Rational Persuasion vs Cancel Culture

Some thoughts on why it is probably bad to bully people into accepting your beliefs.

Suppose that you strongly believe something. It could be anything: that Jesus Christ is the son of God; that yoga is a problematic form of cultural appropriation; that the definition of “woman” is “biological female”; that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 US presidential election; that capitalism is evil; that some races are genetically superior to others; that Western societies are white-supremacist, heteronormative, and patriarchal hellscapes; and so on.

Now suppose that you do not just strongly endorse the relevant belief. You are also strongly motivated to spread it to others. That is, you are an evangelist for the belief. How should you proceed?

It is possible to draw a rough distinction between two strategies.

Persuasion

First, there is a persuasion strategy. In this case, evangelists attempt to spread their beliefs by changing people’s minds with evidence and arguments.

Milton Friedman’s life provides a clear example of this strategy. Friedman was a passionate advocate for free-market, classically liberal ideas. Contrary to much left-wing conspiracy theorising, his main strategy for spreading those ideas involved trying to persuade policymakers and the general public with evidence and arguments.

Of course, evangelists rarely work alone. For example, in Friedman’s case, he was part of an energetic, pro-market political movement that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. As with most such movements, it was a loose coalition of individuals and groups united by a strong motivation to spread shared beliefs. At the level of social movements like this, which strategies they employ boils down to which strategies they encourage and reward among community members. If they provide financial support and status to members who devote time, energy, and ingenuity to spreading the group’s beliefs via evidence and arguments, the group is implementing a persuasion strategy.

Pressure

Second, there is a pressure strategy. In this case, evangelists attempt to spread their beliefs by pressuring others to accept them. This can involve both rewarding those who publicly agree with the beliefs—showering them with praise, admiration, and so on—and harming those who publicly challenge them. For example, evangelists might spread gossip about heretics, try to get them fired from their jobs, or chop their heads off in the public square.

Once again, evangelism is a team sport. You are unlikely to get very far with these tactics in the absence of a community that enforces the rewards and punishments. At the group level, the degree to which evangelists implement this strategy therefore depends on which behaviours they encourage among group members. As I have argued elsewhere, in many evangelising communities, members can win status within the group by behaving as epistemic warriors and enforcers, making personal sacrifices to impose costs on anybody who challenges the community’s beliefs.

Examples of this strategy are ubiquitous. Many will think of “cancel culture”. As most people understand this term, it refers to cases in which mostly young, mostly privileged progressives use social media and other means to destroy the reputations of those who dissent from their worldview. However, understood in the broadest sense as cases in which groups attempt to impose practical costs on those who challenge their beliefs, cancel culture exists across the political spectrum. It is also ancient and often takes a far more extreme form than social media-based reputational destruction. Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Catholic Church. Salman Rushdie was recently stabbed twelve times.

Persuasion or Pressure

Most real-world evangelists use a mixture of persuasion and pressure, and the distinction between them is not always sharp. Nevertheless, I think it is real and important. This intuition is not universal. I once had an interesting exchange with the philosopher Neil Levy where he seemed to argue that the Catholic Church was engaged in a kind of persuasion when it burned heretics at the stake. Neil is one of my favourite philosophers and I always enjoy talking with him, but I do not share this view.

Assuming the distinction is real, which strategy should evangelists opt for? I suspect that social desirability bias—roughly, saying things that sound good rather than saying what one really thinks—would push most people to say that the persuasion strategy is better. However, social desirability is not a good guide to truth, and the fact that the pressure strategy is so pervasive suggests that many people think it is superior in practice.

Moreover, it is not obvious that the pressure strategy is bad. Of course, it seems bad if you think about beliefs you disagree with. However, I am not interested in the question of whether people should try to pressure others into accepting bad beliefs. I am interested in whether evangelists should try to pressure others into accepting beliefs they sincerely think are good.

The case for pressure

Here are some things that can be said in defence of the pressure strategy.

First, persuasion is extremely hard. It can sometimes seem impossible. People are biased and stubborn. They are especially difficult to persuade on topics where they have a self-interested stake in holding their beliefs. Suppose you think that your society is racist in ways that promote the interests of a specific racial group. To the extent that this racial group benefits from the current system, are they likely to be open to rational persuasion? Probably not much.

Second, even when rational persuasion is possible and might work in the long run, in the long run we are all dead. Many evangelists treat proselytising as a matter of urgency. If you think you are spreading Truth and Justice, you will often feel that you cannot wait for people—stubborn, self-serving, and irrational people—to change their minds via rational persuasion.

Finally, pressure can be effective. Sometimes opponents of censoring and cancelling argue that these activities are not just morally bad but also do not work. As I will return to shortly, I agree they have important downsides and dangers. Nevertheless, I think this argument is often a cope, a classic case in which people’s moral opposition to a behaviour biases their beliefs about its empirical consequences. Could religions such as Islam and Christianity have ever achieved their cultural success in the absence of tactics such as ostracising, attacking, bullying, humiliating, and killing those who rejected core beliefs? I doubt it.

