When you are in a debate or an argument with another person, there are two potential goals you can have. One potential goal is to win the argument. The other potential goal is to find out what is objectively true or objectively right. Though there can be shades of gray, I think that people tend to be shifted more towards one side. In other words, some people are not thinking as much about what is objectively right/true. They just want to win the argument. Other people care more about what is objectively true/right. They are concerned that their thinking may be misguided, and they want to be put right in the case that they are wrong.
People who just want to win the argument are going to exhibit certain behaviors. I figure that such people are going to talk more and listen less. When they do listen to the other person’s side of the debate, they are doing so not to genuinely understand the other person’s perspective, but rather to find fault. As the other person is talking to them, they will be constantly looking for fault so that they can secure their win. When they do this, they will often find fault before they even completely understand the other person’s argument in its entirety. In other words, they will jump to conclusions about why the other person thinks the way that he/she does before completely hearing the other person out.
Sometimes when people just want to win an argument, they pervert the other person’s assertions into something that they are not so that the other person’s perspective is made easier to criticize. For example, let us say that some women are complaining about “mansplaining” in the workplace, and a man invalidates their complaints by saying that mansplaining is defined as “whenever a man speaks”. In this case, the man is saying that these women do not want men to speak or express themselves at all. That is not necessarily true, however. In reality, mansplaining is defined as commenting on or explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner. In other words, these women are complaining that they are being talked down to by men who think that they are superior. As you can see, there is a discrepancy between what the man thinks that the women are complaining about and what the women are actually complaining about. By altering the definition of mansplaining to “whenever a man speaks”, the man is making it much easier to find fault with the complaints of these women.
If the man cared about what was objectively right, then he would have collected information from the women and the other men that they encountered. He would have tried to develop an understanding of why these women felt that they were being talked down to, and how they would like to be treated. He would have then considered whether men would still be able to express themselves while still treating the women the way that they want to be treated.
The straw man logical fallacy is the act of setting up a phony, weak, extreme or ridiculous parody of an opponent’s argument and then proceeding to knock it down or reduce it to absurdity with a rhetorical wave of the hand. For example, if the opponent is a vegetarian who claims that animals have feelings, the person may ask if anyone has ever heard a cow laugh at a joke. If the opponent is pro-life and against abortion, the person may judgmentally assume that the pro-lifers want women to be oppressed, pregnant and chained to the stove. In these scenarios, the person who wants to win the argument is trying to frame the opposing view into something that it is not so that it is easier to win.
When people just want to win an argument, the reasons, I figure, are ego and wishful thinking. In other words, sometimes people just want to feed their sense of pride. Other times people believe what they want to be true/right, but not what is evidently true/right.
Scenarios where the truth is more popular
While droves of people are more interested in winning an argument than in finding out what is objectively true/right, there are some situations where most people do care what is objectively true/right. For example, let us say that you decide to take a train from New York City to Boston. You are sitting on the train waiting for it to start moving when someone near you explains that you are wrong, the train is actually going to Philadelphia. Here, someone has expressed disagreement with you as to where the train is going. What do you care about more?—winning the argument or finding out where the train is actually going?
If you decide that winning the argument is more important, then your goal is to convince the other person that the train is actually going to Boston. If you succeed, then the other person will leave the train and go find another train. However, what if it turns out that the train you are on is really going to Philadelphia? You would end up in the wrong city, and you would be late for an important business meeting, BUT at least you won the argument with that other guy who thought the train was going to Philadelphia.
Another example: Let us say that you and another person are having a debate about whether the Atkins diet is a healthy diet. You argue that the Atkins diet is good for weight loss, vibrant health and longevity while the other person disagrees. Eventually, you win the argument and convince the other person that the Atkins diet is a good healthy diet. Now imagine that years later, you die a slow and painful death from heart disease because of the high fat content of the Atkins diet. Though you die a slow and painful death, at least you won the argument.
In these examples described above, a reasonable person would care more about the objective truth than about winning the argument. A reasonable person would be willing to find out that he/she is wrong if that is the case so that he/she could be put right.
A lesson we can learn from the examples above is that even when you win the argument, you may still be objectively wrong, and the truth will often be made known eventually. At that point you may look more foolish than if you just admitted that you were wrong in the beginning, and allowed yourself to lose the argument.
Another lesson we can learn from the examples above is that when you win an argument, and you turn out to be wrong later, you not only screw yourself over, but also other people. Think of the person who thought that the train was going to Philadelphia, and then left to go look for another train, not knowing that he was on the correct train at the start.
Goodness cares about what is right while evil just wants to win
Sometimes people are praised for having good debating skills. With good debating skills, we are good at being persuasive—not only towards the person with whom we are debating, but also towards others observing the debate. The problem comes when techniques emerge that involve deception and manufactured misunderstanding of the opposing side.
