Picture a CEO — let's call her Maya — walking into her third board meeting on the same "group belongingness" initiative she's been pitching for more than a year. She has the numbers: ROI modeling from two independent firms, a cost-of-inaction analysis, and peer-benchmark data from three competitors who did something similar first (and now have both the reputational lead and the retention data to prove it).
She has, in other words, done everything an executive is trained to do before walking into a room like this one. But she begins her pitch by saying "It's only fair that we do our part to care for our people, and here are the numbers to back it up…"
And just like that, she lost part of the room.
Now, the board isn't hostile, and they aren't stupid. Two of them own successful businesses of their own, one is a retired four-star general, and the rest have more than a century of combined leadership experience between them. But, just like last time (and in spite of all Maya's great data), they nod politely, ask a handful of clarifying questions, and indicate — as boards often do — that they'd prefer to "hold" on the proposal for another quarter. One comments "it just doesn't feel like the right move."
And that's our first clue.
You see, Maya isn't failing with her logic, she's failing with translating her argument into language that resonates with much of the room.
For nearly two decades, a body of research at Stanford, Toronto, and Berkeley has been demonstrating that most persuasive failures across ideological, generational, and cultural divides (including the ones you have in your organization, whether you realize it or not) are not failures of evidence so much as they are failures of moral language.
They find that, when pressed to make a passionate case for a cause we believe in, people tend to lean on moral language that they find most compelling. For liberals (like Maya), that's often emphasizing things like harm and fairness. For instance, if you were to think back to the battles that raged over same-sex marriage, you'll recall that most of the proponents mounted arguments that relied on these two foundations: they're not harming anyone (i.e., harm) and if opposite-sex couples get to marry, it's only right that we allow same-sex couples to marry (i.e., fairness).
Now, this moral argument is plenty sufficient for other liberals (who share a reliance on these two moral foundations), but it's often insufficient for conservatives (i.e., the ones who they're actually trying to convince). This is a massive barrier to persuasion: we intuitively build arguments that our side is likely to find persuasive but that the other side is unlikely to be moved by. The person making the case argues from their own moral foundations — the things they find self-evidently important — and cannot understand why the other side is unmoved by arguments the arguer finds compelling.
The argument is being delivered in a moral dialect that the audience doesn't natively speak. The technical name for this failure mode is the "moral empathy gap" (Feinberg & Willer, 2015). The technique for closing it has a name too: moral reframing.
The seminal work comes from Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer. In a 2015 paper titled "From Gulf to Bridge," they ran six studies across some of the most polarized topics in American life at the time — same-sex marriage, universal healthcare, military spending, and even the question of whether English should be the official language of the United States. In each one, they compared two versions of a pro-position argument. Version A framed the position using the moral foundations the arguer's own political tribe tended to prioritize; Version B framed the same position using the moral foundations the opposing tribe tended to prioritize.
The results were both striking and consistent. Pro-environmental messages framed around purity and sanctity — "keep our land clean and pure" — persuaded conservative audiences meaningfully more than the standard care/harm framing that liberal environmentalists reflexively reach for. Pro-military-spending messages framed around fairness and equality — the armed forces as an engine of social mobility, a place where poor kids get college paid for — moved liberal audiences more than the standard loyalty/authority framing conservatives reflexively reach for. Same-sex marriage arguments framed around loyalty and patriotism outperformed fairness-based versions when the audience was Republicans.
In every case, the substance of the position didn't change — only the moral vocabulary surrounding it did. In other words, these were the same underlying policies, but they were garnering significantly different levels of support based upon which moral arguments were used to support them.
In spite of this, when Feinberg and Willer asked liberals and conservatives to write arguments intended to persuade the other side, they were terrible at it. In almost every case, the participants wrote arguments grounded in their own moral foundations, not the audience's. It turns out that most people have a hard time understanding that what is persuasive for them is not necessarily what will be persuasive for an opponent. We tend to think "well, I find this compelling, so they must, as well."
But it's not that simple. And in this way, the moral empathy gap does not seem to be a niche failure — it seems to be our default.
A follow-up study by Voelkel and Feinberg (2018) extended the finding into the electoral arena. In the middle of the 2016 U.S. presidential race, they showed conservatives one of two messages criticizing Donald Trump. One argued that Trump was unfit for office because he discriminated against minorities and promoted prejudice (a fairness argument). The other argued that Trump was unfit because he had dodged the Vietnam-era draft (a loyalty argument). The loyalty-framed argument produced measurably lower conservative support for Trump; the fairness-framed one did not. The same design run on liberals with Hillary Clinton produced the mirror-image result: liberals were more moved by a fairness-based critique of Clinton than by a loyalty-based one. The mechanism generalized cleanly from policy to candidates to (in later work by Voelkel and colleagues in 2023) even to reframing economically progressive platforms in "binding" language — patriotism, family, tradition — which produced meaningful gains in conservative support without any change to the platform itself.
Which brings us back to Maya.
