How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty

When exploring debate practices, much of the argumentation and debate literature suggests effective strategies for persuasion. However, debate appears to be a type of dialogue where participation promotes one-sidedness and persuasion normally fails to occur. This indicates that debating is useless unless it addresses uncertain people, as the literature often claims. Relegating debate to deal with only uncertain people implies that debate is ineffective when it is addressed to highly committed participants, denying its historical role as a method to combat absolute certainty. Therefore, in order to restore the role of debate, this paper presents a review of relevant surveys on attitude strength moderation performed by collecting information on how to lead people with strong attitudes toward a doubtful stance.