What if everything we believe about changing minds is wrong? What if the foundation of democratic discourse — the belief that better arguments lead to better outcomes — is not just flawed but destructively naive?

Sarah Lubrano, with her PhD from Oxford and years of writing about the intersection of psychology and politics, brings devastating news: Decades of research reveal that political debates don’t change minds; they calcify them.

In my recent WhoWhatWhy podcast Sarah gives an almost clinical study of American democracy, dissecting why our most sacred ritual of reasoned argument has become democracy’s poison pill.

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