Communication Formats and Epistemic Quality

This paper deals with the perennial question of how to stimulate epistemic advancement - in-depth and complex thinking - in political communication and deliberation. Drawing from longstanding psychological research on different communication formats and their effects on epistemic advancement and acceptance (Schweiger et al. 1986), it contrasts contestatory inquiry to appreciative inquiry and free communication in the context of the Corona pandemic (priority of health vs priority of freedom). We present data from a representative survey experiment conducted in Germany in February 2021, where participants were randomly assigned to different communication formats (contestatory, appreciative and free) and asked by an artificial moderator to either react to counterarguments to their own position on health vs freedom (contestatory inquiry), to think about potential commonalities among different arguments on health vs freedom (appreciative inquiry), or just react to different arguments (free communication). We focus on two metrics of argumentative quality - integrative complexity (e.g. Suedfeld et al. 1992) and justification rationality (Steenbergen et al. 2003) – to capture the epistemic quality of written statements of the participants in the three communication formats.