How to Make Your Arguments Stronger (Hint: Longer Is Not the Answer) ( Archived) (7)

Resist the temptation to bury people under a blizzard of evidence, says psychology researcher Niro Sivanathan. He explains why.
TED Ideas

Niro Savanthan



ave you ever been in a heated discussion (Breaking Bad vs. The Wire; spring vs. fall; small college vs. large university; carbon offsets vs. renewable energy credits) and wanted so badly to show the other person just how wrong they were? If you’re like most of us, you tried to overwhelm your opponent with sheer quantity, to barrage them with every scrap of evidence you could think up.

As it turns out, piling on the proof is an unwise approach, says Niro Sivanathan, a psychology researcher and associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School in a TEDxLondonBusinessSchool talk. That’s because when we double down on our arguments, we’re setting ourselves up to be undone by the so-called “dilution effect”.

For humans, receiving too much information interferes with our ability to process it. Sivanathan explain that our minds deal with this by quickly sorting the input received into two types: diagnostic and non-diagnostic. He says, “Diagnostic information is information of relevance to the evaluation being made; non-diagnostic is information that is irrelevant or inconsequential to that evaluation. When both categories of information are mixed, dilution occurs.”

Now you have no excuse

Very good glasshoppe, i can see my teachings have not fallrn on deaf ears, at least you have your hearing aid on