Bias, Belief, and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts

Front matter

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

BIAS, BELIEF, AND CONVICTION IN AN AGE OF FAKE FACTS

Edited by p i a 4 |

Contents

List of contributors vii Foreword xi Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction: New Parameters for Bias, Belief and Conviction: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Personal Positions and their Justification 1 ANKE FINGER AND MANUELA WAGNER

2 Political Conviction 11 MICHAEL P. LYNCH

Index

Contributors

Michael Byram is a Professor Emeritus at Durham University, England, and Guest Professor at Luxemburg University. He has worked in initial teacher training and doctoral supervision and taught courses on intercultural competence. He has researched bilingual and minority education, residence abroad for language students, and intercultural competence in foreign language learning.

Anke Finger is a Professor of German Studies, Media Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, USA. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the Public Outreach Director for the “Humility and Conviction in Public Life” Project. She has published widely in the area of Modernism (Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne, 2006; The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, 2011, edited with Danielle Follett), media studies ( Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 2011), and in intercultural communication (KulturConfusao, 2015, edited with Gabi Kathoefer and Christopher Larkosh), apart from many articles within all three research areas. Her latest publication is entitled Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities (2021), edited together with Virginia Kuhn.

Christiane Heibach is a Professor of Media Aesthetics at the Institute of Information and Media, Language and Culture at Regensburg University, Germany. Her research focuses on the epistemology of media, the history and theory of multi- and intermedial art forms, the aesthetics of new media, and the literary and media theories of the twentieth century. She completed her PhD at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 2000 with one of the first studies on internet literature, followed by numerous publications on media theory and the aesthetics of digital and internet-based literature and art. In 2007, she finished her habilitation on multimedia performing art forms at the University of Erfurt where she worked until 2008. From July 2009 to April 2013, she directed a research project on the epistemology of multimedia, funded by the German Research Foundation, at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She is the author, among many other books and articles, viii Contributors of Multimediale Auffiihrungskunst: Mediendsthetische Studien zur Entstehung einer neuen Kunstform (Munich 2010), and the editor of Atmosphdren: Dimensionen eines diffusen Phänomens (Munich 2012) and Ästhetik der Materialitat (2015).

Adrian Hermann is a Full Professor of Religion and Society and Director of the Department of Religion Studies at Forum “Internationale Wissenschaft” of the University of Bonn, Germany. His work focuses on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Documentary Film, Global Christianity (especially in the Philippines), Buddhist Modernism, and the Religious History of the Globalized World. From 2002 to 2011 he studied Comparative Religion, Drama Studies, Sociology, and North American Literature in Munich, Bielefeld, and Basel. He received a PhD from the University of Basel, Switzerland, based on a dissertation titled “Distinctions of Religion — Analyses of the modern discourse on ‘religion’ in world society and the problem of the differentiation of ‘religion’ in 19th and early 20th-century Buddhist contexts”. In 2014/15 he was a Visiting Scholar at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and Stanford University, USA.

Michael P. Lynch is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is Director of the Humanities Institute and Director of the New England Humanities Consortium. His work concerns truth, democracy, public discourse, and the ethics of technology. Lynch’s newest book is Know-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture (2019). His other books include The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy, Truth as One and Many and the New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s pick, True to Life. A contributor to the New York Times “The Stone” weblog, Lynch’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Wired (among others).

Deborah S. Mower is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi, USA, and specializes in moral psychology, applied ethics and public policy, and moral education. She has special interests in how moral education (in particular) and a liberal arts general education (more broadly) contribute to the development of moral sensitivity and civility. Because of these interests, she mines literature from psychology and philosophy (Eastern, Western, and cross-cultural) for insights into the teaching of ethics, the development of character, the nature of public discourse, moral conviction, and the navigation of disagreement. She has co-edited Developing Moral Sensitivity, Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory (2015), and Civility in Politics and Education (2012), among many other publications.

