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Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

97 points by JoshTv 13y ago

tehwalrus 13y ago
Politics is the art of persuading people they already agree with you. Subtler arguments are much better than brazen ones for doing this, and getting people to change their mind - and good politicians exploit this fact whenever they're in a setting that lets them. 24/7 media, and national coverage when somebody "flip-flops," might have contributed to politicians doing this less often, but I'm not sure. And don't forget that a political debate isn't supposed to end with either politician changing their mind; it's supposed to end up with the spectators making up their mind about the politicians (which is why in those sorts of debates, you're supposed to use arguments that appeal mostly to your own supporters, assuming you have enough of them.)
sitkack 13y ago
Or if you want to have a population with a dogmatic rigid attitude then you make everything a symbol for "who they are and what they believe in." I have been to countries that are more nationalistic than the USA and many minds are closed when it comes to even realizing that questions can be asked. The sphere of what is the truth is so large it obscures all vision.
dsego 13y ago
Funny to read knee-jerk reactions in the comment section. Many commenters missed the point completely.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
'Winning an argument' is a magic bullet that doesn't exist. Otherwise it would be called 'teaching' I'm not trying to change the person's mind when I enter into a debate, I'm trying to plant a seed of empathy for them to see things from another perspective so that their own brain begins to work against their existing bias. I also tend to be one of those crazy people that believe their are a lot of grey areas when science isn't involved.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  There are two issues that I can see with that style of debate: you assume that the other doesn't have empathy for your point of view and that he would agree with you if he had. You leave out the possibility that you were wrong.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
'Winning an argument' is a magic bullet that doesn't exist. Otherwise it would be called 'teaching' I'm not trying to change the person's mind when I enter into a debate, I'm trying to plant a seed of empathy for them to see things from another perspective so that their own brain begins to work against their existing bias. I also tend to be one of those crazy people that believe their are a lot of grey areas when science isn't involved.
rjprins 13y ago
The best insight here is that self-worth and fear of shaming are the main motivators for not agreeing. A weaker argument, that is less threatening to self-worth is one way of preventing that your discussion partner goes on the defense. Another way is to make him feel safer in the sense that he can trust that you will not hurt his feelings. This can be done by affirming that you are on the same page with him, that you and him share the same goal. You can also do this by denying what the other person might be afraid of, such as "I don't think your opinion is stupid" or "I don't want to abolish guns for hunting purposes". These methods come from "Crucial Conversations", it goes in depth on the underlying emotional motivations of conversations. Great book. Another, cheaper tactic is to acknowledge positive characteristics of the other, making that person feel better about himself. This way, their self-worth is less vulnerable and they are more open to arguments (although this frequently fails because people distrust compliments from people that pose a threat).
- euroclydon 13y ago
  Great point! So many comments on HN need to start off with one such sentence. I think this is called etiquette.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  Absolutely. I would even go so far as to say that it's not about making a "weaker" argument; it's about making a more socially nuanced argument. Context counts. Subtext counts. They count especially when there's an audience to the argument (real or perceived). When someone feels his face, or dignity, or credibility is on the line, he feels intense pressure to stick to his guns -- and to keep his guns blazing. Conversational softeners ("You make some great points, but...," or "I agree about X, but have you considered...") are not necessarily about weakening your own argument. They're about lowering psychological defensiveness to your argument. They increase the chances you might actually wind up with a productive dialogue, and after all, results matter more than absolute correctness. IMO, an effective argument is one that makes some headway -- ergo, this isn't really "weakening."
  - DanHulton 13y ago
Kequc 13y ago
My take away here is that we need to educate people in such a way they view ones' ability to change their position given new evidence as a positive. Like scientists do. I guess I always felt people didn't value this trait but I needed to have it spelled out for me in this article. Why in the world would any person value themselves more having been right all along. Why wouldn't they care about educating themselves every day.
- slurry 13y ago
  I have a couple of older relatives who were gentleman's-C athlete types at an Ivy League school. Majored in History or something. Both very successful in banking. Some things they have in common are: they're both very slow to form an opinion, seldom have an opinion on anything they don't need to have an opinion about, very interested to hear new evidence or arguments about something they do have an interest in, and very gracious about letting you down gently if they do have to win an argument (even if they can be colossal dicks in many other respects). Uninformed people think they're dumb. tl;dr Roger Sterling is the smartest person on Mad Men.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Because arguments often end up being proxy battles for social status, and we're hardwired for those. The book that really opened my eyes on this was de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics. And, perhaps just as importantly, a book about acting: Johnstone's Impro.
- mistercow 13y ago
  The amount of education that requires is, unfortunately, tremendous. Learning to overcome instinctive thought patterns is difficult and requires dedication, and even at the end of all of that, you'll sometimes fail. Education can show people the way, but it can't force them to put in the practice.
einhverfr 13y ago
I have also said we should talk more about first principles and less about the policy arguments at first. Regarding gun control, the first principles at issue are these: 1. Is life more important than liberty or vice versa? (ooh this reverses vs. the abortion issue regarding political lines) 2. Do we trust the government to fully monopolize force? Do we trust the police? the army? Should the government be there primarily to protect us? 3. What are the implications of one interpretatin of the 2nd Amendment on federal power or another? (I won't go over my view here, except to say it is not a partisan view.) The reason is that very often we can find common ground over first principles, and this helps with discussing others without putting the other side on the defensive or shaming.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  I am not sure about your point two. Abortion isn't nearly as split along party lines as you may think, except among the leaders of the parties and a few extremists.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I said political lines, not party lines. My point is that people IME who are more likely to see liberty as the winning interest in abortion are more likely to see life as the winning interest in gun control and vice versa.