The most recent frontier of this research has moved out of politics and into precisely the kind of room she was standing in. A 2024 review in the Journal of Management & Organization documented what happens when organizations frame diversity-and-belonging initiatives exclusively in care/fairness language — which Maya did — while addressing an audience whose moral vocabulary might skew more towards loyalty (to the team, the mission, the country), authority (to established norms), and sanctity (to the integrity of the institution). Participants whose moral foundations aren't spoken to disengage, and in some cases actively resist, initiatives whose substance they might otherwise have supported.
Now, moral reframing is not a magic fix. If used irresponsibly, you risk losing more than if you hadn't tried reframing at all. This is for two reasons.
Firstly, people can tell when someone's trying to manipulate them. If you think moral reframing is just about slapping words like "loyalty" onto your pitch to persuade a conservative, you're likely to lose more than just the argument — you can say goodbye to integrity and credibility, too. Moral reframing is not to be treated as a "trick," but instead as an exercise; can I put myself into the shoes of another and truly understand what matters to them? And can I then build a case that remains true to my own values while also acknowledging how it supports theirs?
Secondly, moral reframing has the potential to (prepare to be shocked) moralize an issue. In 2022, Kodapanakkal, Brandt, Kogler, and van Beest found that moral framing of any kind (matched or mismatched) tends to increase moralization of the audience's own attitude — making them more persuaded in the short term, but also less willing to compromise afterward. Moral language is a lever that both moves the audience but then hardens the ground beneath them. If you use it clumsily, you may win the meeting while creating a situation where compromise in another direction is impossible in the future.
The evidence is not that people who disagree with us are impossible to persuade — it's that they are almost never persuaded in a language they don't speak. Maya had almost certainly been arguing, without noticing, in a single moral dialect — hers — and treating the substance of her case as though the substance were enough. But it rarely is. And the version of the pitch that gets the board unstuck almost certainly runs through moral foundations she has, until now, been leaving on the shelf.
There is a version of this month's issue that reduces to a bumper sticker: know your audience. That's a good start, but there's a bit more to ensuring you use moral reframing both well and responsibly:
1. Audit your own moral dialect before you audit anyone else's. Most leaders I've worked with can name, fairly quickly, the moral foundations they don't prioritize (e.g., "I don't care much about respecting authority"). What they struggle with is the mirror version of that question: which foundations do they lean on so reflexively that they no longer notice they're leaning? The Feinberg and Willer finding that people spontaneously argue in their own moral language — even when explicitly instructed not to — isn't a quirk of political partisans, it's a fact about all of us. Before your next high-stakes pitch, write out the reasons you find your position compelling and label each one against the five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity/purity). If four of your five reasons cluster in one or two foundations, you've just diagnosed the problem. Your argument isn't wrong, it's monolingual. And you're about to deliver it to a room that includes speakers of several other moral languages.
2. Translate the position. Do not translate yourself. The most common misreading of moral reframing is that it asks you to become a different kind of arguer — to feign values you don't hold, or worse, to abandon your own moral position in service of persuasion. It doesn't. Feinberg's original framing is careful and worth preserving: the goal is to reframe the position through the audience's moral vocabulary while keeping your own conviction intact. When Feinberg and Willer showed liberal environmentalists making a purity-based case for environmental protection ("industrial pollution defiles the natural world; we have a duty to keep our air, water, and soil clean and pure"), the arguers didn't become conservatives. They found the true moral overlap between their own commitment and a foundation their audience already valued, and led with that. If you can't find the overlap honestly, you probably shouldn't reframe — you should either find a different position or accept that this argument isn't going to land with this audience. Moral translation is not moral impersonation, and audiences almost always catch the difference.
3. Anticipate the double edge. The Kodapanakkal finding — that moral framing persuades and entrenches — is worth taking seriously. If you use moral reframing to win a specific decision (say, the board approves Maya's belongingness initiative), you may simultaneously make the audience less willing to compromise on adjacent decisions later. Moralized wins carry moralized commitments. That is sometimes exactly what you want (a coalition unwilling to backslide) and sometimes exactly what you don't (a partnership now brittle around related trade-offs). Before you moralize an argument, ask yourself the question that separates the tactic from the strategy: am I trying to win this decision or build a durable coalition? The two answers imply different frames, different intensities, and, on some occasions, the decision not to moralize the case at all — to argue instead from pragmatism, cost, or shared interest. The best communicators know that moral language is a scalpel, not a hammer, and that the wound it opens takes longer to close than the incision it makes.
Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2015). From gulf to bridge: When do moral arguments facilitate political influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1665–1681 (sagepub.com).
Voelkel, J. G., & Feinberg, M. (2018). Morally reframed arguments can affect support for political candidates. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(8), 917–924 (sagepub.com).
Voelkel, J. G., Malik, M., Redekopp, C., & Willer, R. (2023). Moral reframing increases support for economically progressive candidates. PNAS Nexus, 2(6).
Kodapanakkal, R. I., Brandt, M. J., Kogler, C., & van Beest, I. (2022). Moral frames are persuasive and moralize attitudes; nonmoral frames are persuasive and de-moralize attitudes. Psychological Science, 33(3), 433–449 (sagepub.com).
Journal of Management & Organization (2024). Enhancing engagement in workplace belonging efforts: Why moral processes matter.