Persuasion

Mind changing, individually and at scale

2017-06-07 — 2025-08-21

adversarial
bounded compute
communicating
cooperation
culture
mind
wonk
Figure 1

Handy terms and concepts in the realm of persuasion at scale. Persuasion at scale is a mix of persuading individuals, and then causing those opinions to propagate. These are coupled in some deep and confusing way by the fact that “in groups” and “our groups” are very different regarding how we take up their opinions.

1 Mass opinion dynamics

I wrote up a blog post about this which I will probably use to update this notebook one day.

2 How to

Miscellaneous remedial argumentation (slightly spammy): Eric Barker’s This Is How To Change Someone’s Mind: 6 Secrets From Research advocates self-awareness:

If absolutely nothing else works, they might just be a totally unreachable zealot. Or it could be that…

You’re the zealot. And if you are unwilling to give any serious consideration to this possibility, that’s a big red flag. Nobody thinks they’re the problem — and that’s the problem. After all, you’re the one reading articles about how to change people’s minds, aren’t you? (Yes, I plead guilty to being an accomplice.) It’s just a possibility to consider, but if you’re serious about having fewer arguments to the death, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re really a victim and not Patient Zero. So what do you do if you think you might be Typhoid Mary?

Consider the beliefs you usually argue about. Now ask yourself disconfirmation questions. Write down the answers. Show them to a friend who has a different perspective than you on the topic. Does your pal feel those responses pass the implausibility sniff test?

Derek Black the ex-storm front white supremacist who changed his mind and wrote about it.

Interesting case study, Change My View:

A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue. Enter with a mindset for conversation, not debate.

Dylon Marron’s Conversation with people who hate me

a podcast where he calls up the people behind negative comments on the internet.

3 Deep canvassing

Fascinating back story.

4 Via AI

See AI persuasion for a discussion of AI-augmented persuasion.

