[LINK] Want to Sway Climate Change Skeptics? Ask About Their Personal Strengths (And Show Pictures!)

I don't think the suggestions in the article seem all that Dark Arty. Presenting data as diagrams rather than text to make it easier to interpret is standard advise in scientific communication. In the example, the diagram contained much more information than the text, as well as being easier to process for humans.

And presenting evidence in a way which is not threatening to the listener's sense of identity is standard advice for all communication. (See in particular all the Less Wrong articles about atheism). If it turns out that asking someone about their personal strengths makes it easier for them to evaluate evidence neutrally, such a mind hack would be a very light art!

Two ideas are present here, one good, and one especially bad.

The good: You can be more open minded with self-affirmations before looking at politically controversial issues.

The bad: You can maneuver people into agreeing with you by having them go through self-affirmations and then presenting your argument. Note in the original article where they mention previous research doing this to "both" sides regarding the death penalty*. This is bad because it's a fully generalizable rhetorical technique that relies on filtering arguments (yes, a perfect reasoner would just adjust for the filtering, as the current sequence reruns emphasize, but if humans were perfect reasoners, the affirmations would not have any effect in the first place). The practicality of this attack is pretty questionable in most circumstances**, but it's something to watch out for.

* The first cite on the topic says that fabricated evidence was presented, but this doesn't seem to be the case for the second

** Beyond some obvious difficulties, and that this is a probably a marginal effect, they write "However, unlike previous studies, we find little evidence that affirmation increases the persuasive power of corrective information."

Piece of advise: If you find that one of your deeply held beliefs is being promoted through dark arts, you may want to have a crisis of faith to determine whether your own reasons for holding the belief are valid.

This doesn't seem to be dark arts to me. The use of graphs as a persuasive element seems to use the fact that graphs are visual and striking and so can overcome our cognitive defenses which prevent updating. This may connected to why graphs are such a useful mode of communication. Similarly, starting people off where they feel good about themselves may simply reduce the level which they feel a need to defend their beliefs as part of themselves.

So I don't see either of these as Dark Arts per se.

I am puzzled by the downvotes. I suspect that they may be coming from the title of the post which is unfortunate because people can read the link to see that the relevant methods worked on people across the political spectrum about issues they were otherwise unwilling to examine.