Is Rational Argument Hopeless?
Dan Williams says that "mind virus" is an empty slur; Alexander Coppock says that "motivated reasoning" is bogus
Belief systems do not spread via simple contagion. They are maintained through complex social dynamics and incentives in which members of belief-based tribes win status by enforcing, rationalising, and spreading bespoke realities.
He argues that the term “mind virus” is used as a slur, not as an insight into the process of social cognition. It simplifies and distorts the nature of the problem of dealing with views with which one disagrees.
The depiction of people as hapless victims of brain parasites functions as a demonising narrative that makes productive disagreement impossible.
…Contrary to conventional wisdom, people can typically be persuaded by rational arguments.
The latter link goes to a book that I had never heard of. I did some searching and found this informative interview of the author, Alexander Coppock.1
In graduate school, I read an important, regularly cited study from 1979 on motivated reasoning with my collaborator Andrew Guess. We suspected that the research design contained two significant weaknesses regarding a biased way for measuring the attitude change and a failure to assign participants randomly into experimental and control groups. We replicated the study with a much larger, more diverse sample, randomized the treatments, and reached the exact opposite conclusion.
He argues that the success of the motivated-reasoning mind virus (I cannot resist) is due to publication bias.
researchers are trying to find ways in which some variable affects groups differently, and then they report those differences. But, as with the circles and triangles in the sample chart, when researchers don’t discover differences — when the experimental treatment causes the same effect, of the same size, in the same direction — it usually goes unreported. The hypothesis under investigation didn’t work out, so they move on to something else. This other finding remains hidden.
He goes on,
Let’s say somebody writes an op-ed in favor of the United States supporting Ukraine. Persuasion in parallel tells us that this opinion piece will move people a little bit in the direction of supporting Ukraine regardless of a reader’s starting position. The same would be true of an op-ed arguing against U.S. support of Ukraine. People would move a small amount in the direction of not supporting Ukraine regardless of what they thought before reading it. And this is true about many topics. If an advocacy group runs a TV ad that uses scary music and shares information about how fracking is bad for the environment, this makes people like fracking less.
But the observation that led me to write The Three Languages of Politics is that people do not write op-eds that try to persuade. They instead mostly write with the intention of encouraging people on their own side to dismiss people who disagree. If pundits thought that persuasion would work, they probably would write very differently.
He does point out that persuasion effects are small. Someone might move 5 percentage points in the intended direction. And in some cases where people have stronger prior opinions, it might be less than 1 percentage point.
The phenomenon I am observing is probably pundits giving what Coppock calls “group cues.”
This involves information about which groups in society support which positions. Someone seeking to deploy group cues to influence public opinion is not trying to persuade you on the substance of an issue but just trying to clue you in to what other people think.
…Group cues are typically more potent than information-only treatments. People are strongly influenced by solidarity with the groups they identify with.
This is consistent with my adage that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. I can look into Coppock’s research debunking “motivated reasoning,” but I can also take Dan Williams’ link as an endorsement.
Coppock concludes by advising
Don’t use group cues. Use information.
That is useless advice, based on a false dichotomy. Group cues are information.
substacks referenced above: @
And if you want to go further down the Coppock rabbit hole, there is this discussion among critics.
The best man at my wedding and lifelong friend was a very normal and successful person.
The other day I was talking to him and invited him to meet us halfway between our two families at one of those indoor water parks that the kids like.
"Sorry, we don't do anything indoors."
The reason for this is that they are still masking and isolating over COVID. The wife drives this more than he, but he's on board enough. They won't take the child to any indoor activities, still, as of a month ago.
I don't know how to characterize this other than a "mind virus". My friend has heard the *arguements* for why what he's doing is insane, including from me. But they don't work. Nor can I write it off as his being "mentally ill" like some blue haired Palestinian protestor. He was perfectly normal before this. And he definitely didn't have a "victim mentality" in his personal life, he was an optimistic go getter.
The Palestinian stuff actually is useful here. He's very worried, being a Jew. But when I tried to link Palestinian support to BLM and how Jews had become "white", he just crimestopped. BLM was a noble and pure attempt to help the victim, but Jews are the victims, not the Palestinians. He just doesn't "get it." Like his brain just bugs out and he can't understand what's going on, but he knows it shouldn't change his believes in any way. It's just some weird thing he hasn't figured out yet, maybe it will just go away if BiBi goes or something.
I could list another similar situation with a close friend from Vietnam who now lives in LA and whose wife went to Harvard. Again, nothing like the kind of warped personality you would expect. No previous signs of insanity before 2020. Then all of a sudden, boom!
Hell, I could list my own mother. She's not masking at least, but she was for two years and doesn't appear to have leaned anything (still an intense news watcher who believes what she's told).
I just don't think argument works. I think when people publish op-eds they are maybe trying to nudge and re-direct their own side. "This is what we believe now, we have always been at war with East Asia." It's how you let people know one day to hug someone in Chinatown and another to hide in their homes. But its not meant to argue, its meant to instruct and coordinate.
When it comes to persuasion in US politics, many of the dynamics we see are because the people have no direct role or stake in either the process or the outcome. You opened the "Three Languages" book with a comparison of your experience on a jury with your experience with larger political discourse. The major difference here is that the jury deliberates on an unmediated exercise of power. Only in unusual circumstances will a court set aside a jury's verdict. Usually, when normal citizens (and even individual politicians) discuss politics, they are not doing something much different from yelling at the TV. The actual exercise of power over an issue with the Ukraine war is highly mediated, and the news media is often not the most important medium, but rather money and relationships are.
So e.g. the decision to go to war in Ukraine was made in secret, pushed this way and that way by secret diplomacy, secret spying, secret transmissions of money, and the very occasional barely-perceived news media article. At no time was this issue sent to the people in an unmediated fashion as it was in Thucydidean Athens when the assembly had to decide whether or not to send the military to Syracuse. By the time the issue went to Congress, it was accompanied by a high pressure money campaign, of which the most important part of the campaign was likely money and not the medium of persuasion through words. There are other ways to persuade people than by words, such as by paying them off. Even in the Thucydides example, the author notes that many of the Athenians in the assembly voted for the doomed expedition because they expected to make a lot of money doing it and heavily discounted the words of the opposing orator because of it. So too in our world.