Why we should argue more in class
In organizational psychology, disagreement isn’t a bug — it’s perhaps the most valuable feature of how we conduct research. Our field thrives on competing theories, mixed findings, and unresolved questions: does autonomy always motivate, or can it backfire? Should leaders prioritize transparency or discretion? Is AI integration into human teams a help or a hindrance? These are debates in every sense of the word, and they deserve to be treated that way.
I’ve long believed that structured debate — the kind with evidence, roles, and rules — is one of the most underrated tools for teaching critical thinking. As someone who’s competed in and coached competitive debate for years, I’ve seen how a well-organized clash actually improves clarity, refines thinking, and assesses learning effectively. When students have to defend a position (even one they don’t agree with), they learn to organize evidence, anticipate counterarguments, and appreciate the nuance of the complicated world that we live in.
From discussion to discipline
A typical classroom “discussion” tends to reward the confident and the quick. A structured debate, by contrast, rewards preparation and precision. It slows down argumentation, channels it through time-limited speeches, and demands that each claim be supported by credible evidence. That’s why in my Organizational Psychology class this semester, I’ve made it their final project: teams of three or four students will take on a full academic-style debate on one of five contemporary workplace controversies:
Should personality tests be used for hiring decisions?
Should companies require employees to work in-person?
Should AI agents be incorporated into human teams?
Should organizations move to a four-day workweek?
Should academic research in I-O psychology prioritize practical impact over theory?
Each team must research both sides of their assigned issue, develop opening statements and rebuttals, and submit all sources — peer-reviewed studies, news articles, and opinion pieces — in a clearly labeled digital folder. On debate day, they’re randomly assigned a side. They don’t know until that morning whether they’ll argue Affirmation or Negation.
Why that twist? Because it forces flexibility. The best organizational psychologists — and, I would argue, the best professionals in any evidence-based field — can articulate opposing arguments with integrity.
Our debates run like this: opening speeches, rebuttals, a cross-examination period (where audience members can also ask questions), and closing summaries. Students use a structured note-taking format to track arguments and evidence, a skill that maps neatly onto what we do as researchers reviewing literature or evaluating peer reviewers’ critiques. I’ve sprinkled training in throughout the semester on topics such as finding research articles, reading and organizing research, identifying logical fallacies, and persuasive verbal presentation skills.
Ultimately, I hope that this assignment provides a clear, structured avenue through which students can demonstrate their learning, integrate multiple streams of research into one persuasive set of arguments, and have some fun while doing so!
Why this matters for organizational psychology
Organizational psychology is inherently pluralistic. Almost every construct we study — motivation, leadership, fairness, engagement — invites multiple theoretical lenses. The act of debate mirrors that pluralism, but in miniature: it demands that students weigh evidence, identify limitations, and decide what “works” under which conditions.
In practice, that’s the same skill set managers use when evaluating competing HR policies or leadership interventions. It’s also what peer reviewers do when reading manuscripts. Structured debate, then, becomes training for both scholarship and applied work. It cultivates an ability that’s very much lacking in today’s modern contentious society: the ability to say, “Here’s what we know, here’s where the evidence splits, and here’s how I’d decide anyway.”
For instructors: how to start
If you teach in the behavioral sciences (or any discipline with interpretive tension), may I encourage you to try building a single structured debate into your syllabus? Start small: one class session, one proposition, one debate. Over time, perhaps you can build additional scaffolding to lead to a larger debate as an in-class project or even final assessment.
I’ll be refining my materials for this final project and sharing them widely. It’ll include detailed roles (AFF 1, NEG 1, AFF 2…), grading rubrics, and research preparation steps. I also am currently working with debate experts here at CMC to organize additional resources, even videos of sample debates that students can be inspired by.
If you’re interested, please subscribe here — I’ll be sharing the resources later this semester. You can also just get in touch if you’re interested in learning about this sooner, or if you have some of your own resources to share! If this goes well, I’m hoping to create a more formal set of reproducible resources to share widely for faculty in any institution or field of study who are interested in structured debate as a classroom assessment technique.
