If it feels like someone won’t accept your basic, obviously-true point, the culprit is a communication error.
This is as opposed to what it will feel like in the moment: they are stupid, they are obstinate, they won’t listen, etc. If you have no good reason to believe the other party has stopped acting like a reasonable social being, then back up and find the communication error before proceeding. Maybe you are accidentally attaching riders to your point. Maybe they are reading too much into your point. Who knows. But it’s probably not that whoever you’re talking to suddenly turned into a bad human being, which points to a communication error of some sort.
If it feels like someone won’t accept your basic, obviously-true point, the culprit is a communication error.
This is as opposed to what it will feel like in the moment: they are stupid, they are obstinate, they won’t listen, etc. If you have no good reason to believe the other party has stopped acting like a reasonable social being, then back up and find the communication error before proceeding. Maybe you are accidentally attaching riders to your point. Maybe they are reading too much into your point. Who knows. But it’s probably not that whoever you’re talking to suddenly turned into a bad human being, which points to a communication error of some sort.
I think this is a good heuristic.
However, another possibility is that either you or your discussant is unduly influenced by an informational cascade.