In the fall of 2014 a group of hackers pulled off the biggest Hollywood

heist of all time. They broke into computer servers belonging to Sony pictures and

released hundreds of thousands of top secret documents. The attack would cause an international incident

upend thousands of lives and change the movie industry forever. From Spotify and

the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftering and this is the Hollywood Hack.

Listen on the Big Picture Feed, starting August 19th.

Today's episode is about how we change our minds and the political science of

voters changing their minds during an election. I don't know that I've talked

about this before but I have a very specific theory of persuasion.

My theory is that nobody ever changes their mind, not ever. That's a strong version of the theory at least, so maybe I ought to back up and explain where it comes from.

In 2019, Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and Rob Willer, a sociologist

in Stanford University, published a paper on the Moral Foundations Theory of Persuasion. They said political differences are often

fueled by different moral stories, different moral concerns. Conservatives tend to

care more about order, safety, patriotism.

Progressives tend to care more about equality, justice.

And one reason why these groups are so profoundly unpersuasive to each other in debate is that both liberals

and conservatives typically craft arguments based on their own moral convictions rather than the convictions of the people they're trying to

persuade. We tend to assume that our way of looking at the world is correct and

therefore universal. But values are more like a state currency.

They work within certain networks,

but they don't always translate across borders.

The Canadian dollar works very well in Ontario, but it doesn't facilitate

...