People are persuaded by rational arguments. Is that a good thing?

Power, persuasion, rationality, conservatism, knowledge, politics, Burke, Sowell, Henrich, Mercier, Sperber, Dewey, Hanson, evolution, the Enlightenment.

In thinking about human psychology, there is a tendency to lapse into one of two myths: the myth of gullibility, and the myth of pig-headedness.

The myth of gullibility

According to the myth of gullibility, human beings are highly credulous. They are easy to dupe into embracing false beliefs. They gulp up the lies and propaganda of demagogues and disinformation campaigns. They believe whatever conspiracy theories they stumble across on TikTok. They suffer from false consciousness, accepting ideologies that justify their oppression. They are victims of the “mind viruses” that circulate in their social network. And so on.

All of this is wrong. A large body of research shows that even from a very young age, people are sophisticated and vigilant in how they evaluate claims and arguments. Unless they deem a message plausible and its source trustworthy, they tend to reject the message. And they instinctively—that is, usually unconsciously—evaluate plausibility and trustworthiness in careful and sceptical ways.

Although this research on “epistemic vigilance” surprises many people, its basic lesson aligns with experience. If you have ever tried to convince someone that their political opinions are mistaken, you will appreciate that people are extremely—maddeningly—difficult to persuade.

None of this means that people always hold accurate beliefs or make good decisions. However, the origins of misperceptions and bad decisions often lie more in people’s own biases, interests, and mistakes than in the gullible acceptance of other people’s propaganda.

The myth of pig-headedness

When you experience people’s obstinacy, you can be led to a very different myth: that people are not just difficult to persuade, but—at least when it comes to deep-rooted convictions—unpersuadable. On this view, people’s irrationality lies not in their credulity but in their stubbornness.

Historically, lots of research in psychology seemed to support this idea. In fact, much of it went further, suggesting that persuasion can even backfire. On this view, people become even more entrenched in their passionate opinions when presented with mixed evidence or counter-arguments (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here).

This view also appears to be wrong. A large body of experimental research shows that people are persuaded by rational arguments. More precisely, it shows that when people are presented with rational arguments in favour of a position X, they tend to update their views a small amount in the direction of X. Moreover, this appears to be true for all people, irrespective of their characteristics (e.g., age, political identity, intelligence, etc.), and irrespective of their initial feelings towards X.

As Alexander Coppock puts it in Persuasion in Parallel, an excellent book which summarises a large number of experiments in this area,

When people encounter pro-immigration arguments, regardless of whether they are immigration opponents or proponents, they increase their support for immigration a little bit. The converse is also true. Anti-immigration arguments will decrease support among both proponents and opponents of immigration just the same.

What are rational arguments?

The concept of “rational arguments” is important here. Merely stating and repeating a claim is not a rational argument. Nor is asking people to accept something on trust. Instead, rational arguments present evidence and reasons in favour of a conclusion.

Of course, this is extremely vague. It would be nice to have a more precise characterisation. Unfortunately, I am not aware of one. However, the basic idea is quite intuitive. To give you a sense of the kind of content that qualifies, here is a rational argument for the death penalty. (The argument is taken from an interesting study by Ben Tappin and colleagues, which presented arguments like this to participants and found that they are at least somewhat persuasive to people).

“Some crimes are so uniquely brutal that prison is too weak to provide justice for victims and their communities. For example, names currently on death row include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — the Boston Marathon bomber who murdered or injured nearly 270 innocent people — and Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter who murdered nine African Americans in cold blood. These criminals deprived many innocent people of their right to life, by terribly brutal and racist murders. If it were not for the death penalty, these men would instead be in prison, where they could carry on with their own lives in some way: reading books, exercising and even watching selected TV shows. Is this right? Certainly there should be a high standard of proof and a uniquely brutal crime to warrant the death penalty. But banning it completely is wrong: it removes a form of justice which many victims and their communities may need in order to find peace and closure. They deserve that option.”

As you can see, the argument ties together information, rational considerations, and an appeal to people’s sense of morality to make the case for a specific conclusion: that execution should be legal.

A highly replicable finding from lots of research in psychology is that rational arguments like this tend to be persuasive to people, even if just a little bit.¹

Here is my question: Is that a good thing?

The Dangers of Being Persuaded by Rational Arguments

It seems obvious that being persuaded by rational arguments is a good thing. The intuition, I think, is that rational arguments are likely to support accurate beliefs and good decisions. Given this, being persuaded by rational arguments means you will be more likely to form accurate beliefs and make good decisions.

Is that right?

First, note that experiments demonstrating that rational arguments are persuasive show that people can be persuaded in opposite directions. For example, if you present somebody with an argument in favour of the death penalty, they will become a bit more favourable towards it, but if you present them with an argument against the death penalty, they will become a bit less favourable towards it.

If persuasive arguments can be constructed in favour of opposing conclusions, they cannot inherently lead to accurate beliefs or good decisions. (Opposing positions cannot both be correct).

Nevertheless, you might think that true or otherwise good conclusions have an advantage when it comes to rational arguments. On this view, even though people can be persuaded by rational arguments to endorse bad conclusions, the best—and hence the most persuasive—arguments support good conclusions.

One question is whether this is true. That is, do the most persuasive rational arguments inevitably support the best decisions?

Another question is whether people are likely to be exposed to the most persuasive arguments. If not, the fact that people are persuaded by rational arguments—even if the best arguments support good decisions—does not guarantee that they will make good decisions.

I will consider these issues in reverse.

Power and Persuasion

The Power of Good Arguers

To the extent that people are persuaded by rational arguments, this gives power to people who are good at constructing rational arguments. If people were equally capable of producing such arguments, this might not be an issue. However, there is massive variation in people’s argumentative abilities. It also might not be a problem if people were primarily motivated by lofty ideals like truth and justice when they produce arguments. However, the production of rational arguments is often motivated by more self-serving goals. Given this, the persuasive power of rational arguments seems to hand power to those who are good at arguing.

This is a complaint that conservatives often make about intellectuals and their role in society. Roughly, the idea is that intellectual elites are especially good at producing arguments, have lots of time and resources to produce arguments, and tend to produce arguments that reflect their lefty biases and interests (e.g., in self-congratulation, virtue signalling, or status competition with economic elites).

On this view, the problem—or at least one problem—with the persuasive power of rational arguments is that it leaves society vulnerable to the whims, fashions, and biases of those who happen to be good at producing them.

The Marketplace of Rationalisations

The ability to shape people’s beliefs is highly valuable. To the extent that people are persuaded by rational arguments, this makes rational arguments highly valuable. We should therefore expect a market for rational arguments, one in which consumers are willing to “buy” rational arguments that support their favoured conclusions, and intellectuals, writers, journalists, and so on create whatever arguments generate the greatest profits.

As I have written about elsewhere, much communication and argument in the public sphere can be understood in this way. That is, it emerges from a marketplace of rationalisations, an informational economy in which people—pundits, journalists, commentators, intellectuals, media organisations, and so on—produce content that rationalises narratives and decisions favoured by different constituencies in society. In return for their efforts, the producers of such rationalisations are rewarded, both socially (e.g., with attention, trust, and status) and—at least among the most successful—financially (e.g., via subscriptions, advertising revenue, a salary, etc.).

To the extent that this analysis is right, the production of rational arguments is not fundamentally tailored towards the goal of forming accurate beliefs or making good decisions. It is specialised for rationalising whatever pre-determined claims, narratives, and decisions happen to be favoured within a given cultural context. Moreover, we should expect the most skilful arguers to devote their efforts to producing the most lucrative rationalisations. Depending on your perspective, that might explain why intellectuals and journalists cater to the interests of the rich and powerful, pander to the prejudices of the great unwashed masses, or indulge whatever progressive narratives happen to be trendy among the cultural elite.

Pessimism or Optimism?

These arguments might persuade you that being persuaded by rational arguments is a bad thing, or at least can have negative consequences. Are they sound?

Here are some reasons you might push back:

• You might think many people are fundamentally interested in things like truth and justice when they produce arguments.

• You might think there is a strong “demand” for rational arguments that support accurate beliefs and good decisions, which means that journalists, intellectuals, pundits, and so on can profit by generating them.

• You might think it is ultimately impossible to produce persuasive rational arguments for bad conclusions. On this view, rational arguments supporting accurate beliefs and good decisions will eventually “win out” in the marketplace of ideas if they are not aggressively censored, even if other forces (like self-interest and rationalisation markets) act against them. For example, people like Steven Pinker trace progressive social change at least in part to the fact that exploitative practices like slavery simply cannot be rationally justified.

And so on.

Note, however, that the reasons for pessimism and optimism so far share a common assumption: that if people were exposed to the best rational arguments, these arguments would lead them to make good decisions. Is that true?

The Limits of Reason

There is an important tradition of thought uniting thinkers as diverse as Burke, Hayek, Sowell, Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich, which is sceptical of the power of individual reason. It is not sceptical because it doubts that the best rational arguments will get a fair hearing in society. It is sceptical because it thinks rational argumentation is inherently flawed as a way of forming beliefs and making decisions.

According to this perspective, the world is unimaginably complex and mysterious. It is governed by forces and causes we do not and cannot understand. It is therefore hubristic to use our feeble minds to try to reason our way to good decisions. Reliance on such reasoning can lead to outright disasters. Just look at the catastrophes driven by utopian projects and central planning in the twentieth century, all founded on the delusion that individuals can use the power of reason to achieve a better world.