Matthew Pianalto is a Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, USA. He is the author of On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational

Contributors ix

Virtue (Lexington, 2016) and several articles on virtue ethics and applied ethics. His 2012 essay “Moral Courage and Facing Others” was awarded the inaugural Robert Papazian Prize on Themes from Ethics and Political Philosophy by the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. He has published articles on many topics in ethics, including papers on patience, courage, integrity, and tolerance, animal and environmental ethics, and the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche. His interests also include Animal Studies (Animal Ethics) and Environmental Sustainability and Stewardship (Environmental Ethics).

John Sarrouf is a co-Executive Director for Essential Partners. Formerly Director of Program Development and Strategic Partnerships, John was first exposed to EP’s work while studying in the Master’s program in dispute resolution at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, USA. Since then he has facilitated dialogues on issues such as sustainability, gender, Israel-Palestine, religious pluralism, and technology and sexuality. He served as the Assistant Director of Difficult Dialogues at Clark University, USA, where he taught dialogue to faculty and students, and teaches in the Departments of Communication and Peace and Conflict Studies at Gordon College, USA. His private consulting work has focused on mediation and transforming conflict in small work groups and non-profit boards. To all of his work, he brings a background of 15 years in the theater as an actor, director, and administrator.

Linda J. Skitka is a Professor and Associate Department Head at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, with a courtesy appointment in political science. Her many academic publications cover topics such as the psychological foundations and consequences of moral conviction, how attitudes rooted in moral convictions differ in consequence and kind from otherwise strong but non-moral attitudes, people’s everyday moral and immoral experiences, the psychological underpinnings of the left-right political divide, political intolerance, reactions to terrorism, distributive and procedural justice, and automation bias. Dr. Skitka’s research has been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Templeton Foundation, and she frequently presents her research at national and international conferences (recent examples include the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, International Society for Political Psychology, International Society for Justice Research, and Asian Social Psychological Association).

Justin E. H. Smith is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris, France. In 2019-20, he was the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library. His latest book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, x Contributors

A Philosophy, A Warning, appeared in 2022. Justin writes literary nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, and he also translates poetry — Currently, he is translating the Olonkho, a Siberian oral epic. He is co-author, with D. Graham Burnett and Catherine Hansen, of a work of historiographical metafiction, In Search Of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) 2001-2021.

Manuela Wagner is a Professor of Language Education at the University of Connecticut, USA, and a specialist in the integration of intercultural competence and intercultural dialogue in education. She is particularly interested in the interplay of theory and practice and has been part of and helped create communities of practice to implement models of intercultural competence and citizenship as well as related theoretical frameworks (theories of criticality, culture, intercultural communication, social justice, intellectual humility, and conviction) in practice. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Teaching Intercultural Competence Across the Age Range: From Theory to Practice (2018) and Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Principles in Practice (2017). The co-authored book Teaching Intercultural Citizenship Across the Curriculum: The Role of Language Education appeared with ACTFL in 2019.

Jennifer Cole Wright is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston, USA, as well as an Affiliate Member of the Philosophy Department and Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. She is also currently a Sustainability and Social Justice Faculty Fellow with the Honors College. Her area of research is moral development (at both the individual and community level) and moral psychology more generally. She studies and has published widely on virtues such as humility, meta-ethical pluralism, the relationship between moral values and tolerance for divergent attitudes, behaviors, and practices, the influence of “liberal vs. conservative” mindsets on moral judgments, and young children’s early socio-moral development.

Foreword

I have been studying the psychology of moral conviction for close to 30 years. The approach I have generally taken is a very bottom-up one. Instead of defining what a morally convicted attitude is, my collaborators and I ask people whether they perceive a given attitude as a moral conviction, and then examine how the features of morally convicted attitudes are the same or different from other kinds of attitudes. For example, although most if not all moral convictions are examples of strong attitudes (e.g., they are experienced as more evaluatively extreme, important, and certain), not all strong attitudes are moral convictions. People tend to have strong attitudes about their favorite sports teams, musicians, or even certain brands. However, these attitudes are seldom moral convictions but instead reflect people’s strong preferences. People might use the words “right” and “wrong” about certain things, but not all these judgments or attitudes are necessarily moral convictions. For example, someone in the United States might forcefully argue that driving on the left side of the street is wrong, but at the same time, find it perfectly acceptable that someone in Australia or the United Kingdom routinely does so. People’s positions on some issues reflect widely understood norms or coordination rules in the groups to which they belong, norms and rules that do not always apply outside of the confines of one’s group. Although strong, people are unlikely to experience these kinds of attitudes as moral convictions.

