Two ideas are present here, one good, and one especially bad.
The good: You can be more open minded with self-affirmations before looking at politically controversial issues.
The bad: You can maneuver people into agreeing with you by having them go through self-affirmations and then presenting your argument. Note in the original article where they mention previous research doing this to “both” sides regarding the death penalty*. This is bad because it’s a fully generalizable rhetorical technique that relies on filtering arguments (yes, a perfect reasoner would just adjust for the filtering, as the current sequence reruns emphasize, but if humans were perfect reasoners, the affirmations would not have any effect in the first place). The practicality of this attack is pretty questionable in most circumstances**, but it’s something to watch out for.
* The first cite on the topic says that fabricated evidence was presented, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for the second
** Beyond some obvious difficulties, and that this is a probably a marginal effect, they write “However, unlike previous studies, we find little evidence that affirmation increases the persuasive power of corrective information.”
“Filtering” isn’t a problem with an argument technique, it’s a problem with argument. Every argument is a filtered argument, which means that anything that makes an argument more persuasive makes the filtering problem worse, whether it involves using self-affirmation or conveying ideas clearly. So the “bad” looks to be fully generalizable to all persuasive communication, making all arts dark.
Two ideas are present here, one good, and one especially bad.
The good: You can be more open minded with self-affirmations before looking at politically controversial issues.
The bad: You can maneuver people into agreeing with you by having them go through self-affirmations and then presenting your argument. Note in the original article where they mention previous research doing this to “both” sides regarding the death penalty*. This is bad because it’s a fully generalizable rhetorical technique that relies on filtering arguments (yes, a perfect reasoner would just adjust for the filtering, as the current sequence reruns emphasize, but if humans were perfect reasoners, the affirmations would not have any effect in the first place). The practicality of this attack is pretty questionable in most circumstances**, but it’s something to watch out for.
* The first cite on the topic says that fabricated evidence was presented, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for the second
** Beyond some obvious difficulties, and that this is a probably a marginal effect, they write “However, unlike previous studies, we find little evidence that affirmation increases the persuasive power of corrective information.”
“Filtering” isn’t a problem with an argument technique, it’s a problem with argument. Every argument is a filtered argument, which means that anything that makes an argument more persuasive makes the filtering problem worse, whether it involves using self-affirmation or conveying ideas clearly. So the “bad” looks to be fully generalizable to all persuasive communication, making all arts dark.
I mostly agree but with severe caveats.