In the last week before the November presidential election, are we philosophy instructors setting our students up to fail in arguing about climate change, racial injustice, and other ethically-charged topics? Attention to some empirical work on persuasion suggests we might be, but it also points to a simple remedy.
In case it’s not obvious: this question is urgent. The two major presidential candidates differ radically on their attitudes toward the climate crisis, racial injustice, democratic institutions, and most other issues. For example, Biden’s $1.7 trillion dollar climate policy proposal does not go as far as some other Democrats’, but Trump shows no interest in addressing it in any way. The November 3rd election will likely hinge on a small number of voters in states like Florida and Ohio, people who are either undecided about which candidate to support or people have not decided whether to vote at all. Some of those people may already be students in our classes, but others are almost certainly in conversation with our students – perhaps as relatives, friends, or even strangers on the other end of phone banking calls. In addition to climate change, racial injustice, and democracy, our students are also engaging in extracurricular conversations with potential voters about activism, immigration, abortion, and even the nature of truth.
What happens if our students try and fail to persuade somebody on these topics, or (perhaps more importantly) try to persuade them to vote by appealing to these topics? Not only might there be a missed opportunity, but they might even make things worse by polarizing the person they’re talking to and wasting some of their own energy they could have used for non-argumentative political activities, like helping support voters who need no persuading about the issues.
Why students think philosophy makes them persuasive
What do philosophy departments promise their students? My own department at the University of Washington tells prospective majors that we will teach them “critical thinking, close reading, clear writing, and logical analysis,” enabling them “to spot bad reasoning… [and] to avoid it in their writing and in their work.” NYU’s philosophy department, where I did my graduate work, tells students that philosophy “prepares students… for professions that emphasize analytic thinking and argumentation.”
These statements are accurate, because they do not over-reach. Though there is some evidence that analytic thinking can be helpful in, e.g., detecting fake news, we do not tell students that studying philosophy will make them more persuasive. But can we blame them for making that inference? It is surely tempting to think that becoming skilled at critical thinking, spotting mistakes, and argumentation will make them more persuasive… especially when their classes have made them familiar with the philosophical and empirical terrain around a moral issue like climate change, and when students may found themselves being persuaded by arguments in those same classes.
It’s a good bet, therefore, that many of our students feel empowered to persuade others on important issues in the lead-up to the election.
Insights from the Elaboration Likelihood Model
Most philosophers know from experience that skill in philosophical argumentation does not make one better able to persuade non-philosophers. It may not even make one better able to persuade philosophers. David Lewis wrote that “[p]hilosophical arguments are never incontrovertible – well, hardly ever. Their purpose is to help expound a position, not to coerce agreement” (Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, p. 304).
Social psychology can help us understand the gap between philosophical argumentation and persuasion. One of the most influential frameworks in empirical studies of persuasion is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), first developed by psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in the late 1970’s. ELM is a ‘dual process’ model, similar to Daniel Kahneman’s well-known discussion of ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ in Thinking, Fast and Slow. According to ELM, there are two routes to persuasion. The first route is through ‘peripheral processing,’ which is relatively fast and requires little cognitive effort, but also produces relatively unstable results. For example, a salesperson’s charm might persuade me to buy fancier exercise bike than I’d planned on buying, though I might regret that soon after. The second route is through ‘central processing,’ which is slower and involves more cognitive effort, but can produce more stable results. For example, working carefully through customer reviews of exercise bikes takes time, but can result in longer-lasting satisfaction with the purchase.
Perhaps the most important part of ELM is what it says about when people engage in central processing. Given our limited mental energy, peripheral processing is the default when confronted with new information. For us to engage our central processing, we must be both (1) able and (2) motivated to do so. To a philosopher, that might sound trivial: of course we only do things we are able and motivated to do! However, this apparent triviality can direct our attention to some mistakes our students might make in trying to persuade. More specifically: philosophical training focuses on distinguishing good (e.g., sound, not question-begging) arguments from bad ones, but that distinction makes little difference to persuasion when people are employing only peripheral processing.
