What is the best style of debate for persuasion?

Great Debates
1

This was a question that came up in another post, but it seems like a hard problem and I don’t have the answer.

What style and form of debate is the best at persuading people, and potentially the debaters themselves?

I wonder if the last requires a NON public forum to eliminate the need to save face in public? Has there ever been a televised debate where one side conceded that the other side was right?
Is calling it a “debate” in the first place counter productive? Would calling something a discussion be more conducive to dialog and hashing ideas out?
I used to think it was always best to have hyper intelligent people that were extremely knowledgeable about the subject was always ideal, and I think that is still better than having people who do not know as much, but I think that alone might not be enough. I remember reading recent research that suggested that greater knowledge of a subject INCREASED polarization on a topic, likely because people with greater knowledge can better select the bits that conform to their world view. The one group that was more resistant to this were the science “curious” that were more open to looking at arguments and data that went against their own views. So would having debaters that were more like the latter crowd be more conducive to persuasion?

Are formal debates with moderators inherently inferior? The intelligence squared debates are structured but are fairly decent in my mind, but political debates with moderators are just so much fluff and talking to the camera.
What is the answer? Answers?

2

I don’t have an answer, but I got excited when I read this thread topic because this is something I was pondering just the other day. College debating seems to have fallen apart lately. Presidential debates don’t really persuade people about policy issues so much as give candidates a chance to introduce themselves to a wider audience. Debates here at the Dope don’t seem to sway people from one position to another with much regularity, although we sometimes succeed in fighting pieces of ignorance here or there.

3

Demonstrate a full, fair and honest understanding of your opponent’s position.

4

I don’t think there’s any one answer to the question in the OP, and it’s highly dependent on the nature of the participants and the audience.

I think there’s a difference between polarization and openness to being convinced. You’re talking about the latter in this thread, but the factor in this quote relates to the former.

I think the same is also true of openness to being convinced, but for a different reason. People who know a lot about a topic are more likely to have already formed an opinion on the subject. People who already have an opinion on a subject are much harder to convince than people who do not.

5

This, plus the “gadfly” technique : ask why they believe this or that, increase questioning around weak or bullshit arguments (but don’t bite or poke fun !)

6

For actually changing people’s minds, your best best is appeals to emotion. Facts don’t help, and can even make things worse, especially when the issue at hand relates to someone’s sense of identity. You need a big wallop of emotional force to overcome that. This is why fear is the effective propaganda tool that it is.

Now, if you want to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong a lot of the above advice will be helpful, but that sense of curiosity is fairly rare. And even those that do have it usually only have it with regard to certain subject matters.

7

Yelling over the other person, and when that fails disparaging their mother.

One thing I’ve heard is asking them to play devils advocate, ask them to defend positions they normally are at odds with.

Another is to keep asking ‘so why do you believe that’ in a non-confrontational way (that is interesting, tell me more). Sooner or later they will realize their beliefs have no foundation or are contradictory if you push hard enough. It doesn’t mean they’ll change their beliefs though.

8

I like the sound of this. Can you think of an example where this has been done (and was it successful)? Are there any debaters / public figures / etc. that you can think of today that are good at this?

9

Short paragraphs and posts. The wall-of-text approach turns people right off.

10

I don’t have video but an example would be after listening to someone say back to them ‘so you are saying XYZ because XYZ’ to ensure you are showing you understand their views.

Part of the problem is that our views on intimate subjects (religion, politics, etc) is tied into our morals and our identity. Any attempt to change these views by force (like forcing them to confront logical inconsistencies) will result in the other person digging their heels in and getting angry .

11

Someone above at least obliquely mentioned this, but it needs more direct emphasis:

no debate technique or approach can work to persuade, unless the goal of the the debate participants is to discover truth.

Outside of places such as Universities, where the debates are carefully designed as exercises in reasoning and or speaking skills, the vast majority of so-called debates, do not take place between people who are after reality, they take place between adversaries who hope to win something.

It is like asking how best to fight a bloody war against someone, in hopes of persuading them to how rational, intelligent, and thoughtful your people are.

However. If what you want to do, is to interact with an individual who is not already on your side, and coax them in to altering their course, I do have some suggestions. Again as someone said above, it is very important to demonstrate to them that you are genuinely interested in dealing with what they are concerned about. If your goal in the interaction is to prevent them from addressing their worries, and displacing their goals for yours, you will directly (and very logically) cause them to reject anything you try to say to them

In my opinion, the primary reason for the Era of Great Political Intransigence and Inertia, which we seem to be adrift in, is the direct and logical result of all the most powerful people in the US, deciding and declaring that they only want to address the concerns of THEIR SIDE, and that the “other side’” concerns, are entirely invalid, or even treasonous.

