Politics

OK, so that is in the running for clickbait hed of the year, but it's actually apt for the column.

It may seem paradoxical to write this in an opinion piece. But it needs saying: arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people’s beliefs. And the implicit societal acceptance that they do is getting in the way of other, more effective forms of political thinking and doing.

I’m a researcher who studies the intersection of psychology and politics, and my work has increasingly led me to believe that our culture’s understanding of how political persuasion works is wrong. In the age of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rise of the far right, commentators have endlessly opined on the problems of fake news, polarisation and more. But they’ve mostly been looking in the wrong places – and have focused too much on words.

Take “debates”. They’re a central part of most election campaigns around the world, seen as so influential that they’re often governed by strict rules around media coverage and balance. Yet evidence suggests that watching debates has no impact on opinions whatsoever. In 2019 researchers analysed 56 TV debates in 22 elections in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Europe from 1952 to 2016. The study tracked nearly 100,000 respondents to see whether debates helped undecided or decided voters to make up or change their minds. They found no evidence that they did. In 2012, a reporter ran another analysis about whether debates influenced election outcomes. As he put it: “The effects of debates on eventual votes are likely mild, and, in most cases, effectively nil.”