Were I writing this essay a year or two ago, I’d have started it this way: When disagreements arise, the first impulse for many of us is to give direct arguments in favor of our own viewpoint. In other words, you give reasons directly for some conclusion in the expectation that the audience will share your reasons and thereby come to accept your conclusion. As I’ll explain, this sets up the discussion as a zero-sum game that actually makes the other side far less likely to accept your reasons. If your argument wins the day, then your opponent loses (and vice versa), and this win-lose setup is exactly what makes the participants in the discussion defensive and argumentative, resistant to your ideas. I have come to believe that such attempts are practically useless for reasons that are widely acknowledged but rarely applied to the subject of rational persuasion. Everyone knows about motivated reasoning at some level or another. (At the very least, we recognize when other people are engaged in wishful thinking or confirmation bias, etc.; we can see all too clearly when the other political party is reasoning in bad faith by our standards.) Nevertheless, few seem to draw the obvious conclusion that rational persuasion via head-on arguments is doomed to fail in most cases. Nor has anyone developed a clear alternative. I aim to do both.
As you read that, I’m betting that one of three things just happened. In the worst-case scenario, you have already gotten defensive. “That can’t be right,” you say to yourself, and you begin to marshal all your attention to the task of finding flaws in my forthcoming arguments. In the best-case scenario, your interest was piqued, and you are on your way to accepting some or all of my conclusions. In that case, what I have to offer is to take you willingly down a path you want to walk, hopefully a bit further than you would have gone on your own. You might be in this headspace because you were already skeptical of the effectiveness of rational discourse, already disillusioned with humanity’s basic inability to be compelled by reason-giving. Either way, very little is happening in terms of persuasion and a whole lot is happening in terms of motivated reasoning. Persuasion moves you toward viewing the world in a different (hopefully, more accurate) way. But in most cases, head-on arguments like the one above are not really going to change anyone’s view of the world. We resist ideas and evidence that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or incongruent with what we currently believe, and we subject the familiar, comfortable, and congruent to far less scrutiny. We are unlikely to be persuaded, even if our interlocutor has a better grip on the truth.
The third most likely response to my “opener” is that you have not given the matter much thought at all prior to reading this, and that’s why you’re open to being persuaded. Here, I am reminded of a saying I heard from a mentor, “The only point of giving arguments is to convince unaffiliated grad students.” In the academy, grad students are the initiates, and many of the debates they are initiated into are too arcane to be on the radar of the average layperson. Having never encountered the debate before, the initiate does not necessarily have any clear idea of what to think. So, the point of the saying is this: the only case in which anyone is persuaded by reasons is when they didn’t have a dog in the fight to begin with. Otherwise, no real persuasion is happening. If you were already disposed to agree, then you don’t need persuasion, and if you already disagree, then motivated reasoning will likely kick in and prevent persuasion.
If this is right, then Max Plank’s famous quip captures the best hope for head-on arguments: “Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” Initiates to a debate are (hopefully) convinced by the more rational arguments (unless there are plenty of rational arguments on all sides!), and the matter is gradually settled by attrition. But is this the only hope for rational discourse to lead to knowledge or understanding? That error and falsehood will eventually just peter out as their defenders leave the discussion by one means or another? My hope here is for us to find greater optimism about rational discourse and persuasion.
Motivated Reasoning: Soldier and Scout
First, we need a clearer view of reasons for despair or skepticism about rational discourse and persuasion. The problem is that it is incredibly difficult to get anyone (including oneself!) to change their mind about most matters of importance. Why is this? There is a complicated story to tell about a whole host of biases and heuristics by which we navigate the world and make decisions, and some have even done the hard work of funneling these heuristics and biases into a kind of cheat sheet with broader categories. However, in most domains of rational discourse, the simple answer seems to reside in our defensiveness. In her recent book, The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef starts with a thoughtful examination of motivated reasoning, or what she calls soldier mindset. However, she goes a step further to identify an opposing set of inclinations and habits of mind that she calls scout mindset. Whereas soldiers want to defend their ideas, scouts just want an accurate picture of how things really are.
What is soldier mindset defending? Galef identifies six different categories of ego defense.
- Comfort: We shield ourselves from unpleasant emotions. If you have invested time and energy in convincing yourself and others of something (e.g., that the earth is flat or not, that global warming is a threat or not, that abortion is okay or not), you will avoid evidence to the contrary because you want to avoid the shame, embarrassment, or dissonance that would go along with admitting you were wrong.
