Arguments, Conflicts, and Decisions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 117

7.3.1 Argument Engagement: Likelihood of Success

and Contextual Appropriateness

Previous work (Paglieri 2009 ) has suggested that arguers do not carelessly waltz
into any potential dialectical confrontation, but on the contrary are very careful in
“picking their fights,” more often than not declining the opportunity to engage in
argument, and with good reasons. More generally, this emphasizes that arguing is
not always the best option, not only because arguments may occasionally backfire
and lower the credal status of their conclusion (Cohen 2005 ) but also because the
original disagreement (when arguments originate from a divergence of opinions, as
they often do) may in fact escalate due to argumentative intercourse, rather than
resolving itself (a point also discussed in Martin and Scheerhorn 1985 ; Hample
and Benoit 1999 ; Goodwin 2005 , 2007 ). Crucially, arguers are fully aware of these
dangers and factor them in deciding whether to engage in argument or not. 3
Hample ( 2009 ) noticed that this view, originally proposed as a theoretical
speculation based on commonsense observations, could be easily operationalized
in terms of costs and benefits (see also Paglieri and Castelfranchi 2010 ), thus
producing some testable predictions on what conditions would make an arguer more
or less willing to engage in argument. The following is the list of predictive factors
proposed by Hample and colleagues ( 2011 ), to empirically test the hypothesis that
argument engagement is affected by such considerations:

(a) Costs, including effort, emotional exposure, and unwelcome consequences
(b) Benefits, that is, whatever an arguer gets out of the interaction if it goes well
(c) Likelihood of winning/success
(d) Reasonableness of the counterpart/audience
(e) Civility, that is, how pleasant and productive the interaction is expected to be,
as opposed to angry and destructive
(f) Resolvability of the argument
(g) Contextual appropriateness

This list was meant as a simplified version of a richer but less precise model
(Paglieri 2009 ) and intended for a first exploratory attempt to individuate factors
affecting argument engagement. As such, it leaves much to be desired, both
in terms of completeness (are there other relevant factors not listed here?) and
correctness (are these factors all necessary or are some of them irrelevant?), as
well as ignoring some potential interdependence between different factors (for

3 The studies presented in this section refer to persuasion dialogues (Walton 1998 ), in which each
party tries to prove a point that the other party is resistant to accept. Such focus on persuasion
will result in frequent reference to the notion of “winning the argument” as a criterion for success.
This does not imply that winning is invariably the purpose of arguing in general: as it is often
emphasized in the literature (Walton and Krabbe 1995 ; Walton 1998 ; Paglieri and Castelfranchi
2010 ), arguing can be motivated also by other goals, personal or dialogical. Nonetheless, arguers
are still concerned with success , defined in terms of whatever goal they are striving to achieve.