I'm usually "fight" (not "flight"), but not this time.
I’m a first-gen kid with no immediate family role models for pursuing a college degree or associated career. But, I trained in competitive speaking as a kid. Like, from roughly age 7 or 9. And I did speech and debate in high school. I was confident, eloquent, a total know-it-all, and I also relished debate and wordplay for fun, not just in competitive settings. (I still enjoy a good bantering exchange). Back then, family friends who had degrees and more experience in a white-collar world assumed (and encouraged) my obvious calling as a lawyer.
(Friends, I never a day in my life wanted to be a lawyer. But I would have been good at it.)
And yet.
I do not encourage or advocate for debate as a method for understanding or bridging different points of view. Instead, I teach considerably different methods for engaged scholarship and ethically sharing science in my scicomm courses and workshops.
The difference between debate and evidence-based methods for finding middle ground (vital for effectively sharing science!) matter enormously right now. I’m clinging to them as a guiding framework to navigate a number of very polarized relationships in my personal life, too.
Let me be clear: there are many attitudes and actions that cause harm, are morally reprehensible, and should not be tolerated in modern, just societies. But, as you may have personally experienced in the past few weeks, we’re not going to come to agreement on these issues by yelling at each other. No one changes their mind when they’re accused of being ignorant, wrong, or malevolent.
👉So why are we still fighting like fighting works?!?👈
I’ve been mulling all this over for nearly a year, ever since a scientist whose reflections and academic leadership I admire posted a commentary titled “Why I don’t like arguments and debates.” Terry McGlynn was writing in response to two well-known science bloggers writing about how they planned to use debate as a teaching tool [1] and why there seemed to be less debate happening among ecologists [2] (and whether that’s a loss for the field) [3].
Those discussions assumed real value in debate as a method for considering differing perspectives. But, I agreed more with Terry’s take when he said, “arguing and debates are generally bad for education and scientific progress…I am open to changing my mind, and they should be open to changing theirs, and after this dialogue, then I would imagine that all of us should have a better understanding of the situation and have our viewpoints evolve a bit. That doesn’t seem to happen with debate and argument, but it does with dialogue.”
From my experience in competitive speaking and as a debater for fun and competition, what Terry’s saying is 100% accurate. Doing this myself for decades, I’ve learned some things that have real bearing on (a) how we teach the science professionals of the future to communicate and (b) how we interact professionally and personally with people we disagree with.
The same conclusions are born out in the scicomm literature.
Arguing for any position tends to entrench that position [4] into people’s world views (we convince ourselves). [5] Science-trained people are not immune to this.
Unless there are very clear “rules of engagement” in a debate, we can be expected to talk past each other. So, not only are we convincing ourselves we’re right, we’re also practicing ignoring the people we’re supposedly trying to convince. Why would they be listening to us, when we’re not listening to them!?!
It is possible to slightly inoculate against points 1-2 by priming people with readings on how people make decisions, how emotions play into decision-making and beliefs, and how science is often weaponized/politicized rather than serving as a neutral “tool” in policy and personal decisions. [6] But, we all know that the arguments we fall into with our uncle or sibling or neighbor aren’t going to be readily put on pause while we each quick go read the literature!
In other words, science-trained folks are as susceptible to confidence biases, channelized thinking, motivated reasoning, etc., as anyone. Debates can inadvertently reinforce our worst habits, and we should be aware and wary of giving into that outcome in professional and personal situations.
Carrying this into a training environment, I’d be aiming for a principle takeaway being the myriad ways in which scientists have engaged in debate and close-mindedness throughout history. (e.g., historical debates around things like the Earth’s position in the universe on forward to more current debates). A session on the history of debates in ecology could be helpful scaffolding, coupled with opportunities to dissect the arguments of various sides of a debate — without reiterating those positions them/ourselves. It could also be useful to assign a paper I led a few years ago that specifically maps out (including worksheets) a process for scientists to collaborate with policy makers and community members by accounting for their own and their intended collaborators’ values and goals, then using storytelling to identify shared values and goals.
