Legal & DebateNEUTRAL — Rhetoric

Ideological Turing Test

What it is

A test of whether you understand a position you reject: can you state it so faithfully that its actual adherents cannot tell your account from one written by one of their own?

How it works

The economist Bryan Caplan proposed the test in a 2011 EconLog post, replying to Paul Krugman's claim that liberals could pass as conservatives while conservatives could not pass as liberals. Caplan borrowed Alan Turing's 1950 imitation game — a machine counts as intelligent if judges cannot tell it from a person — and turned it on partisans: you understand a view when its holders cannot distinguish your statement of it from their own. The mechanism is accountability. “I understand them” is unfalsifiable while the speaker is the judge; the test hands judgment to the people being described. That matters because the errors it catches are systematic: partisans overestimate how extreme and how hostile the other side is (Lees and Cikara; Moore-Berg and colleagues), and Graham, Nosek, and Haidt found that Americans across the spectrum exaggerated the other side's moral views, with liberals the least accurate about conservatives. A rebuttal aimed at a position nobody holds persuades nobody who holds the real one. The test has limits. It can be passed by mimicking vocabulary and shibboleths without grasping reasons; passing shows understanding, not that the view is correct; and there is no controlled evidence that passing it changes minds. Its value is diagnostic, and its sharpest use is on yourself before a disagreement that matters.

Real-world examples

  • •Caplan's original challenge: let liberal and conservative economists each write answers in the other's voice and let readers of each camp guess which are genuine; whoever is unmasked has failed to understand the side they claimed to understand.
  • •Switch-side debating — arguing the affirmative in one round and the negative in the next on the same resolution — has been the norm of American academic debate for decades and is defended on exactly this ground: you cannot beat a case you cannot make.
  • •Negotiation preparation: Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes (1981) tells negotiators to write the other side's case as the other side would, because a proposal that ignores their real interests cannot be accepted by them.
  • •Depolarization workshops such as Braver Angels' red-blue sessions have each side describe the other's views and then check the description with the people described — an ideological Turing test administered live.
  • •The failed version is everywhere online: “They only believe that because they hate us” is a description no adherent would sign, which is the test's verdict on the describer.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Passing the test shows you understand a view, not that it is true or that you are entitled to speak for its holders.
  • ●Reproduce reasons, not just vocabulary; a paraphrase built from shibboleths passes only with graders who listen for tribe.
  • ●Let actual adherents grade you. Self-certified passes are the thing the test was invented to prevent.
  • ●When you fail, revise your picture of the disagreement, not just your phrasing.

How to defend against it

  • ►When someone summarizes the other side for you, ask whether an adherent would sign the summary. If the honest answer is no, you have been handed a straw man with a confident face.
  • ►Treat “they believe X because they are stupid or evil” as a failed test and ask for the reasons an adherent actually gives; motive attribution is not a description.
  • ►Before a disagreement that matters, write the other side's best case in their words and, if you can, have someone from that side read it. Fix the parts they reject before you argue.
  • ►Be most suspicious of confident translations of a group offered by people who only talk to your group; check with the group itself, the way lateral reading checks a source against sources outside it.
  • ►Use it on your own team: if no one in the room can pass for the opposition, the plan has not been tested against the opposition.

References

  1. Caplan, B. (2011). The Ideological Turing Test. EconLog (Library of Economics and Liberty), blog post, June 20, 2011
    Proposal of the test, in reply to Krugman, as a way to check claimed understanding of an opposing ideology.
  2. Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433-460
    The imitation game on which the test is modeled.
  3. Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., & Haidt, J. (2012). The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e50092
    Partisans across the spectrum exaggerate the other side's moral views, with liberals least accurate about conservatives.
  4. Lees, J., & Cikara, M. (2020). Inaccurate Group Meta-Perceptions Drive Negative Out-Group Attributions in Competitive Contexts. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(3), 279-286
    Partisans overestimate how negatively the other side views them, and correcting the estimate reduces hostility.
  5. Moore-Berg, S. L., Ankori-Karlinsky, L.-O., Hameiri, B., & Bruneau, E. (2020). Exaggerated Meta-Perceptions Predict Intergroup Hostility between American Political Partisans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(26), 14864-14872
    American partisans substantially overestimate the other side's dislike and dehumanization of them.
  6. Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Houghton Mifflin
    The preparation practice of stating the other side's case as they would state it.
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