5 References

Acemoglu, Chernozhukov, and Yildiz. 2006. Learning and Disagreement in an Uncertain World.” Working Paper 12648.
Acemoglu, and Ozdaglar. 2011. Opinion Dynamics and Learning in Social Networks.” Dynamic Games and Applications.
Ajduković. 2007. Attitude change and need for cognition in debaters and non-debaters.”
Aral, Muchnik, and Sundararajan. 2009. Distinguishing Influence-Based Contagion from Homophily-Driven Diffusion in Dynamic Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aral, and Nicolaides. 2017. Exercise Contagion in a Global Social Network.” Nature Communications.
Aral, and Walker. 2011. Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks.” Management Science.
———. 2014. Tie Strength, Embeddedness, and Social Influence: A Large-Scale Networked Experiment.” Management Science.
Arguedas, Robertson, Fletche, et al. 2022. Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, and Polarisation: A Literature Review.”
Bakshy, Eckles, Yan, et al. 2012. Social Influence in Social Advertising: Evidence from Field Experiments.” In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. EC ’12.
Bakshy, Rosenn, Marlow, et al. 2012. The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web. WWW ’12.
Ballard-Rosa, Malik, Rickard, et al. 2021. The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom.” Comparative Political Studies.
Barash. 2011. The Dynamics Of Social Contagion.”
Bechtel. 2013. Public Opinion about Income Inequality.” Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis.
Behr, Reding, Edwards, et al. 2013. Radicalisation in the Digital Era: The Use of the Internet in 15 Cases of Terrorism and Extremism.”
Bentley, Ormerod, and Shennan. 2011. Population-Level Neutral Model Already Explains Linguistic Patterns.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Bessi. 2016. On the Statistical Properties of Viral Misinformation in Online Social Media.” arXiv:1609.09435 [Physics, Stat].
Bond, Fariss, Jones, et al. 2012. A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization.” Nature.
Boyd, and Richerson. 1992. Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation (or Anything Else) in Sizable Groups.” Ethology and Sociobiology.
Brock-Petroshius. 2024. Race Talk to Change Carceral Attitudes: A Field Experiment on Deep Canvass Organizing.” Social Service Review.
Broockman, and Kalla. 2016. Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing.” Science.
Cabrera-Lalinde. 2022. How Misinformation Affected the Perception of Vaccines in the 20th Century Based on the Examples of the Polio, Pertussis and MMR Vaccines.”
Campbell. 2013. Social Networks and Political Participation.” Annual Review of Political Science.
Cao, Gao, Qu, et al. 2013. Fashion, Cooperation, and Social Interactions.” PLOS ONE.
Centola, Damon. 2010. The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment.” Science (New York, N.Y.).
Centola, Damon M. 2013. Homophily, Networks, and Critical Mass: Solving the Start-up Problem in Large Group Collective Action.” Rationality and Society.
Centola, Damon. 2015. The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion.” American Journal of Sociology.
———. 2018. How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions.
———. 2021. Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.
Centola, D, and Macy. 2007. Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties.” American Journal of Sociology.
Christakis, and Fowler. 2013. Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior.” Statistics in Medicine.
Cook, Lewandowsky, and Ecker. 2017. Neutralizing Misinformation Through Inoculation: Exposing Misleading Argumentation Techniques Reduces Their Influence.” PLOS ONE.
Coscia. 2017. Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances for Viral Propagation of Protomemes.” Communications of the ACM.
Costello, Pennycook, and Rand. 2024. Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues with AI.” Science.
de Lange, Milner-Gulland, and Keane. 2021. Effects of Social Networks on Interventions to Change Conservation Behavior.” Conservation Biology.
DellaPosta. 2020. Pluralistic Collapse: The ‘Oil Spill’ Model of Mass Opinion Polarization.” American Sociological Review.
DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy. 2015. Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes? American Journal of Sociology.
Dodds. 2017. Slightly Generalized Generalized Contagion: Unifying Simple Models of Biological and Social Spreading.” arXiv:1708.09697 [Physics].
Dodds, and Watts. 2005. A Generalized Model of Social and Biological Contagion.” Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Draief, Heidari, and Kearns. 2014. New Models for Competitive Contagion.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI’14.
Evans. 2017. The Economics of Attention Markets.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3044858.
Facciani, and Brashears. 2019. Sacred Alters: The Effects of Ego Network Structure on Religious and Political Beliefs: Socius.
Farrell, and Schneier. 2018. Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3273111.
Gelman, and Margalit. 2021. Social Penumbras Predict Political Attitudes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Goel, Mason, and Watts. 2010. Real and Perceived Attitude Agreement in Social Networks.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Goel, Watts, and Goldstein. 2012. The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks.” In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce - EC ’12.
Gould, Jamieson, and Romer. 2003. Media Contagion and Suicide Among the Young.” American Behavioral Scientist.
Goyal, and Kearns. 2012. Competitive Contagion in Networks.” In Proceedings of the Forty-Fourth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. STOC ’12.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties.” The American Journal of Sociology.
Granovetter, Mark. 1983. The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.” Sociological Theory.
Guilbeault, and Centola. 2021. Topological Measures for Identifying and Predicting the Spread of Complex Contagions.” Nature Communications.
Haghtalab, Jackson, and Procaccia. 2020. Belief Polarization in a Complex World: A Learning Theory Perspective.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3606003.
Halvorsen, Pedersen, and Sneppen. 2021. Social Contagion in a World with Asymmetric Influence.” Physical Review E.
Houghton. 2021. Interdependent Diffusion: The Social Contagion of Interacting Beliefs.” arXiv:2010.02188 [Physics].
Howard, and Kollanyi. 2016. Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda During the UK-EU Referendum.” Browser Download This Paper.
Hunter, Haye, Murray, et al. 2019. Social Network Interventions for Health Behaviours and Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” PLOS Medicine.
Hurd, and Gleeson. 2012. On Watts’ Cascade Model with Random Link Weights.” arXiv:1211.5708 [Cond-Mat, Physics:physics].
Information, Get-Out-the-Vote Messages, and Peer Influence: Causal Effects on Political Behavior in Mozambique.” 2021. Journal of Development Economics.
Johnson, Hollyn M., and Seifert. 1994. Sources of the Continued Influence Effect: When Misinformation in Memory Affects Later Inferences.” Learning, Memory.
Johnson, N. F., Velasquez, Restrepo, et al. 2021. Mainstreaming of Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation.”
Jørgensen, Bor, and Petersen. 2021. Compliance Without Fear: Individual-Level Protective Behaviour During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” British Journal of Health Psychology.
