A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on the brink of a high-risk conversation. Sitting in my in-laws’ living room, listening to television news about the latest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, I grew curious about my father-in-law’s views. My “Pa” is an old-school conservative, an Army veteran fully bought into the American ideals of freedom, hard work and self-sufficiency. I’m a liberal Harvard professor who immigrated from Russia as a child. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our views on immigration have always differed.
The choice between engagement and avoidance, so familiar to me from my own research, felt paralyzing. I wanted to know my father-in-law’s thoughts. He’s lived a long life and risked it repeatedly for American democracy. Surely, he understands the desperate yearning that drives people to seek refuge on U.S. soil, I thought. But I was also afraid. What if he said something I couldn’t condone? Something inaccurate or insulting? Would it be wiser to stick to discussing the kids and the weather?
A vast majority of Americans say that political conversation has become less respectful in recent years, the Pew Research Center has found, and almost twice as many people find political disagreement stressful as find it interesting. Most people have a scant interpersonal tool kit for navigating important differences of opinion, whether in politics, family matters or work. When we rely on soaring rhetoric and sound logic to change minds, we often find ourselves surprised that other people don’t want their minds changed. Meanwhile, the mere possibility of disagreement can induce anxiety because we (accurately) expect confrontations to be fruitless, eroding even the closest relationships. Yet, dodging discussions of contentious topics feels cowardly and robs us of connection.
It’s not easy to show our genuine selves, strong opinions and all, to our loved ones — and to have them do the same. It’s even harder to do so and not end up screaming.
The good news is that there is a growing behavioral science that shows us that we can disagree better. In my lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, we define “constructive disagreement” as any disagreement that increases the parties’ willingness to speak to each other again. This definition recognizes that people rarely change important beliefs in a single conversation. In our research, we test strategies that make further conversations more likely by avoiding acrimony from the get-go.
The first step involves jettisoning assumptions. When faced with disagreement, people quickly judge their counterparts to be less intelligent, less objective and less moral than those on their own side. But when two people in one conversation feel this way, they can’t both be right. Once people allow for the possibility that those they disagree with might not be foolish or evil for believing what they do, it becomes easier to seriously consider their reasoning.
Our research shows that clearly stating that you want to learn about your counterpart’s perspective significantly improves how that person evaluates both you and your arguments. In multiple experiments — one involving stakeholders in the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance — a person’s stated desire to learn about his or her conversational partner strongly predicted a variety of improved conflict outcomes. In one study that dealt with affirmative action policies, almost four times as many people wanted to converse with an opponent they believed to be interested in their views as wanted to converse with someone they believed to be uninterested.
Similarly, when Democrats and Republicans learned that a member of the opposing party was curious to learn about their perspective, they judged that person more positively than members of their own political faction. Indeed, we have found perceptions of curiosity to be the No. 1 predictor of whether a conversation between political opponents goes well or poorly. Participants in our research even found political opponents who were curious to be more trustworthy, moral and intelligent than people they agreed with.
People often struggle to express their desire to learn about opposing views. Some of this reluctance is driven by pride. Asking a person for an explanation of their beliefs suggests that there is something about the topic of disagreement that one doesn’t fully understand. It puts us in the position of a student and elevates the other person to the position of instructor. As an immigrant with a doctorate, it is hard for me to listen to people’s hot takes on immigration. But in my in-laws’ living room, I embraced the lessons from my own research and told my father-in-law that although he and I probably see this situation differently, I’d like to hear what he thinks about the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Then I shut up and listened.
Setting aside our assumptions and seeking others’ perspectives is just the beginning. Staying constructive requires continued engagement with opposing views even as we argue for our own. Conversations are two-way affairs. It would be unreasonable to expect people to question their assumptions and express curiosity without also giving them a chance to say their piece. But it’s easy to destroy all the good will you just created with curiosity by stating your views too dogmatically or letting snark creep in.
To address this problem, my team wrote an algorithm for identifying the concrete linguistic markers that signal that a person is engaging with opposing views even as they are arguing for their own perspective. Hedging phrases like “sometimes” and “maybe” help. Signaling acknowledgment by saying “I hear what you’re saying” or “I understand” and then restating their view offers concrete, verbal evidence of engagement. Predictably, “no,” “can’t” and “won’t” have negative effects. And “merely” and “therefore”? Those can drip with condescension.
We call this communication style conversational receptiveness: language that shows people in disagreement that they are being heard, leading them to see each other and future interactions more positively. Crucially, conversational receptiveness is contagious. When we train participants to communicate in this way, their counterparts naturally emulate their tone and become more receptive themselves.
As I talked with my father-in-law, I restated some of his points, making sure that I didn’t caricature or minimize his arguments. I emphasized where we agree. Then, I offered my own opinion — with warmth and plenty of hedging. And because I just listened to him, he was willing to listen to me, too. What would have been an argument took on a tone of exploration. Nobody changed their minds, but we learned about each other’s experiences and motives. The questions that remained were set aside until the next conversation. By resisting the temptation to set this conversation on fire, we managed to build a bridge to a future one.
Julia Minson is a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of “How to Disagree Better.”
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