I love this and agree for sure. I used to be a big arguer. Now I am have a lot more success in sharing my perspective and helping people see another way by asking the right questions. This is a very powerful thing to be aware of. Thanks for the great post. 

In my last post, I introduced Julia Galef’s way of thinking about motivated reasoning, what she calls soldier mindset: people take ideas personally, and then respond with defensiveness when “their” ideas are attacked. Among other things, soldier mindset leads people to evaluate evidence in a different way, depending on whether it supports their favored ideas or not. Soldier mindset helps explain why attempts to convince people with direct arguments not only fail to work as intended but actually backfire, making people become further entrenched in what they already believe. Plenty of people have offered ways to work on ourselves to become less defensive when our ideas are attacked. Basically, they are recommending that we take on a mindset more like a scout than a soldier, where our interest is primarily in figuring out how things really are, rather than in defending a particular idea that has become personally significant. Nevertheless, I would suggest that we also need to more fundamentally change the way that we relate to others in our attempts to persuade.

alter_native

_Isaac Wiegman, April 24, 2024_

![t67t67.webp](https://m.stacker.news/28039)

> In my last post, I introduced Julia Galef’s way of thinking about motivated reasoning, what she calls soldier mindset: people take ideas personally, and then respond with defensiveness when “their” ideas are attacked. Among other things, soldier mindset leads people to evaluate evidence in a different way, depending on whether it supports their favored ideas or not. Soldier mindset helps explain why attempts to convince people with direct arguments not only fail to work as intended but actually backfire, making people become further entrenched in what they already believe. Plenty of people have offered ways to work on ourselves to become less defensive when our ideas are attacked. Basically, they are recommending that we take on a mindset more like a scout than a soldier, where our interest is primarily in figuring out how things really are, rather than in defending a particular idea that has become personally significant. Nevertheless, I would suggest that we also need to more fundamentally change the way that we relate to others in our attempts to persuade.
> 
> ### [... read more](https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/04/24/an-alternative-to-argumentation-persuasion-via-questions/)

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