The Argumentative Theory is relatively new, and people are pretty excited about it. They are excited because it makes sense of quite a few contradictions that exist in psychology around reasoning.
I am particularly interested myself because I have made a bit of study of ‘confirmation bias’, otherwise known as 'my-side bias', both in the research literature, but also making first-hand observations about how this works in my own head, but also in the accompanying social behaviours that confirmation bias compels.
How it works is that rather than taking on new ideas or information neutrally, we tend to gather information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We might also spend more time with people who share only the same ideas and beliefs as ourselves … and begin to share, what we now generally understand as, ‘group think’. In decision-making terms this is considered far from ideal. Sometimes you can observe people re-inforcing their point of view by 'borrowing' some confirmation bias, sometimes exaggerating a little, by saying things like 'everyone agrees with me' or 'anybody in their right mind can see...', or 'it is universally supported'. This is a common competitive 'debating' technique.
So what does The Argumentative Theory add? It puts forward the suggestion that ‘reasoning’ is a social constructed, evolutionarily helpful mechanism, designed to persuade another person to our argument. It suggests that reasoning is specifically for arguing. In this light confirmation bias becomes functional, rather than a cognitive shortcoming, because we are gathering support for our beliefs in order to persuade.
The new theory explains confirmation bias better, confirms that reasoning on one’s own leads to poor decision-making and suggests that reasoning in groups is better than on your own because reasoning together means we can potentially escape the bad consequences of confirmation bias.
It also confirms why collaborative learning, which we already know is a powerful learning and teaching tool, works so well. Very importantly, and a point I particularly like, it supports Deliberative Democracy… which involves a much more rigorous discussion. Rather than just voting, it tries to move beyond ideological jousting to making decisions through a process of collective reasoning, which the Argumentative Theory suggest could be better than making them on our own or even in a bias-laden environment. It also emphasises for me the value of neutral organisations which have created very open knowledge-sharing environments, such as the RSA (who are studying the 'real world' implications of just such research in their Social Brain project) and others.
The theorists who have been working on this also suggest that a self-concious awareness of these cognitive and social dynamics would change our behaviours, which is another aspect I like because it supports my own Informed Autonomy theory, which emerged from my research and suggests that knowledge about how we function changes how we behave. The current plan is to study this further later this year. Sounds very much like confirmation bias in action to me too!
It also starts to connect with social thinking and collaborative problem solving, which we see working so well in innovation.
This article in Edge has a good accompanying video by Hugo Mercier and links to lots of articles reacting to the new theory.
"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."
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