In general, if you are capable of imposing strong practical costs on anyone who dissents from your beliefs, either because you are in a position of power or because you belong to a well-organised, energetic social movement, pressuring can be an effective strategy for spreading those beliefs.

Moreover, although the initial effect of applying pressure is simply to change people’s outward behaviour—for example, by causing them to self-censor—effective pressure can end up genuinely changing people’s minds.

One reason for this is that when onlookers see evangelists exhibiting extreme passion in spreading their views, they might interpret this as higher-order evidence that the views are true. (“If Bob is that passionate about his beliefs, maybe there is something to them…”). When people make clear sacrifices for their beliefs, as evangelists often do, their sacrifices can function as “credibility-enhancing displays” that end up genuinely persuading people. (I think this is the kind of thing that Neil Levy was getting at in his comments about the Catholic Church).

Another reason is that strong pressures on communication ensure that people are only exposed to evidence in favour of the relevant views and not to evidence against them. Unless people account for the fact that public evidence is systematically skewed in this way—something which is difficult to do—the evidence can end up genuinely persuading them. As Timur Kuran puts it,

“The holder of a publicly unquestioned belief faces no reminder of its weaknesses. He finds public discourse to be loaded with facts and arguments consistent with his belief. By contrast, the holder of a belief at odds with public discourse is routinely reminded of the flaws in his thinking. He feels pressured, therefore, to revise his beliefs. If nothing else, he finds himself gripped by doubt and confusion.”

Finally, beliefs plausibly respond to social incentives, not just evidence and arguments. That is, some beliefs are socially adaptive: people embrace them not to model the world accurately but to gain status and social approval. By creating an incentive structure in which expressing certain beliefs is reputationally lucrative and denying them is personally costly, pressuring can sometimes shift what people sincerely believe.

People embrace beliefs that signal their traits and loyalties

The case for persuasion

Having said all of that, I think that the pressure strategy is ultimately bad. I am not certain about this, but I am moderately confident. More specifically, I think that the strategy is costly and risky—more costly and risky than the persuasion strategy—and that we should therefore develop stronger norms and institutional policies against it.

What if you are wrong?

First, what if you are wrong? Of course, here I am considering cases where evangelists do not think the beliefs they are spreading are wrong—it is obviously bad to pressure people into accepting beliefs you think are mistaken—but even sincere evangelists should be open to the possibility that they might be wrong. In fact, simple reflection on the fact that there are many more bad beliefs than good beliefs and that most evangelising movements throughout history were delusional should lead one to infer that one’s passionate beliefs probably are wrong, even if—in virtue of believing them—one cannot know why they are wrong. As Hrishikesh Joshi puts it,

“All human societies in the past have erred, but we are absolutely right,” is an attitude that, though implicit and pervasive, upon reflection merits incredulity. What a convenient denial of basic inductive reasoning!

If you might be wrong and probably are wrong, pressuring people to accept your beliefs seems, well, bad. It certainly seems worse than trying to persuade them with evidence and arguments.

One reason for this is that when you attempt to persuade people with evidence and arguments, you generally leave yourself open to the possibility of learning that you are mistaken. Partly this is because persuasion generally occurs in the context of an interactive dialogue, and partly it is because successful persuasion requires that you take into consideration objections to your arguments. When you try to bully people into accepting your beliefs, this openness to discovering that you are wrong vanishes. For this reason, pressuring people to accept your beliefs only seems justified if you can be extremely confident that your beliefs are true.

Another reason is that there appears to be no correlation between whether the pressure strategy is successful and whether the beliefs being spread are correct. That is, rewarding and bullying people in ways aimed at spreading your beliefs does not reliably favour the transmission of true beliefs. It is a strategy available to both good and bad evangelists, and their goodness or badness seems irrelevant to whether the strategy succeeds; what matters is just the evangelists’ power.

Things are different with the persuasion strategy. It is a difficult question whether the truth will ultimately win out in a free marketplace of ideas, but successful persuasion does at least depend on whether beliefs can be supported by evidence and rational arguments. Given this, most really silly beliefs cannot easily be supported by the strategy. (In fairness, there are clearly exceptions to this in academia).

The marketplace of good and bad ideas

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

Again, I am not making the trivial point that it is bad when people try to pressure others into accepting false beliefs. I am arguing that even when you think an idea is true, the fact that you might be wrong means that the pressure strategy is far riskier than the persuasion strategy.

Rational persuasion works

Second, I think many evangelists avoid the persuasion strategy because they are sceptical that rational persuasion works. However, rational persuasion does seem to work, especially over the long run. It is not easy. In fact, it is often unpleasant, and you are not going to be able to dislodge someone’s entire worldview in an instant by presenting them with a devastating argument. But I think that people often greatly underestimate the power of rational arguments.

