Walk me through it. Explain the reasoning step by step, out loud.
Show your work. A math teacher’s instruction. Write down every step, not only the answer.
Poke holes in it. Look for the weak points in an idea or a plan.
Grill. Question someone hard and at length.
Deer in the headlights. Someone who freezes and cannot answer.
Keep your cool. Stay calm under pressure.
On November 9, 2011, Texas governor Rick Perry stood on stage at a Republican presidential debate broadcast by CNBC from Oakland University in Michigan. He said he would eliminate three federal agencies. He named Commerce and Education. Then he could not name the third. He said: “I can’t. The third one I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”
The missing agency was the Department of Energy. Afterward Perry said: “I stepped in it, man.” The Texas Tribune called the moment perhaps the greatest embarrassment yet in a series of missteps.
McKinsey and Bain hire through case interviews. The candidate receives a business problem and works through it while the interviewer watches. McKinsey describes the case as a way “to evaluate your approach to solving complex problems.”
Bain tells candidates what the interviewer watches: “We’re evaluating how you think, not the framework you memorized.” Its advice is to “pause, structure your thinking, and talk us through your logic.”
In medical training, senior doctors question medical students and residents during rounds, often in front of their peers. The questions get harder until the trainee misses one. Medical slang calls the practice pimping.
In 1989 Frederick Brancati described it in an essay in JAMA, “The Art of Pimping.” He wrote: “On the surface, the aim of pimping appears to be Socratic instruction. The deeper motivation, however, is political.”
In the film The Paper Chase (1973), Professor Kingsfield teaches law by the Socratic method. His best-known line is usually quoted as: “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” Early sources give slightly different wording.
John Houseman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role.
In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, decided on June 28, 1993, the Supreme Court made trial judges gatekeepers for expert testimony. “The trial judge must ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable.” A key question is whether a theory “can be (and has been) tested.”
Admitted evidence still faces attack. The Court named “vigorous cross-examination, presentation of contrary evidence, and careful instruction on the burden of proof” as “the traditional and appropriate means of attacking shaky but admissible evidence.”
Before nominees face a Senate confirmation hearing, their teams hold practice hearings called murder boards. In 2010 about 20 members of the Obama team played senators and questioned Elena Kagan for several hours a day. Rachel Brand, who helped prepare John Roberts and Samuel Alito, described the aim: to “ask those hard questions in the nastiest conceivable way, over and over and over.”
In January 2017 the Trump transition team held 30 practice hearings for cabinet nominees, more than 70 hours in all.
The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics list practices that students should learn. The third reads: “Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.”
The standard explains: “Mathematically proficient students understand and use stated assumptions, definitions, and previously established results in constructing arguments.”
On September 26, 1960, Americans watched the first televised presidential debate. Richard Nixon had recently left the hospital after a knee infection and was 20 pounds underweight. Both candidates declined the network’s makeup artist. Nixon used a drugstore powder, and under the studio lights he sweated visibly. John F. Kennedy looked tanned and ready. He won over the 70 million television viewers by a broad margin.
The story is often told with one more detail: radio listeners thought Nixon had won. That claim rests largely on one survey by Sindlinger & Company. Of more than 2,100 people asked, only 282 had listened on radio, and only 178 named a winner. In 1987 two scholars, David Vancil and Sue Pendell, judged that group too small and unrepresentative for firm conclusions.
In an experiment published in 2003, 81 percent of participants who watched the debate thought Kennedy won. Of those who only listened, 60 percent did.
Harvard Business School teaches almost entirely by case. Students are given an incomplete business situation, cold-called without warning, and required to state what they would do. Not what the considerations are — what they would do. And a substantial part of the grade is participation, so silence is penalised directly.