important findings about the persuasive power of facts

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There is a huge body of research that suggests that people are not very susceptible to good arguments. Apparently, we believe things for unexamined reasons, cherry-pick evidence to support our intuitive beliefs, and minimize the significance of inconvenient evidence.

These findings contribute to a general skepticism about people’s capacity for democracy, and I fear that this skepticism is self-reinforcing. If we presume that humans cannot reason well, why would we try to build institutions that promote reasoning? Only half jokingly, I sometimes say that the theme of current social science is: people are stupid and they hate each other.

But I also argue that at least some of this research employs methods that are biased against discovering rational thought. In particular, if you ask random samples of people disconnected survey questions that interest you (not them) and then use techniques such as factor analysis to find latent patterns, you will, indeed, often discover that people are stupid and hate each other. More prosaically, you will develop scales for latent variables like knowledge or tolerance that yield poor scores. But such methods may overlook the idiosyncratic ways that reasons influence individuals on the topics that matter to them.

Of all people, those who believe in false conspiracy theories are generally seen as the least susceptible to good reasons; and previous efforts to convince them have often failed. However, in a 2024 Science article, Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand report results of an intervention that substantially reduced people’s commitment to conspiracy theories, not only in the short term, but also two months later.

In this study, holders of conspiracy theories wrote about why they held their beliefs, and then an AI bot held a conversation with them in which it supplied reliable information directly relevant to the specific factual premises of each respondent. For instance, if a person believed that 9/11 was an “inside job” because Building 7 collapsed even though no plane hit it (see Wood and Douglas 2013), the AI might provide engineering information about Building 7. Many people were persuaded.

These results are consistent with a study of conversations with canvassers who succeeded in persuading many voters “by listening for individual voters’ … moral values and then tailoring their appeals to those moral values” (Kalla, Levine, A. S., & Broockman 2022). The two studies differ in that one used people and the other, an AI bot; and one emphasized facts while the other focused on values. But both results point to a model in which each person holds various beliefs that are more-or-less connected to other beliefs as reasons, forming a network. Beliefs may be normative or empirical–they function very similarly. Discourse involves stating one’s beliefs and their connections to other beliefs that serve as premises or implications.

People actually do a lot of this and are relatively good at assessing the rigor of such conversations when they observe them (Mercier and Sperber 2017). However, many of our methods are biased against discovering such reasoning (Levine 2024a and Levine 2024b), leaving us with the mistaken impression that we are a bunch of idiots incapable of self-governance.

Sources: Costello, T. H., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2024). Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science, 385(6714); Wood MJ, Douglas KM. “What about building 7?” A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Front Psychol. 2013 Jul 8;4:409; Kalla, J. L., Levine, A. S., & Broockman, D. E. (2022). Personalizing moral reframing in interpersonal conversation: A field experiment. The Journal of Politics, 84(2), 1239-1243; Mercier, H. & Sperber D, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard University Press 2017; Levine, P. (2024a). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024a), and Levine, P. (2024v). Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas. Journal of Political Ideologies, 29(3), 464-491.

16 colliding forces that create our moment

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Not one major phenomenon is driving US and global politics today. Several powerful and somewhat contradictory currents must be navigated together. I list the following trends in no particular order. The references in square brackets link to previous posts on the same themes.

Costs of neoliberalism: The global market economy harms people in wealthy countries [1]. It also has benefits, and the net impact is debatable. (For instance, US workers are reporting the highest mean levels of job satisfaction yet recorded.) But even if a minority of workers hold insecure, regimented, automated, underpaid, and demeaning jobs, their concerns are real. Meanwhile, AI looms as a potential destroyer of decent livelihoods.

Class inversion: In many countries, right-wing parties draw their main support from less-educated and less affluent constituencies, while the main center-left parties depend on voters of the highest socio-economic status. As a result, right-wing parties cannot compete by offering limited government, but instead promise versions of ethno-nationalism. And left parties provide mostly symbolic policies on social issues while blocking more ambitious economic reforms that would cost their own voters [2, 3, 29, etc.].

Right-wing populist authoritarianism: From the Philippines and India to Hungary and El Salvador and the United States, successful charismatic male politicians disparage outsiders or minority groups and repress dissent, purporting to speak–without inhibitions–on behalf of the authentic “people” of their respective countries. This formula wins elections [4].