Although sharing some characteristics with strong attitudes, we have discovered that moral convictions differ from otherwise strong but non-moral attitudes in some important ways. Moral convictions are seen as more universally applicable (i.e., if it is perceived as morally wrong, it is also morally wrong 100 years ago, in other cultures, and so on), seen as objectively true to people as the idea that 2 + 2 = 4, people are very unwilling to compromise their positions on morally convicted attitudes, and will persist in holding them even when their positions are at odds with important authorities (e.g., the law) or a majority of their peers. People are likely to become more politically engaged when they have moral convictions about their preferred candidates or the issues at stake (i.e., more likely to vote and engage in collective efforts at change), as well as to volunteer and give to causes they xii Foreword morally support. People also become very focused on achieving morally convicted ends, to neglect concerns about the means used to obtain them, including whether they are obtained by the use of deception or extra-legal violence. The normative implications of these and other findings are both reassuring (moral convictions can protect against obedience to potentially malevolent authorities) and terrifying (moral convictions are associated with rejection of the rule of law and can provide a motivational foundation for violent protest and acts of terrorism; for a review of these and other research findings, see Skitka et al. (2021).

Most scholarship on moral conviction has come out of experimental social psychology. This edited volume takes a completely different tack. The editors of this volume have brought together an impressive interdisciplinary group of scholars who come at the question of moral conviction from a wide range of different epistemological traditions in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, comparative literature, media studies, religion, psychology, and linguistics. The scholarship in this book, therefore, has the potential to be genuinely transformative, not only by shedding new light on the question of moral and personal convictions but by also inspiring a new wave of interdisciplinary scholarship on these questions. It is one of the most exciting new books to come out in recent years, and I hope it is but the first of many future efforts for a continuing interdisciplinary dialogue about these questions.

Linda J. Skitka

Reference

Skitka, L. J., Hanson, B. E., Morgan, G. S., & Wisneski, D. C. (2021). The psychology of moral conviction. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 347-366.

Acknowledgments

This project has been both an adventure and an exercise in humility, and we wish to thank the many colleagues and friends with great conviction and sincere gratitude for their consistent encouragement. First and foremost is Michael P. Lynch whose unwavering support included bringing many of the authors in this volume together in 2019 to begin conversations around conviction as the corresponding element to humility, within the context of the “Humility and Conviction in Public Life” initiative housed at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. This initiative, and hence this book project, was made possible through the support of a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

As Covid-19 affected all of our lives, the project slowed down but did not lose momentum or spirit. We thank all contributors for their consistent collaboration and enormous patience and for their generous participation during the peer review process. We also thoroughly appreciate and express our sincere thanks to Routledge for enthusiastically welcoming our ideas, especially Suzanne Richardson who embraced the project from the very start. A sincere thanks to Tanushree Baijal as well for guiding us through the manuscript process. As always, we are grateful to the many colleagues who inspire us and our work with their open and critical conversations.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

1 Introduction

New Parameters for Bias, Belief and Conviction: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Personal Positions and their Justification

