Win Every Argument, Summary Part 1
Book by Mehdi Hasan
Chapter 1: Winning over an Audience.
Reading the room is critical.
1. To win an argument is to win over your audience. Many times your audience might not share your point of view. In such situations, it is important to make the argument more palatable for the audience. It is important to put your argument and adapt your argument to the language of the audience.
2. Content, references, quotes, tone, and voice modulation are the areas that can be adapted to the language and affiliation of the audience.
3. Do proper research before an event about the audience. You know how to convince your family members because you have learned the ways to convince them. Similarly, you have to learn the way to convince your audience. To know your audience it is important to ask 3 questions.
a. How big is the audience?
b. What kind of people constitute the audience?
c. What’s the rough demographic of the audience? Are they students or professionals? Are they young or old? Are they male or female? Black or white? Political or apolitical? Etc.
4. Human attention span is very small. Therefore, it’s very important to grab the attention of the audience at the very onset.
5. You can not start with a mundane phrase. Start with a question. The knowledge gap always attracts people. Start with a story, a good interesting story.
6. It is extremely important to attract the audience with the very first line. It is important to surprise them to grab their attention.
Holding on to the attention of the audience:
In a debate or a speech, we are not trying to change the minds of our opponents but we are trying to change the minds of our audience in our favour. To do that it is important to hold on to the attention of your audience.
1. Make eye contact: Prepare well. Don’t read from notes or ppts. The audience is there to see you and to be seen by you. Make eye contact with every single corner of the audience. Eye contact is the non-verbal equivalent of addressing someone by their name. It helps the audience to feel important and to be seen.
2. Heap Praise: Praising the audience or the city from which they are from helps you to charm them. Your praise should be tailored to reflect actual familiarity with the place or with the audience.
3. Get personal: Share a personal emotional story or a self-deprecating joke. No argument is ever made in a vacuum. To like your argument, your audience must like you first.
Chapter 2: Feelings not (just) Facts
If you want to persuade an audience the facts are not enough. To move people to your side you need to make them care about your side. That is why appealing to emotions and showing a human side is very important.
Aristotle described 3 modes of persuasion:
1. Ethos: when people’s character or reputation adds weight to their argument.
Eg: when a doctor says: get the vaccination. My years of study and practice suggest that they prevent diseases.
2. Pathos: when emotions, empathy, and sympathy in a person’s argument add weight to their argument.
Eg: when a doctor says: get the vaccination. Radha and her husband died last week leaving their kids an orphan as they did not get vaccinated.
3. Logos: when logic, facts & statistics add value to a person’s argument.
Eg: when a doctor says: get the vaccination. 90% of people taking vaccination do not contract covid, according to a new research study.
Logos alone do not provide for a strong persuasive argument. Because in recent research studies it has been seen that, when people lose their ability to feel, they also stop making rational decisions.
Human beings are not thinking animals who can also feel. But they are feeling animals who can also think.
Pathos is a vehicle to deliver Logos to the audience. Pathos is the main element of any argument or speech.
To win an argument is to make people make a decision in your favor. The following are the ways of persuasion:
1. Tell stories: Stories are to human beings what water is to fishes. It’s been seen in research that storytelling can help to sync the brains of the listeners with the brain of the teller as it evokes similar emotional responses in the minds of the listeners as in the mind of the teller. A story is up to 22 times more effective than a fact. Those who can tell a compelling story are the ones who can rule. To think of a story, think of people and their circumstances who have been affected by the motion that you are arguing for.
2. Use your words carefully: Use words that evoke pathos. Use exaggerated words to evoke sentiments in favor of your motion.
3. Show, don’t just tell: When making an argument, one must come across as authentic. Showing emotions helps you to achieve that. Displaying your feelings helps everyone to connect with you easily.
To evoke a feeling in favor of your argument it’s important to feel your argument yourself.
The best time to show emotions is whenever you genuinely feel. But it’s a good practice to start and end your argument with emotions.
It’s been shown in studies that people don’t vote for what they agree with. They vote for what they like. People like what they can emotionally connect with and that’s what they vote for.
Political left very often keeps its arguments devoid of emotions and very often the right assumes a monopoly over emotions and that’s why their arguments stick so often.
Whenever there is a battle between Pathos and Logos, Pathos will usually will.
Chapter 3: Show your Receipts.
Although society is fast moving towards a post-truth Era, where facts don’t matter much many Surveys and Researches Show that Facts still have a place in society when it comes to shaping public opinion.
Pathos is idealistic whereas logos is an undeniable proof that is essential to build opinions. Having the knowledge of how emotions work can help us to use them to our best advantage by carefully delivering logos.
To deliver Logos:
1. Find Receipts: it’s essential to find facts, events, and quotes which favor your arguments and downplay the opponent's arguments. It’s important to know that your opponents will have a response prepared for the most common surface-level facts. To deliver a knockdown punch it is essential to dig deep and find points for which your opponent might not be prepared for. Thorough research is extremely important.
2. Create your Receipts: While arguing if you catch your opponent contradicting himself then point it out. Use their own words against them. This is powerful. Because the audience has heard them contradicting themselves and bringing this to the notice of an audience only adds weight to your argument.
3. Time your Receipts: it’s important to fight the urge to give away all your facts all at once. The best way to deliver your Receipts is to first quote something without a source. This will allow doubt or curiosity to develop in the opponent. The opponent will deny it and then you can present your undeniable Receipts.
Best receipts are those which you can show physically in a printout. Such Receipts can boost your confidence while reducing your opponent’s. Bring the studies and quotes from other experts on the topic to the discussions. This creates a chorus of experts at your side.
Chapter 4: Play the Ball and the Man.
