The Four Biggest Myths About Political Persuasion

Today’s episode is about how we change our minds—and what political science tells us about the best ways to change the minds of voters. Our guest is David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California Berkeley, and the coauthor, with Josh Kalla, of a new essay in Slow Boring on Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the most persuasive arguments and messages to decide this election. Today, David and I talk about the four biggest myths of political persuasion—and in the process, David will attempt to do something that I’m not entirely sure is possible: He’ll try to change my mind about how persuasion works.

 

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: David Broockman

Producer: Devon Baroldi

 

Links:

“What’s Better Than Calling Donald Trump ‘Weird’?” https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-better-than-calling-trump-weird

“Consuming cross-cutting media causes learning and moderates attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers” https://osf.io/preprints/osf/jrw26

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