Monday, January 30, 2023
1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Social Sciences Building 820, 8th Floor,
UC Berkeley
About the book
According to theories of motivated reasoning, attempts to persuade political opponents are often counterproductive because they end up strengthening opponents’ initial views via directional motivations. Drawing on evidence from 23 randomized survey experiments, Persuasion in Parallel shows that the predicted “backlash” fails to materialize. Instead, the experiments show that the effects of persuasive messages are similar for many subdivisions of society, including policy opponents and proponents, Republicans and Democrats, young and old, and men and women. The overarching conclusion is that persuasion occurs in parallel: even though Americans differ tremendously in their baseline views on many political issues, they are quite similar in their responses to information. This empirical pattern casts serious doubt on the motivated reasoning framework for understanding information processing. The political implication of this work is that we should not give up trying to persuade the other side.
About the Author
Alex Coppock is associate professor (on term) of political science at Yale University, where he specializes in political persuasion and research design. He is the author of Persuasion in Parallel, which synthesizes evidence from 23 randomized experiments to show that even groups that differ tremendously in their baseline attidues change their minds in response to new information quite similarly. Coppock is also the coauthor of Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declare, Diagnose, Redesign, a research design textbook that introduces a language for describing research designs and an algorithm for evaluating their properties. His recent work in peer-reviewed journals presents meta-analyses of list experiments, campaign advertisement experiments, candidate choice experiments, and employment audit experiments.
Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and the Charles & Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.
Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research
UC Berkeley
The Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science
798 Social Sciences Building #1950
Berkeley, CA 94720-1950
citrincenter@berkeley.edu