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     11 days ago  

    New research finds that people who identify as politically conservative are more likely than liberals to view "slippery slope" arguments as logically convincing, a tendency linked to greater reliance on intuitive rather than deliberative thinking.

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       11 days ago  

      Slippery slope arguments claim a small initial action will trigger a chain of events ending in a severe outcome—the classic example being one cookie leading to many and substantial weight gain.

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         11 days ago  

        To test who finds these arguments persuasive, researchers ran 15 studies using surveys, experiments, and natural-language analysis across samples from multiple countries. Participants read everyday, non-political vignettes (e.g., skipping dishwashing leading to never cleaning the house) and rated how logical the slippery-slope reasoning seemed. Conservatives consistently rated these arguments as more logical than liberals, even after controlling for demographics, and the pattern appeared across international samples.

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           11 days ago  

          Analysis of tens of thousands of comments from partisan online communities—coded with an AI-assisted method—showed more slippery-slope structures in conservative forums, and such comments tended to receive more approval from other users.

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             11 days ago  

            Measures of thinking style revealed that a preference for intuitive (gut) processing statistically mediated the link between conservatism and endorsement of slippery slopes. An experiment that forced deliberation (instructing careful thought and imposing a short delay before responses) reduced conservatives’ agreement with slippery-slope arguments, narrowing the ideological gap.

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               11 days ago  

              The structure of the argument also mattered: conservatives rated slippery-slope arguments as more logical only when intermediate causal steps were presented, suggesting the intuitive appeal depends on a plausible chain.

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                 11 days ago  

                Slippery-slope endorsement predicted greater support for punitive criminal-justice policies, which helps explain part of why conservatives often favor harsher sentencing.

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                   11 days ago  

                  The findings do not claim conservatives are inherently irrational; the logical strength of a slippery-slope argument depends on the probabilities that each step will follow.

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