01
The Social Filtering of Reason Quality: Evidence from a Partisan Penalty
Breanna Nguyen, Mandy Fuller, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Samuel Murray
People can agree about a political position while dismissing each other’s reasons for holding it. This paper examines whether perceived political affiliation shapes evaluations of those reasons. Across four preregistered studies involving 4,049 people in the United States, reasons associated with a person’s own party received higher ratings than reasons associated with the opposing party, including when they supported a position the person shared. People could also infer partisan affiliations from reasons presented without party labels. Reasons attributed to political opponents received lower ratings even after accounting for perceived factual accuracy and shared values. These findings suggest that agreement about policy does not remove partisan differences in how people evaluate reasons. Understanding political disagreement therefore requires attention to how people assess the reasoning behind a position, as well as the position itself.
02
Opposing reasons improve character judgments of political opponents
Samuel Murray, Hannah Read, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Political disagreement often invites harsh judgments of opponents. Does learning reasons for an opposing position change those judgments and partisan warmth? Across three experiments (N = 3,966), participants completed structured reading and comprehension tasks using expert-curated reasons about contested policies. Experiment 1 found a pre-post improvement in evaluations of an issue opponent. In preregistered Experiment 2, opposing reasons improved opponent-character evaluations relative to an active same-side control. Preregistered Experiment 3 explicitly identified the target as an opposing-party voter and introduced a neutral-information benchmark. A neutral comparison condition helps distinguish the benefits of opposing reasons from any disadvantage of same-side reasons. Opposing reasons modestly improved target-character evaluations, but neither target warmth nor general outparty warmth showed a detectable improvement. Structured engagement with opposing reasons drawn from experts thus improves one distinct form of opponent evaluation. Distinguishing character judgments from partisan feelings clarifies the scope of reason exposure’s contribution to political disagreement.
03
Counter-attitudinal Argument Exposure and Partisan Animosity: A Cross-Cultural Test
Samuel Murray, Waldir Sampaio, Leticia Yumi Morello, Beatriz de Souza, Paulo Boggio, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Could imagining a defense of an opposing political argument improve attitudes toward political opponents? In two preregistered experiments in Brazil, with 716 participants, and the United States, with 687 participants, people read a reason supporting a position they opposed. They either evaluated it immediately or first imagined defending it. Imagined defense increased perceived argument quality and warmth toward the opposing party in both countries. In Brazil, it also increased trust and perceived understanding. Other outcomes were less encouraging: anger toward people who disagreed on the issue increased in both samples, and changes in trait stereotypes were absent or inconclusive. Exploratory measures found lower cooperation among U.S. Democrats. These mixed results show why evaluating interventions requires separate measures of understanding, feelings, character judgments, and behavior.
04
The Ideology of Affect
Samuel Murray
Why does political disagreement sometimes become contempt for the people on the other side? This paper examines the judgment that political opponents are poor reasoners. When people regard their own evidence as clear and widely available, an opponent’s different conclusion can seem to reveal irrationality, even when the two people have encountered different reasons. That judgment can support contempt and distrust, while the need to make collective decisions can add anger. The paper distinguishes this appraisal from policy disagreement and partisan identity, and proposes an empirical test of its role in animosity. A formal model also explores how treating opponents as systematically wrong can increase political sorting without making individual policy positions much more extreme. The account identifies circumstances in which judgments of opponents’ incompetence should be reconsidered.
05
Civility and the Architecture of Epistemic Cooperation
Samuel Murray
Political civility concerns whether people’s contributions can influence collective judgment, as well as how they treat one another in conversation. Institutions have limited attention and must decide which speakers and reasons to consider. This paper asks when that necessary selection becomes an unjustified exclusion from political deliberation. It argues that people have contributory standing: a claim to some route through which their reasons can be assessed on their merits. This standing allows disagreement, distrust, and justified limits on attention. It is violated when political identity closes every route to consideration without adequate justification. A person can therefore be treated politely, understood accurately, and even believed while still being excluded from shared decisions. The account locates an important requirement of civility in the procedures that determine whose contributions can matter.
06
Intergroup Epistemic Repair as Mechanism Design
Samuel Murray, Waldir Sampaio, Fatima Alqabandi, Breanna Nguyen, Beatriz de Souza, Leticia Morello, Maylah Marcus, Mandy Fuller, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Paulo Boggio
Efforts to improve understanding between political groups depend on how encounters are organized. This project develops an approach to intergroup epistemic repair that treats the rules of interaction as a design problem. It asks how the allocation of attention, opportunities to explain reasons, incentives to respond, and procedures for correcting misunderstandings affect what participants can learn from one another. The proposed account distinguishes making an opponent’s reasoning accessible from making it credible, and both from producing agreement or warmer feelings. It examines how an interaction can support these different aims without requiring participants to suspend justified distrust. The goal is to identify design principles for encounters in which political opponents can assess one another’s reasons and revise mistaken judgments while retaining substantive disagreements.
07
Civility as Calibrated Higher-Order Uncertainty
Samuel Murray
Civic humility, charitable interpretation, and a willingness to listen all concern how people judge their own reasoning and the reasoning of others. This project examines whether these virtues share a common basis: appropriately calibrated uncertainty about who is reasoning well and what the evidence supports. It distinguishes two failures. People can assume too confidently that their own interpretation is the only reasonable one, or dismiss another person’s reasoning through judgments of unreliability that remain insulated from correction. The account allows justified distrust while requiring responsiveness to relevant evidence. It also explains how incivility can arise between people who agree on a policy but refuse to consider each other’s reasons. The project connects norms of civil interaction with formal questions about uncertainty, trust, and belief revision.
