Creating effective educational interventions that correctpeople’s misconceptions is difficult. This has led manyresearchers to conclude that people do not properly attend tonew information in a way that they should. However, even if ascientifically-grounded intervention fails, it is still possiblethat other interventions would be effective. Yet, it is notpractically feasible to systematically explore and test theentire hypothesis space of possible interventions. Here, weexamined whether researchers could use online arguments todevelop effective educational interventions, in effect,narrowing the intervention hypothesis space. Across twoexperiments (N = 1, 816), we found that argumentscrowdsourced from Reddit’s Change My View were aseffective or more effective at changing beliefs thaninterventions developed by academics and published intop-tier scientific journals. These results suggest thatresearchers can build on successful crowdsourced argumentsto develop effective educational interventions likely to correctpeople’s misconceptions in more naturalistic settings.

People generally ignore evidence that is contrary to theirbeliefs (Nickerson, 1998). To examine the factors thatpromotes attitude change with a new perspective, this studyexamined how people change their beliefs on a range of topicsfrom gender identity to gun control on the Redditforum Change My View. Specifically, we examined howpeople on Change My View cite evidence to change otherpeople’s minds. As prior work suggests, we find that peopleare not easily convinced to change their beliefs about socialand moral issues, and this occurs even though people citeconsiderably more evidence while discussing theseissues. However, our data provides one source of optimism:We found that the amount of evidence provided in adiscussion predicts attitude change, suggesting that whileattitude change is hard-won, providing facts and evidencemay nonetheless be an effective persuasive tactic.

People’s beliefs and attitudes about social and scientificissues, such as capital punishment and climate change, appearto form complex but generally coherent networks.Understanding the nature of these networks is a prerequisitefor designing interventions for changing beliefs on the basisof rational arguments and evidence. It is therefore importantto develop methods to represent and analyze the form andnature of belief networks, which may not be explicitlyverbalizable. Adopting an emerging approach that utilizescrowdsourcing to develop educational interventions, wemined discussions from the Reddit forum Change My View todetermine which beliefs and types of information underliepeople’s attitudes about capital punishment. By combiningcomputational analyses based on a topic model with morequalitative assessments of the extracted topics, we found thatmoral arguments are more prevalent than statistical ordata-based arguments. The present study serves as a test casefor the open sourced software crowdpy, a Python toolkit forrunning naturalistic studies on the web, which will enableother researchers to use crowdsourcing in their research. Thisapproach sets the stage for research exploring potentialinterventions to change people’s beliefs.