You’re wrong because I’m right: Why arguing to win is a losing strategy for all
It’s almost trite to point out: Certain topics always lead to heated arguments between two people.
Once you start with this line of thought, you eventually reach the conclusion that your opponents are not just wrong, but that even entertaining their opinions appears deeply incorrect. And more importantly, the other person thinks the exact same thing about you and your opinion.
This seems to be an almost inevitable back-and-forth of many contentious issues —but according to recent research published in Cognitive Science by researchers at Yale University, this need not be the case. They argue that our unquestioned acceptance of our own positions and our blindness towards others’ opinions does not need to be a necessary feature of difficult conversations, provided one adopts the correct mindset.
Approaching arguments as a cooperative endeavour, where one’s aim is to learn and walk away with a nuanced opinion, rather than a first-past-the-post competition, has the direct effect of making one more open to entertaining the opinions of those with whom you disagree.
Arguing to win versus arguing to learn
In their article, Matthew Fisher and his colleagues examined how people think about contentious issues to see how one can be made more open towards divergent opinions. They start by discussing social reasoning, which appears to come in two main forms. The first would be the kind where you and peers collectively try to solve a problem with a definite, right-or-wrong answer to it—like trying to discern whether that cave over there contains bears or not.
The second, and for our purposes more important, kind of social reasoning is argumentation. Here, we start off with opposing views on an issue and present arguments for which side you should believe—unlike knowing if a bear lies in yonder cave, the truth here tends not to be so black-or-white. It’s with argumentation that mindsets play a critical role.
Once a mindset is activated, it becomes much easier to apply the tools of that mindset to the task at hand. To make this more concrete, Fisher and colleagues identify two main mindsets that are relevant to arguments: arguing-to-learn and arguing-to-win.
Arguing-to-Learn: In the arguing-to-learn (ATL) mindset, you are focused on earnestly trying to cooperate with your interlocutor to understand and discover more about the topic at hand. What is of central importance to you in the ATL mindset is learning and coming to a more nuanced, accurate take on an issue. Previous research suggests an ATL mindset is also effective at increasing one’s comprehension of a topic and more likely to occur when arguing in an intimate, one-on-one setting.
Arguing-to-Win: In contrast to the arguing-to-learn mindset is the arguing-to-win (ATW) mindset. In the ATW mindset, your sole focus is to win the argument—no matter the cost and nor logical fallacies of which run afoul. Learning more or increasing your comprehension of the issue are simply irrelevant to you here. Moreover, you see your interlocutor not as a companion in your honest struggle towards the truth, but an enemy to be given no quarter. As opposed to an ATL mindset, an arguing-to-win mindset is much more likely to crop up when arguing in public, as if one’s honor depends on outwitting your interlocutor.
Objectivism - I’m right, which means you’re wrong
For some questions we can be “objectivists,” where we think that there is a definite, specific answer to a question and where any other answer would be incorrect. For example, we can be objectivists about how many Starbucks there are on Yonge street—any numerically-competent person can count them and come to the same answer.
But for other questions, this seems nearly impossible to do. In addition to being objectivists, we can also be “subjectivists” about certain questions. Here, there isn’t any clear cut right answer to a question—in fact what seems to be the right answer is likely to vary from person to person. So for a question regarding which coffee bar on Yonge street has the best coffee, it seems unlikely that there is any definite answer to this question as there was in the previous one—there’s too much of an influence of subjective taste for us to come to a single answer, and so we can be subjectivists about the answer here.
Linking this with the rest of their paper, Fisher and colleagues mention that there may be some important similarities between the arguing-to-learn and arguing-to-win mindsets and being high or low in objectivism. That is, people high in objectivism and those who use ATW mindsets seem like they’d be less inclined to consider and entertain opinions that differ from their own—they both seem to be dead-set on being right and in thinking that their answer is that right answer. People low in objectivism and those with ATL mindsets, however, would seem to be more inclined to entertain different opinions—they appear to be unconcerned with making sure that their answer is the right one. They’re in it to learn.
This leads Fischer’s central research question: Does the mindset one has towards arguments lead to differences in whether they think that there is a single, objective truth to the issue and hence whether they’ll entertain different opinions on the issue? Fischer and colleagues hypothesized that when a person adopts an arguing-to-win mindset, they’ll be more likely to be objectivists about the issue, and hence more intolerant towards other divergent opinions.