Acting on conviction has been linked to extreme accomplishments and significant positive change. At the same time, according to one of the earliest modern commentators on the concept of conviction, Friedrich Nietzsche, “convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies”. Personal conviction, as a moral, cultural, and emotional concept, has largely escaped interdisciplinary scholarly scrutiny, with relatively few studies (Larmore, 1987; Skitka, 2012 for an overview see, Skitka, 2021) investigating from different perspectives what is defined as “an unshakeable belief in something, without seeking evidence”, or as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, “a firm and settled persuasion.” Beliefs are based on certain sets of values, but what about the much stronger term conviction? Where do our convictions come from? Are we aware of our convictions? How do we develop our convictions? Why do they compel us to carry out certain actions? Are they generated or maintained by affects? What do we gain or what does it cost us to follow our convictions? Can we change our convictions if we are presented with compelling evidence proving our convictions “wrong”? (How) do we communicate convictions to those around us? And can we still listen to someone when our convictions clash with theirs? These questions are at the core of this book. We live in a time where the loudest, and often most caustic, voices appear to garner the lion’s share of national and international attention. When divisiveness gets rewarded and polarization is often the result, it is critical to demonstrate that there are other paths that we can take toward a more productive national and international discourse. One of the main questions motivating the conversations in this book is whether close examination of a core aspect of divisiveness, of personal or moral conviction, can help repair fissures and tears in our social tissue. The psychologist Linda J. Skitka (2012), a leading scholar of moral conviction whose foreword is included in this book, pursues what she deems Janus-faced features of conviction in “Moral Convictions and Moral Courage: Common Denominators of Good and Evil” (The Social Psychology of Morality, 2012, pp. 349-365). She tests the “accepted wisdom” that “strong situations” eventually force people to fall in line, conforming to social norms and she argues, “good and evil sometimes become less clear when acts of moral courage are related to actors’ political, social or cultural beliefs” (p. 350). Studies on obedience and conformity are pitched against “authority independence,” for example, to show that “heroism” and “terrorism” may be two sides of one coin and dependent on one’s perspective or value system: “it is [...] important not to let our values about what counts as good and evil blind us to the possibility that others have an opposing but equally ‘moral’ (by their standards) view” (p. 361).

Assuming that our convictions, in extreme cases, can lead us to heroic acts or the opposite thereof, or that they present, at the very least, an important factor in whether we act or do not act on important issues in society or on behalf of groups we align ourselves with, a crucial question follows: how aware are we of our convictions? Importantly, which of our convictions are not backed up by evidence and why? While we don’t want to suggest that heroism and terrorism are smoothly conforming with conviction — their connection requires separate analysis — the conundrum inherent to conviction seems to be precisely its oscillatory qualities, akin to finding that line between being true to yourself and voicing beliefs that are deemed beyond a cultural or social norm, outrageous, or even vile. As Skitka points out,

[g]iven that strong moral convictions are associated with accepting any means to achieve preferred ends, gaining more insight into how and why moral convictions promote constructive, but potentially also quite destructive, forms of moral courage is a critical agenda for continued scientific investigation.

Whether we engage via social media or in face-to-face settings, drawing the “line between heroism and terrorism” may often constitute a matter of opinion, of cultural and situational context, and, sometimes, of one’s emotional disposition that — as is so often the case today — comes as a result of media effects. Where do we find ourselves within a certain debate, on a particular issue, amongst a particular group? How do we identify, examine, and trace our innermost beliefs when so much of what we try to communicate is context-driven, context-determined and channeled via a plethora of divergent media?

Conviction, Fake Facts and Media Literacy

In Information: A Historical Companion (Blair et al., 2021), the entry on “information” is fittingly entitled “Information, Disinformation, Misinformation.” While information as a modern concept has long been associated with books and the press, with a reading public that is educated enough to compile information as part of a duty of citizenship, misinformation or disinformation,

Introduction: New Parameters for Bias, Belief and Conviction 3 as the mischievous twins, have always accompanied or been adjacent to information as a basis for human knowledge formation. Geoffrey Nunberg alerts us that numerous terms for fake or wrong information have been used over the course of history, with the latest gaining currency in the 19th century:

Fake news’ emerged already in the 1890s, when fake itself caught on, first in America, as a slang term for something that masquerades as the genuine thing. Propaganda was an obscure and recondite word until World War I, when it was attached to the public relations campaigns of the contending governments.

