Thursday morning talk

How to sway voters

Across the world, politicians challenging the established elite are rising. Presenting contrarian views with high confidence, these politicians challenge the status quo, calling for a radically different course of action, often going against scientific evidence. Systematic investigations of the success of such ‘contrarian’ strategies are, however, absent. Though the process of advice taking is well-studied, the equally-important process of advice-giving has received much less attention. We present a systematic investigation of the success of the ‘contrarian’ in attracting the attention of decision-makers. Using game-theoretical modeling, we find that a contrarian strategy is a Nash equilibrium. Next, we tested whether this contrarian strategy is successful in drawing the attention of decision-makers across seven experiments testing over 800 participants. We found that, across all experiments, participants are more likely to follow the ‘contrarian’ than an advisor who honestly communicates the available evidence. This was found for participants who made decisions by themselves, in anonymous groups in which decisions were pooled using a majority vote, as well as in communicating groups. The success of the contrarian increased the more unpredictable the environment was. Our results show that actively going against the evidence is a powerful strategy to attract followers, and this explains the recent (and historical) success of such contrarian leaders. Especially in highly uncertain situations, as for example the recent Corona outbreak, such strategies are successful.