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.