In 2019, Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and Rob Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University, published a paper on the moral foundations theory of persuasion. They said political differences are often fueled by different moral stories, different moral concerns. Conservatives tend to care more about order, safety, patriotism. Progressives tend to care more about equality, justice. And one reason why these groups are so profoundly unpersuasive to each other in debate is that both liberals and conservatives typically craft arguments based on their own moral convictions rather than the convictions of the people they're trying to persuade. We tend to assume that our way of looking at the world is correct and therefore universal. But values are more like a state currency. They work within certain networks, but they don't always translate across borders. The Canadian dollar works very well in Ontario, but it doesn't facilitate any transaction in Japan. And similarly, progressive values are persuasive among progressives, but they lose their purchase in, say, an evangelical church in rural Oklahoma. Let's consider an example here, and I'm stealing from my colleague Olga Kazan, staff writer at The Atlantic, who has written about this several times. Think about the topic of immigration, which clearly divides left and right. If you're a progressive trying to persuade a conservative to join your side, you might be tempted to base the argument on your own moral code. You might say, refugees are a human rights crisis. You might say, a child born one mile south of the Texas-Mexico border has the same rights in the eyes of God as a child born one mile north of that border. Justice, equality. These are fine values, but they are disproportionately progressive values, which means they're unlikely to persuade anybody who isn't progressive. To persuade conservatives, you should make arguments on conservative grounds. You could say, our country was founded on the American dream and that's all these folks want to do. Work hard for their families, pay taxes, and build a strong community. You could appeal to family needs. You could say there's a strong work shortage in construction and home health care. If you want more houses for your kids or more home nurses for your parents, we need to expand legal immigration so that your family can feel taken care of. When I read moral foundations theory, I have, I think, a weird take on it. I don't think this is persuasion at all. I think the subtext of these persuasive efforts is essentially the recognition that people's moral foundations, their deepest opinions, are essentially fixed. If you want to persuade somebody of anything, don't tell them why they're wrong. Tell them why they're right. You're right want cheaper housing, your right to want home health aides to take care of your aging mother, and achieving both might require more immigrants. If you support liberalized immigration law like I do, you don't have to change your mind. You just have to see the ways in which we agreed all along. In the last few years, I've quietly followed the research on political persuasion, and I've started to wonder whether my pet theory, nobody is ever persuaded of anything, is correct. Several recent papers have found that political persuasion is actually more common than I assumed, and it doesn't always work at the level of moral foundations theory. Sometimes people change their mind not only because they interpret familiar facts through new frameworks, but because they really do learn new facts. If this is true, then my cynicism is misplaced. People learn. They change. Their minds can be changed. And this has important implications for thinking about our own minds and the political campaigns trying to change them. Today's guest is David Brockman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-author with Josh Kal of a new essay in Slow Boring on Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and what political science predicts will be the best arguments and messages to decide this election. Today, David and I talk about the myths of political persuasion, and in the process, David will attempt to do something that I'm not entirely sure is even possible. He's going to try to change my mind. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. David Brockman, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Very quickly, and before we dive into the meat of this show, who are you and what do you study?