Yes, indeed; that's one big part of it, the tendency to give in to hysterical behavior because it's unpleasant to be subject to it and for a moment you put aside whatever conflict you have with the person in order to get them to calm down; you don't feel that pressure when you're engaged calmly and rationally. That's something that affects people of all levels of intelligence and rationality.

When expressing concerns about the target audience of this message, I was perhaps focusing on the other half of it, the one which is skewed by intelligence/rationality: actually reacting well to reasonable discussions. So, on one hand, you need to not respond to pathos, and on the other you need to do respond to logos. I don't imagine LWers struggling with that part of the process, because we like nice yummy reasoning and arguments. Less cerebral people, as I found, may simply not respond as expected to "what-if"s and "my-side-of-the-pond"s and "consider-the-possibility"s; they don't speak the rationalist language, and as such don't recognize these attempts at mediation as invitations to switch from "stick-to-your-own-guns" mode to "let's-debate-this" mode. (Pardon the Buffy Speak.)