Effective state repression: From ca. 1980-2000, authoritarian states–whether left, right, or technocratic–tended to falter when challenged by mass popular movements. One reason was that the authoritarians clung to old-fashioned methods, such as cancelling elections and imprisoning dissidents, which failed in the face of sophisticated nonviolent social movements that borrowed and extended the repertoire of the US Civil Rights Movement. But then authoritarian states innovated, developing more effective methods for control. Meanwhile, social movements mainly reprised the toolkit of the 1960s, with some modifications for digital media. The rate of success of nonviolent social movements fell [28].

Oligarchy: Small numbers of billionaires wield enormous power in the politics and media of many countries. This is a different problem from class struggle or economic inequality. In fact, some of the billionaire oligarchs are at odds with the highest income strata of their own societies. Often (as in the cases of Trump and Musk) they owe much of their fortunes to the public purse. They are literally corrupt [11].

Elite capture: The same institutions and towns or neighborhoods where political opinions are most progressive–and sometimes intolerantly so–are also designed to preserve the economic advantages of their own people. I write this post at Stanford University, which students describe as a “liberal bubble” and which operates at the very heart of global capitalism. Students who may be hyper-liberal also expect to work in tech or finance. They got here (and to institutions like my own) thanks to K12 schools and college admissions that relentlessly favored the most advantaged families; professors who held scarce, tenured jobs; contingent workers who cooked and cleaned for them; and even zoning rules that inflated the value of their families’ homes. From an outsider’s perspective, all of this looks rigged and hypocritical [5, 13, 14].

Regulatory capture: Progressive politicians prefer to require behavior by companies, nonprofits, and public institutions instead of providing services. The costs of regulation do not appear on governments’ balance sheets and can be played down. Unfortunately, regulations rarely produce the intended results because they are implemented by organizations that have interests of their own. From the perspective of an employee or a consumer, a government regulation whose original rationale was to protect the public good often looks like just another self-serving directive handed down by the company’s HR department [21].

Racial backlash: From the 1960s to the 2000s, national Democratic and Republican politicians talked about race in ways that were similar enough that voters who weren’t political specialists couldn’t tell the difference. Indeed, each party was inconsistent enough about racial issues that their real differences were ambiguous. I think the Democrats’ nomination of Barack Obama and then the party’s partial receptiveness to Black Lives Matter alerted voters to the fact that people of color, particularly Black Americans, held real influence in that party but not in the GOP. A significant number of white voters then shifted to the Republicans as a form of racial backlash [6, 7]

Affective polarization: Citizens in the USA and many similar countries are affectively polarized, increasingly using party labels to decide whether other citizens are friends or enemies. In the US, this trend is symmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. Many people also receive news and opinion that is ideologically tilted. We marinate in ideologically convenient clichés and avoid wrestling with tradeoffs and complexities. (This is true of sophisticated liberals as well as other people) [9, 10].

Loneliness: Americans have become much less likely to participate in self-governing voluntary associations. Yet such participation supports other forms of political engagement and correlates with tolerant and democratic values. The opposite of social capital is loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions. Among the organizations that have shrunk are unions, which declined to their lowest level (one in ten workers) during Joe Biden’s friendly administration. Another category is religion. For many Americans today, being Christian is an identity label rather than a demanding, collective practice that teaches self-sacrifice and common action [12, 15].

COVID hangover: Several of the previously mentioned trends, notably loneliness and racial backlash, rose rapidly during and since the global pandemic. Although I sympathize with leaders who had to make decisions about matters like masks and vaccine mandates, I believe that these issues became polarized by party and social class; and liberal elites far overstated the case for restrictions. For example, as I noted during the pandemic, the scientific evidence for masks was weak, yet wearing a mask became politically correct. (Not to mention the genuine coverup of the Wuhan lab leak.) Since those who favored pandemic restrictions also tend to want more regulation in general, they helped to discredit government [16, 17].

Legislative incapacity: So far in this century, Congress has yet to pass any landmark legislation. Perhaps the strongest candidate for that label would be the massive spending bills that Joe Biden signed, but even those were mainly time-limited budgetary changes rather than new institutions. The federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. No Child Left Behind was a set of amendments (and a short-lived new title) for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Obamacare was likewise a set of tweaks on the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Congress appears incapable of passing major new laws, liberal or conservative [18, 19].

