Arguing in Mexico: How Uniquely Mexican Is It?

ABSTRACT

In legal and educational circles, the quality of arguments has become a growing national concern in Mexico. We examined the motivations, understandings, and private reactions to arguing among Mexican college students, and compare these to data from the United States. Mexican men were more aggressive than women, which is not the case in all nations studied to this point. Mexicans were very substantially more oriented to civility than U.S. respondents, more sophisticated in their understandings of interpersonal arguing, and far less inclined to take conflicts personally. Power distance was a substantial predictor for many of the measures used here.

KEYWORDS:

• Argumentation
• mexico
• interpersonal arguing
• argumentativeness
• conflict
• cross-cultural communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dale Hample

Dale Hample is now Professor Emeritus of Communication at Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois, USA.  He has recently edited Local Theories of Argument (Routledge, 2021), and has authored Interpersonal Arguing (Peter Lang, 2018) and Arguing: Exchanging Reasons Face to Face (Erlbaum, 2005).  He has published numerous articles assessing orientations to interpersonal arguing across the world.

Fernando Leal

Fernando Leal is full professor at the University Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Guadalajara, Mexico. With a background in philosophy, typological linguistics and classical scholarship, he works at the intersection of philosophy of science, research methodology, argumentation theory and academic writing, with a special focus on philosophy, social science and cognitive science.

Judith Suro

Judith Suro is associate professor at the Department of Education, University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She has  45-years of hands-on experience in special education. Her research concerns the causes of learning disabilities, especially in reading and writing. In recent times, she has become intrigued by the causal role that argument skills can have in reading comprehension, especially in higher grades. She is also interested in the recent changes in the kinds of statistical argumentation acceptable in quantitative research.