Many languages, indeed, have words for mis- or disinformation as they describe political, cultural or psychological acts of influencing public opinion in ways that manipulate, divert or, indeed, convince audiences. Applying the most up-to-date concept of information in the 21st century, that is, data, this concept, too, points to the past whereby it emerged concurrent with the concept of information as it was used in the modern age:

In the general culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘data’ still evoked specialized kinds of argumentation and the special situation of argument. As the etymology of the word indicates - ‘data’ is the neuter past participle of the Latin verb dare (to give) - ‘data’ in the early modern period were ‘givens.’ What ‘data’ meant depended on what kind of argument one was making, what kind of facts, principles, or values, might be ‘given’ in a particular argument.

While we think of data as underlying all digital information today, communicated via a binary code that compresses information, based on Claude Shannon’s information theory from 1948, the data glut our cultures are exposed to and are experiencing today obfuscates the ambiguity data as a concept itself embodies. Data, considered neutral bits of information collected or gathered to inform and construct meaning, were never such, that is, neutral. As the conversations in this volume circle belief, bias, and fact, Rosenberg calls our attention to a crucial difference between data and facts:

For facts to be facts, they must be true. Data, on the other hand, may be — and very often is — erroneous or confected. None of this affects its status as data. Facts proven false cease to be facts. Data proven false is false data.

When considering bias, belief, and conviction, data (false or correct) and information, including mis- or disinformation, function as part of the scaffolding with which to build “data” in the early modern sense. Data nourish arguments, but they don’t nourish them in a neutral fashion. They are picked and curated, as we learned above, based on “facts, principles, or values.” This combination presents a mathematical conundrum: while facts can only be facts if they are true, as Rosenberg has demonstrated, principles and values emerge from ambiguous territory, making arguments formed with false or correct data filtered through belief, bias and conviction (principles and values) very unstable constructions indeed. Literacies that facilitate awareness and understanding of information are much in need of adapting as well. Jürgen Habermas (2021), author of the influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962, acknowledged such need for adaptation: “Just as the letterpress turned everyone into potential readers, digitization today turns everyone into potential authors. But how long did it take until everyone learned to read?” (pp. 488-489). Since the 18th century, the world has seen a rapid increase in general print literacy. Today, media literacies beyond print, however, require an exponentially higher awareness and, ideally, knowledge of media affordances and media effects. Both constitute elements that influence the communication of information, with media affordances determining the possibilities and limits of a particular channel or apparatus of communication (radio, social media, TV, book, camera, etc.) and with media effects determining “those things that occur as a result — either in part or in whole — from media influence.” (Potter, 2012, p. 38).

While media effects have long been studied taking mostly dominant groups into account, recent scholarship is calling for new “critical media effects frameworks” that “address various dimensions of experiences such as discrimination, stress, media access, media representation, etc. that are informed by multiple identities and power hierarchies.” (Ramasubramanian and Banjo, 2020, p. 386). Conversely, in “How to Obfuscate,” Finn Brunton offers strategies to generate “personal disinformation” in order to conceal one’s identity in the interest of maintaining data privacy in an age of oversharing, both willingly (on social media) and unknowingly (by allowing personal data to be used for capital gain, e.g., by Google; Brunton, 2017). As a result, we find ourselves in “disrupted public spheres” (Habermas, 2021, p. 498) where principles and values, as two-thirds of the data, as the “givens” informing an argument, present two sides of the coin: they can inform as agreed upon principles and values of a more or less regulated mass media or can inform as the individualized, algorithm-enhanced principles, and values of ad hoc authors speaking through unregulated social media platforms. That is territory ripe for communicating and debating conviction.

Conviction, Fake Facts and Intercultural Dialogue

In this book of connected essays, the authors engage in an interdisciplinary discourse of theory and practice on the concept of personal conviction, addressing the variety of gray zones that mark the concept. Scholars from philosophy, psychology, comparative literature, media studies, applied

