Cheryl Says She's An Atheist

[koganbot]

Proposal for a social psychology experiment:

We'll use four separate, sizable groups of people, say 75 people in each group. (Not that I know if that amount is any good or not, or if we want our overall pool to be similar socioeconomically. I'm not a statistician.)

Ask each member of Group One:

What arguments would you use to try and persuade an

Comments

[arbitrary_greay]

The dynamics discussed here are found in the competitive debate circuit. In the CX/Policy division, (the one I have the most experience with and prefer) the affirmative team reads their plan and justifications, the negative team reads a combination of arguments directly targetting the affirmative's first speech and arguments that function as their own independent unit that the affirmative team can dismantle on multiple levels

[koganbot]

This is interesting. I was on debate team freshman year in high school (this is 44 years ago), didn't do very well. I see the similarity regarding canned arguments versus responsive ones. One thing debate has, though, is a judge, who, if she's any good, will penalize a team for not responding to the other team's ideas (or at least for not giving a good reason for the nonresponse), for attacking straw men, etc. Also, it seemed to me at the time that, among other things, debaters had to either have a clear idea of the weaknesses in their position and know how to cover them up, or have no idea of the weaknesses in their position and for that reason be good at covering them up (the cynic in me says that the latter do even better than the former).

One difference in my experiment is that the subjects have to think about persuading the other party (rather than impressing a judge). Another is to see what increases uncertainty, and therefore (one hopes) produces a more flexible and creative response, and a thirst for knowledge

[arbitrary_greay]

You're exactly right about the differences. I would use drastically different tactics in debating vs. persuasion, namely that I would play all sorts of unfair philosophy games and blow up inconsequential flaws into the judging points. In discussion, while I still love many of the concepts used in debate, I do try to avoid getting bogged down in semantics as the main point. (Semantics always make fun friendly tangential discussions) I also tend to make lots and lots of concessions that I wouldn't in competition for the sake of deepening discussion instead of butting heads over the same points over and over

[koganbot]

I probably didn't present Krugman and Silver all that well, but what they do that impresses me is not that they pre-empt standard counterarguments that they know are wrong (though they certainly do that, and it's good that they do), they also present counterarguments and alternative hypotheses that they believe have something to them. Which means that when they're very certain and aren't presenting counterarguments, I'm also likely to go with them (even when I don't understand what they're saying), since they're the sort to present uncertainty when it's warranted

[ext_878085]

"What arguments would you use to try and persuade her there might be a God after all?"

I think this question is a bit unclear and you would possibly get a variety of types of responses. Parsing this question out, I think it is asking for arguments to persuade an atheist to really be agnostic. I don't think that is what you mean for it to ask, however I could easily be wrong with that assumption. Most people would probably respond to the question by creating an argument to go from atheism to theism. They'd attempt to convince the atheist that their specific version of god does exist. Then there would be people like me that get stuck on the "might exist" part, as the question is written, which again is really an argument for agnosticism and not theism. While both types of arguments would be interesting to study, I imaging it is a lot easier to convince an atheist to be an agnostic rather than a theist.

[koganbot]

The question is clear but doesn't give enough information (it doesn't tell us why Cheryl is an atheist, it doesn't tell us what she thinks being an atheist means, it doesn't tell us what she thinks believing in a God means, and of course it doesn't tell us what sort of arguments persuade her; some people think it's persuasive to tell someone "You're not being open-minded"). You're mostly right in saying the question is asking "How do you persuade her to be an agnostic?" except that "There might be a God after all" is actually a bit stronger than "I don't know if there is or isn't a God," which just says that you can't prove otherwise. (And there are other definitions of "agnosticism" too, that I won't go into.) I'd say, following along with what you wrote, that in responding to questions, people (incl. me) respond to the question that is intended rather than the question that is literally asked. And we're right to do so, if we know what question is intended. But people also tend - this is inescapable, but some people are more prone to

[skyecaptain]

Currently reading Us Against Them: The Ethnocentric Foundations of American Politics. This has been a good foundational reading in in- and out-group identification, which seems to be at least part of your interest here. The in- or (more likely) out-group would be "atheists," depending on the respondent's position, and it's likely that people in the in-group AND out-group underestimate how much they know about "Cheryl," even if they'd be quick to define "atheists" according to their at-hand beliefs.

