Artificial intelligence programs can persuade people to temper their political views, but highly customized messages or deep conversations with bots do not seem to work any better than a single basic argument. These results challenge long-held academic theories about what makes political messaging effective, suggesting that targeted data and interactive debates might not provide the advantages that politicians expect. The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Changing the minds of voters is an essential feature of democratic societies. Advocacy groups, public health officials, and political candidates spend vast amounts of money attempting to sway public opinion on polarizing topics. Despite decades of study, the exact psychological processes that dictate whether a person will change their mind remain difficult to pin down. Academic researchers often face practical limitations when studying how social communication works in the real world. Two central concepts have dominated the academic understanding of targeted messaging. The first is message customization, which is also known in the political realm as microtargeting. This theory proposes that a …