Ad Hominem arguments are the arguments applied against a person.
Conventional wisdom holds ad hominem arguments with contempt. It’s considered:
1. Informal fallacy: This means that you reach a conclusion with a faulty premise.
2. Unsubstancial: It shows that your argument is on shaky ground as you lack the logic to back and hence you are attacking your opponent.
3. A sign of rudeness and insult to your opponent.
In the real world ad hominem attacks can prove to be a necessary tactic. They discredit your opponents and their arguments at the same time.
People often use their ethos or their personal credibility to back their arguments. In such situations, it’s fruitful to go after their ethos using an ad hominem attack.
3 types of Ad Hominem attacks:
1. Abusive: this is an attack against a person’s character flaw which could be real or imaginary. It’s all about the reputation of the person and their ethos.
2. Circumstantial: this is an attack against any possible conflict of interest and bias of your opponent. The point of such an attack is to put a seed of doubt in the mind of the audience regarding the credibility of the ground on which the opponent stands.
It’s been shown in research that allegations of conflict of interest are as strong as allegations of fraud.
3. Tu Quoque (Hypocritical): The purpose of such an attack is to bring to light the hypocritical actions or words of your opponents.
An ad Hominem attack is a fallacy only when it’s used to dismiss your opponent's arguments. But it’s a legitimate form of rhetoric which is a useful tool for persuasion.
An ad hominem attack must be bundled as a part and parcel of a larger argument. At the very end of an argument that is filled with Pathos and Logos, attacking the ethos of your opponent is much more effective.
How to deploy an ad hominem attack?
Research the biography, resume, scandals, and controversies of your opponent.
An ad hominem attack is deployed in the real world by targeting opponents' 3 C’s
1. Character: research the character, misdeeds, and misdemeanors of the opponent. In many debates, you will face an opponent who’s a bigot in real life. In such cases, it becomes important to expose the person behind the argument to your audience. In such a situation define, identify, and characterize your opponent in front of your audience for who they really are.
2. Credentials: As soon as the opponent uses her Credentials to support their argument attack their Credentials. The best way to do this is to ask some questions to inform your audience why your opponent shouldn’t be taken seriously. Questions like:
a. What do they know about the issue?
b. When did they become an expert on the issue?
c. What qualifications do they have to pass a judgment on the issue?
3. Claims: Show to the audience the fate of claims that your opponent had made earlier, when the claim met the test of reality. Show the audience a track record of the opponent, of how their past claims were all wrong.
Defense against Ad Hominem attacks.
Using ad hominem arguments is a high-risk high reward strategy that shouldn’t be used in an academic setting as it will be regarded as a logical fallacy there. But in the real world, it is still very useful.
To defend an ad hominem attack there are 3 strategies:
1. Call it out as a logical fallacy.
2. Accept it and move on
3. Attack is the best defense. Attack your opponent in response to an ad hominem attack.
Chapter 5: Listen, don’t just speak.
Winning a debate isn’t just about speaking well. It’s about listening well too.
The marked difference between listening and hearing is the fact that listening is a process of actively comprehending what you are hearing and hearing is simply a biological process of turning sound vibrations into information.
If you don’t listen well to what your opponent is saying then you will end up responding to what you assume they are saying or to what you wanted them to say.
There are 2 types of listening. Critical Listening and Empathetic Listening.
To defeat an opponent’s argument learn to be a critical listener. To win over an audience, learn to be an empathetic listener
Critical Listen: A process of comprehending an argument and evaluating its soundness. You have to be a Critical listener to determine the varsity or everything that your opponent is saying.
3 Things to look for in the Argument of your opponent:
1. False Claims: Only if you listen critically, you will be able to keep track of all the arguments that the opponent is making. It is helpful to highlight the false claims that the opponents make using receipts of your own.
2. Fallacious claims: Critical listening can help you to poke holes in the logic of the opponent and to highlight fallacies and contradictions in their arguments.
3. Concession: when you come across a point that is right and genuinely lacks a counter then you can concede to the argument of the opponent. This can help you shock your opponent if they were not ready for it.
2 ways to improve your critical listening:
1. Keep an open mind: Do not assume that your opponent is wrong, silly, or dumb. Don’t dismiss their arguments at hand. Listen carefully to valid arguments or clever lines that you may need to concede to or debunk respectively, later on.
2. Clear your Mind: Put your phone, laptop, or any other distraction aside. Calm your mind. Don’t think about what you have to speak next. Be in the moment and focus narrowly on what’s being uttered by your opponent. Do not try to multitask.
3. Take Notes: Mind, memory, and focus can be improved by the act of note-taking. Take notes of what seems important in the opponent’s argument or about what seems to be missing from their argument. It has been shown in research that note-taking radically improves the ability of individuals to listen critically.
Empathetic Listening
Critical Listening is what we should be doing when the opponent is speaking. Empathetic Listening is what we should do when the audience is speaking. The goal of empathetic listening is to see the world from the point of view of the audience.
While listening to the audience, don’t get distracted. Pay your full, undivided attention to the audience. Don’t make it look like you want to be someplace else. Don’t talk down to your audience. The audience wants to see that you understand their concerns and emotions and you are likable and relatable.
To improve Empathetic Listening:
1. Stay Present: make it clear to the speaker and the rest of the audience that you are focused on what they are saying using your body language. Be free of all physical and mental distractions.
2. Make Eye Contact: It helps the brain to generate an empathetic response in the mind of the listeners, as has been proven in research.
3. Ask the right question: Pose questions to the speaker to drive the conversation. Pose open-ended questions.
To be a good listener of the critical and empathetic type you need patience, concentration, and self-discipline.