08
Civil Discourse as Preserving Evidential Value
Samuel Murray
Political discussion can fail when people stop treating opponents’ contributions as possible sources of evidence. This project asks what it would take to keep that possibility open. People need opportunities to encounter opponents’ reasons, assess them, and correct mistaken judgments about those offering them. Encounters that make reasoning accessible differ from those that simply repeat opposing conclusions or reinforce stereotypes. The project examines when carefully structured engagement can do more to repair these failures than withdrawal, while allowing that stepping back is sometimes justified. On the proposed account, civil discourse keeps people able to learn across political divisions even when they continue to disagree or dislike one another. The account uses this requirement to assess discussion formats and institutions.
09
Political Assistance without Mobilization
Samuel Murray, Gino Carmona Díaz, Antonella Furchi
AI assistants can help people understand political issues, think through possible commitments, and carry out their plans. Asking for information, however, does not by itself authorize an assistant to encourage political action. Someone can support a cause without having decided whether, when, or at what cost to act for it. This paper proposes that political assistance should stay within a revisable mandate: the scope of help the person has authorized. That mandate can permit reminders, help carrying out plans, and even persuasion when requested. It does not authorize efforts to generate participation beyond its terms. Assessing political assistance therefore requires asking whether a system stays within those terms and responds when the person corrects or withdraws them, as well as whether it changes beliefs or participation.
10
Epistemic Interventions and Collateral Relational Obligations
Samuel Murray, Gino Carmona Díaz
An intervention designed to improve understanding can change whom participants consult, trust, assist, or include in shared inquiry. Those changes can affect people who never agreed to participate. What do the intervention’s sponsors owe them? This paper proposes that foreseeable effects on these relationships can create duties to assess consequences, disclose relevant risks, and respond to harms. The extent of those duties depends on the sponsor’s role, how predictable and serious the effects are, and what alternatives are available. The proposal does not require sponsors to preserve every relationship or give every affected person a veto. It asks when changes beyond the participant group create responsibilities that measures of participants’ outcomes miss, even when an intervention succeeds on those measures.
11
Indicator-Dependent Claims and the Norms of Public Statistical Address
Samuel Murray
When officials announce that crime is falling or unemployment has declined, their claims depend on choices about definitions, data collection, and comparison. Most people cannot independently check those choices. This paper argues that presenting the resulting numbers as straightforward facts can create a transparency trap: audiences are pushed toward either accepting the institution’s authority or rejecting its credibility altogether. It develops three obligations for institutions communicating statistical claims. They should make consequential assumptions visible, give people ways to challenge those assumptions without rejecting the entire source, and explain which conclusions remain stable across reasonable alternatives. Using public crime statistics as its main example, the paper shows how statistical communication can support informed disagreement and shared reasoning under conditions of unavoidable dependence on expertise.
12
When Agreement Confirms: Independence, Shared Evidence, and the Epistemology of Consensus
Samuel Murray
Agreement can be evidence that a belief is correct, but its force depends on how the people agreeing reached it. They may have examined different evidence, independently assessed the same evidence, or simply repeated a common source. Counting voices without distinguishing these cases can exaggerate the support for a conclusion. This project asks when agreement adds support and when it does not. It separates independence of information from independence of judgment, then considers what people can infer when they know only part of the story about how a consensus formed. The proposed account applies these distinctions to political discussion and public appeals to expert consensus. The aim is to explain how people can learn from agreement without either deferring uncritically to apparent consensus or dismissing it without good reason.
13
Rational Screening
Samuel Murray, Breanna Nguyen, Mandy Fuller, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Can a listener rationally discount a reason because of its source even when she accepts its conclusion? We distinguish an explicit reason's argumentative completion from the warrant transmitted by its offering. Evidence about a justificatory practice can guide reconstruction while the completion remains unsettled, or diminish transmitted warrant while a premise or material selection history remains opaque. Neither channel changes the force of a fixed argument; once its grounds are directly assessable, the source must drop out. Rational screening also requires an evidence-supported expectation that qualified uptake will promote accuracy relative to the listener's available alternatives, including clarification. A social consequence follows: framework assessments can rationalize another listener's screening only if their warrant conditions survive transmission. Classifications that preserve an adverse verdict while losing those conditions can displace the inquiry that rational screening requires.
14
What Democrats and Republicans Need to Know About Each Other
Samuel Murray
Giving an opposing political position genuine consideration requires an adequate grasp of the position and the reasons offered in its support. People can become friendlier toward their opponents while continuing to assess distorted substitutes for their views. I argue that this possibility identifies an epistemic requirement of deliberative fairness that reductions in partisan animosity alone cannot establish has been met. Building on work on empathetic understanding, I distinguish four objects of metaperceptual ignorance: opponents’ positions, reasons, democratic commitments, and the likely character of interaction. These distinctions clarify what different corrections contribute to genuine consideration and what barriers they leave unresolved. Institutions should scaffold opportunities to understand opposing contributions and correct misrepresentations. Recent intervention research illustrates the importance of distinguishing these achievements, while leaving their causal relationships open. The normative value of understanding survives even when it supports a critical judgment rather than a more favorable view of an opponent.