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A study published in Political Psychology proposes that the strongest, most universally persuasive arguments are ones that feed into other’s cognitive biases. This research was carried out by Political Science Professors Dr. Michael Bang Petersen at Aarhus University and Dr. Kevin Arceneaux at Temple University. 

Past research has suggested that there are two types of strong arguments. The first type relies on a sense of familiarity, such as the listener’s cultural heritage. The second type is known as “easy arguments”. These arguments tend to rely on activating intense feelings in the listener, rather than information. However, recent research has suggested that arguments don’t need to be “easy” or “familiar” to be strong.

The Key to Stronger Arguments 

When a person is first presented with information, they begin processing that information unconsciously, using mental shortcuts to get the job done quickly. 

These mental shortcuts include cognitive biases, which allow an individual to rely on preconceived opinions about the world around them. However, once that information leaves the unconscious mind, it manifests as intuition. 

Dr. Bang Petersen and Dr. Arceneaux argue that intuition (rooted in cognitive biases) provides the basis for how people evaluate an argument. If an argument aligns with a listener’s intuition, they will perceive the argument as strong. This is known as bias-congruent. The opposite is known as bias-incongruent, which are deemed weak arguments.

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In the first study, participants from the United States, Japan and Denmark were randomly assigned to read an argument about welfare benefits, and evaluate the perceived strength of the argument. The researchers were interested in examining the effects of bias congruency, easy arguments and familiar arguments.

The researchers found that perceived argument strength was significantly predicted by bias congruency. This was significant across all three countries. 

However, the bias congruency effect was smaller in Japan, compared to the United States or Denmark. This slight difference does suggest that an argument's sense of familiarity to one’s culture does play a role. 


They also found that the effect of bias congruency was significantly larger than the effect of easy arguments across all three countries. 

In the next experiment, the researchers hypothesized that people who pay attention to welfare debates will be familiar with arguments that link welfare benefits to deservingness. This sense of familiarity will cause them to find these arguments stronger. 

Much like the previous experiment, participants were randomly assigned to read an argument about welfare benefits. The arguments were either deservingness-congruent (e.g. portrays welfare recipients as lazy and opposes welfare benefits) or deservingness-incongruent (e.g. portrays welfare recipients as lazy but supports welfare benefits). 

The participants were also asked to report how familiar they were with political debates about welfare benefits, as well as their political ideology. 

The results showed that deservingness-congruent arguments were rated as stronger, even among those who didn’t pay attention to welfare debates and those with left-wing values. Thus, the familiarity of the argument only had a minor impact on perceived strength of the argument. 

In the final experiment, the researchers randomly assigned participants to read an argument about welfare benefits. Ten days later, they contacted the participants and presented them with a list of 16 arguments. Participants had to pick which argument they read in the first part of the experiment. 

The results revealed that participants more accurately recalled bias-congruent arguments, than bias-incongruent ones. In addition, they found that 87% of participants recalled being exposed to a bias-congruent argument. In reality, only 47% were exposed to a bias-congruent argument. 

This suggests that people may have a strong tendency to restructure arguments in memory to match their own cognitive biases. 

Overall, the researchers found support that arguments that align with the listeners cognitive biases may be more effective than easy or familiar arguments.





Nick Hobson