Author(s)

Nazaria Solferino, Serena Fiona Taurino, Maria Elisabetta Tessitore^*

Economics Department, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy.

Persuasion can be considered as a situation where subjects having an opinion or an argument are willing to change it in favor of others’ proposal only if the new message has personal relevance and significant consequences on their lives. In this paper, we argue that improvements in the information set and the knowledge of the fundamental rules of a “well-formed formula” are necessary to minimize errors when people make their choices. Arguments can be manipulated either in terms of the truth of premises or in terms of the logical connectives among propositions. The emerging mechanism of the so-called fact-checking, used to verify candidates’ statements during the electoral campaign, may be a very useful instrument to realize these improvements in political debates.

Persuasion, Logical Connectives, Political Debates

Solferino, N. , Taurino, S. and Tessitore, M. (2015) Manipulating Persuasion in Debates: Fact Checking’s Usefulness. Theoretical Economics Letters, 5, 447-452. doi: 10.4236/tel.2015.54052.