Let’s start with ability. In one study that helped launch ELM, students were presented with a mix of strong and weak arguments for increasing tuition, while also being asked to keep track of how often an ‘X’ flashed on a nearby screen. The rate at which the ‘X’ flashed varied between students, generating different levels of distraction. Not surprisingly, for students with no distraction, the strong vs. weak arguments had very different effects, with strong arguments leading to more favorable attitudes towards increased tuition, and weak arguments leading to less favorable attitudes. But as distraction increased, the difference began to disappear, and strong and weak arguments had more similar effects on their attitudes. Distraction is not the only factor that can increase or decrease people’s ability to process information; others include speed of speech, repetition, and complexity.
Next, consider motivation. In another foundational study for ELM, students were presented with strong and weak arguments for a college instituting new comprehensive examinations for graduation. Some students were given arguments for instituting the examinations at their university, while others were given exactly parallel arguments for instituting the exams at a different university. The effect was similar to the one for studies concerning ability: strong and weak arguments had similar effects on shaping attitudes for students in the latter group, that is, for students for whom the issue had no personal relevance. By contrast, when students were evaluating whether they themselves should face exams, they were much better at recognizing the virtues of good arguments over bad ones. Greater personal relevance does not always increase sensitivity to the quality of arguments – certain sorts of personal relevance can also increase defensiveness and so decrease the impact of good arguments. So some level of motivation is a necessary condition for the virtues of good arguments to shine through, though hardly a sufficient one.
With all that in mind, think of the likely scenarios in which a philosophy student encounters an undecided voter who does not believe in climate change. Perhaps this happens in a social media thread, over the phone/videoconferencing, or in the street. In these contexts, the other person is likely to be partly distracted with other concerns and to have little motivation to devote their finite mental energy to someone else’s subtle argumentative points – especially if those points are couched in complex jargon. These contexts are hence very different from the philosophy classroom (real or virtual), in which everyday distractions are minimized and students have clear motivations to attend to the more subtle virtues of different arguments. Students may have found that a given argument can be persuasive in the classroom context, and so assume it will work elsewhere. Without flagging this difference in how contextual factors limit persuasion, we are setting up our students to fail in arguing about election-relevant issues.
What we can do
Hopefully, this description of the problem points the way towards a solution. To conclude, I’ll sketch two easy additions that can be made to any philosophy class (even this week – without any further preparation!).
A minimal addition is just to tell students that people are typically moved by philosophical argumentation only in rare contexts that are friendly towards careful thought, like the philosophy classroom, and that they should therefore just generally avoid arguing with people they want to persuade.
A near-minimal addition helps students appreciate this point is a bit more depth. Recall the near-trivial claim that people are sensitive to the virtues of good arguments only when they are both able and motivated to think through them. First, we can ask our students to reflect on how often they have been persuaded by someone else’s argument (on either a big topic or a small one), and then think about how motivation and ability factored into their being persuaded. Once they recognize how fragile the conditions are for argumentative persuasion, we can ask them to find examples of failed persuasion (ideally, their own) and analyze them in terms of whether ability or motivation was lacking. Finally, we can prompt them write down some advice for their future selves the next time they’re tempted to launch into argument.
Of course, given more time, one could go a lot further than this, looking into other factors that enhance or decrease the likelihood of persuasion (such as the temptation of virtue-signaling) or looking into research on effective, topic-specific forms of communication (such as the effectiveness of concrete vs. abstract representations of climate change). My aim here, though, has been to describe how one familiar (mis-) understanding of philosophical training can lead students to make certain mistakes, and sketch two minimal additions to classes that can help them avoid those mistakes – and, perhaps, help them productively redirect some of their limited political energy in the final days before November 3rd.
Special thanks to Michael Brownstein and Steve Gardiner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this post.
