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Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Want to Sway Climate Change Skeptics? Ask About Their Personal Strengths (And Show Pictures!) - Less Wrong
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Comments (13)
This doesn't seem to be dark arts to me. The use of graphs as a persuasive element seems to use the fact that graphs are visual and striking and so can overcome our cognitive defenses which prevent updating. This may connected to why graphs are such a useful mode of communication. Similarly, starting people off where they feel good about themselves may simply reduce the level which they feel a need to defend their beliefs as part of themselves.
So I don't see either of these as Dark Arts per se.
I am puzzled by the downvotes. I suspect that they may be coming from the title of the post which is unfortunate because people can read the link to see that the relevant methods worked on people across the political spectrum about issues they were otherwise unwilling to examine.
The impression I got from the description in the article is that without the graph subjects didn't believe that the data were accurate, with the graph they did. This, even though the existence of the graph doesn't provide any additional evidence about the accuracy of the underlying data.
If you'll indulge me some just-so-story type speculation, I suspect the reason striking visuals are more persuasive then words is that we evolved to expect others to manipulate us through language, we didn't evolve to expect to be manipulated through visuals.
Perhaps; on the other hand, this strikes me as a mild form of the infamous love-bombing technique.
That's a really interesting hypothesis. I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings. I'd be really interested in seeing a way of testing your hypothesis. Another alternative hypothesis- people are more likely to dismiss simple assertions but graphs signal that someone has spent time and effort thinking about the issue in question. Moreover, knowing how to make a graph signals minimal intelligence so people are more likely to give credence?
That seems disconnected. Love-bombing involves making a set of emotional connections to the claims or people in question. This doesn't connect the emotion to the claims that are then evaluated later.
The paper briefly considers whether the effect is due to graphs being easier to process, but apparently not (p.32):
This effect certainly exists, this is a special case of the reason the conjunction fallacy is frequently a good heuristic.
Well, we're also verbal beings, in fact most of our explicit rationality ability is verbal rather than visual.
I haven't thought of a good way to do this. However, one way to test your "it is just due to humans being very visual beings" is to take advantage of the fact that people differ greatly about how visual they are.