Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

Incivility: Groups are more polarized when they talk more negatively about the people at the other pole

Antagonism is about how people feel, but these private feelings often get expressed in public speech

Distance plus homogeneity equals polarization. These features together are enough to capture the metaphor of poles, since the North and South Poles are points far from each other

When they talk with opponents, they do not try to give reasons but instead resort to emotional appeals, verbal abuse, jokes at their expense, and threats of ostracism or worse. Or they quickly change the subject to avoid uncomfortable disagreements. None of these reactions builds bridges or solves problems

What Arguments Can Do

Who Is the Slave?

Is There Any Hope?

What Do We Get Out of Arguing?

Learning

Respect

Humility

Abstraction

Compromise

Where Do We Stand Now?

Other forms of verbal abuse impose similar costs. If I tell my friend that her position is wrong, she can ask me why it is wrong, and then we can still have a fruitful discussion in many cases. However, if I tell her that her position is ridiculous, that means that it deserves ridicule instead of reason. If she does not want to be ridiculed, why should she ask me why I think that her position is ridiculous?

It might be useful for therapists to listen to them in order to find out which mental illness they have, and it might be calming to them for friends and relatives to listen to or talk with them. But that is not really having a conversation in the sense of an intentional exchange of information and reasons. When people are “fully insane,” we do not bother to tell them what is wrong with their views or give them reasons to change. We try to cure them instead of reasoning with or learning from them.

No single explanation can do justice to all of the many influences that push opponents apart. Still, we can learn a lot by focusing on one factor, which is often overlooked. Here it is: Instead of listening to and trying to understand our opponents, we interrupt, caricature, abuse, and joke about them and their views.

Instead of trying to understand each other, both sides spread inaccurate caricatures of their opponents. When opponents make such assumptions and toss around such misleading stereotypes, it becomes hard for them to understand each other properly.

Instead of civilly asking why people adopt their positions, today we tend to assume that we already know their reasons. Of course, the reasons that we ascribe to them are rarely their real reasons, and they are rarely the best reasons for their views. Instead, we too often try to beat opponents by putting them in a bad light.