From people to prompts: Understanding susceptibility to persuasion in conversations with artificial intelligence
People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It
People can be more persuaded by AI because they don’t feel like arguing with it.
We often assume that a persuasive advantage must come from the speaker being especially convincing: they have better arguments, more expertise, more information, or a more compelling style. But conversations are two-sided. What matters is not only what the other person says to us. It also matters how we respond.
This becomes especially important with conversational AI. When another person tells us that we are wrong, we instinctively push back. We explain why our own view makes sense. We point out weaknesses in their stance. In doing so, we are not only trying to persuade the other person; we are also reminding ourselves of the reasons for our own position. Put differently, when someone disagrees with us, we dig our heels in.
AI changes this dynamic. In our research, people tended to think that an AI was less persuadable than a human being. That belief makes intuitive sense. People often imagine AI as fixed: a system whose views come from its programming, training, or underlying rules. If its “mind” cannot really be changed, then arguing with it can feel pointless.
So people argue less.
In our experiments, participants had real conversations about everyday matters of opinion with a conversation partner: whether it is better to exercise in the morning or evening, whether physical books are better than e-books, whether it is worth subscribing to multiple streaming services, or whether credit is preferable to debit. Their conversation partner was always an LLM programmed to try and change their mind. However, we randomly assigned them to be told that their partner was either an AI or another person.
When participants thought their partner was an AI, they argued less. By extension, they also changed their attitudes more.
But, this wasn’t always the case. When we gave participants an explicit goal to persuade their partner, they argued more with the AI and its persuasive advantage shrank. When we explicitly told them that the AI could be persuaded, the same thing happened. And when participants could not respond at all, so there was no opportunity to argue, AI also lost its persuasive advantage.
Overall, we found that our tendency to argue with other people can get in the way of having our minds changed by them. Absent that motivation to argue, however, we can be more receptive towards shifting our opinions.
Ongoing thread. More from Geoff Tomaino to follow.
Engaging Minds: Cognitive Disability and American Storytelling, 1899–1953
In disability fiction, distance lends us not only drama, but intimacy.
From the Netflix drama Atypical to the Japanese manga-turned-anime Komi Can’t Communicate, our world today is awash with representations of minds that think, feel, and perceive differently. This rich present makes for an ideal time to reconsider the literary history of mental difference. Whatever the achievements of contemporary storytellers may be, twentieth-century American writers approach the disabled mind in ways worth remembering. My book, Engaging Minds: Cognitive Disability and American Storytelling, 1899-1953, holds that this tradition involves a certain politics of representation to be sure. But more than just representation, I consider how writers draw readers into relation with disability using specific storytelling features, including narration, vision, and time among others.
The relationships authors cultivate grow out of unique, and often underappreciated, coordinates of intimacy and distance. Authors use the most foundational feature of fiction – i.e., the turning of a page – to adjust these coordinates as a story progresses. Thinking about disability narrative in this progressive way requires our acknowledgment that authors might open up unique paths of access to disability at times only to withhold them at others. It challenges us to remember that intimacy does not necessarily mean uninterrupted access to an unbroken flow of subjective, interior thought. Moments of direct access interspersed by less-direct but equally moving moments of curiosity, longing, or the acknowledgement of separation can be just as aesthetically and ethically compelling.
Some of the works I survey will come as no surprise to readers: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew. But other works might, like Frank Norris’s McTeague, Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis,” or Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Among these texts, storytelling techniques that today’s reader would praise can be easily spotted. We see developed representations of disabled subjectivities, characterizations that challenge the prevailing psychological theories of the time, and plots where the mentally different character is a major character or even protagonist. Acknowledging these overt resonances in U.S. literary history is important. But truthfully, I’m a little more interested in how these texts diverge from what we see today, and I think other readers and storytellers should be too.
Consider Of Mice and Men, surely the most commonly read book I cover. After a string of events suggesting his inability to fit into the world, Lennie, the central disabled character, is killed at the end. Frankly, if we were only to look at its plot summary, Steinbeck’s novella would be a textbook example of a story not worth reading, at least from a disability studies perspective. But when we look at how Steinbeck builds the world of Of Mice and Men, and just as importantly, how he leads the reader into this world, we see that Lennie’s most obvious disabled quality – an inclination towards repetition and routine – serves as the foundation of storytelling. The narrator repeats imagery that echoes throughout the text. Scenes recur, rescaled, but consistent. Dialogue accrues meaning because readers receive it with the sense of having heard it before.
Because we never get access to Lennie’s subjectivity in the story, his death might seem trivial and hollow to some readers. But as I argue in my book, direct access is not intimacy’s exclusive path. After all, isn’t it true that sometimes our deepest felt intimacies involve not occasions of knowing exactly what’s in the head of the other person, but rather the arrival of a certain type of curiosity and longing that, whatever our intent might be, washes over us in moments of separation, departure, and goodbye?
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