In general, I suspect that the primary reason why people think rational arguments do not work is because they simply do not have good arguments for their views, and the reason they do not have good arguments for their views is because their views are bad and uninformed. “Why don’t people see the self-evident truth of my political worldview?! They must be in denial, or irrational, or brainwashed, or subject to false consciousness, or … etc.” There are entire schools of intellectual inquiry founded on this kind of attitude. In fact, the main reason why people are not persuaded to accept the worldviews of passionate ideologues and activists is because those worldviews are typically simplistic, biased, ignorant, and dogmatic.

If rational persuasion works, but it only works when views are supported by evidence and good arguments, there is something troubling about people and groups that opt for the pressure strategy instead of the persuasion strategy. Even though their beliefs are sincere, they should ask themselves: If I lack confidence in my ability to persuade others of these beliefs, should I be persuaded myself?

One might object as follows: “This is very easy for you (i.e., a privileged, white, heterosexual man) to say. However, when it comes to social justice movements campaigning on behalf of marginalised and oppressed groups, they do not have ready access to the ‘marketplace of ideas’. Should slaves have waited to persuade their slaveowners?! Etc. etc.”

I have never understood this line of argument. First, there are many reasonable goals distinct from persuasion. When it comes to something like slavery, obviously the main goal is to end slavery, not to persuade slaveowners that slavery is wrong. To the extent that you can achieve this without spreading anti-slavery beliefs, you should. Slaves should kill their slave owners. More generally, societies must often implement laws that many people disagree with.

Second, it is of course undeniable that powerless people will typically not get very far with rational persuasion. However, to the extent that they are powerless, the pressure strategy—which depends on power—is even less viable for them. I am tempted to come up with a simple “principle of proselytising” here:

• Principle of proselytising: If you are powerful enough to bully people into accepting your beliefs, you are powerful enough to persuade them.

Preference Falsification is Incendiary

Above, I noted that the pressure strategy can work. However, it can also be explosive. When evangelising groups are successful in pressuring people to publicly endorse certain beliefs, this can create widespread preference falsification, a systematic misalignment between private opinion (what people actually think and feel) and public opinion (what ideas and preferences they publicly endorse). As Timur Kuran explores in one of my favourite books, Private Truths, Public Lies, this can have extremely negative social consequences.

One such consequence concerns societal volatility. When people’s behaviours and expressed beliefs are not reflective of how they really feel about a topic, it is impossible to know how people will respond to changing circumstances. For example, Kuran notes that preference falsification often causes a period of “deceptive stability”. When people are not honest about how they feel concerning social conditions, these conditions can persist in a stable form as long as the pressures that cause self-censorship remain in place. However, once these pressures decrease in strength or the balance of power in a social context shifts, the result can be explosive change—change which appears to come out of nowhere relative to the beliefs and preferences that people were expressing beforehand.

Kuran argues that this dynamic is one thing that makes oppressive regimes highly unpredictable and combustible. However, the basic point generalises across numerous contexts: Whenever there is a mismatch between private beliefs and public beliefs brought about by social pressures and self-censorship, the result is social instability and unpredictability. This is therefore always a potential danger with the pressure strategy. It is not a danger of the persuasion strategy, however.

Backfire

Finally, I suspect that the pressure strategy often backfires. That is, if you try to bully people into accepting beliefs they do not think are true, this can cause them to increase their resistance to those beliefs. Admittedly, I am not aware of any research that directly supports this. (There is something called “reactance theory”, but I do not know much about it and it seems to come from good old-fashioned social psychology, which I do not think is trustworthy). Nevertheless, I would find it difficult to believe that backfire does not sometimes occur when it comes to the pressure strategy. Human beings hate being bullied. If people try to spread beliefs by bullying, it seems likely that people’s resentment at this will often spill over into resentment at the beliefs themselves. I have met many people with an extreme contempt for “wokeness” beyond anything that could be justified by the badness and harms of woke ideas, and I think this is at least part of what is going on in such cases.

The persuasion strategy is very different. Contrary to some widely reported psychological findings from a few years ago, merely presenting people with evidence and arguments does not seem to produce a “backfire effect”. There might be some exceptions to this but they are extremely rare.

Summary

In summary, the persuasion strategy seems superior to the pressure strategy. Again, I am not 100% confident about this assessment. I worry that my strong political commitments to free speech and opposition to “cancel culture” are biasing my judgement. More prosaically, I also worry that I have not thought about the issue enough. Nevertheless, given that

• the passionate beliefs humans are motivated to spread are often wrong;

• the success of the pressure strategy seems mostly unaffected by whether the beliefs are wrong whereas wrong beliefs are generally more difficult to spread via persuasion;

• and the pressure strategy is dangerous and can potentially backfire

I am inclined to think the persuasion strategy is generally better. It is better for society if evangelists play the persuasion strategy, and it is better for evangelists themselves to play the persuasion strategy, especially if they are concerned about the possibility they might be wrong. If this is right, we should develop stronger norms and institutional policies—stronger social pressures—against pressuring.

Further Reading

Four of my favourite things to read on the topic of social pressures on communication:

• Why it’s OK to speak your mind by Hrishikesh Joshi

• Private lies, public truths by Timur Kuran

• The spiral of silence by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.

• Self-censorship in public discourse by Glenn Loury