Stuck in a Heated Argument? Follow the ‘ATL Rule’ to Ensure Everyone Wins

There are certain topics that we know will almost always lead to a heated argument.

When it comes to these hot-button issues, you may believe that your opponents aren’t just wrong, but that even entertaining their opinions appears deeply incorrect. And, of course, the other person thinks the exact same thing about you and your opinion.

This seems to be an almost inevitable back-and-forth of many contentious issues — but according to recent research published in Cognitive Science by researchers at Yale University, this need not be the case. The researchers argue that our unquestioned acceptance of our own positions and our blindness toward others’ opinions does not need to be a necessary feature of difficult conversations, provided one adopts the correct mindset. 

Approaching arguments as a cooperative endeavor, where one’s aim is to learn and walk away with a nuanced opinion, rather than a first-past-the-post competition, has the direct effect of making someone more open to entertaining the opinions of those with whom they disagree.

Arguing to win versus arguing to learn

In their article, Matthew Fisher and his colleagues examined how people think about contentious issues to see how one can be made more open toward divergent opinions. They start by discussing social reasoning, which appears to come in two main forms. The first would be the kind where you and peers collectively try to solve a problem with a definite, right-or-wrong answer to it.

The second and, for our purposes, more important kind of social reasoning is argumentation. Here, we start off with opposing views on an issue and present arguments for which side you should believe. It’s with argumentation that mindsets play a critical role.

Once a mindset is activated, it becomes much easier to apply the tools of that mindset to the task at hand. To make this more concrete, Fisher and colleagues identify two main mindsets that are relevant to arguments: arguing to learn and arguing to win.

• Arguing to learn: In the arguing-to-learn (ATL) mindset, you are focused on earnestly trying to cooperate with your interlocutor to understand and discover more about the topic at hand. What is of central importance to you in the ATL mindset is learning and coming to a more nuanced, accurate take on an issue. Previous research suggests an ATL mindset is also effective at increasing one’s comprehension of a topic and more likely to occur when arguing in an intimate, one-on-one setting. 

• Arguing to win: In contrast to the arguing-to-learn mindset is the arguing-to-win (ATW) mindset. In the ATW mindset, your sole focus is to win the argument–no matter the cost nor logical fallacies that run afoul. Learning more or increasing your comprehension of the issue is irrelevant to you here. Moreover, you see your interlocutor not as a companion in your honest struggle toward the truth, but an enemy to be given no quarter. As opposed to an ATL mindset, an arguing-to-win mindset is much more likely to crop up when arguing in public, as if one’s honor depends on outwitting the other person. 

This leads Fisher’s central research question: Does the mindset one has toward arguments lead to differences in whether they think that there is a single, objective truth to the issue, and hence whether they’ll entertain different opinions on the issue? Fisher and colleagues hypothesized that when a person adopts an arguing-to-win mindset, they’ll be more likely to be objectivists about the issue, and hence more intolerant toward other opinions.

How they studied it

To see if how we understand the truth of an issue can be altered by how we approach arguments, Fisher and colleagues had participants interact in an online chatroom on a variety of contentious issues. Upon their arrival at the lab, participants were given a selection of contentious topics on which they needed to state their position. These topics were vetted in advance to ensure that they’d be likely to lead to a heated debate under normal circumstances, such as the reality of climate change or the wage gap between men and women. Once this was done, the experimenters put participants in pairs of two, where each participant took an opposing stance to their partner on at least three issues to ensure that the two wouldn’t simply agree with one another. 

Here, participants were split into two conditions: a “cooperative” condition, where they were encouraged to adopt an ATL mindset, and a “competitive” condition, where they were encouraged to adopt an ATW mindset. In the competitive condition, participants were told that they would need to justify their position on three issues to a participant who has a strong stance on each of the issues. 

Then, a moderator in the online chatroom would introduce the topic that the participants would be discussing and ensured that the participants stayed on topic. Each of the conditions was given a maximum of four minutes to discuss the topic.

As expected, they found support for their main hypothesis. When participants approached an argument as a cooperative exchange that was intended to facilitate learning and depth of understanding (i.e., approach it with an ATL mindset), they were less likely to believe that there is a single, objective truth to the issue at hand. But when participants adopted an arguing-to-win mindset, where their main goal was to simply win the argument rather than learn, they were more likely to believe that there was a single truth to the issue and hence were less likely to accept opinions that diverged from their own.

As a follow-up, Fisher and colleagues found that people’s natural starting point, without being given any sort of mindset prompts, was indistinguishable from the competitive (i.e., argue-to-win mindset) condition in study 1a. This means that people’s default view on contentious issues is that there is a single objective truth to the issue, and may seem to automatically adopt an arguing-to-win mindset. 

Get on the same page 

Contentious arguments often run afoul of the rule that interlocutors should always be arguing about the same thing–else the two of you end up talking past one another and at times not even disagreeing with one another but simply failing to notice that you’re on separate pages. This may be the case with arguing-to-win and arguing-to-learn mindsets, where you may be trying to learn as much as you can from the discussion, but your colleague may be more interested in simply winning the argument without an ounce of concern for learning anything. 

As a result, the argument may seem to benefit only one person, or simply leave unchanged opinions that should probably be changed. Thus, it would be more beneficial for all those involved in such discussions if you subtly hint that you’re not here to “win” anything, but simply to understand and learn as much about the issue as possible. Doing so may help in getting your opponent to adopt an arguing-to-learn mindset to make them less of an objectivist and so more willing to hear other opinions on the matter.