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Blog Post 1- Chapter 2

Blog Post 1 - Chapter 2
This discussion post will be concerning the material for the upcoming week, from Chapter 2 of the textbook. There were many interesting concepts pertaining to argumentation that were covered throughout the Chapter. One concept that I found particularly interesting was “social influence”. A man by the name of Soloman Asch experimented with the topic of social influence. He was best known for conducting experiments, where he told people to deliberately give wrong answers pertaining to the questions being asked, in turn influencing the actual participants of the experiments. These wrong answers did in fact influence the participants as ⅓ of them said they were swayed to change their answers because of the people planted, giving wrong answers. This makes me thing of our society today, we often react quickly to headlines we see online and on TV. These headlines are just the ones that those specific media outlets want us to see, the answers that they want to plant in our heads. Not saying these outlets are evil and doing anything wrong, other than just using their platform to convey their specific message. I have also heard this been referred to as “group think”, where a dominant voice in a community or group takes control of the flow of ideas. This can limit the creativity of the group as a whole, just as the social influence in the first experiment limited the creativity and individuality of the participants in Asch’s experiment.

The second concept I wanted to discuss was commonplaces, because they are different for every person, they can cause quite the stir-up in arguments. Every person has their own set of traits and experiences that make them the person they are, these are where they base their commonplace beliefs. These beliefs are what influence individuals to make most, if not all of their decisions. You must take these commonplaces into consideration when trying to convince someone that your position is the correct position. And if you must, adjust your argument accordingly, so that your opposition can see the argument through your own personal commonplace lense.

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