Читать книгу How to Win Arguments - Robert Allen - Страница 13

Those arguments that take place between individuals, or in a small group of people with no audience listening, are clearly in the private category. The fact that such arguments are, by definition, carried on without an audience will have a profound effect on their shape. In a private argument, what is said will tend to be regarded as ‘off the record’ and people may well feel able to reveal feelings and opinions that they would hide from a wider audience. Inevitably a private argument will tend to concentrate on the personal aspects, even when matters of public importance are being discussed. Anecdotal evidence is very common in private arguments and people will frequently use their own experiences, and those of friends and relatives, to try to prove a case. They will often not be able or willing to see that just because Uncle Harry smoked forty cigarettes a day every day of his life from the age of eleven, and lived till he was eighty-seven, then that doesn’t mean that it must be a load of rubbish that smoking gives you cancer.

Unless the participants are experienced arguers they will tend to make common mistakes such as confusing fact and opinion or quoting facts inaccurately. One of the strongest ploys you can use in private arguments is Know-all (see page 49), the simple ruse of knowing the facts and quoting them accurately. However, know-alls are never popular in any sphere and in arguments, where emotions are usually heightened, you risk making yourself unpopular by always knowing better. It may be wise to save this technique for occasions when it really matters.

Another important facet of private arguments is that the participants will take the outcome intensely personally and will frequently carry it over into other parts of their private life. You must have noticed how an argument with friends or colleagues can have repercussions quite out of proportion to the importance of the original disagreement. People have been known to refuse to speak to each other for days, months or even years because of some minor squabble that got out of control.

One of the troubles with private arguments is that they often serve as an outlet for underlying hostilities. In fact such an argument will frequently be engineered solely for the purpose of providing an outlet for past grudges. Even where the original argument is genuine, it is surprising how, when emotions become aroused, the placid surface of everyday behaviour gets completely disrupted. Once this has happened there are no limits to what can result. Look, for example, at what happened in the former Yugoslavia when some of the constituent peoples informed their Serb neighbours that they would like to go their own way and form independent states. This may at first appear to be a matter of politics but, when you listen to the stories of those involved, it becomes apparent that many of the grievances and hostilities had their origins in squabbles between neighbours that got completely out of hand. News reports all emphasized that people suffered atrocities that were committed not by a foreign army but, in many cases, by people they knew by name.