Executive aggrandizement: As the legislature has waned, the presidency and the executive branch have waxed. But the presidency is much more dangerous because it is the branch with guns, files, prison cells, and a charismatic leader. According to Juan Linz, constitutionally powerful presidents are almost guaranteed to become dictators unless a party-system creates effective checks, which has ceased to be the case in the United States [20].

The attention economy: The public sphere runs on advertising. Outrage draws attention and thereby drives profits. Not only do these incentives worsen affective partisanship and loneliness among citizens, but they reward politicians who can attract attention on cable news or social media instead of developing legislation [22, 23].

Climate change: The earth’s climate is warming in ways that are already harming, frightening, and dislocating people. Yet the public’s explicit support for addressing this problem is so weak that Democrats hid their own climate legislation under the misleading title of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and even the Sierra Club’s president avoided climate in favor of abortion when he endorsed Kamala Harris. It is probably correct that Democrats would poll better if they were less identified with climate reform, but the issue needs more, not less, attention [24, 25].

Anxiety about American “exceptionalism”: For all MAGA’s rhetoric about the unique excellence of the United States, the same movement also paints a picture of decline and weakness in the face of overseas rivals. It is easy to psychoanalyze this combination of emotions as a neurosis. But I would not overlook that fact that the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. In other words, the neurosis results from trauma. The trauma could be described as self-inflicted, but it was inflicted by US political elites on everyone else [26, 27].

These 16 trends do share one root cause. (Some would point to capitalism, but I do not find that analysis useful [28].) However, all of these trends relate to the same larger problem: the degradation of democracy. Each phenomenon reflects and/or worsens the declining power of regular people to discuss, learn, and control their environment in large numbers.

Solutions:

Better political leadership would help.

An authentic conservative movement could play a valuable role in countering populism, executive aggrandizement, regulatory capture, and some other items on this list. (Genuine conservatism is deeply antithetical to Trumpian populism).

I would favor significant changes to our constitution and can imagine that we will see serious efforts to curtail the presidency and the Supreme Court and to restructure elections after Trump’s term.

Voluntary groups with mostly middle-class members can address loneliness, anxiety, and perhaps even racial backlash if they were bigger and more influential.

But nothing is as important as building powerful parties, unions, and other organizations that are accountable to diverse working-class members. Such organizations can counter all the trends on my list above.

Right now, much attention is focused on the Democratic Party, because its favorability has reached an all-time low for either party, even while it represents the official opposition to a catastrophic president. I would welcome new Democratic leaders and policies, but deeper reform must be structural: shifting resources to active local party committees, especially in working-class districts, and making candidates accountable to them. Meanwhile, we also need associations that stand somewhat apart from any party.

the ham actor and the psychopath: Adorno on Trump and Musk

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It is not my style to apply psychoanalytic categories to political phenomena. I generally want to take explicit political claims at face value, whether I find them appealing or awful. I see this as a way of treating other people as fellow citizens. Besides, I have little background in psychoanalysis and sometimes doubt whether it can make falsifiable claims about politics.

However, if you want a critical Freudian interpretation of people like Trump and Musk (or Putin, or Modi) and their supporters, I can recommend a classic text: Theodor Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).

Adorno claims that many people in capitalist societies have “a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency.” I think this means that people have been taught to form personal desires and to strive to get what they want. But they also experience “the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.” In short, they are not as successful as they expect to be. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object” (p. 126).

This object is a leader. “Only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father. This is the ultimate root of the otherwise enigmatic personalization of fascist propaganda, its incessant plugging of names and supposedly great men, instead of discussing objective causes” (124).

Three features enable a leader to draw support:

First, the leader presents himself as similar to his followers. “While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person” (127). He even demonstrates “startling symptoms of inferiority,” such as a “resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths.” (I thought about Trump and Musk, respectively, when I read that sentence.)

Adorno explains why people tolerate–or even prefer–their leader to have such flaws: it makes it easier to identify with him. “He resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority” (132). “The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” In short, the leader aims to be a “great little man” (127).

Second, people gain pleasure from loving a leader who demonstrates little or no love. “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches, namely the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give,’ as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial, is thus being accounted for: the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love.” This combination is compelling because the followers identify with the leader and thereby feel liberated from having to give or care.

