Argument stakes: preliminary conceptualizations and empirical descriptions.

• Author: Hample, Dale
• Position: Report

People argue for a variety of reasons. Evolutionary psychologists believe that the ability and inclination to argue and reason evolved so that one person could persuade another (Mercier & Sperber, 2011). This possibility points immediately to utilitarian reasons for argument engagement, the idea that people argue in order to obtain or protect some practical benefit. Scholars very commonly propose this sort of goal as the impulse for arguing: resolving a controversy, persuading others, deliberating together, or seeking the truth of some matter. Material or epistemological aims are the explicit or implicit concerns of many theorists. Obviously, some personal benefits are subjectively weightier than others. Arguers will find some topics to be more important than others. However, people also argue for reasons that are not clearly instrumental in this sense. They may argue for fun, to display some prized facet of personal identity, or to assert their dominance over another person (Hample, 2003; Hample, Han, & Payne, 2010; Hample & Irions, 2015). These matters, too, vary in their importance. Proving that one is relationally faithful is surely a more substantial consideration than proving that one has excellent handwriting, to mention two possible examples of topics concerning identity display.

To capture the variations discussed above, we aim to investigate the concept of argument stakes in the present study. We define argument stakes as the matters that people believe are involved in the argument, and how important they believe these matters are. Two things are involved, the issues and their weightiness. These matters are subjective in two respects: (a) what sorts of things are thought to be at issue during an argument, and (b) the importance of those considerations.

This definition is in line with a common use of the word "stake." In colloquial English, "at stake" means being risked or hazarded. In the context of interpersonal arguing, argument stakes are the things that are being risked or hazarded during the argument. So if spouses were arguing about whether to cook an elaborate meal or eat at a restaurant, each would notice the obvious issue (cook at home versus eat at a restaurant), and each would register the importance of the matter, probably being influenced by several things (e.g., How much do I care about the expense? How much would I enjoy or resent having to cook? How much do I care about my spouse's wishes? Which would be the better meal?). The two people can certainly register the issue differently (e.g., cook versus go to a restaurant; my unappreciated labor versus being treated well by my spouse; a traditional dinner at home versus an attempt at cosmopolitan living; and so forth). And it will be immediately obvious to the reader than even if both parties understood the issue in approximately the same way, their valuations of the choices could well be divergent. So the essential subjectivity of an argument's stakes is individual. Whether the stakes are also intersubjective (consensual) is an interesting possibility, but not one that is explored here.

We claim no originality for our basic concept here, argument stakes. Most people involved in argumentation studies have noticed that people orient differently to exchanges according to how subjectively important they are. Some ideas are quite close to ours, particularly ego-involvement and goal importance. However, ego-involvement is actually the title for its own family of not-quite-identical meanings (B. Johnson & Eagly, 1989). Goal importance is not quite our idea either: one can orient to a particular matter (e.g., an angry spouse threatening divorce) but have different goals in mind for dealing with it (e.g., to pacify, to attack, or to deny). Goals are stimulated by stakes, but goals do not define them. "Argument stakes" is a somewhat more expansive construct. Furthermore, scholars working on goals and ego-involvement have paid little explicit attention to argumentation, preferring instead to define their research domains as influence or message production. The intuitive idea that subjective estimates of argument stakes are important has often been casually involved in describing several aspects of people's interpersonal arguing behaviors and understandings. But with the exception of A. Johnson, Hample, and Cionea (2014), the notion of argument stakes has not been explicit, and even there it was not very closely defined.

The common-sense idea that arguments vary in their personal importance, and that this difference probably has consequences for arguers' understandings and behaviors while arguing, has been relevant in several recent lines of argumentation research. It has been most explicit in A. Johnson's (2002) work aimed at distinguishing public and personal argument topics. Personal issues are those that are internal to the arguers' relationship (e.g., who should get to choose a movie to see, how often the car's oil should be changed), and public issues are external to the relationship (e.g., what should be our public policy about budget deficits, what kind of music is most energizing). A. Johnson, Hample, and Cionea (2014) emphasized "engagement-involvement" as a distinguishing feature of argument topics: personal issues seemed consistently to be more important, more engaging, weightier, and more involving, and public issues less so. The only direct empirical tests of that interpretation involved tests of ego-involvement that showed personal issues to produce higher ratings (A. Johnson, 2002). Indirect tests of the involvement idea included studies showing that personal topics had more pointed implications for relational satisfaction than public issues. Personal topics were judged to have higher argument stakes than public ones.

A second line of research that in retrospect dealt with argument stakes was some early work relating argumentativeness to beliefs about arguing (Rancer, Baukus, & Infante, 1985; Rancer, Kosberg, & Baukus, 1992). People high in argumentativeness reported that arguing promotes self-image, is useful during conflicts, is enjoyable, and leads to learning. These results highlight some of the possible stakes for arguing: feelings about self, utilitarian matters that have led to disagreement, entertainment, and knowledge. Rancer and his colleagues established that high argumentatives had more positive evaluations of how arguing will address those stakes.

Another pertinent research program is the cost/benefit analysis of argument engagement initiated by Paglieri's (2009) analysis. The idea here is that the possibility of arguing (or not) in a given situation is a choice, and that choice can be modeled as a function of subjective expected utility. Researchers have been able to use people's subjective ratings of various costs and benefits to predict whether or not they will argue (Cionea, Hample, & Paglieri, 2011; Hample & Irions, 2014; Hample, Paglieri, & Na, 2012; Richards & Cionea, 2015). The costs and benefits can be understood to constitute possible stakes for arguing. These include benefits such as persuading the other person, and costs such as damaging own face or having a brutish encounter.

The final research we review dealt with message production, rather than argumentation in particular. Messages are produced in service of goals, and these goals can be understood as following from the stakes the communicator registers during the episode (recall our earlier distinction between goals and stakes). Several studies have explored the effects of goal importance in influence efforts. Increasing goal importance led to more effortful planning of what to say, and, not incidentally, resulted in more argumentative content for the messages (Dillard, Segrin, & Harden, 1989). Samp and Solomon (2005) reported that in discussions of interpersonal problems, as goals increased in their felt importance, the embellishment and redundancy of people's messages also increased. Although these two studies involved message types that do not exactly reproduce the domain of argumentative episodes, they generated useful clues: important goals lead to more effort, more arguing, and more expressiveness. Although goal research sheds light on our inquiry about argument stakes, we want to remind the readers of the difference between the two concepts. Argument stakes are the matters involved in the argument, as well as their perceived importance. Goals are activated by these matters, and so represent a person's motivational orientation toward the stakes. Arguers may perceive the matters involved in the argument in a similar way but generate different goals.

So this review of research suggests that various things implicitly related to argument stakes (i.e., ego-involvement, beliefs about arguing, costs and benefits of arguing, and goal importance) have some commonality in what we might infer about those stakes. These ideas help associate argument stakes with felt episodic importance, goal importance and valence, cognitive effort, production of more arguments, and interest in engaging in argumentative episodes. Furthermore, the idea of argument stakes might lead to a retrospective reinterpretation and unification of these lines of work.

Our current research interest is mainly descriptive, because we want to explore this proposed construct explicitly. Therefore we asked people to describe an actual argument to us (they were free to describe an argument of any importance), and then to answer both open-ended and closed-ended questions about it. We coded the argument descriptions and analyzed some standardized measures. Our research questions were:

RQ1: What stakes are apparent in people's recollections of actual arguments?

RQ2: How are high-stakes arguments distinguished from low-stakes arguments?

RQ3: How are the various stakes related to one another?

Answers to these questions should permit us to describe interpersonal arguments in terms of...