What, then, should we rely on instead? Although answers to this question vary, they typically appeal to things like sentiment, intuition, “commonsense”, and—perhaps most importantly—deference to tradition and custom. As Edmund Burke put it,

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations of ages.”

On this view, tradition and custom—norms, rituals, social conventions, institutions, narratives, and so on—emerge over extremely long periods. During these periods, complex mixtures of trial and error, lucky mistakes, the recombination of ideas, selective social learning, intergroup competition, and many other subtle processes generate adaptive cultural practices. These practices encode knowledge, but the knowledge is implicit in the practices themselves and is rarely understandable by its beneficiaries, let alone expressible in the form of an explicit argument.

Summarising this kind of view, Thomas Sowell writes that

“knowledge is predominantly experience—transmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices which indicate costs, scarcities, and preferences, to traditions which evolve from the day-to-day experiences of millions in each generation, winnowing out in Darwinian competition what works from what does not work.”

In this vision of social epistemology, writes Sowell,

“knowledge is a multiplicity of experience too complex for explicit articulation, distilled over the generations in cultural processes and traits so deeply embedded as to be virtually unconscious reflexes.”

In my view, Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success is the most important work of conservative political thought published in the past couple of decades. (Henrich does not see it that way). In it, Henrich draws on research on cultural evolution and gene-culture evolution to advance a similar argument:

Operating over generations as individuals unconsciously attend to and learn from more successful, prestigious, and healthier members of their communities, this evolutionary process generates cultural adaptations… Though these complex repertoires appear well designed to meet local challenges, they are not primarily the products of individuals applying causal models, rational thinking, or cost-benefit analysis… Often, most or all of the people skilled in deploying such adaptive practices do not understand how or why they work, or even that they “do” anything at all.

Henrich goes on:

Such complex adaptations can emerge precisely because natural selection has favoured individuals who often place their faith in cultural inheritance – in the accumulated wisdom implicit in the practices and beliefs derived from their forbears – over their own intuitions and personal experiences. (my emphasis).

Edmund Burke could not have said it better!

Evaluation

Is any of this right? I think there is significant wisdom in this intellectual tradition. Moreover, given how hostile much of modern academia and the chattering classes are to conservative thought, I think this wisdom is greatly undervalued in our intellectual culture today.

Nevertheless, I think the most radical critiques of reason and rational argumentation are not persuasive. First, I think they are far too optimistic about the benefits of tradition and custom, which are often highly ineffective ways of solving collective problems. Throughout human history, many traditions and customs also simply functioned to promote the interests of extractive elites. Second, I think such critiques are far too pessimistic about individual reason and rational argumentation, which—under the right conditions and in the right contexts—can greatly improve beliefs and decision-making. Finally, such critiques tend to blame rational argumentation for the fact that bad arguments—such as those favouring utopian political projects—have been culturally successful. However, the cultural success of such arguments and projects had very little to do with rational persuasion.

I also think it is noteworthy that these critiques of rational argumentation themselves rest on rational arguments. To the extent that these arguments are persuasive, as I think—at least in their more moderate forms—they are, this attests to the flexibility and power of rational argument. Contrary to what critics of the Enlightenment often claim, an endorsement of the importance of reason need not involve the belief that reason is all-powerful, infallible, or the right tool for making all decisions. If there are persuasive arguments against such inflated beliefs about reason, reason enables us to acknowledge reason’s limitations.

The evolution of reason

In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber make the case that our reasoning capacities evolved for social purposes of persuasion and reputation management. Roughly, they argue that our ability to reason enables us both (i) to produce reasons to persuade people that our beliefs are true and our actions justifiable and (ii) to evaluate the reasons produced by others. When we produce reasons, we tend to be biased, favouring reasons that justify our claims and decisions. When we evaluate reasons, however, we tend to be vigilant and objective, only accepting people’s arguments and justifications when they are genuinely persuasive.

This is an optimistic view of reasoning and rational argumentation. As a result of the social exchange of reasons, people end up on average with more accurate beliefs and better decisions. It is also an evolutionary theory. Mercier and Sperber argue that reasoning abilities evolved because they promoted the fitness of individuals in the small-scale social worlds our ancestors navigated. In fact, the optimism and evolutionary aspects of their story are connected: unless reasoning conferred a selective advantage on individuals, it could not have evolved.

If Mercier and Sperber’s story is right, does it vindicate the power of rational argumentation? One reason for scepticism is that we now inhabit worlds fundamentally different from those of our ancestors. In the small-scale social environments that shaped human evolution, both the variability in argumentative skills and asymmetries in power were much less extreme. Moreover, decision-making would have concerned matters that were relatively local and simple when compared to the vastness and complexity of the world we must navigate today, at least when it comes to politics and collective decision-making. As John Dewey put it,

“The local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast, so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so complexly indirect in operation that they are, from the standpoint of the members of local social units, unknown. . . They act at a great distance in ways invisible to [them]”.