Another sort of “technique” you can use, is similar to what someone again pointed out above. That is, to listen to the other side’s logic, and demonstrate to them using their own goals and methods, that what they propose will not accomplish their desires. Essentially, what was mentioned above, but not labeled such, is to use the Socratic Method. That is to ask questions which allow the other person to reason for themselves, following their own course, to the different conclusion.

12

For political debates, I would probably suggest that we drop the “two guys on a stage at the same time” concept. Possibly, back in history, political debates were real debates, conducted by people who had spent real time dedicated to learning rhetoric and debate rules. (Though, realistically, I somewhat doubt this.)

Instead, I think we should start having them give back-to-back Powerpoint presentations. This would give them some visuals to point at - which helps with any sort of technical discussion - and really lay out a line of reasoning, without being interrupted.

And you could still give them each a couple of runs, so as to be able to criticize the other person’s presentation (maybe let them run through the other person’s deck of slides).

13

I’m increasingly of the persuasion that ‘don’t do it online’ will increase your chances of success.

14

Some think using a combination of empathy, reason, and facts to build rapport and persuade is a good method. Others think shrieking “racist” or “Nazi” and when that fails beating on the person works. Who’s to know who’s right.

15

I don’t have any very good examples beyond personal experience - In cases where my mind has ever been changed on any major topic, it has always been because the person who persuaded me understood my side of the argument as well as I did, and could show me the problems with it, without ever giving me the opportunity to complain that they were distorting or misrepresenting my views.

This works best, I would say, in domains where there is a factual basis for the ‘right’ position (or a measurable absence of factual basis for the other) - i.e. creationism/evolution, vaccination and other medicine, various claims about supernatural phenomena, etc.

It doesn’t work quite so well in ‘soft’ or complex domains such as politics, where there is no hard fact at the bottom level - it’s all about whether something works or not, and that’s hard to measure, contains mixed results anyway, and is affected by a great many confounding factors.
But even there, fully understanding your opponent’s position allows you to gently point them at (what you perceive to be) a serious flaw, without any counterproductive distractions.

Basically, if the debate is about the topic, it’s productive. The moment the debate turns into an argument about the people debating, or their methods of debating (i.e. “that’s not what I said”/“If you believe that, then you must also think this”), it’s on a downward spiral.

16

That’s just the sort of thing a Nazi racist would… Wait no! It was just a joke! Help! Mods going for my crotch! It was a joookkeee! explodes into a shower of blood

17

Short posts take a LOT longer to write than long ones.

18

Fundamentally, I think, you don’t persuade people in debates at all. It is by its very nature confrontational and aggressive; it’s a contest and one side wins and the other loses, based on the audience response.

I’d say the only real way to change someone else’s attitude is empathy and exposure. Let’s say, an older white man who has never ever seen a Muslim, much less spoken to one, but is certain that they are the spawn of Satan. If he somehow found himself eating dinner regularly with a Muslim family and spent that time discussing mutual concerns – worries about jobs, acceptance for their beliefs, security for their families, good schools, the NCAA playoffs, housebreaking a puppy, and terrorism (which actually affects Muslims a thousand times more than US white people) … my guess is that might really change that guy’s beliefs.

Spewing statistics? Humiliating him in front of an audience with your big words? Calling him a racist nativist idiot? Probably not.

19

Emotion is powerful, but it can be empathy as well as fear. As much as I hate to admit it “Empathetic facts” (possibly anecdotes) have worked for me better than either pure facts or emotion. Example:

Me: Environmental regulations are generally good.

Not convincing to me: Regulations cost industry $N and we’d have M more jobs id we got rid of them, so they’re bad (Even if I admitted the numbers were accurate, I’d just reply with statistics on human health and so forth).

Convincing to me: Sure, clean water is good in general, but Obama rolled out this rule change and my permitting process doubled and I couldn’t build something I wanted, and it wasn’t anything that dirty anyway - it was a real pain to me and no benefit to the environment, just paperwork!

Now, of course, the latter wouldn’t change my tune instantly, but it makes me question the methods and implementation of environmental rules, or if Obama exceeded his authority in that particular case case. I empathize emotionally with the person (it’s not like I wish trouble on people for no reason) wonder whether there’s a middle ground, whether the rule lumped hurt small-scale folks too much in trying to get at “big polluters”, and so forth.

20

I’d say, “ransom notes”, with credit to Elmore Leonard.