Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.