Given this, it is not obvious that we can generalise from the adaptive benefits of rational argumentation in the ancestral environment—the so-called “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”—to the very different world we inhabit today.

In politics, the truth is not self-evident. So why do we act as if it is?

Moreover, it is not clear that Mercier and Sperber are right. According to Henrich and others, the idea of providing reasons and engaging in argumentation when it comes to making decisions is a culturally-specific practice, not a universal feature of human sociality:

“… educated Westerners are trained their entire lives to think that behaviours must be underpinned by explicable and declarable reasons, so we are more likely to have them at the ready and feel more obligated to supply “good” reasons upon request. Saying “it’s our custom” is not considered a good reason. The pressure for an acceptable, clear, and explicit reason for doing things is merely a social norm common in Western populations, which creates the illusion (among Westerners) that humans generally do things based on explicit causal models and clear reasons.”

I think this is probably wrong. At least when it comes to mundane, everyday decision-making, I suspect capacities to produce and exchange reasons and arguments are ancient and universal. However, I think Henrich is right that there are inherent limits on the power of rational argumentation, that people are often better off simply deferring to tradition and custom, and that different cultures vary in the degree to which they place a value on rational argumentation when it comes to collective decision making.

Final thoughts

Being persuaded by rational arguments seems like a good thing. I think it generally is. The production and evaluation of arguments is indispensable to everyday cooperation and social coordination, and on average it leads us to make better decisions within the sphere of our immediate interests.

However, being persuaded by rational arguments can lead to bad decisions if (i) the best arguers argue in self-serving or biased ways, (ii) the production of arguments is geared towards justifying self-serving or biased conclusions, or (iii) we would be better off simply deferring to tradition or custom.

In response to (i)—that is, the fact that the persuasive power of arguments gives power to good arguers—a good strategy is probably to value persuasive arguments less when they come from good arguers. I am not aware of any research on this, but I suspect many people do this already. Robin Hanson observes the following:

“While we usually give lip service to the idea that we are open to letting anyone persuade us on anything with a good argument, by the time folks get to be my age they know that such openings are in fact highly constrained. For example, early on in my relation with my wife she declared that as I was better at arguing, key decisions were just not going to be made on the basis of better arguments.”

This seems like a completely rational move from his wife.

In response to (ii)—that is, the fact that arguments are often produced to rationalise pre-determined conclusions—it is probably a good strategy to value arguments less when they result from the search for rationalisations. Of course, figuring out whether arguments function as rationalisations of favoured conclusions can be difficult. Nevertheless, whenever arguments seem to justify a conclusion that promotes the interests—whether material, social, or ideological—of powerful individuals or groups, that should be a reason to take them less seriously. Again, I am not aware of any research on this, but I suspect people do this already.

The fact that some decisions are best made not via rational argument but by deference to tradition and custom poses the greatest challenges. I think it is right that there are certain cases where it would be better if we simply trusted in such things as “intuition”, “experience”, “tradition”, and “custom” rather than trying to reason our way to a better decision. Nevertheless, I suspect it is probably just a tragic feature of the human condition that we generally cannot know whether we are in this situation.

Further Reading

• For scepticism of reason and rational argumentation, I would highly recommend Thomas Sowell (e.g., A Conflict of Visions) and Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success.

• For a more optimistic view, Mercier and Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason is excellent.

• Alexander Coppock summarises evidence of the persuasive power of rational arguments in Persuasion in Parallel.

1. Of course, this must be qualified in a million ways. For example:

• Persuasive effects appear to decay quite quickly with time (although they do not appear to decay completely).

• The studies I am familiar with overwhelmingly focus on Western (i.e., WEIRD) populations (although the core finding appears to apply consistently within these populations).

• The most convincing evidence comes from randomised experiments in which one group (the treatment group) is exposed to the relevant persuasive information and another (the control group) is not. As with all experiments in psychology, it is reasonable to question their ecological validity (i.e., whether the experimental conditions are so artificial that they do not tell us much about the real world). For example, asking people to click buttons on a screen when they are on their own and their responses are anonymous, which is the case with many psychological experiments, is very different from the context in which most real-world political thinking occurs.

• There could be some important exceptions to the general pattern (i.e., cases where persuasion cannot be effective or even backfires), although existing research allegedly showing such exceptions is either unreliable or unreplicable. (For my part, I would bet that the pattern would break down when dealing with identity-defining or sacralised beliefs).

• Even when people are persuaded by rational arguments, they are highly skilful at accommodating new information in ways that do not challenge more basic attitudes and allegiances.