Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social media is often used as a platform where individuals engage in debate regarding topics that are important to them. Not all arguments are equally convincing, and whilst a given argument may be persuasive to some people, it is often seen as inadequate by others. We are interested in both the individual and argument level differences that make ‘everyday' arguments such as those on social media persuasive. In a replication of our Everyday Belief Bias Task (Deans-Browne & Singmann, 2024), we investigate this question using a paradigm that consists of two parts. In the first part, we measure participant's individual beliefs about eight claims each referring to a political topic (e.g., Abortion should be legal). In the second part, participants rated an argument for each of these claims that was deemed as either good, inconsistent (containing internal inconsistencies), or authority-based (being centered around appeals to authority). We replicated the belief consistency effect – participants preferred arguments that were also in line with their beliefs. We also found that authority-based arguments were rated as worse than inconsistent arguments, and that both types of arguments were rated as worse than good arguments. The implications are first that people do not evaluate arguments independently of the background beliefs held about them. Secondly, people are willing to ignore inconsistencies in arguments more than they are willing to accept the endorsement of authority figures as adequate evidence for arguments.