Cognitive Science Hybrid Colloquium

Cognitive Science Colloquium delivered by Dr. David Rand Changing Minds with Facts & Evidence It is widely assumed that once identity-relevant beliefs become entrenched, motivating reasoning makes them nearly impossible to change. In this talk, I challenge this assumption using preregistered experiments in which large language model (LLM)–powered AI chatbots engage participants in back-and-forth dialogue and attempt to change their minds. First, I show that LLMs can substantially reduce belief in conspiracy theories — even among participants who report being completely certain that the conspiracies are true beforehand. These effects generalize across many types of conspiracies (including antisemitic conspiracies and actively unfolding conspiracies) and persist even when participants believe they are conversing with a human expert rather than an AI. I then turn to politics, presenting experiments in the United States, Canada, and Poland showing that LLM dialogues can also shift preferences and voting intentions for presidential candidates. Across both conspiracy debunking and political persuasion, the data indicate that belief change is driven primarily by the presentation of compelling factual claims and evidence, rather than by psychological-informed persuasion tactics. Together, these studies suggest that many people are more willing to update strongly held, identity-relevant beliefs than is commonly assumed, provided they are presented with sufficiently compelling evidence.