Here’s one way to try to persuade others: given them the evidence that convinced you. A simple recipe. Sometimes, it even works.

Frequently, though, it fails. And this can be an intensely frustrating experience. When your reasons don’t seem to get a hold on others’ perspectives, it is common to shift to thinking of them as stupid or irrational. But, as often happens when we face conflict, the problem might be us, not (only) them. We might be neglecting important facts about our interlocutor and where they are coming from. We might be neglecting that our interlocutor has evidence we lack. The evidence we offer might be no more than a drop in an ocean of evidence they have pointing in the opposite direction, justifying the resilience of their view. We might also be forgetting to frame our evidence in ways that hook up with their deeply held values. This is so important that, as George Lakoff highlights, political campaigners spend millions on coming up with the turns of phrase that will connect their policies with patriotism, honor, and family values (or care, nurture, and community, as it may be).

But there is yet another factor we often neglect in persuasion: our interlocutor’s style of interacting with evidence, or epistemic style for short.

In handling evidence, much as in anything else, people differ in style. We do not wear the factory uniform of the ideally rational agent. When it comes to clothing, some of us are loudly flamboyant, others primly minimalist, and yet others favor amicably blending in. There is no less variety when it comes to how we navigate information—and no less of a connection to community, belonging, and who we are as people. Here as elsewhere, style shapes patterns of response.

Consider conspiracy theorists. It is implausible that what sets them apart from non-conspiracists is only that they were unlucky in encountering evidence that supported conspiracist beliefs. Something seems different about how they interact with evidence. They distrust conventional sources and place their credulity at the feet of self-styled mavericks speaking truth to power. As Rachel Fraser has pointed out, they display a stubborn “refusal to allow that the evidence really guarantees what it appears to show”, which they combine with “epistemic FOMO”, a fear of missing out on true beliefs abut the moon landing, 9/11, or George Soros. Conspiracists, then, display a distinctive way of interacting with evidence, characterized by an internal logic that unfolds from a horror of being duped; a distinctive epistemic style.

Though I don’t tend to encounter conspiracists in my social circles, I do often run into people with a radically different epistemic style from my own. They believe in astrology, offer to draw me tarot cards, look askance to science as a colonizing force, and worry about the devaluation of wonder in how we approach the world. Here, as with conspiracism, we can delineate distinctive evidential preferences: in this case, for first-hand experience and non-Western sources of knowledge over the deliverances of science.

We also find relaxed thresholds for how much evidence to require before forming beliefs. And, in prioritizing wonder, plausibility falls by the wayside. Hypotheses that are implausible relative to the status quo of accumulated knowledge get taken seriously, indeed, foregrounded.

From the perspective of reaching and persuading others, even an obsession with the purity of rationality can be viewed as its own distinctive epistemic style. Indeed, the so-called “rationalists”—a tech-orbiting movement that congregates on the online board Less Wrong—illustrate how epistemic style can become a principle on which to build community. The epistemic style rationalists strive for involves adhering religiously to Bayesian reasoning and cultivating a “scout mindset” displayed in ravenous consumption of statistics and contrarian lines of inquiry. This, too, is its own distinctive, socially-embedded, internally structured way of interacting with evidence, one we must contend with in persuasion.

Trying to persuade without taking into account these differences in style is a little bit like playing a game of soccer while bullishly ignoring how the other team plays–where they locate themselves in the field and navigate it, their characteristic moves, the points where their defense is weakest, the lines of attack they most aggressively pursue. Likely to result in frustration.

Once we take into account epistemic style, we can devise new paths forward. Perhaps others need to be presented with a different kind of evidence (stats, not a first-person report); we need to select sources they actually trust; we need to offer them a lot of evidence, as this is a topic where they will only change their mind if they are close to certain; or we need to do more to address their skeptical inklings. We can then shift our strategy, get more information about their style, and repeat.

Other times, we might instead come to the conclusion that there are serious problems with their epistemic style. Talk of epistemic style is not meant to encourage the idea that anything goes—a principle surely false when it comes to aesthetic style, too. Some styles might reliably lead to false beliefs and dangerous distortions. In such cases, interacting in our interlocutor’s style might amount to unacceptably caving in to unsavory dispositions, or, alternatively, constitute a form of condescending manipulation (“I’ll stoop downto your level as long as I can get you to agree with me”).

The best thing to do in such cases might be to try to have them shift epistemic style. This is an uphill battle. As rationalists, conspiracists, and post-modern spiritualists illustrate, epistemic styles are often central to agents’ sense of who they are. They are also crucial to group belonging. Indeed, sharing an epistemic style with others cultivates a kind of intimacy: intuitively grasping how they see the world because one sees it in the very same way. As such, abandoning an epistemic style can mean unmooring oneself not only from a stable, well-honed way of engaging with information but also from those who were “our people”.

Awareness of epistemic style, then, is no guarantee of successful persuasion. But it helps us adjust our communicative strategies and understand ourselves and others. Perhaps most important of all, attention to style illuminates how seeing reality clearly might demand reconfiguring our sense of self and place in the social world

Photo by Michael Mandiberg  Yigal Azrouel Fashion Show on Flickr