This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee might want to spend a little time brushing up on psychology.

A raft of academic research has found that a simple recitation of facts often fails to change people’s minds. A more promising approach can be to use a trusted intermediary. That is, the who of an argument can matter more than the what and the why.

In politics, as the political scientist Brendan Nyhan has written, avoiding “partisan and ideological cues” is particularly important. It’s extremely hard to persuade Republicans if the people trying to do the persuading are Democrats.