Winning an Argument
We spend a lot of our lives trying to persuade others. This is one of the reasons that Daniel Pink says that we're all in sales. There are many ways to change minds. We often try to convince people. In the difference between persuading and convincing, Seth Godin writes, But what do we do when this doesn't work?, Kathryn Schulz, in her book Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error, explains, This is what we normally do. We try to convince them that we're right and they are wrong. Most people, however, are not idiots., In many cases this is just us being overconfident about what we think  the illusion of explanatory depth. We really believe that we understand how something works when we don't. In a study about a decade ago, Yale professors Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, in a small study, asked students to explain how simple things work, like a flush toliet, a sewing machines, piano keys, a zipper, and a cylinder lock. But we're not nearly as smart as we think. When their knowledge was put to the test, their familiarity with these things led to an unwarranted overconfidence about how they worked. Most of the time people don't put us to the test. When they do, the results don't match our confidence. Interestingly, one of the best ways to really learn how something works is to flip this around. It's called the Feynman Technique., *** The Era of Fake Knowledge, It's never been easier to fake what you know to yourself and others. It's about energy conservation. Why put in the effort to learn something if we can get by most of the time without learning it?, We end up fooling ourselves. In a lecture at the Galileo Symposium in Italy in 1964, the future Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, said "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.", *** How to Win an Argument, Research published last year and brought to my attention by Mind Hacks shows how this effect might help you convince people they are wrong. Mind Hacks summarizes the work, ***, This simple technique is one to add to our tool belt. If you want to win an argument, ask the person trying to convince you of something to explain how it would work. Odds are they have not done the work required to hold an opinion. If they can explain why they are correct and how things would work, you'll learn something. If they can't you'll soften their views, perhaps nudging them ever so softly toward your views. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that someone might do the same to you. Join over 50,000 readers and get a free weekly update via email here.