Why must school debaters argue both sides of the Resolve? It seems hypocritical.
Outside school nearly all our important attitudes and beliefs are picked up from our
surroundings. In adult life we see great emphasis is placed on loyalty and sincerity to
these characteristics. Yet young debaters get caught up in the competition at school and
don’t ponder this paradox. Psychologists call holding conflicting hypotheses “cognitive
dissonance” (see Wikipedia).

Psychological science has changed my attitude toward the paradox in school debate.
The charge of hypocrisy or theatrical insincerity can come from all sorts of extreme
sources: from classmates to visitors from non-English speaking countries. But all must
acknowledge scientific experiments conducted in Psychology. It is necessary to debate
both sides of the Resolve in order to overcome a weakness of the Human Mind proven by
scientific psychology.

We’re going to try and overshoot the charge of hypocrisy from classmates by aiming
at the more difficult charge from foreign countries. If we don’t quite succeed then
at least we may have countered the charge from classmates. Below we will consider
Psychological science at each of several major steps in the debating procedure. United
States style debating meets the dangers of bias exposed by experimental Psychology.
There may be other ways of meeting the danger of bias – depositions in law, for example
-- but competitive debate makes good sport while it engages conflicting evidence of one
issue.

First off the debaters must begin by trying to search for information about the Resolved
Affirmative Statement. From the start the mind’s weakness toward “Confirmation bias”
(from Wikipedia) shows itself. In the beginning the debater will probably take the whole
Resolved-statement as a hypothesis for searching. “Confirmation bias (also called
confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that
confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.
As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and
interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant
issues and for established beliefs. …They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as
supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been
invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme
even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance
(when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational
primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and
illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events
or situations).

“A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased towards
confirming their existing beliefs. Later work explained these results in terms of a
tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring
alternatives. In combination with other effects, this strategy can bias the conclusions
that are reached. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the
limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show

confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong,
rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.”(End quote, Wikipedia)

These general observations about Confirmation bias go on to apply to searching in a
library and internet. There are several paragraphs in Wikipedia on the “Topic: Biased
search for information” which the reader would enjoy, if he has time or space (about 760
words).

I think I have made my point about hypocrisy in gathering all the evidence you need for
your cases (pro & con); but for the still skeptical reader I will be explicit: If you don’t
debate both sides of the Resolve (and you still debate), then you only debate one side.
If you debate only one side of the case, then your primary-search for information will
be one sided. You will be susceptible to Confirmation bias. Primary: secondarily you
could claim to look-up, have, and understand the evidence for the opposite side (your
opponent). In practice you would probably learn the case against you (from the school
of hard knocks) from your opponent during debate rounds. If two ‘sincere’ one sided
debaters were against each other they would tend to ‘talk past’ each other’s case – not
engaging the evidence of the opponent. I can think of a lot of examples. The spectator
would be the loser, also!

The next important step in the debate procedure is the presentations, that is the debate
itself before an audience (if only a time-keeper and a judge). The charge of hypocrisy
at a debater(s) can arise for reasons other than that he debates both side of the Resolved.
For example the speaker’s style of presentation may emanate a sense of hypocrisy. But
in this essay we are considering only the most probable source of the charge of hypocrisy
in school debate sport, and that is that the debaters debate both sides of the Resolved.
Again, it is necessary to debate both sides of the Resolved in order to overcome a
weakness of the Human Mind proven to exist by Scientific Psychology.

In addition to this another frequent cause of the charge of hypocrisy comes from using
arguments that appeal to the emotions of the audience – these arguments are problematic.
In some cases the need arises to appeal to the audience’s emotions, for example in infant
mortality statistics. The debater may feel that the evidence and argument warrens appeal
to the audience’s emotion to correctly present the facts of the debater’s case. If so, he
should admit to the audience that he tries to avoid this emotion when he is forced to
argue the opposite side. However the audience is mislead without knowing the emotional
weight of the argument. Otherwise – if he did not qualify the emotional feelings he
solicits – the audience would probably feel that he was a charlatan, trying to dup them
with his hypocrisy of debating both sides of the question. But the facts of the case may
warrant a feeling of emotion from the audience.

Wikipedia has a “topic: bias interpretation”, and this is almost entirely concerned with
strongly held emotional bias; and thus almost never applies to debaters presenting their
cases.

The foreign visitor puts the problem of the charge of hypocrisy most simply: The visitor
from a non-English speaking country asks why does the debater try to persuade us
when he is not convinced himself? I think the honest high school debater would answer

simply, “It’s the competition of the sport!” But a competition between hypocrites?! The
coach would then have to interject that these speeches are a learning exercise from our
Legal Tradition. That both in the making of laws and in the administration of justice
occasions arise where the duty of the advocate must argue persuasively for a case about
which he has no personal preference. The debaters are learning to lay out the best case
for a particular point of view The English (and American) system of justice allows
a defendant to lay out his best case for his innocence, and recognizes that he needs a
professional (an attorney who understands the law and the way the court works) to be his
advocate. That system will not work if there are no such advocates. Our system is based
on the principle that the prosecution must be able to convince a third party--the jurors--of
the defendant's guilt. That system reduces the ability of a tyranny (or even a democracy)
to imprison enemies of the government. The high-school debates are a teaching tool. The
sport of debate is the training ground for future advocates.

The reader of this article can now go one step beyond the Legal Tradition, and he can
point out that the Science of Psychology has justified the two sided speaker. The human
mind is rather weak in trying to search for information about only one side of a case.
The best recourse for the amateur is to listen to a debate between informed advocates.
Usually debaters do have a personal judgment about which side of the case is stronger
or more convincing. They rarely will reveal this, because they have been very brutally
intimidated by reams of evidence for both sides. Now the debater is further reluctant
to reveal any bias he has, because he knows scientifically this prejudices his search for
information for his argument before an audience.

The last important step in the debate procedure is how the audience reacts to what it
has heard. Here Wikipedia, “Confirmation bias,” does apply with its “Topic: Biased
interpretation:” Emotionally involved people do not listen to evidence refuting their
biased opinion. This is unfortunate, but it is a fact of Scientific Psychology that all
debaters should know.

In summary, knowing the new Psychological facts about debate, you may be able to sell
debate to the residents of your city. Students have the energy to argue the facts about city
ballot issues. It should be a public service from schools. Internationally once the new
facts of Psychology are known, United States style of debating can be adopted in many
other countries – thus spreading out democracy.

The only other reference I used was Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, Chapter #
9 “Why the Mind Gets What It Expects.” This chapter gives many descriptions of
experiments while Wikipedia gives many general conclusions.

Autobiography of the Author: Woolsey Lent debated 3 years at South High School,
Denver, Colorado from 1954 to 1957, attended a High School Summer Debate Institute
at Denver University. He graduated from the University of Colorado with a B.A. major
in mathematics and minor in physics. He worked as a scientific computer programmer in
the California aerospace industry. His email address is woolseylent@alaska.net .