Let us say that you are a prosecutor and you are praised for having an 85% success rate. This may seem impressive, but what if only 60% of the defendants were actually guilty? That would mean that because you are “so good at your job”, innocent people have been prosecuted and sent to prison. Is this acceptable? According to the world, it is. When a destructive behavior is common, culture becomes desensitized to it, and eventually people just shrug their shoulders and mutter “that’s just how things are…”
While the law profession has sometimes been condemned for being corrupt, a lawyer can still carry out his/her work in a morally right manner by, for example, refusing to take a case if he/she has reason to believe that it does not represent what is true/right. In the long term, this can result in a higher success rate even though at times it can involve rejecting high-paying clients.
How do we define “winning an argument”?
When there are formal debates, the winner is generally chosen by a panel of judges who are supposed to be impartial. In informal debates, however, there are usually no 3rd party judges present, and so it is more difficult to define the winner and loser. Is the loser the one who stops arguing first? Is the loser the one who changes his/her mind to that of the opposing side? If we define the loser as the one who is persuaded of the opposing view, then we make it difficult to impossible to win an argument against an idiot. In order for a person to be persuaded to change sides, the person needs to first understand the other side, and this is more difficult for an idiot to do. Idiots find more difficulty in learning new concepts and taking in new information.
To persuade the opposing side of our view, we need to do some amount of talking. To be persuaded of the opposing view and thus change sides, we need to listen and understand. The thing is that listening, and especially understanding, requires much more cognitive capacity than talking and lecturing. The reason is that when we are talking, all we are doing is taking information that is already in our heads and spitting it out. Talking is so easy that even parrots can do it, and they do not even possess human intelligence! To listen and understand, however, we need to take in new information and make sense of it. This is more difficult.
So if we were to see an idiot having a debate with a smarter person, we may see the idiot doing more of the talking while the smarter person listens. The listener may look like he/she is just sitting there doing nothing, but in reality, he/she is doing more than the one who is doing all of the talking. Recall the scene from the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie where Dorothy asks the scarecrow “How can you talk if you do not have a brain”. The scarecrow comments that “some people without brains do an awful lot of talking”. We should try not to be one of those people.
Do you want to look smarter or get smarter?
I have a saying: if you want to look smarter, then use your mouth. If you want to get smarter, then use your ears.
I would imagine plenty of people saying that they would like to both look smarter and get smarter, but there is some degree of tradeoff. When we are too obsessed with looking smarter, we become unable to admit when we are wrong. Correspondingly, when our view is objectively wrong, we will be less likely to be corrected in a debate. Indeed, a debate is an opportunity to be put right in the case that we are objectively wrong; but it is harder to be corrected when we are too busy talking over the other person and finding fault in the opposing view that may not be there.
Additional behaviors exhibited by people who want to win
People who just want to win are more likely to be condescending and disrespectful towards the opposing view. Such people also are more likely to be aggressive and hostile. They may even take pride in making the other person cry. At this point, the debate is more like a verbal boxing match than it is a civilized discussion.
People in search of truth, on the other hand, are more likely to take the time to listen and understand. They are open to the possibility that they are wrong and the opposing side is right. Such open-mindedness is not always easy.
Sometimes when people just want to win an argument, they will falsely accuse the other person of falling into logical fallacies. For example, they may accuse the other person of the post hoc logical fallacy even when there is reason to believe that a cause-effect relationship does exist. They may accuse the other person of the slippery slope logical fallacy even when there is evidence of a chain reaction taking place. They may accuse the other person of the style-over-substance logical fallacy simply because the other person does not feel comfortable around someone who is dressed in shabby attire. The shabby attire is not necessarily what is causing the discomfort for all they know.
Most people hate hearing the other person say “you are wrong. This is what I think…”, but at least the person is addressing you as an equal and is taking the time to disagree with you. What I find to be more noxious and offensive is being told “well, if that’s how you feel…”. This expression also is an expression of disagreement, but with an additional condescending twist. Unlike the expressions “that’s what you think…” or “you are wrong”, the phrase “how you feel” to me implies that your view does not come from any reasoning, is not rooted in reality, and is rather just a feeling. While people sometimes say “I feel that…” as a way of admitting that they may be wrong, the act of telling someone “that’s how you feel” serves as a put-down in ways that saying “you are wrong” does not.
Summary
Let us say that you are having a disagreement with someone, and you really care about what is objectively true/right. If you see that the other person just wants to win the argument, then the two of you are not on the same page. You both have different agendas. What will probably happen is that you will do more of the listening, the other person will do more of the talking, and the other person may have the illusion of getting the upper hand simply because he/she is talking more. He/she may think that your talking less means that you are less knowledgable. This can be frustrating, but sometimes the right way is harder.
A debate can be one of two things: a search for truth or an ego fest.