Rogerian argument (or Rogerian rhetoric) is a rhetorical and conflict resolution strategy based on empathizing with others, seeking common ground and mutual understanding and learning, while avoiding the negative effects of extreme attitude polarization. The term Rogerian refers to the psychologist Carl Rogers, whose client-centered therapy has also been called Rogerian therapy. Since 1970, rhetoricians have applied the ideas of Rogers—with contributions by Anatol Rapoport—to rhetoric and argumentation, producing Rogerian argument.

A key principle of Rogerian argument is that, instead of advocating one's own position and trying to refute the other's position, one tries to state the other's position with as much care as one would have stated one's own position, emphasizing what is strong or valid in the other's argument. To this principle, Rapoport added other principles that are sometimes called "Rapoport's rules". Rhetoricians have designed various methods for applying these Rogerian rhetorical principles in practice.

Several scholars have criticized how Rogerian argument is taught. Already in the 1960s Rapoport had noted some of the limitations of Rogerian argument, and other scholars identified other limitations in the following decades. For example, they concluded that Rogerian argument is less likely to be appropriate or effective when communicating with violent or discriminatory people or institutions, in situations of social exclusion or extreme power inequality, or in judicial settings that use formal adversarial procedures.

Some empirical research has tested role reversal and found that its effectiveness depends on the issue and situation.

In the study and teaching of rhetoric and argumentation, the term Rogerian argument was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by the 1970 textbook Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by the University of Michigan professors Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. They borrowed the term Rogerian and related ideas from the polymath Anatol Rapoport, who was working, and doing peace activism, at the same university. The University of Texas at Austin professor Maxine Hairston then spread Rogerian argument through publications such as her textbook A Contemporary Rhetoric, and other authors published book chapters and scholarly articles on the subject.

Anatol Rapoport's 1960 book Fights, Games, and Debates described three persuasive strategies that could be applied in debates. He noted that they correspond to three kinds of psychotherapy or ways of changing people, and he named them after Pavlov (behaviorism), Freud (psychoanalysis), and Rogers (person-centered therapy). Young, Becker, and Pike's 1970 textbook Rhetoric: Discovery and Change said that the strategies correspond to three big assumptions about humanity, which they called three "images of man".

The Pavlovian strategy represents people "as a bundle of habits that can be shaped and controlled" by punishments and rewards. This strategy changes people by punishing undesired habits and rewarding desired habits. Some examples of Pavlovian techniques in the real world are behaviorist teaching machines, training of simple skills, and brainwashing, which Rapoport called "another name for training". Some fictional examples cited by Rapoport are the inquisitors in Shaw's Saint Joan, in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and in Orwell's 1984. The Pavlovian strategy can be benign or malign, but a "fundamental limitation" of the strategy is that the user of it must have complete control over the rewards and punishments used to change someone's mind and behavior, and someone in a conflict is unlikely to submit to such control by a perceived opponent, except under draconian conditions such as imprisonment.

The Freudian strategy represents people as consciously espousing beliefs that are produced by unconscious or hidden motives that are unknown to them; changing people's beliefs—and changing any behaviors that are caused by those beliefs—requires revealing the hidden motives. Rapoport considered this strategy to be at the core of Freudian psychoanalysis but also to be present in any other kind of analysis that aims to change people's minds or behaviors by explaining how their beliefs or discourse are a product of hidden motives or mechanisms. Rapoport mentioned his own teaching as one example of this strategy, in situations where his students' resistance to new knowledge was dissolved by the teacher pointing out how the students' opposing preconceptions were caused by the students' memories of prior experiences that were illusory or irrelevant to the new knowledge. Another of Rapoport's examples was a certain kind of Marxist class analysis, used repeatedly by Lenin, in which the ideals of liberal intellectuals are "explained away" by Marxists as nothing more than a rationalization of the liberals' unconscious motive to preserve their social class position in a capitalist economic system. Such "explaining away" or "debunking" of people's beliefs and behaviors may work, Rapoport said, when there is "a complete trust placed by the target of persuasion in the persuader", as sometimes occurs in teaching and psychotherapy. But such complete trust is unlikely in most conflict situations, and the strategy can often be turned back against someone who is trying to use it: "It has been used by anti-Communists on the Communists (clothed in Freudian terminology) as well as by the Communists on the anti-Communists (clothed in Marxist terminology)."