Women, the intellectually humble, and liberals write more persuasive political arguments.

ABSTRACT: If sincere attempts at political persuasion are central to the functioning of democracy, then what attributes of individuals make them more persuasive toward fellow citizens? To examine this, we asked 594 Democrats and Republicans to write politically persuasive arguments on any topic of their choice and then gave those arguments to a US representative sample of 3,131 to rate the persuasiveness, totaling 54,686 judgments. We consistently found that arguments written by women, liberals, the intellectually humble, and those low on party identification were rated as more persuasive. These patterns were robust to controls for the demographics and partisanship of judges and persuaders, the topics written about, argument length, and the emotional sentiments of the arguments. Women's superior per

SUBMITTER: Lees J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10184441 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature