A Stanford study on persuasion found that the person most likely to have their mind changed in a disagreement isn’t the one who argues hardest — it’s the one who simply asks, ‘Tell me more about that,’ and means it

He had a chart on his phone, which he turned towards me at intervals, like a policeman with a warrant. Two experiments out of Stanford suggest that what would have worked was one sentence and a bit of actual curiosity. Chen and Minson were in Stanford’s psychology department at the time; Tormala, who studies attitudes and persuasion, is at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Why a question does something an argument cannotAn elaboration question is a request to expand on what you just said. In their field data, Wikipedia editors who opened a disagreement receptively were less likely to be personally attacked.