The Ethics of Persuasion

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David: I think a tricky issue here with the ethics is that most people feel like they're on the good side and if your justification is well I'm trying to persuade them to my beliefs because I'm right so of course that's ethical automatically. We are set up to get into a sort of 12 angry men scenario with other human beings and realize that we have a limited perspective and a limited amount of experiences, he says. David: One project i'm really excited about is a website we'll be launching that will help you get estimates of psychological constructs.

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What is persuasion, and what is it not? How does persuasion differ from coercion? What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion? How are the concepts of assimilation and accommodation related to persuasion? Motivated reasoning is usually seen as a cognitive bias or error; but what if all reasoning is motivated? Are we motivated more by physical death or social death? How much evidence would Flat-Earthers need in order to be convinced that Earth is round? What are "deep" canvassing and "street" epistemology? In what contexts are they most effective? Under what conditions is persuasion morally acceptable?

David McRaney is a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture. He created the podcast You Are Not So Smart based on his 2009 internationally bestselling book of the same name and its followup, You Are Now Less Dumb. Before that, he cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South. Later, he covered things like who tests rockets for NASA, what it is like to run a halfway home for homeless people who are HIV-positive, and how a family sent their kids to college by making and selling knives. Since then, he has been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and tornado survivor. Most recently, after finishing his latest book, How Minds Change, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of the idea and the word: genius. Learn more about him at davidmcraney.com, or follow him on Twitter at @davidmcraney.

Staff