It’s not what you think that matters, but how you think it…
The class begins with a question: what colour is this dress?
Some say black and blue and others say white and gold. We appear to be at an impasse. I tell the class they need to make a decision and we experiment with a number of ways of doing this.
First, I ask them to shout the colour they see as loud as possible. White and gold shout louder so that decides it, right? The class object — just because one side is louder than the other, it doesn’t mean they’re correct. OK. So, next I ask for a show of hands. The majority clearly see white and gold, so surely now our qualm is settled. Still the class object — even those who won the vote — a majority can still be wrong.
I suggest we consult the experts then. The twitterati seem to care an awful lot about the opinion of a certain Mr Bieber from Canada and he says it’s white and gold — or black and blue. I forget. One student suggests we consult the person who took the picture in the first place until I tell them that it was she who started the whole thing by referring to it as the white and gold dress she planned to wear to the wedding of her daughter, who saw black and blue. The result of that exchange, I hear, was a damning indictment of the daughter’s eyesight that quickly escalated into a row.
Ten minutes have gone by and we’re still at an impasse. The students are getting irritated, mainly because they are fully grown adults with lives and families who couldn’t care less about the colour of a solitary dress. All of them already know the answer to the question thanks to the carpet-bombing of their newsfeeds when the story originally ‘broke’. And yet, they’re still not sure how they would go about resolving their meaningless disagreement if they hadn’t known the answer.
They came here to learn how to debate, the first crop of adult students to do so as part of Lambeth council’s revamped efforts to tackle extremism and radicalisation in the community. Instead, here I am wasting their time.
Suddenly, Eureka! One of the students suggests we stop looking at the photo of the dress, the results of which are clearly inconclusive, and track the dress itself down to see if it looks different ‘in the fabric’ so to speak. She also recommends that we cross-reference this with a search for the dress on the website of the company who made it, which will surely state its actual colour.
No objections. Some still see white and gold and some still see black and blue, but now they all agree that this is the best way to tell one way or the other. They also all accept that unless the dress actually is two colours at once, there is every chance they will be proved wrong. But this is OK because the reason why they are wrong will make sense to them and they will now be able to concentrate on explaining why the photo looks different from the dress itself.
That is how you win a debate.
My students learned an important lesson that day. Debating a contentious question needn’t be a zero sum choice between demonising your opponent and meekly agreeing to disagree. Instead it becomes a collaborative process in which both sides agree on the ‘rules of the game’, fully accepting of the fact that in doing so they will sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. And so the debate is allowed to continue and even expand to include multiple other issues with the focus now placed on whether the process for reaching a conclusion has been correctly followed instead of on the conclusion itself.
Everybody learns something and nobody dies. Win!
I wasn’t safe yet though. They still hadn’t forgiven me for taking up 15 minutes of their day that they would never get back arguing about a frigging dress. An explanation was in order.
Biding my time, I put the question back on them: “why do you think I chose that subject” (other than just for the fun of it)? They were stumped, so I answered. I deliberately chose a subject I knew you would care little or nothing about. How else would I get you to focus on how you were thinking about the problem instead of just what you thought?
If I had started with a debate on the refugee crisis, spending cuts, or climate change — subjects we argue about with passion and fervour every day — we would have only just skimmed the surface of the rhetoric we all employ to defend opinions we feel strongly about by the time my two hours was up.
Yet how often do we find ourselves trying to resolve these eminently more complicated disagreements with the same methods that proved so fruitless in our dress debate: shouting louder than the other side, taking a show of hands, or consulting self-appointed experts? You know who you are change.org and 38 degrees — not that they are the only offenders of course.
The 21st century is a perilous time for debate in the western world. There seems to be an in-built assumption that as time moves forward, so does society, replacing outdated prejudices with ‘modern’ enlightened values. But we only have to look at the ferocity of trolling on social media and the near suffocation of free speech on university campuses to know that’s not true. Technology and organised society are just as effective at spreading hate and ignorance as they are at spreading all other forms of information.
I was reminded of this when reading about the work of David Dunning and Robert Proctor, pioneers in the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology. They explain how it is used to demonise opponents, by inventing ‘facts’ designed to undermine their credibility, or to nullify the case for change by asserting that the evidence is inconclusive and we should just agree to disagree — competitive debaters know this as the ‘if you can’t convince them, confuse them’ manoeuvre. I used it a good few times myself back in the day.
You can read the fascinating report on Proctor and Dunning’s work here.
The conclusion I hope you take away from this is that the first step to improving the quality of public debate is to re-define what debating actually means. Every time I am invited to talk about it on air for a radio station, it is described in terms of stirring speeches and witty put-downs. This is rhetoric, not debate. Rhetoric serves a purpose: to engage us and hold our attention, but when it undermines the purpose of debate: to make a decision by choosing between conflicting options, it becomes less valuable.
I was always taught to believe that it’s not what you say that matters, but how you say it. I now fundamentally disagree with this maxim. I think what you say matters a great deal as it has the power to at once unify and alienate entire communities. To use that power to simply say what you think without considering how you got there will do nothing to help the rest of us discern truth from ignorance. Because, as my students learned just last week, it’s not what you think that matters, but how you think it.