In other words, if you approach arguments with intent of learning something about the issue and not just beating people, then your liable to think that 1) the issue in question has no single right answer and 2) that you’ll be more willing to entertain opinions different than your own on the matter.
Experiment 1(A)
To see if how we understand the truth of an issue can be altered by how we approach arguments, Fisher and colleagues had participants interact in an online chat room on a variety of contentious issues. Upon their arrival at the lab, participants were given a selection of contentious topics on which they needed to state their position. These topics were vetted in advance to ensure that they’d be likely to lead to a heated debate under normal circumstances, such as the reality of climate change or the wage gap between men and women. Once this was done, the experimenters put participants in pairs of two, where each participant took an opposing stance to their partner on at least three issues to ensure that the two wouldn’t simply agree with one another.
Here, participants were split into two conditions: a “cooperative” condition, where they were encouraged to adopt an ATL mindset, and a “competitive” condition, where they were encouraged to adopt an ATW mindset. In the competitive condition participants were told that they would need to justify their position on three issues to a participant who has a strong stance on each of the issues.
Then, a moderator in the online chat room would introduce the topic that the participants would be discussing and ensured that the participants stayed on topic. Each of the conditions were given a maximum of four minutes to discuss the topic.
Once the four minutes were up, participants in all the conditions were sent the following message by the moderator and asked to rate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed it: “Earlier studies show that people take opposite positions on the issue of [issue]. Given that people have opposite views, at least one side must be wrong.” Higher scores of agreement would mean that participants are objectivists about the issue at hand, thinking that there is only a single, objective truth to the matter; lower scores of disagreement would mean that they are closer to subjectivists about the issue and think that there may be a variety of answers to an issue.
As expected, they found support for their main hypothesis. When participants approached an argument as a cooperative exchange that was intended to facilitate learning and depth of understanding (i.e., approach it with an ATL mindset), they were less likely to believe that there is a single, objective truth to the issue at hand. But, when participants adopted an arguing-to-win mindset, where their main goal was to simply win the argument rather than learn, they were more likely to believe that there was a single truth to the issue and hence were less likely to accept opinions that diverged from their own.
Experiment 1 (B)
As a follow-up, Fisher and colleagues found that people’s natural starting point, without being given any sort of mindset prompts, was indistinguishable from the competitive (i.e., argue-to-win mindset) condition in study 1a. This means that people’s default view on contentious issues is that there is a single objective truth to the issue, and may seem to automatically adopt arguing-to-win mindset.
To summarize the main finding:
People’s default assumption for contentious issues is that there is a single objective truth to the issue.
When people adopt an argue-to-win mindset about an issue, where their main focus is to simply win the argument at hand, they are even more likely be objectivists about that issue.
When people adopt an argue-to-learn perspective towards an issue, however, they are less likely to objectivists about the issue at hand and more so more likely to be tolerant of differing opinions.
The results applied
1. Get on the same page
Contentious arguments often run afoul of the rule that interlocutors should always be arguing about the same thing—else the two of you end up talking past one another and at times not even disagreeing with one another but simply failing to notice that you’re on separate pages. This may be the case with arguing-to-win and arguing-to-learn mindsets, where you may be trying to learn as much as you can from the discussion, but your colleague may be more interested in simply winning the argument without an ounce of concern for learning anything.
As a result, the argument may seem to benefit only one person, or simply leave unchanged opinions that should probably be changed. Thus, it would be more beneficial for all those involved in such discussions if you subtly hint that you’re not here to “win” anything, but simply to understand and learn as much about the issue as possible. Doing so may help in getting your opponent to adopt an arguing-to-learn mindset to make them less of an objectivist and so more willing to hear other opinions on the matter.
2. Pick the right place to argue
When it comes to arguing about difficult issues, picking out when and where you argue your points may make a difference. As the current research suggests, private one-on-one interactions appear to be more likely to induce an arguing-to-learning mindset towards contentious issues; however, more public and viewer-heavy discussions about the very same issue tend to lead to an arguing-to-win mindset. So if possible, try to bring up contentious issues with people whom you know are of the opposite opinion as you in settings that are more private and intimate.
Otherwise, arguing about difficult topics in public environments is liable to end up with either side engaging in argumentative one-upmanship and only furthering existing divisions between the relevant sides of the issue.