To close, I’ll note that my considerable experience with competitive and social debating growing up included most of my interactions with my own family. I come from a big family that loves to debate and is also very conservative. Debating has never worked when I wanted my dad or grandma to care about organic food [7] or a relative to see value in conserving predators (instead of just shooting them). Over time, I learned— the hard way — that I was just picking fights and entrenching their points of view. Eventually, (with nudges from my mom), I learned that only dialogue with individual family members, about things that mattered to us both, reliably helped us find common ground. [8] Now, as a scicomm researcher, I can turn to all the literature on why the deficit model is a dead end [9] to help me understand why my early attempts at these discussions were fruitless.
Most of the people I work with, teach, or train these days are dealing with similarly fraught situations and actually want to do more than argue. It's important we give them models and skills for that, rather than implying to students or colleagues that debate works. Every day we encounter more opportunities to fight and rage rather than find the common ground that can move our relationships, careers, and communities forward, together. [10] We need to leverage the insights from scicomm and related fields more than ever, to overcome our tendency to pursue debates to their inevitable dead-ends.
As always, if you run into a paywall and can’t access something I’ve linked to, let me know; I’m happy to share a PDF.
NOTES
See Meghan Duffy’s “In-class debates: Looking for thoughts on topics & structure!”
I’ve previously written about whether I consider myself an ecologist, and how I became a scientist by not being a scientist.
See Jeremy Fox’s “Ecologists don’t argue any more. (Do they?) Why not?”
See “From debate to dialogue: Toward a pedagogy of nonpolarized public discourse” and “The Argument Culture.”
If you’re going to assign a debate in class, you’d need to be very careful with topic selection and with framing of the objectives, delivery, etc. Otherwise, it’s possible (maybe even likely) that students will come out of the experience convinced of their assigned POV, which is likely not your objective. Terry outlines a helpful alternative approach, wherein students work to reconcile several (not just two opposing) perspectives.
I have a set of readings to this effect listed in my scicomm bibliography, and a top recommendation (though dated and longer) is Sarewitz’s 2004 paper “How science makes environmental controversies worse.” Another important one is The Oatmeal’s You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you. Students in my scicomm classes also report meaningful take-aways from The Cranky Uncle Game, which engages players in identifying several common types of science denialism and associated arguments/rhetorical strategies.
Reader, at the time, I did not understand that the reason my grandparents always raised a few cows was the same reason why I wanted us to make a 100% local, organic thanksgiving spread. And, nearly 3 decades later, my dad has turned into an organic-when-affordable advocate as part of his effort to control high cholesterol and heart attack risk through nutrition. It’s possible my early efforts played a role, but largely, it may be that my decision to stop pushing it left him room to change his mind.
There is SO much research confirming this conclusion that I had to experience for myself to really understand. In case you’re able to get there just by reading, see, for example, the Better Arguments Project, Merkle et al. 2022, Carlisle 2020, Noy & Jabbour 2020, Kaplan et al. 2016, Fiske & Dupree 2014, Knapp et al. 2013, Lupia 2013, Scheufele 2013, Shindler et al. 2011. But if you were going to read just one thing, read Sarewitz 2004: “How science makes environmental controversies worse.”
Start with my recent paper (Merkle et al. 2022) for a useful framework to understand why deficit-model approaches don’t work. See another (Broder & Merkle et al. 2024, Use your scicomm power for good) for how academic prestige paradigms reinforce rifts, not mend them and an extensive bibliography of alternatives we can pursue in the academy.
To reiterate, early in this piece, I made clear: we do not need to accept injustice and hate as the baseline for finding common ground. What I am saying in this piece, though, is that we should also not assume that debate/arguing, etc., is going to change people’s minds. Social change often relies on making change happen despite (and often in part by refusing to engage with) hate and efforts to resist justice and equality. If you’re not sure how to take action on all this, I highly recommend you start by reading Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection and Do The Work: A Guide to Understanding Power and Creating Change by Megan Pillow and Roxane Gay. Both are short, action-focused books that pull no punches.
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