    - nhaehnle 13y ago
      I would like to point out that nobody really sees liberty in the abstract as a winning interest in the abortion debate. Pro-choicers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the fetus, while pro-lifers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the woman. The whole issue arises because liberty in the abstract cannot have a full victory, because different kinds of liberty collide. So then you have those who think society's interest in population growth trumps the woman's interest in self-control, and those who think the opposite. Something similar is true in gun control. If the liberty of gun ownership ends up severely restricting certain people's liberties - after all, you can't really exercise any form of liberty when you're dead - then gun control debate isn't really about liberty in the abstract. Of course, that doesn't prevent people from phrasing it as such as a matter of rhetorics.
mathattack 13y ago
A mentor explained this to me as, "If you want someone to do something, you have to let them save face. If someone screws something up and you want them to fix it, you can't humiliate them in the process." I used to get very frustrated with shoddy work from subcontractors. I found that the more I directly documented the quality of the work, the worse they'd harden their position. I learned there are better ways to operate. (And if they still don't fix things when presented softly, it's better to fire than to try and convince someone who can't learn.)
- tocomment 13y ago
  Would you mind providing some examples? I can't really picture what you're talking about?
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Example: I recommend a client to hire a specific 3rd party consulting firm that will work side by side with my team from the product vendor. The firm's salesman agrees to my methodology and deliverables. The project starts, and their project team starts making up their own methodology, and staffs it with underskilled resources. I raise this to the salesman, who raises it to the PM, who digs in. So I gather an email chain of all the mistakes his team has made. And their PM digs in even more. The client is getting antsy about missed deadlines all around. So I get an extremely detailed report on every failure their team has made, and send it to the PM, the salesman, the senior partner responsible for the client and senior partner responsible for the practice area. The PM has to save face, so all he can say is, "You're not there day to day to understand." The client meanwhile gets hosed. In hindsight, once I humiliated the PM, he couldn't turn things around. I should have set it up that they were reporting to me, and pushed them with a "Here's how you can succeed in making the client love you guys" message rather than being confrontational. If they didn't react to that, I could have then replaced them.
chrismealy 13y ago
This is true in the short run, but in the long run you can wear people down and get through to them. Nobody said politics was easy.
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
>And if you’re wrong about a bunch of things, you’re obviously not as smart or as good or as worthwhile a person as you previously believed. These are all true statements. Most people are not as smart or good or worthwhile as they believe, myself included. That makes true rational implementation of policy extremely unlikely .
IvyMike 13y ago
Once upon a time, I learned to play the game Go. One of the key insights I took away was that if you directly attacked an enemy in a weak area, the enemy would defend in that area, making him strong there. Almost always you would end up with an impenetrable wall on both sides. There's an art to pressing your advantage in an area without making it an 'attack'. (In the end, I never really got that good and haven't played for years, so actual good Go players may find my insight pretty naive.)
- hackula1 13y ago
  Risk has this same dynamic. Going head to head on main choke does nothing but let the other players come in and mop the floor with you and your opponent.
  - janson0 13y ago
    I agree. This also shows up in Stratego on some levels, with the interesting twist that you can't understand the size of the force in each area.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  Go is an awesome game and, dare I say, strategically superior to chess ;)
tocomment 13y ago
I've always found it interesting that most people have really strong opinions on complex political questions to begin with. For example, as a programmer, how do I know what the correct immigration level should be? How should I know if we should intervene in Syria? Even if I follow the news, a few articles and news clips really aren't going to give me enough information to make an educated decision.
- nhaehnle 13y ago
  Based on Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I would suggest that it is a case of substitution: We (often unconsciously) substitute a hard question for an easier question. In your examples, that might be: Did you have good experiences with immigrants? How do you feel about war more generally? Those judgments aren't necessarily bad in themselves. For example, as a pacifist, I might be happy to err on the side of non-interventionism as long as the situation is sufficiently unclear. These substitutions only really become problematic when we close ourselves to new data that might change our mind.
rdtsc 13y ago
I use another tactic sometimes, somewhat related. I make a stronger and radically (more inflammatory if you wish) than the person I am talking to. It has to be just inflammatory enough for them to start defending the weaker more moderate position, basically leaning towards the direction you'd want to persuade them originally. For example, I have some hard core Fox News watching Republicans in my extended family. So sometimes when they bring health care and how it distributes wealth to the lazy and it is not free market and such. I bring grandma so and so and how she is just mooching off our government with the medicare. She never paid all that in her life and she is part of the socialist communist system that is robbing the country. Then they usually start to backpedal -- well...you see this is different and they argue for how the country should take care of the elderly and so on... Anyway I do it more for fun and amusement if someone makes the mistake of bringing the topic up, rather than hoping to actually convince them. And maybe this is well studies and has a name I just don't know what it is called. "Act crazier than the crazies"?
- bad_user 13y ago
  This works well and it's called shifting the overton window: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window It has been used by politicians quite successfully. Like for example if a party wants to make abortions illegal after 3 months of pregnancy, it's better if they start from an outrageous position, like criminalizing all abortions, after which their real target starts being seen as a reasonable compromise. This also works the other way too. Many people that are anti abortions have had abortions themselves or have family members that did - throwing jail time into the conversation or other outrageous positions like criminalizing pregnancies without a license, does wonders, but of course, politicians have to be more careful otherwise they risk losing votes. If you pay attention, this happens all the time.
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    Yes, thank you. I knew it has to have a name.
- adamzochowski 13y ago
  Looks like a variant of Poe's Law. > without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
pbreit 13y ago
I would have liked to have seen some examples or research affirming the assertion. The research all seemed to deny the other-way-around.

