Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure.

Yeah, so the genesis of that line of research really came out of this interesting question of how do people who moralize their views respond to persuasive attempts, right? And- and there's lots of reason to think that if someone sees their stance as rooted in morality, they're just not gonna budge, right? They're gonna go, "No.

It's- I already made up my mind.

(laughs) This is what's right.

I decided." But, you know, we realize that there's this approach to persuasion that talks about morality, right? Like, "Do the right thing.

This is the right way to do it," when you think about how we talk about the environment, right? We say, "This is your- your opportunity to reduce harm, to, uh, you know, to think about future generations." Right? These are moral appeals that we use, and there's this long history in psychology and communication research of showing that if the message matches the kind of opinion the audience already has, it's gonna go further.

(laughs)

But that's not what people do, and we know this because sometimes researchers will ask people the same question but a little differently, like, "How many babies are born in the United States each year? I can tell you it's less than 50,000." Okay, less than 50,000

50,000Also not helpful.

If we were being completely rational, we would just make our guess the same way we would if you said it was more than 100.

But in a recent study that asked those questions, people's guesses depended a lot on the question itself.

If the researchers noted that the answer is more than 100, people on average guessed that about 3,000 babies were born in the US each year.

But if the researcher noted that the answer is less than 50,000, now people's average guess was that almost 27,000 babies were born in the US each year.

To swing from 3,000 to 27,000 as your guess based on some meaningless information, now that's a bias.

Did you learn anything from this you didn't already know? Is there anything, like, surprised you to the point that you were like, "If I hadn't made this podcast, I would not, even though I am a professional psychologist, know X"?