- Self-esteem: We enhance or protect our self-image. If you are wealthy, you might ignore or discount evidence of systemic injustice or inequality. At some level, you want to maintain the belief that you earned what you got within a just and equitable system. If you are relatively poor, you’ll think the opposite and blame bad luck for your setbacks.
- Morale: We fight to preserve our motivations and expectations. If you are committed to a new business idea, you might avoid evidence that it could fail. You want to protect your motivation to give it your best shot, holding on to your expectation that your hard work will pay off.
- Persuasion: We defend our ability to convince others. If you’re in the middle of a messy divorce or court battle, you might fiercely deny your adversary’s claims, however reasonable. You want to stay convinced of the righteousness of your cause so that you can be convincing to others.
- Image: We shield our reputation. If someone accuses you of plagiarism, you may look for all kinds of reasons why your uncited use of a source was excusable. As in the case of René Diekstra.
- Belonging: We protect our place of belonging in social groups. If your belief in God is required for membership and belonging in a community of faith (or required to keep your job in it), then you may tend to avoid evidence that God might not exist.
Each of these categories represents a way in which an idea can get caught up with one’s identity, understood in terms of social affiliations, personal commitments, and closely held goals, dreams, and values. So, then we get defensive about the idea, because by defending it, we think we are defending ourselves. While there is much more to say about motivated reasoning and many more ways to think about it (for example, the metaphor of the psychological immune system), I think Galef’s metaphors of the soldier and scout are especially helpful where rational persuasion is concerned. The issues where people have the most difficult time coming to a consensus are exactly the ones that we defend because of their connection to our social, political, and religious identities. In Galef’s terms, soldier mindset aims to protect the self/ego and thus manifests most forcefully when the self is threatened. Moreover, the self is threatened in rational discourse when our ideas are attacked, at least if the ideas under attack have become entangled with one’s identity. Most of us can probably agree that soldier mindset interferes with our ability to get to the truth through rational discourse: If an idea becomes too entangled with your identity, it will become next to impossible for anyone to persuade you that it is wrong as you dig in your heels to defend it. Thus, I suspect most people will agree that to improve rational discourse requires becoming better scouts ourselves.
Galef fleshes out several different strategies for accomplishing this. Her central idea is to change one’s guiding motivation in reasoning. We start actively caring more about the truth than making our ideas win, and we do so by intentionally challenging our ideas, a habit of mind that some psychologists have dubbed active open-mindedness.
Nevertheless, Galef is not the only one imagining what it might look like to make ourselves more amenable to revising our beliefs via rational discourse. For example, Scott Aikin and John Casey, leading defenders of head-on arguments, suggest that to have better arguments, we ought to do the following: have some intellectual humility, get more familiar with other perspectives, expect arguments to feel like attacks, learn how to view “losing” an argument in a positive light.
These correctives are helpful so far as they go, but what are they helpful for? It seems to me that they are all directed at making oneself better at receiving other peoples’ arguments, but they don’t necessarily make your own arguments any more effective, at least when we stop to consider the perils of activating defensiveness in others. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Aikin and Casey (and probably many others) think you should still be giving arguments for your position and that in many cases, this is the most fruitful approach to navigating disagreement. I won’t say they are entirely wrong. In some instances, head-on arguments are very helpful, “unaffiliated grad students” come to mind here. Another case is when you’re discussing some factual matter that has no grip on someone’s identity, as when you are arguing about the exact date the Declaration of Independence was signed. Yet, in many of the most important disagreements of our day, people do have a personal stake in the outcome (as I suggested above). In those cases, you might be conducting yourself like an inveterate scout, but even so, your attempts to persuade others with head-on arguments will likely fail in most cases. It may even feel like there was little point in trying.
Ever since the 1950s, social psychologists have been aware of the “boomerang effect,” whereby attempts to convey information have the opposite effect, as people respond by entrenching themselves deeper into what they already believe. Working on myself may help me become less likely to boomerang when someone gives me a direct argument, but it will probably do nothing to make my own attempts at persuasion less likely to boomerang.
In other words, rational discourse always involves more than one person, and so, if it is ailing or defective, it is unlikely to find its entire remedy in self-work. Some self-work is clearly necessary, but I would suggest we also need new ways of relating to each other when we are giving reasons and navigating different ideas together; ways that don’t put our conversation partner on the defensive and threaten to undermine our attempts at persuasion or the truths they may convey. That is what my next post here will offer.
