How to Win Your Next Political Argument

1. Forget Facts.

• Psychologists who study political belief think it’s adorable how obsessed argumentative people are with those cute little things called facts.
• The process of belief formation runs in the opposite direction than we’d hope: People “come to the conclusion first, and then the reasons they kind of pull out just to support their beliefs.” [according to Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at Stanford]

2. Let your opponent hang him or herself.

• “illusion of explanatory depth”. If you ask the average person to explain why they hold a given opinion, “They will come to realize the limitations of their own understanding,” said Frank C. Keil, a Yale University psychologist who studies intuitive beliefs and explanatory understanding.
• if you ask them gently and non-aggressively to walk you through their point of view, they’ll likely see the holes more.

3. Don’t be such a dick.

4. Defuse disgust.

• if you look around, you’ll see political arguments couched in disgust everywhere
• simply asking your adversary not to be disgusted could be a surprisingly successful strategy.

5. Change the frame.

• Moral Foundations Theory, or MFT. MFT posits that there are five foundations to moral beliefs: care/harm (whether other beings are being hurt); fairness/cheating (whether people are treating each other fairly); loyalty/betrayal (whether people are exhibiting loyalty to their group); authority/subsversion (whether people are playing by the rules); and sanctity/degradation (whether people are sullying physical or spiritual things that are sacred). According to the theory, liberals and conservatives view these concerns differently. For liberals, care/harm and fairness/cheating are the most important of the five, while conservatives are more into loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

Pulling It All Together

• too many of us, having spent countless hours watching jerks on TV scream at each other, have developed bad argumentative habits.