Most people are bad at arguing. These 2 techniques will make you better.
Argue better — with science.
1) If the argument you find convincing doesn’t resonate with someone else, find out what does
The answer to polarization and political division is not simply exposing people to another point of view.
On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like: "No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America." And they think other people will find this compelling, too.
Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
What both sides fail to understand is that they're arguing a point that their opponents have not only already dismissed but may be inherently deaf to.
"The messages that are intuitive to people are, for the most part, not the effective ones," Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and psychology at Stanford University, told me in 2015.
How to sway the other side: Use their morals against them
Willer’s work is based on moral foundations theory. It's the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations are more stalwart: They favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.
The chart below shows how well the moral reframing worked for each policy area in Willer’s study. To be clear, there's only so much that reframing in terms of values can do: It can't turn an anti-Obamacare conservative into a proponent, but it can soften his stance and get him to listen to counterarguments.