scale from 1 to 7 with 0.5 precision. In order to guarantee reliablity of our results, we then verified that our pre-qualified Turkers are representative of the population as a whole, by comparing the means and standard deviations of our sample of 637 Turkers with the national standards given in Gosling et. al . Table \[tab:distr\] shows that our survey means and standard deviations are very close to the national norms, suggesting our sample is representative of the public in general, and hence can be used to validate whether social media arguments could fruitfully be be used to educate the public.

[| c\*[5]{}[|c]{} |]{} &[**E**]{} & [**A**]{} & [**C**]{} & [**N**]{} & [**O**]{}\
Our survey&4.30&5.19&5.50&4.82&5.53\
Norms&4.44&5.23&5.4&4.83&5.38\
Our survey $\sigma$ &1.45&1.11&1.32&1.42&1.07\
Norms $\sigma$ &1.44&1.24&1.24&1.41&1.14\

Prior Beliefs and Belief Change {#corpus-belief}
-------------------------------

Previous research suggests that people who are entrenched about an issue are unlikely to change their mind [@Anderson71; @Davies98; @Devineetal00], so we wanted to establish the baseline beliefs of our pre-qualified Turkers before they had been exposed to any arguments about a topic. We therefore collected each Turker’s initial stance on a topic, by asking them to answer a simple [**stance question**]{} with no context, for example: [*Should the death 