Deliberators’ Awareness of Attitude Transformation

Abstract

The significance of deliberators’ awareness of attitude transformation can be derived directly from deliberative democracy theory, but the issue has received little attention in research. This paper is an attempt to synthesize literature on factors influencing this awareness into a heuristic that can guide further inquiry. Conceptualizing learning as a fundamental mechanism through which attitudes are influenced during deliberation, either consciously or subconsciously, this heuristic stipulates that the level of awareness of any transformation is enhanced by overt persuasion in accordance with communicative rationality, and lowered, first, by various subconscious biases prompted in dialogue settings, and, second, by certain forms of calculated manipulation of deliberators. For illustrative purposes, the paper also presents a few more tangible, if tentative, observations from two small Swedish citizen dialogues that exemplify how design of deliberation may interact with factors influencing awareness of attitude transformation in real-life settings. More specifically, the observations suggest that ‘hot’ dialogues addressing well-defined and conflictual policy choices may favor awareness, while ‘colder’ consensus-oriented dialogues on broader issues might make participants less aware.