The Effect of Argumentative Exchanges on Political Attitudes

• In Event: Navigating Partisan Rancor

Abstract

Prevailing theories of public opinion and political psychology hold that human reasoning is biased and lazy, which suggests it is ill-suited to help ordinary citizens engage meaningfully with politics. In contrast, I contend that the biased and lazy nature of reasoning is precisely what gives citizens the tools to think through political issues and update their attitudes in response to argumentative exchanges. To test these hypotheses, I conduct a series of survey experiments that vary subjects' exposure to counter-attitudinal reasons and whether they are prompted to provide pro-attitudinal reasons in return. I test the effects of these interventions across a range of issues: offshore drilling, immigration, and COVID-19 mitigation policy. Subjects receiving the argumentative treatments generally provide higher-quality reasons supporting their prior attitude, exhibit increases in cognitive effort, and show declines in attitude strength and extremity. However, the magnitude (and sometimes direction) of these effects vary across issues, suggesting that the familiarity of an issue conditions how citizens respond to counter-attitudinal reasons on it. These results contribute to a burgeoning literature on interactive reasoning in cognitive psychology and carry implications for how citizens communicate about politics in an era of heightened mass polarization in many Western democracies.

Author

• Isaac Mehlhaff, Texas A&M University