Listen and Give Credence

Reading the (in)famous recent letter in Harpers https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ and the responses it engendered. I was struck that I hadn’t seen anything addressing the empirical research on how people process information, and bring those results to bear on evaluating the issue.

I’ve been, and continue to be, an advocate of an ACLU style free speech approach — marketplace of ideas, etc.. However, a decade+ ago I read a paper that gave me pause. It described experiments showing that just listening to and understanding an argument caused the listener to give the argument greater credence, even if their prior belief was that the argument was completely specious. The article was a bit old when I read it, so I was wondering how it has held up over the years.

After an excessively long search I managed to find the article on one of my storage devices. It was  You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read by Dan Gilbert. Gilbert later became very well known for his work on happiness . The article seems to have held up pretty well research gate lists 267 citations , google scholar 670

A spot check of the citations, showed them all positive and a 2019 review paper Judging Truth discusses a myriad of other studies which bolster the underlying concern that our judgments are continually influenced by environmental and situational factors of which we aren’t consciously aware, and may reject if we were made aware of them.

This isn’t only around how much it impacts “the public’s” thinking, but how much it impacts our own. Writing this is mid-July 2020, I can think of three times this century where the conceptual ground quickly shifted (without even counting 9/11) 

• the drumbeats of war leading up to Iraq II; 
• Trump’s election which shifted the Overton window on acceptable speech (who would have previously thought you’d have to come up with reasons for why Nazis are bad) 
• defunding police which suddenly became an acceptable topic over the course of the last few weeks.

That said, one doesn’t want to shut down “radical” opinions. From a personal standpoint I think it’s useful to think of it is how much power 1By power  I mean something ~= time x the a priori credibility of the resource, or time x the reach of the platform (reach being something on the order of how much attention will be paid to it given its publisher).  does one want to give to a viewpoint to have impact upon one’s views. One may wish to be exposed to alternative viewpoints, but if you spent the next two years only reading Breitbart, it seems likely that your judgements would change.

This is, of course, a large part of the rationale for deplatforming