" without them knowing that's what you're trying to do (and even make them like you while you're doing it). It could be called a manifesto for manipulation, but as with all tools their value is in whether they can be used for evil or good.
The first weapon I propose to use for the good of collegiality on Capitol Hill is "reciprocation." Human beings are natural reciprocators. Studies suggest that our propensity to dole out and return favors is not just something we learn, but rather a behavior hard-coded in our DNA. Unlike most species that usually just help out their immediate kin (ie those who share genes), humans are surprisingly altruistic toward people with no familial relation. Evolutionary biologists theorize that this altruist - or more accurately "quid pro quo" - trait would be beneficial to groups of humans in the early days; a small tribe which naturally helped each other out in hard times might be more apt to survive than tribes without a similar help-thy-neighbor instinct. (Humans are not naive enough to be pure altruists though; we also have a strong instinct to punish "free riders" who don't live up to their half of the "quid pro quo" bargain.)
Cialdini charts out a few modern day examples of this reciprocation instinct in action. Joe, the plant in one study, casually buys a participant a coke while he goes to get himself one at the vending machine. The unsuspecting participant thinks Joe is just another subject in a fake study. Later, when the "decoy" study is over, Joe asks the other guy if he wants to buy raffle tickets for a local charity. If Joe hadn't bought a coke, participants on average bought 25 cents of tickets. If he did come back with a coke, the other guy would buy 50 cents of tickets. Given that a bottle coke back in the 70s was 10 cents, Joe made a good return on his "gift" investment.
Apparently we have a strong urge to return favors. Or more precisely, according to Cialdini, we have a strong urge to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of being in someone else's debt.
Cialdini doesn't mention it himself, but at least one other great mind has noticed that being in someone else's credit also makes them more apt to help out. As Ben Franklin famously noted, "he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged."
Either way, gifts have a way of producing more gifts.
One kind of favor - a "concession" can be particularly effective at eliciting return favors. In negotiations, a "concession" is essentially a gift. If I'm splitting the responsibility of a project with a co-worker, I can start start with a demand that he handle 70% of the work, which will likely make him balk "no friggin' way." I can then backtrack, splitting up the work a little more fairly, say 55% and 45%. That concession can win me some good will and perhaps a concession in return, so I end up doing 40% of the work, but getting 50% of the credit (which, of course, I would never do).
Remarkably, studies that set up quasi real-life negotiation show that when there is a concession back-and-forth people are happier with the result - even if they they had reached the exact same result without a concession. (The technique - which Cialdini calls "rejection then retreat" - can, however, backfire if the initial demands are seen as extreme and made in bad faith.)
With all the mutual benefits of giving and giving-in, you can imagine how they'd come in handy on Capitol Hill. It wouldn't be just during legislation negotiations that favors (in the form of concessions) would reap favors - and ultimately lead to compromise and bipartisan solutions. But even small favors out of the committee rooms - not of the grease-palming but of the "could you pass the salt" variety - would naturally spur collegiality.
Of course, giving and giving-in face two obstacles in DC. The greater obstacle by far is the culture that "giving-in" is a sign of weakness. We've bred a generation of partisans that think any compromise is akin to trouncing on your principles, if not selling your soul. The other obstacle is a logistical one; according to Ron Brownstein, the combination of low airfares and high fundraising demands means that congressmembers no longer have any downtime in DC - that is, downtime they used to use socializing with each other often across party lines. With no off-the-clock face time, lawmakers have no opportunity to build up good faith in the everyday quid-pro-quo humans are used to.
The question then becomes how do you surmount those obstacles? How do you fight a culture of "stand your ground" and how do you encourage lawmakers to spend more time with their colleagues across the aisle?
I'm not sure, but one thing I know: changing a "culture" is near impossible. You can, however, lessen the effects of that culture by putting some teflon between it and lawmakers. This is certainly an unpopular position, but giving lawmakers a space - free from onlookers - where they can freely concede without be charged as "spineless flip-floppers" would be a start.
As I said, it's not a popular idea. America, of course, is heading in the direction of more transparency in DC discussions, not less. It would be impossible to backtrack and close the doors on committee meetings that were opened in the 70's when the transparency movement took off. But we could stem the tide of greater openness in Capitol Hill chambers. That is, unless Americans can embrace "giving a little to get a little", which I don't see happening soon, we need to give our lawmakers the closed-door room to reciprocate on their own.
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