Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In polarized political climates, debate is ubiquitous but minds rarely change. This raises a question: what causes people to update their views? Recent work has shown that people are persuaded more by experienced-based explanations rather than factual ones. Yet, facts surely play (or ought to play) an important role in political discourse. Is it possible to leverage the persuasive power of personal experiences without sacrificing factual information? In Experiments 1 and 2, we replicate and build on previous findings showing that people who offer experienced-based (vs. fact-based) explanations are perceived as more rational and worthy of respect. In Experiment 3, we show that more complex explanations combining factual information with personal examples reveal more nuanced results. Collectively, this work sheds new light on how experienced-based and fact-based evidence can be used to persuade.