Or perhaps the leader vaguely expresses love for his followers (without being accountable to them), while denouncing more general love. Adorno quotes Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922): “Even today, the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent” (127)

Third, the leader enables the followers to identify with each other by expressing hatred for weak outsiders. The followers do not deeply believe the premises of the hatred but gain pleasure from participating together in ritualistic expressions of it. “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance” (136-7).

There is more to Adorno’s account. For example, the mass’s desire is libidinal and erotic, but this truth must be concealed because it would be embarrassing. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends” (123).

Also, the decline of serious religious belief helps fascist leaders, because actual religions teach demanding ideas, including self-sacrificial love. But once religion becomes an identity label, religious ideas no longer stand in the way of politics.

the division between the believers and nonbelievers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the “sheep and goat” device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages (129).

Finally, Adorno denies that fascism has caused these outcomes or that a fascist leader is ultimately responsible for them. “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue” (135). Rather, for Adorno, a fascist demagogue is a tool by which capitalist interests control the masses.

(I am not committed to either the Freudianism or the Marxism of Adorno’s account, but it rings lots of bells today.)

Source: Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’”[1951] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982). See also: the troubling implications of factor analysis for democracy (with notes on Adorno); philosophy of boredom; what if the people don’t want to rule?;

how markets “think” about politics

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As I write, US stocks are plunging. I have no idea what will be happening by the time you read this post. However, stepping back from the moment, what does it mean that Wall Street indexes rose after Trump won the 2024 election but fell last week? Or that Ukrainian government bond prices rose from October 2024 until last week and then fell rapidly?

One view is that markets have wisdom–or at least predictive value–because they aggregate information from many people. Investors think critically and rigorously because their money is on the line. The recent trends make sense on their face and confirm that markets are rational.

A different view is that capitalism involves a class struggle, and capital markets rise when the upper classes expect their interests to prevail. This model has no trouble explaining why business leaders, including registered Democrats, would tell Steven Rattner that they like Trump. They were not predicting prosperity for all but expecting to profit for themselves.

I would endorse a third model. Friedrich Hayek had a genuine insight: individuals have limited cognitive capacity and diverse motives. Therefore, individuals cannot reliably assess whole societies, let alone predict the future of anything large-scale. However, says Hayek, within our own domains of experience and expertise, we can reasonably predict specific prices. After a tough spring, farmers will expect the price of wheat to rise.

Prices allow us to plan efficiently. Many people do not seek to maximize wealth but to accomplish something else, such as holding onto a valued job or retiring soon. Nevertheless, the result of all their private planning is a market that is–in certain respects–efficient.

However, markets also create opportunities to profit by correctly predicting the large-scale situation. In turn, such predictions require assessing the present. For example, to guess how the US economy will fare over the next four years, it’s necessary to evaluate Donald Trump as a leader. One can buy bonds and other securities partly on the basis of such predictions. In this way, an accurate evaluation of Trump could pay off financially.

But Hayek’s defense of markets would not encourage us to trust the aggregate results of such thinking. Just because many people trade securities, it does not follow that their overall understanding of the present or their predictions for the society as a whole are reliable.

On the contrary, each participant in a market who tries to predict how a whole economy or country will perform is subject to the same cognitive limitations that–according to Hayek–beset us as voters and policymakers.

Markets do respond intelligibly to news. Wall Street indices fall every time Trump announces tariffs and rise whenever he seems to back off. But these changes are not predictive. In fact, we can easily predict market shifts as soon as we know what Trump says. The market adds little new information.

It’s true that putting money on the line gives an individual a motivation to think rigorously and critically. But motivations do not solve cognitive limitations. The businessmen who confided in Rattner said that they didn’t like “woke stuff” under Biden. Such feelings should not directly influence their market behavior under Trump. Nevertheless, their hostility to “woke stuff” could affect their stock trades by influencing their moods or by leading them to consume news and information that is tilted in favor of Trump. As cognitively limited creatures, we must rely on limited sources and a priori models–also known as ideologies.

In recent months, CEOs reported rising confidence in the economy, while consumers’ confidence slipped. A closer look at consumer confidence reveals that it fell by 28 points among Democrats but rose by 32.8 points among Republicans between January and February. So we can compare three changing predictions: those of corporate bosses, Democrats as consumers, and Republicans as consumers. Why do the Democrats diverge from the CEOs and the average Republicans?