97 points by JoshTv 13y ago

Politics is the art of persuading people they already agree with you. Subtler arguments are much better than brazen ones for doing this, and getting people to change their mind - and good politicians exploit this fact whenever they're in a setting that lets them. 24/7 media, and national coverage when somebody "flip-flops," might have contributed to politicians doing this less often, but I'm not sure. And don't forget that a political debate isn't supposed to end with either politician changing their mind; it's supposed to end up with the spectators making up their mind about the politicians (which is why in those sorts of debates, you're supposed to use arguments that appeal mostly to your own supporters, assuming you have enough of them.)

sitkack 13y ago

Or if you want to have a population with a dogmatic rigid attitude then you make everything a symbol for "who they are and what they believe in." I have been to countries that are more nationalistic than the USA and many minds are closed when it comes to even realizing that questions can be asked. The sphere of what is the truth is so large it obscures all vision.

dsego 13y ago

Funny to read knee-jerk reactions in the comment section. Many commenters missed the point completely.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

'Winning an argument' is a magic bullet that doesn't exist. Otherwise it would be called 'teaching' I'm not trying to change the person's mind when I enter into a debate, I'm trying to plant a seed of empathy for them to see things from another perspective so that their own brain begins to work against their existing bias. I also tend to be one of those crazy people that believe their are a lot of grey areas when science isn't involved.

tomjen3 13y ago
There are two issues that I can see with that style of debate: you assume that the other doesn't have empathy for your point of view and that he would agree with you if he had. You leave out the possibility that you were wrong.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

rjprins 13y ago

The best insight here is that self-worth and fear of shaming are the main motivators for not agreeing. A weaker argument, that is less threatening to self-worth is one way of preventing that your discussion partner goes on the defense. Another way is to make him feel safer in the sense that he can trust that you will not hurt his feelings. This can be done by affirming that you are on the same page with him, that you and him share the same goal. You can also do this by denying what the other person might be afraid of, such as "I don't think your opinion is stupid" or "I don't want to abolish guns for hunting purposes". These methods come from "Crucial Conversations", it goes in depth on the underlying emotional motivations of conversations. Great book. Another, cheaper tactic is to acknowledge positive characteristics of the other, making that person feel better about himself. This way, their self-worth is less vulnerable and they are more open to arguments (although this frequently fails because people distrust compliments from people that pose a threat).

