Don’t feed the trolls arguments.
When someone is wrong—on the Internet or in the coffee shop—the temptation to engage can be strong, even though it often seems futile. While it can be satisfying and illuminating to argue with friends and some other people with whom we share some degree of trust, arguments with family members, acquaintances, and Internet strangers seem more often to harden positions and risk undermining the knowledge of third parties than to illuminate.
Engaging may actually be more effective than it appears. Political partisans do seem to respond to argument; their response is often invisible to us because it is (perhaps rationally) often very small. Given enough evidence, even conspiracy theorists seem to be moved significantly. Argument, even argument with committed partisans, is certainly not always futile.
On some topics, though, argument does seem futile. Why?
One reason often given is that conspiracy theories and committed partisans often don’t hold their views for reasons. Rather, their views reflect emotional commitments or are a reflection of their identity. Argument and the exchange of reasons are the wrong sorts of tools to change positions that are not based on reasons in the first place. You can’t reason someone out of a position they were not reasoned into, as the saying goes.
Despite its popularity, there’s no general reason to think that saying is accurate. There’s no reason to think that mental states respond to only one kind of cause. Even if it’s true that we (or some of us) don’t hold our views for reasons, reasons might still shift us. In any case, I’m skeptical of both the identity and the motivated reasoning accounts of belief formation.
I want to suggest a quite different reason why argument may be futile. It’s not that (some) conspiracy theorists and political partisans don’t have reasons for their beliefs; rather, they don’t actually believe what they say.
There are several different routes whereby someone can come to fervently argue for views they don’t actually believe. On some, they’re insincere. On others, they’re mistaken about their beliefs. I’ll focus on just one route to insincere protestation of belief: trolling.
Trolling, as I’m using the word here, occurs when someone reports (or implies) that they believe something because they think it’s funny to say it: because it upsets others, or gets a rise out of them, or to be outrageous. Trolling hasn’t been widely studied, but there’s growing evidence that it occurs.
One study examined reports that people were drinking bleach and other cleaning products to prevent or treat COVID. Eight percent of respondents (selected for representativeness of the population) reported they were. But a different picture emerged when “problematic respondents” were removed. Problematic respondents are people who are inattentive or answer questions in a way that indicates insincerity (for example, answering “yes” to questions like “have you previously died from a heart attack?” or “Can you name every US senator ever from memory?”) When all problematic respondents were removed, the number sincerely reporting deliberately drinking bleach dropped to zero.
Our own research provides convergent evidence for significant levels of trolling. We asked a representative (Australian) sample for their attitudes toward six familiar conspiracy theories: that climate change is a hoax, that COVID is a myth, and so on. We got responses that are pretty typical, with a substantial minority endorsing (i.e., reporting that they believed the theory was probably or definitely true) these conspiracies (ranging from 19% reporting believing climate change is a hoax to 10% endorsing the theory that the government is covering up the fact that COVID is spread by 5G mobile networks).
In addition, though, we asked about a novel conspiracy theory: “The Canadian Armed Forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries.” We found that reporting belief in this novel theory was a strong predictor of belief in the other theories. For example, only 3% of people who didn’t endorse the racoons theory reported believing the government cover-up of 5G story, compared to 66% of those who claimed to accept “racoons.” The mean number of theories other than “racoons” endorsed by those who endorsed it was 4.08; among those who rejected “racoons” it was 0.50 (see Williams et al. for a preregistered replication).
We think this is strong evidence of trolling. It strains credulity beyond breaking point to think that anyone accepts the racoon theory. Perhaps they really are that gullible? We don’t think that’s at all plausible, but we don’t have to rest content with intuition: we can point to the fact that 56% of people who endorsed “racoons” also endorsed two contradictory conspiracy theories (that COVID doesn’t exist and that the virus is spread by 5G towers) compared to only 2% of those who rejected “racoons.” This adds to the case for insincerity. We’re confident that trolls like these inflate estimates of belief across all conspiracy theories, but most especially for the more bizarre ones.
Once we bear the prevalence of trolls in mind, the political landscape looks rather different. I suspect that trolling is an important factor in the reported political beliefs of MAGA supporters (and of some politicians too). Reporting belief that “they’re eating the cats” or that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist is funny to a certain sensibility. I suspect even far more plausible beliefs, like the belief that broad tariffs are good for the US economy, are sometimes reported as much to troll as to report sincere attitudes.
There’s much to condemn about trolling, most especially when it converges with vice signaling. There’s much to condemn about delighting in the vicious. But condemnation should be targeted at the moral outlook it expresses, not at the rationality of those who espouse such views.
Bearing trolling in mind also should guide us in how we respond to those who claim to believe these things. Arguing—presenting considerations designed to change minds—is pointless. It’s false that you can’t reason someone out of a position they were not reasoned into, but true that you can’t reason someone out of a position they don’t in fact hold.
How we should respond is a difficult question. Refusing to engage is probably more helpful than getting upset or arguing; don’t feed the trolls remains good advice. I suspect that at least some trolls don’t think it matters what they, or we, believe, because politics is not responsive to ordinary people’s concerns anyway. That’s a belief that they can be forgiven for holding. Rather than feeding the trolls, we should aim to change politics so that’s no longer true.