  • The CEOs tend to have different values from the Democratic consumers. If everyone agreed that Trump’s tax policies will boost corporate profits but hurt the environment, CEOs would be more positive than representative Democrats.
  • The CEOs have different information from Democratic consumers. They are awash in data about their own balance sheets, plus business-oriented news. Democratic consumers are seeing negative assessments of Trump.
  • The CEO’s and the Democrats probably hold different mental models of such fundamental issues as the role of government and businesses in our society. Everyone holds such models, without which we cannot absorb new information.
  • Partisan identity is working as a powerful heuristic. Americans are using the party of the incumbent president to predict the economy. This may be unwise, but human beings must use heuristics, and a party label does convey relevant information if you combine it with a model of the society.
  • Some people act performatively. I would probably answer almost any survey question about Trump in a way that made him look bad, even if I didn’t completely believe the literal truth of my response. Some may even buy financial instruments to make a point–witness the popularity of Trump’s cryptocurrency.
  • Finally, the information that people absorb may reflect political agendas. Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, and other media barons want to affect public opinion, although their impact is uneven because news consumers are sorted ideologically.

This is not a simple model, but it does have a simple core. It is methodologically individualist, presuming that the decision-makers are human beings rather than classes or other abstractions. Regardless of their interests and social positions, these individuals are cognitively constrained and not primarily concerned with assessing the whole society. When they do make general assessments and predictions, these decisions reflect their mental models (which, in turn, often reflect their social positions), limited information, and concrete issues that are salient for them at the time. As a result, markets respond intelligibly to widely reported breaking news but have little predictive value.

See also: The truth in Hayek; making our models explicit; social education as learning to improve models; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach; etc.

the future, in utilitarianism and pragmatism

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In 1993, Cornel West wrote that “the future has ethical significance” for pragmatists. “In fact, the key to pragmatism, the distinctive feature that sets it apart from other philosophical traditions—and maybe its unique American character—is its emphasis on the ethical significance of the future” (West 1993, 111). He quotes John Dewey and Josiah Royce to that effect.

At first glance, this claim seems mistaken. What about utilitarianism, which teaches that an act, policy, rule, or institution is good to the extent that it improves happiness in the future?

For philosophers, utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism. In general, consequentialism focuses on the future by assuming that our responsibility is to make things better in the long run. Utilitarianism is the version that equates “better” with greater net happiness. Therefore, isn’t utilitarianism as much concerned with the “ethical significance of the future” as pragmatism is? And isn’t pragmatism a form of consequentialism?

I agree with West that pragmatism has a distinctive focus on the future. Utilitarians believe that we know today the criterion for evaluating future states. We already know what happiness is, and we will find out later whether our current actions promote future happiness. Our concern with the future requires predicting the effects of the present on outcomes that we value today.

In contrast, pragmatists presume that values will change as a result of continuous learning. We cannot know today the criteria by which the outcomes of our present acts will later be judged.

Dewey writes that the “present meaning of action” is the “only good which can fully engage thought.” He is against measuring this present meaning in terms of “a remote good” or “future good,” whether that “be defined as pleasure, or perfection, or salvation, or attainment of virtuous character.” This sounds like a focus on the present to the exclusion of the future. But Dewey adds:


‘Present’ activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. Those who hold that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a remote goal, first confuse meaning with space, and then treat spatial position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements, due to conflict, entanglement and obscurity, in most of the situations of life, and we do not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing; if it cannot be told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition it can never be judged (Dewey 1922, 281-2)

This is rich but abstract. For me, at least, Ruth Ann Putnam helps make Dewey’s view more concrete. She defines “inquiry” as a process that begins when we perceive a problem—something that requires action. “Values typically enter into the beginning of an inquiry on an equal footing with facts,” and they emerge on an equal footing as well, but potentially changed by being explored and compared by groups of people. She writes: “the facts are value-laden, and the values are fact-laden” (Putnam 1998, 7).

See also: explaining Dewey’s pragmatism; Dewey and the current toward democracy; a John Dewey primer. Sources: Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993): 96-106; John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (Henry Holt, 1922); Ruth Ann Putnam, “Perceiving Facts and Values,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1988): 5–19