Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.