Evaluating Arguments from the Reaction of the Audience

Abstract:     
In studying how lay people evaluate arguments, psychologists have typically focused on logical form and content. This emphasis has masked an important yet under appreciated aspect of every day argument evaluation: social cues to argument strength. Here, we focus on the ways in which observers evaluate arguments by the reaction they evoke in an audience. This type of evaluation is likely to occur either when people are not privy to the content of the arguments or when they are not expert enough to appropriately evaluate it. Four experiments explore cues that participants might take into account in evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience. They demonstrate that participants can use audience motivation, expertise and size as clues to argument quality. By contrast, we find no evidence that participants take audience diversity into account.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 23

Keywords: argument evaluation, argumentation, audience, social clues

Accepted Paper Series