By David Thill
A reasoned argument convinces a ready audience.
Editor’s Note: Whether selling a product, training hospital staff, or presenting to the board of directors, the quality of the presentation matters just as much as the content. Chris Anderson, president of TED – the nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading innovative ideas, and sponsor of worldwide TED conferences – recently published the book Ted Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. Last month, our “Bringing Out the TED in You” segment discussed how you can effectively explain your ideas to your audience. This month (and the last installment of our series), we take it one step further, turning explanation into persuasion – a vital tool for successful selling.
“Persuasion means convincing an audience that the way they currently see the world isn’t quite right,” writes Chris Anderson, president of TED, in his 2016 book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. “And that means taking down the parts that aren’t working, as well as rebuilding something better.”
Priming the customer
When making an argument, Anderson suggests the speaker begin by priming their audience. Priming is not a rigorous argument; “it is simply a way of nudging someone in your direction.” To better illustrate his point, he offers the example of a 2005 TED talk presented by psychologist Barry Schwartz, who argued that too much choice can be a bad thing.
“Had [Schwartz] just gone straight to ‘Too many choices can make you unhappy,’ we might have been skeptical,” writes Anderson. Instead, Schwartz began with a story:
I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, “I want a pair of jeans. Here’s my size.” And the shopkeeper said, “Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah blah.”
“Even though his story is a single story of a single man and can’t possibly by itself justify the statement that too much choice makes you unhappy, nonetheless we get where he is heading,” observes Anderson. “Suddenly, the case he’s building seems a lot more plausible.”
After the audience has been primed, they are more receptive to the main argument. And the best way to convey that argument, he says, is to use “the most noble tool of them all, a tool that can wield the most impact over the very long term.”
That tool is reason.
‘The long reach of reason’
“In a reasoned argument, provided the starting assumptions are true, then the validly reasoned conclusions must also be true and can be known to be true,” Anderson writes. “If you can walk someone through a reasoned argument convincingly, the idea you have planted in her mind will lodge there and never let go.
“But for the process to work, it must be broken down into small steps, each of which must be totally convincing.” Each step begins at a point that is clearly true to the audience, or that has already been proven true in a previous step. This idea can be illustrated by an “if-then” statement: If X is true, then Y follows.
The example Anderson provides is from a 2013 TED talk presented by charity reformer Dan Pallotta, in which Pallotta argued that the nonprofit sector is handicapped by societal expectations of businesses.
After pointing out that we encourage companies to take risks but frown on nonprofits for doing so, he said this: “Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can’t raise more revenue. If you can’t raise more revenue, you can’t grow. And if you can’t grow, you can’t possibly solve large social problems.”
“Case proven,” Anderson responds.
Another “devastatingly powerful” form of reasoned argument is reductio ad absurdum: basically, proving that the opposing argument is wrong. “If that counter position is false, your position is strengthened (or even proven, if there are no other possible positions that could be taken),” says Anderson.
Once again, he uses Pallotta’s talk as an example. When illustrating the dichotomy between high-salaried nonprofit leaders and high-salaried leaders in other areas, Pallotta made this case: “You want to make fifty million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, you’re considered a parasite yourself.”
As Anderson notes, “Rhetorically, that’s a home run.”
However, it is also important to heed Anderson’s caveat: Reductio ad absurdum is better used on issues than directly on opponents. “I’m fine with: ‘It’s not hard to understand why we’ve been given a different impression by the media on this for years. You sell newspapers with drama, not boring scientific evidence.’ But uncomfortable with: ‘Of course he says that. He’s paid to say that.’”
Arguments based in reason may not be the most popular ones right out of the gate, because they are harder to process than some other arguments. But TED talks based in reason are some of the most important, he says, “because reason is the best way of building wisdom for the long term. A robust argument, even if it isn’t immediately accepted by everyone, will gradually gather new adherents until it becomes unstoppable.”