From the book:

[M]embership is not sufficient to establish an in-group, just as the absence of membership is not sufficient to establish an out-group. What is required is psychological striving: attraction and identification in the case of in-groups; condescension and opposition in the case of out-groups.The book persuasively argues that ethnocentrism, though a universal feature of human psychology, is more apparent or less apparent in particular groups and individuals, and is not always related to cogent "group interests." (That is,

[koganbot]

it's likely that people in the in-group AND out-group underestimate how much they know about "Cheryl," even if they'd be quick to define "atheists" according to their at-hand beliefs
Assuming you didn't mistype and mean "overestimate" rather than "underestimate," this is the opposite of what I'd expect. That is, this says that people think they don't know as much about Cheryl as they actually do, and that they therefore have more uncertainty than they should. If this is what Kinder is saying, what does he base it on?

Or is he saying that they often go to their immediate stereotype assumptions but actually know more than their initial response indicates?

My experiment doesn't test these directly; it just tries to see if introducing a name and switching the order of the questions would induce people to have (even?) more uncertainty.

It's certainly not my experience that people (atheist or nonatheist) know more about my beliefs than they think they do, though it's possible that they know more about the average atheist than they think

[skyecaptain]

I did mistype -- meant to say "underestimate how much they DON'T know"! Woops!

[koganbot]

Whew! That's a relief.

[skyecaptain]

Re: Dead Lester, it seems to me that rock crit is in its own way uniquely ethnocentric -- that is, particularly prone to forming with and against groups. It's a reason that lots of people become passionate about music in the first place. When I "got into music," it was explicitly because I wanted to define myself with a particular group -- the "music kids" -- and my desire to be part of that group would have, at that point in my emerging understanding of music -- diminished the power good arguments counter to their positions, no matter how absurd their positions might have been. That was my psychological striving, and to the extent that I was striving, I would have been far less likely to challenge any beliefs that happened to jibe with the tribe

[koganbot]

I remember reading* that audience members for "point-counterpoint"-type debates on TV don't learn anything about the ideas they go in opposing, since they basically just listen to their own side and dismiss the other, without making the effort to comprehend the other. (But what about uncommitted viewers?)

*Yes, this is not very good sourcing or fact-checking.

[skyecaptain]

Another interesting point in the opening chapters of Us Against Them is the aassertion that ethnocentrism can function as both strong in-group and strong out-group identification, but doesn't require one or the other to have the same effect. That is, you can identify lots of out-groups without having an "in-group," but you can also identify with an in-group that doesn't necessarily correlate to some deep-seated hatred of others. "[E]thnocentrism need not be interpreted as a dark and irrational expression of repressed hostilities and primeval fears. Ethnocentrism is a commonplace consequence of the human striving for self-regard and personal security."

[koganbot]

I have to break from this discussion for about an hour, but one thing I'm not clear if I'm getting right:

The phrases "in-group identification" and "out-group identification" - does the former mean that you identify something or someone as belonging to your group (and identify yourself as belong to that entity's or person's group?), and the latter that you identify something or someone as belonging to a group you're at odds with or outside of (and identify yourself as outside of and at odds with that group)?

The trouble is that when I see the phrase "out-group identification" my immediate impulse isn't to think, "I'm identifying them as part of a group I'm outside of and at odds with," but rather, "I identify myself as belonging to this particular out-group." The phrase "group-identification" usually refers to what the subject identifies with, not to where the subject locates someone or something else.

[skyecaptain]

Kahneman describes some of the cognitive dissonance that can occur when you personalize a generalizable quality, too -- when students in his psych class watch personal interviews with someone whom they know are statistically likely to act in X fashion, they almost without fail make that person the "exception" to the statistical reality. Out-group identification is its own kind of generalizable reality (one that is not always accurate) from which people can exceptionalize an individual without affecting the way they think about the group. But IIRC Kahneman also mentions a few strategies for diminishing this effect; don't have the book on hand to double-check.