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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.