Lees Jeffrey, Todd Haley, Barranti Maxwell
Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, 86 Olden St, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 20 Prospect Ave, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2023 Apr 25;2(5):pgad143. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad143. eCollection 2023 May.
If sincere attempts at political persuasion are central to the functioning of democracy, then what attributes of individuals make them more persuasive toward fellow citizens? To examine this, we asked 594 Democrats and Republicans to write politically persuasive arguments on any topic of their choice and then gave those arguments to a US representative sample of 3,131 to rate the persuasiveness, totaling 54,686 judgments. We consistently found that arguments written by women, liberals, the intellectually humble, and those low on party identification were rated as more persuasive. These patterns were robust to controls for the demographics and partisanship of judges and persuaders, the topics written about, argument length, and the emotional sentiments of the arguments. Women's superior persuasiveness was partially, but not fully, explained by the fact that their arguments were longer, of a higher grade level, and expressed less dominance than men's. Intergroup dynamics also affected persuasiveness, as arguments written for in-party members were more persuasive than the ones written for out-party members. These findings suggest that an individual's personal and psychological characteristics durably provide them with a persuasive advantage when they engage in sincere attempts at changing the hearts and minds of fellow citizens.
如果真诚的政治说服尝试是民主运作的核心，那么个人的哪些特质会使他们对同胞更具说服力呢？为了探究这一点，我们让594名民主党人和共和党人就他们选择的任何话题撰写具有政治说服力的论据，然后将这些论据交给3131名具有美国代表性的样本进行说服力评分，总计有54686次评判。我们一直发现，由女性、自由主义者、谦逊的知识分子以及党派认同感较低的人撰写的论据被评为更具说服力。这些模式在控制了评判者和说服者的人口统计学特征及党派性、所写话题、论据长度以及论据的情感倾向后依然稳健。女性更具说服力的部分原因在于她们的论据更长、语言水平更高且比男性的论据表现出更少的主导性，但这并不能完全解释这一现象。群体间动态也会影响说服力，因为为党内成员撰写的论据比为党外成员撰写的论据更具说服力。这些发现表明，当个人真诚地试图改变同胞的想法时，其个人和心理特征会持久地为他们提供一种说服优势。
