The Best Self-Help is Free: Focusing on Conclusions in Persuasion

Chapter 21

This is Chapter 21 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

When persuading another person, your primary interest is that the other person adopt the conclusion of your argument - and whether or not he or she adopts all of your premises is of secondary, if any, importance. After all, it is on the basis of the conclusions they have reached that people decide what they ought to do, and their actions are of much more direct relevance to your life than whatever goes on inside their heads.

When entering an argument, it is wise to keep in mind precisely what conclusion you want to persuade the other party to adopt. After you establish this, pursue this goal without being sidetracked by tangents or messy disagreements on premises.

In fact, within your premises, you already hold the conclusion you want to convey to the other person. The problem is that the other person does not share your premises, and his or her own premises were formed during the course of a lifetime. Hence, all of them are highly unlikely to change during the course of a single discussion. If and when they do change, it will only happen if the person thinks that the impetus for change was internal and caused by his or her own lengthy and careful reflection. If you try to directly change the other person's premises, you will not only fail, but you will also antagonize him or her in the process.