Introduction: New Parameters for Bias, Belief and Conviction 5 linguistics, history and intercultural education shed light on the topic of personal conviction, crossing disciplinary boundaries and asking questions not only of importance to scholars but also related to the role and possible impact of conviction in the (digital) public sphere, education, and in political and cultural discourses. We live in a world in which problems have become so interconnected that we will not be able to survive without large-scale intercultural collaboration as can be seen in international crises, such as the climate crisis, the pandemic or the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Productive (intercultural) dialogue, however, is only possible if we are truly open to interrogating what is fact and what is fiction, indeed, if we are willing to look at an issue from different perspectives, even those that go counter to our convictions. In order to define “interculturality,” we refer to the work by the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). This framework has been developed by a group of experts who conducted an audit of 101 existing conceptual schemes of democratic, civic and intercultural competence and came up with an educational model through which “young people acquire the knowledge, values and capacity to be responsible citizens in modern, diverse, democratic societies” (2018, Volume 1, p. 5). In the foreword, Secretary General Jagland explains that “[t]he need for it was brought into sharp focus by the many terrorist attacks across Europe in recent years” (p. 5). According to Barrett (2020), one of the main authors of the RFCDC,

The CoE’s approach to interculturalism is based on universal human rights, shared fundamental values, respect for common heritage, respect for cultural diversity and respect for the equal dignity of every individual. Intercultural dialogue is accorded a central role in this approach because it allows national, ethnic, linguistic, religious and other divides to be bridged on the basis of the shared universal values of dignity and human rights.

Here we are interested in the role of conviction as it can facilitate or hinder dialogue, that is, whether an understanding of our deeply held convictions can open our minds to different perspectives rather than blindly believing something that is not based on or clearly goes against factual information. Ultimately, we investigate how conviction can be used wisely, employed as a tool to understand ourselves and the world around us, and to avoid the dark side of conviction, which is often connected to unreflected and underinvestigated aspects of action and human interaction.

About This Book

This book, therefore, is an attempt to highlight and critically examine the contributions of various disciplines and vantage points engaging with each other on a topic that is of vital importance today. Given the fluidity of the concept of conviction, the dialogue between multiple disciplines, we propose, has a better chance to examine the kind of “moving object” conviction presents. Especially in an age when media affordances and technology permit the manipulation of mediated opinions as well as facts (such as so-called deep fakes), personal conviction should become an element for self-reflection, deep introspection and critical analysis. If we fail to understand or at least become aware of and question our convictions, we argue, we all will be in danger of seeking out information that complies with existing positions, creating confirmation bias and resisting information that might contradict our de facto blind convictions. Bias and stereotype loops will continue without challenge, maintaining fissures and tears that mark many sociopolitical discourses. This book, by taking a critical look at personal conviction as an element of inquiry within the humanities and social sciences, adds to the study of conviction as an aspect of the self, as a human characteristic we all carry within us and are called upon to examine. In an age of media and data saturation, fake facts abound when convictions inform the great challenges of our everyday lives around the globe. These challenges include pandemics (Covid-19), wars (the Russian attack on Ukraine), natural catastrophes (climate change), political upheaval (the January 6th, 2021, insurrection in the USA), and ethnic conflict (racism). Personal convictions greatly influence how we approach these challenges, and at the very least we should gain a better understanding of how they are generated.

Michael P. Lynch leads off our discussion with a chapter on “Political Conviction” as he answers three central questions about the nature of conviction: (1) What are convictions, and how do they differ from mere beliefs? (2) How do we come to form our convictions? and (3) Why are they so resistant to counter-evidence? Examining the relationship between the concepts of conviction and identity, Lynch compares attacks on them to attacks on ourselves: they are difficult to change by appealing to facts alone. But that also means, as Nietzsche was wise to point out, that convictions form as our identity forms, in alignment or in conversation with each other, and what can start out as a passing opinion, can, with the right urging, be hardened into unbending conviction.

Anke Finger, in her chapter on “Manifesto Moments,” argues that nothing spells conviction quite like manifestos. An increasingly prolific literary, artistic and sociopolitical genre since the 19th century, manifestos have spawned artistic and political movements, conspiracy myths, art projects, political parties and ad hoc rebellions. This chapter identifies and explores manifestos as a genre of conviction to place them within the larger context and history of the genre’s political aesthetic. What makes a manifesto a manifesto? How does conviction speak through it? How do political manifestos address a particular sense and patterning of identity and in-group formation? Theories are drawn from intercultural communication and