euroclydon 13y ago
Great point! So many comments on HN need to start off with one such sentence. I think this is called etiquette.
jonnathanson 13y ago
Absolutely. I would even go so far as to say that it's not about making a "weaker" argument; it's about making a more socially nuanced argument. Context counts. Subtext counts. They count especially when there's an audience to the argument (real or perceived). When someone feels his face, or dignity, or credibility is on the line, he feels intense pressure to stick to his guns -- and to keep his guns blazing. Conversational softeners ("You make some great points, but...," or "I agree about X, but have you considered...") are not necessarily about weakening your own argument. They're about lowering psychological defensiveness to your argument. They increase the chances you might actually wind up with a productive dialogue, and after all, results matter more than absolute correctness. IMO, an effective argument is one that makes some headway -- ergo, this isn't really "weakening."
- DanHulton 13y ago

Kequc 13y ago

My take away here is that we need to educate people in such a way they view ones' ability to change their position given new evidence as a positive. Like scientists do. I guess I always felt people didn't value this trait but I needed to have it spelled out for me in this article. Why in the world would any person value themselves more having been right all along. Why wouldn't they care about educating themselves every day.

slurry 13y ago
I have a couple of older relatives who were gentleman's-C athlete types at an Ivy League school. Majored in History or something. Both very successful in banking. Some things they have in common are: they're both very slow to form an opinion, seldom have an opinion on anything they don't need to have an opinion about, very interested to hear new evidence or arguments about something they do have an interest in, and very gracious about letting you down gently if they do have to win an argument (even if they can be colossal dicks in many other respects). Uninformed people think they're dumb. tl;dr Roger Sterling is the smartest person on Mad Men.
wpietri 13y ago
Because arguments often end up being proxy battles for social status, and we're hardwired for those. The book that really opened my eyes on this was de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics. And, perhaps just as importantly, a book about acting: Johnstone's Impro.
mistercow 13y ago
The amount of education that requires is, unfortunately, tremendous. Learning to overcome instinctive thought patterns is difficult and requires dedication, and even at the end of all of that, you'll sometimes fail. Education can show people the way, but it can't force them to put in the practice.

einhverfr 13y ago

I have also said we should talk more about first principles and less about the policy arguments at first. Regarding gun control, the first principles at issue are these: 1. Is life more important than liberty or vice versa? (ooh this reverses vs. the abortion issue regarding political lines) 2. Do we trust the government to fully monopolize force? Do we trust the police? the army? Should the government be there primarily to protect us? 3. What are the implications of one interpretatin of the 2nd Amendment on federal power or another? (I won't go over my view here, except to say it is not a partisan view.) The reason is that very often we can find common ground over first principles, and this helps with discussing others without putting the other side on the defensive or shaming.

tomjen3 13y ago
I am not sure about your point two. Abortion isn't nearly as split along party lines as you may think, except among the leaders of the parties and a few extremists.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I said political lines, not party lines. My point is that people IME who are more likely to see liberty as the winning interest in abortion are more likely to see life as the winning interest in gun control and vice versa.
  - nhaehnle 13y ago
    I would like to point out that nobody really sees liberty in the abstract as a winning interest in the abortion debate. Pro-choicers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the fetus, while pro-lifers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the woman. The whole issue arises because liberty in the abstract cannot have a full victory, because different kinds of liberty collide. So then you have those who think society's interest in population growth trumps the woman's interest in self-control, and those who think the opposite. Something similar is true in gun control. If the liberty of gun ownership ends up severely restricting certain people's liberties - after all, you can't really exercise any form of liberty when you're dead - then gun control debate isn't really about liberty in the abstract. Of course, that doesn't prevent people from phrasing it as such as a matter of rhetorics.

mathattack 13y ago

A mentor explained this to me as, "If you want someone to do something, you have to let them save face. If someone screws something up and you want them to fix it, you can't humiliate them in the process." I used to get very frustrated with shoddy work from subcontractors. I found that the more I directly documented the quality of the work, the worse they'd harden their position. I learned there are better ways to operate. (And if they still don't fix things when presented softly, it's better to fire than to try and convince someone who can't learn.)

