Persuasion invasion: Reducing bias with value-adaptive instruction

Abstract

As civil discourse in America is becoming less substantive and respectful (Doherty, 2019), some educators have turned to educational games as a potential solution. However, providing effective instruction on key civic skills (e.g., perspective taking) requires a level of individualization that is unscalable in traditional classroom environments. Here we present Persuasion Invasion, an educational game that uses Value-Adaptive Instruction to help students learn to engage in productive civil discourse (i.e., discourse that fosters democratic goals (Papacharissi, 2004)). Throughout the game, players learn about the values that underpin our beliefs and barriers to productive discourse (e.g., tribalism and bias). We tested a scalable, value-adaptive intervention, and found that we were able to estimate and, in some cases, reduce the impact of bias when reasoning about political arguments.