Kerkhoff. 1996. “Through the Looking Glass: The Role and Analysis of Metaphorical Language in Interdisciplinary Science.”
Kiley, and Vaisey. 2020. Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data.” American Sociological Review.
Kim, Yonghwan. 2015. Does Disagreement Mitigate Polarization? How Selective Exposure and Disagreement Affect Political Polarization.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.
Kim, David A, Hwong, Stafford, et al. 2015. Social Network Targeting to Maximise Population Behaviour Change: A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial.” The Lancet.
Kong, Rizoiu, and Xie. 2020. Modeling Information Cascades with Self-Exciting Processes via Generalized Epidemic Models.” In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. WSDM ’20.
Lakoff, and Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Lara-Cabrera, Gonzalez-Pardo, Barhamgi, et al. 2017. Extracting Radicalisation Behavioural Patterns from Social Network Data.” In 2017 28th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA).
Lerman, Yan, and Wu. 2016. The ‘Majority Illusion’ in Social Networks.” PLOS ONE.
Malm, Nash, and Moghadam. 2016. Social Network Analysis and Terrorism.” In The Handbook of the Criminology of Terrorism.
Meade, and Islam. 2006. “Modeling and Forecasting the Diffusion of Innovation - A 25 Year Review.” International Journal of Forecasting.
Mercier. 2020. Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.
Moussaïd, Kämmer, Analytis, et al. 2013. Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation.” PLoS ONE.
Müller-Vahl, Pisarenko, Jakubovski, et al. 2021. Stop That! It’s Not Tourette’s but a New Type of Mass Sociogenic Illness.” Brain.
Nyhan. 2021. Why the Backfire Effect Does Not Explain the Durability of Political Misperceptions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
O’Connor, and Weatherall. 2019. The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread.
Odlyzko, and Tilly. 2005. “A Refutation of Metcalfe’s Law and a Better Estimate for the Value of Networks and Network Interconnections.”
Ormerod, and Wiltshire. 2009. ‘Binge’ Drinking in the UK: A Social Network Phenomenon.” Mind & Society.
Ortiz, and Khin Khin. 2018. Traditional and New Media’s Influence on Suicidal Behavior and Contagion.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law.
Pastor-Satorras, Castellano, Van Mieghem, et al. 2015. Epidemic Processes in Complex Networks.” Reviews of Modern Physics.
Perliger, and Pedahzur. 2011. Social Network Analysis in the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence.” PS: Political Science and Politics.
Petersen, Christiansen, Bor, et al. 2021. Communicate Hope to Motivate Action Against Highly Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Variants.”
Pinheiro, Santos, Santos, et al. 2014. Origin of Peer Influence in Social Networks.” Physical Review Letters.
Raley, and Talisse. 2008. Getting Duped.” Scientific American Mind.
Rawlings. 2020. Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups.” American Sociological Review.
Redlawsk, Civettini, and Emmerson. 2010. The Affective Tipping Point: Do Motivated Reasoners Ever ‘Get It’? Political Psychology.
Reyna. 2021. A Scientific Theory of Gist Communication and Misinformation Resistance, with Implications for Health, Education, and Policy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Reynolds, Anna, and Central and Eastern European Online Library. 2020. Mapping Extremist Communities, a Social Network Analysis Approach.
Reynolds, Sean C., and Hafez. 2019. Social Network Analysis of German Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq.” Terrorism and Political Violence.
Robins. 2015. Doing Social Network Research: Network-Based Research Design for Social Scientists.
Robison, Leeper, and Druckman. 2018. Do Disagreeable Political Discussion Networks Undermine Attitude Strength? Political Psychology.
Salvi, Ribeiro, Gallotti, et al. 2024. On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”
Satell. 2019. Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change.
Schuchard, Crooks, Stefanidis, et al. 2019. Bot Stamina: Examining the Influence and Staying Power of Bots in Online Social Networks.” Applied Network Science.
Shalizi, and McFowland III. 2016. Controlling for Latent Homophily in Social Networks Through Inferring Latent Locations.” arXiv:1607.06565 [Physics, Stat].
Sharma, Hofman, and Watts. 2015. Estimating the Causal Impact of Recommendation Systems from Observational Data.” Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation - EC ’15.
Sperber, and Wilson. 1996. Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
Spranzi. 2004. Galileo and the Mountains of the Moon: Analogical Reasoning, Models and Metaphors in Scientific Discovery.” Journal of Cognition and Culture.
Starbird. 2019. Disinformation’s Spread: Bots, Trolls and All of Us.” Nature.
Talisse, and Aikin. 2006. Two Forms of the Straw Man.” Argumentation.
Tan, Niculae, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, et al. 2016. Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-Faith Online Discussions.” In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. WWW ’16.
Thomas. 2013. The Social Contagion Hypothesis: Comment on ‘Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior’.” Statistics in Medicine.
Tokita, Guess, and Tarnita. 2021. Polarized Information Ecosystems Can Reorganize Social Networks via Information Cascades.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Toomey. 2024. Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy.
Törnberg. 2018. Echo Chambers and Viral Misinformation: Modeling Fake News as Complex Contagion.” PLOS ONE.
Trouche, Sander, and Mercier. 2014. Arguments, More Than Confidence, Explain the Good Performance of Reasoning Groups.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2431710.
Tufekci. 2014. Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics.” First Monday.
Ugander, Backstrom, Marlow, et al. 2012. Structural Diversity in Social Contagion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ureña, Kou, Dong, et al. 2019. A Review on Trust Propagation and Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks and Group Decision Making Frameworks.” Information Sciences.
Valente. 2006. Opinion Leader Interventions in Social Networks.” BMJ : British Medical Journal.
Vandeweerdt. 2021. In-Group Interest Cues Do Not Change Issue Attitudes.” Politics, Groups, and Identities.
Vecchi, Van Hasseltb, and Romano. 2005. Crisis (Hostage) Negotiation: Current Strategies and Issues in High-Risk Conflict Resolution.” Aggression and Violent Behavior.
Watts, Duncan J. 2014. Common Sense and Sociological Explanations.” American Journal of Sociology.
———. 2018. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness.
Watts, Duncan J, and Strogatz. 1998. Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature.
Weng, Menczer, and Ahn. 2013. Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks.” Scientific Reports.
Wilson, Zhou, and Starbird. 2018. Assembling Strategic Narratives: Information Operations As Collaborative Work Within an Online Community.” Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.
Wojcik. 2018. Do Birds of a Feather Vote Together, or Is It Peer Influence? Political Research Quarterly.
Zheleva, and Arbour. 2021. Causal Inference from Network Data.” In Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. KDD ’21.
Zhuravskaya, Petrova, and Enikolopov. 2020. Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media.” Annual Review of Economics.