Resource Center

Reading climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a new but promising way to engage people who are not climate denialists, but who are not too concerned about climate change either. After reading a short cli-fi story, people believed more strongly that climate change would cause harm to themselves and future generations, as well as more severe droughts, poverty, and refugees. This, in turn, boosted belief that the President and Congress should make climate change a high priority. Notably, these belief changes were temporary, fading away after one month; this suggests that people may need to read cli-fi regularly to be persuaded more permanently.             

The Lab’s evidence-based guidance for civic engagement programs with voters of color. Covers social pressure tactics, bilingual outreach, vote-by-mail, and much more.

Evidence-backed talking points on climate from a progressive perspective informed by the Race Class Narrative framework, along with current polling data, and messaging resources .

Legislators randomly assigned to be socially lobbied (meeting of a lobbyist and public official outside of a formal office visit) were more likely to take positions supporting the interest group’s preferred policy than were legislators lobbied in their offices or not contacted by the lobbyist. Legislators who were ideological allies of the interest group were most likely to be persuaded by social lobbying

Decades of political communication research has pointed to political persuasion (or changing someone’s mind) being one of the most difficult things to achieve, with campaigns having small effects on average. This would suggest that attempts at political persuasion, such as political ads in an electoral campaign, mostly do not move the needle much (if at all) with audiences. However, one response has been that these small average effects may be masking larger individual effects from sources of heterogeneity, or contextual pieces of a political ad such as message (content, tone, sponsor), audience (partisanship), and setting (battleground status, primary vs. general election, timing). 
Using an astonishing real-time design consisting of real ads from US presidential candidates, 59 unique experiments and 34,000 respondents over the course of the 2016 presidential election, the authors of this study find little evidence that any of the above conditions matter much when it comes to the persuasive effect of political ads on candidate favorability and vote choice. Indeed, owing to the large number of respondents (which makes finding even tiny effects more likely), the authors found a small but significant effect that ads can influence candidate favorability but no significant effect on ads actually influencing vote choice. In other words, the effectiveness of presidential campaign ads – even targeted ones – on persuading people to vote for one candidate or another may be greatly overstated.