For Argument's Sake: Evidence That Reason Can Change Minds

By Tom Stafford

Are we irrational creatures, swayed by emotion and entrenched biases? Modern psychology and neuroscience are often reported as showing that we can't overcome our prejudices and selfish motivations. Challenging this view, cognitive scientist Tom Stafford looks at the actual evidence. Re-analysing classic experiments on persuasion, as well as summarising more recent research into how arguments change minds, he shows why persuasion by reason alone can be a powerful force.

This is a collection of previously published essays, revised and expanded by the author, and accompanied by a previously unpublished introduction and annotated bibliography to guide further reading on the topic.

Tom Stafford is Lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Stafford
• Release date: Jul 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310801877

Tom Stafford

Tom Stafford has a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and is currently a research associate in the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield. He is also an associate editor of the Psychologist magazine and has previously worked as a freelance writer and researcher for the BBC.

Book preview

For argument's sake:

evidence that reason can change minds

by Tom Stafford

@tomstafford on twitter

Illustrations by Harriet Cameron

Contents

Introduction

For argument's sake: evidence that reason alone can change minds

Wrong, but not irrational

Further reading

Acknowledgements

License

Introduction

Now, two centuries into the age of reason, our collective endorsement of human irrationality is at a high-water mark. By this I don't just mean the fads, conspiracy theories and fundamentalisms that beset society, but also how we talk about the human ability to reason, how we collectively think of ourselves.

The attempt to scientifically study reasoning, my field of academic psychology, seems preoccupied with our limits and errors. One of the most successful research programmes in psychology has been the heuristics and biases approach, kickstarted by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their landmark 1974 paper [1], and for which Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel prize in 2002. One reading of this literature is as a collection of the flaws in our thinking - a roll-call of failure. And in parallel to the psychologists whose research careers are dedicated to the systematic errors in our thinking, so the media seems over-ready to pick up and publish these errors. Something about headline writers draws them to stories depicting our choices as unreliable, or - worse - not even our choices, that we are controlled by our brains or our genes or random aspects of the environment. The portrait drawn is one in which our values and choices as are as likely to be determined by whether we happen to be holding a hot cup of coffee as by what we sincerely believe.

The central essay of this ebook was written as a response to this celebration of irrationality. The question it asks is whether it is possible to look hard at the evidence and come up with a different interpretation - that although the funeral lengthened, reason never died.

Part of the problem is that irrationality seems ubiquitous