tocomment 13y ago
Would you mind providing some examples? I can't really picture what you're talking about?
- mathattack 13y ago
  Example: I recommend a client to hire a specific 3rd party consulting firm that will work side by side with my team from the product vendor. The firm's salesman agrees to my methodology and deliverables. The project starts, and their project team starts making up their own methodology, and staffs it with underskilled resources. I raise this to the salesman, who raises it to the PM, who digs in. So I gather an email chain of all the mistakes his team has made. And their PM digs in even more. The client is getting antsy about missed deadlines all around. So I get an extremely detailed report on every failure their team has made, and send it to the PM, the salesman, the senior partner responsible for the client and senior partner responsible for the practice area. The PM has to save face, so all he can say is, "You're not there day to day to understand." The client meanwhile gets hosed. In hindsight, once I humiliated the PM, he couldn't turn things around. I should have set it up that they were reporting to me, and pushed them with a "Here's how you can succeed in making the client love you guys" message rather than being confrontational. If they didn't react to that, I could have then replaced them.

chrismealy 13y ago

This is true in the short run, but in the long run you can wear people down and get through to them. Nobody said politics was easy.

AndrewKemendo 13y ago

>And if you’re wrong about a bunch of things, you’re obviously not as smart or as good or as worthwhile a person as you previously believed. These are all true statements. Most people are not as smart or good or worthwhile as they believe, myself included. That makes true rational implementation of policy extremely unlikely .

IvyMike 13y ago

Once upon a time, I learned to play the game Go. One of the key insights I took away was that if you directly attacked an enemy in a weak area, the enemy would defend in that area, making him strong there. Almost always you would end up with an impenetrable wall on both sides. There's an art to pressing your advantage in an area without making it an 'attack'. (In the end, I never really got that good and haven't played for years, so actual good Go players may find my insight pretty naive.)

hackula1 13y ago
Risk has this same dynamic. Going head to head on main choke does nothing but let the other players come in and mop the floor with you and your opponent.
- janson0 13y ago
  I agree. This also shows up in Stratego on some levels, with the interesting twist that you can't understand the size of the force in each area.
dwaltrip 13y ago
Go is an awesome game and, dare I say, strategically superior to chess ;)

tocomment 13y ago

I've always found it interesting that most people have really strong opinions on complex political questions to begin with. For example, as a programmer, how do I know what the correct immigration level should be? How should I know if we should intervene in Syria? Even if I follow the news, a few articles and news clips really aren't going to give me enough information to make an educated decision.

nhaehnle 13y ago
Based on Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I would suggest that it is a case of substitution: We (often unconsciously) substitute a hard question for an easier question. In your examples, that might be: Did you have good experiences with immigrants? How do you feel about war more generally? Those judgments aren't necessarily bad in themselves. For example, as a pacifist, I might be happy to err on the side of non-interventionism as long as the situation is sufficiently unclear. These substitutions only really become problematic when we close ourselves to new data that might change our mind.

rdtsc 13y ago

I use another tactic sometimes, somewhat related. I make a stronger and radically (more inflammatory if you wish) than the person I am talking to. It has to be just inflammatory enough for them to start defending the weaker more moderate position, basically leaning towards the direction you'd want to persuade them originally. For example, I have some hard core Fox News watching Republicans in my extended family. So sometimes when they bring health care and how it distributes wealth to the lazy and it is not free market and such. I bring grandma so and so and how she is just mooching off our government with the medicare. She never paid all that in her life and she is part of the socialist communist system that is robbing the country. Then they usually start to backpedal -- well...you see this is different and they argue for how the country should take care of the elderly and so on... Anyway I do it more for fun and amusement if someone makes the mistake of bringing the topic up, rather than hoping to actually convince them. And maybe this is well studies and has a name I just don't know what it is called. "Act crazier than the crazies"?

bad_user 13y ago
This works well and it's called shifting the overton window: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window It has been used by politicians quite successfully. Like for example if a party wants to make abortions illegal after 3 months of pregnancy, it's better if they start from an outrageous position, like criminalizing all abortions, after which their real target starts being seen as a reasonable compromise. This also works the other way too. Many people that are anti abortions have had abortions themselves or have family members that did - throwing jail time into the conversation or other outrageous positions like criminalizing pregnancies without a license, does wonders, but of course, politicians have to be more careful otherwise they risk losing votes. If you pay attention, this happens all the time.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Yes, thank you. I knew it has to have a name.
adamzochowski 13y ago
Looks like a variant of Poe's Law. > without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

pbreit 13y ago

I would have liked to have seen some examples or research affirming the assertion. The research all seemed to deny the other-way-around.