Winning by Understanding: Why Steelmanning Beats Strawmanning

Strawmanning is the act of undermining the opponent’s claim to quickly and hastily rebut it. The term captures the behavior of politicians in televised debates. Particularly for charged topics, it seems easier and convenient to drastically alter the disagreeing opinion to paint it as a ridiculous idea. Historically, any call for welfare reform in the West was often met with the strawman rebuttal: “So, you want socialism?”

Steelmanning, however, is the opposite of strawmanning. At its core, steelmanning means reconstructing the strongest, most coherent version of someone else’s argument before offering your own perspective. It allows for a genuine conversation.

Across social psychology, studies show that accurately representing another person’s view reduces defensiveness, deepens trust, and increases intellectual openness. In Chartrand and Bargh’s work in 1999 on the “chameleon effect,” people unconsciously like and trust conversational partners who reflect and mirror their cognitive patterns. Steelmanning is a cognitive version of that mirroring. By showing that you grasp the other person’s logic well enough to restate it precisely, you signal epistemic respect. That respect softens entrenched positions and moves disagreement towards collaboration.

Another body of evidence comes from conflict communication research. Paraphrasing and reflective listening have been shown to mitigate hostility and reduce physiological markers of threat. This is because understanding functions as a social reward: when someone feels heard, the amygdala’s threat response calms, allowing the prefrontal cortex to engage in higher-order reasoning. Steelmanning is a more rigorous, more intellectually disciplined variant of reflective listening. Instead of simply rephrasing, it requires reconstructing the best rationale underlying the speaker’s view.

But why does strengthening your opponent’s argument make your reasoning better? Because it forces you to engage with the most structurally sound version of the claim, not a false caricature. This reduces the chance of “illusion of explanatory depth” and overconfidence —the cognitive bias where people believe they understand something more deeply than they actually do. When you must articulate the logic of a view you disagree with, you are forced to confront whether your counterarguments are substantial or superficial. In that sense, steelmanning is also a metacognitive tool.

In practice, steelmanning has a simple structure. First, identify the most charitable interpretation of the argument. Second, reconstruct it as a logically coherent sequence, ideally in premise– conclusion form. Third, present it back to your conversational partner and ask for correction: “Is this the strongest version of what you mean?” It’s easy to put in practice when conversations heat up: whether in ideological, religious, ethical, or scientific matters.

When both sides steelman each other, we avoid debates where the “winner” is the one who best misrepresents the other. Steelmanning is a useful tool in facilitating productive debates, grounded in truth.

References: Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893–910. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022- 3514.76.6.893