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Vaniver comments on According to Dale Carnegie, You Can't Win an Argument—and He Has a Point - LessWrong
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I think you need a longer time span to see this is quite often false. What has happened many times is I argue with my friend or my parent and "win" while they're defending their position to the teeth. Months later, they present my argument to me as their own as if the previous discussion never happened. Some people's forgetfulness amazes me, but I suspect I've changed my mind this way without noticing too.
Admitting you're wrong is quite different from changing your mind. Even so, I hopefully don't argue to win these days anymore.
I once went to a talk in which Christopher Zeeman modelled this behaviour using catastrophe theory. I'm not sure you need the mathematics for the thesis, which was (roughly) that arguing for your position pushes people towards it in their underlying beliefs, but also pushes people to be more defensive about their initial beliefs (because it's a conflict situation). When they go away afterwards and calm down, they may find that they have moved towards your your position ... without necessarily remembering the argument as having any part in it.
He claimed to have applied this theory successfully to push a committee he was on, by making a big fuss months before the final decision on the topic was needed.