Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Racial and gender bias, from advertisement to political rhetoric, is ubiquitous in persuasion. However, the impact of bias on persuasive discourse is often muddied by intent and framing. Reasoners practicing anti-racism may be more likely to scrutinize racially-specific arguments, while arguments made by women may only be diminished when they are emotionally charged. We sought to study how humans evaluate interpretive arguments, what makes certain arguments persuasive, and the impact of bias and emotionality on persuasiveness. We found that shallow heuristics such as argument length and readability are poor indicators for persuasive impact, but reasoners are more likely to be persuaded by arguments made by White people, particularly White women. Further, no difference was observed based on a reasoner's ability to see the arguer's face, implying that judgments are made solely by name recognition. Our focus on written arguments has broad implications for information literacy and racial justice.