How to Disagree Better

Guest post by Julia Minson

How to Disagree Better, out this week, and is a brilliant, must-read by Julia Minson, a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the founder of Disagreeing Better, LLC–a behavioral science consultancy and training firm.

Julia is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict management, negotiations, and judgment and decision making. Her main line of research addresses the“psychology of disagreement”–How do people engage with opinions, values, and judgments that conflict with their own?

Her work examines disagreements around hot-button, identity-relevant topics—conflicts around politics, values, and professional and health decision-making. She is interested in simple, scalable interventions to help people become more receptive to opposing views ofothers.

Julia teaches courses and workshops on negotiations, decision science, and conflict management. Her work has been published in top academic and business outlets as wellas widely covered by popular media including theNew York Times, theWall Street Journal,and theWashington Post.

Please enjoyed her guest post below!

Consider the myriad unresolved disagreements in your life: your spouse’s parenting choices that you find ineffective, but are reluctant to debate; your business partner’s penchant toward risky investments that you question, but don’t want to challenge; your neighbor’s political bumper sticker, that you find both infuriating and baffling.

For many years, I was obsessed with the following psychological mystery: Why do people hate engaging in disagreement? Why do we avoid opposing views like the plague, even if such avoidance prevents us from obtaining useful information, making better decisions, or simply having more interesting conversations?

As an academic psychologist, I first looked for answers in the research literature, but I was disappointed with what I found. Many studies documented the phenomenon of “selective exposure” – empirically demonstrating that when faced with a choice, people preferred consuming information that supported their beliefs rather than information that contradicted them. Although these studies captured the pattern, they did little to explain it beyond vaguely pointing in the direction of the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, engaging with opposing views feels “threatening” because the arguments on the other side might lead us to question our beliefs and cause the unpleasant feeling of dissonance. To avoid experiencing this type of threat, people sidestep conversations that might expose them to opposing arguments. To me, the idea seemed both too vague and too convenient to be believable.

One time, sitting in a New Hampshire brewery with a basket of fries and an IPA, I shared my frustration with my husband. “Everyone says disagreement is threatening… but I just don’t buy it. Imagine you were debating one of your deepest convictions with somebody who disagrees with you. Would you be threatened by their views? Or would you just be annoyed that they don’t get it? I don’t think that threat has much to do with it.” My husband looked at me, and with a knowing chuckle remarked: “Well YOU don’t feel threatened, because YOU think you are right about everything!”

That’s when it hit me. His teasing remark was actually a pithy articulation of a core psychological principle, and one that should have been top of mind for me since it was first proposed by my PhD advisor, Lee Ross. The principle was “naive realism” - people’s tendency to believe (largely without either doubt or evidence) that their beliefs are fundamentally accurate and reasonable. In other words, we naively believe that our perceptions correspond to an objective reality. Of course, this principle didn’t only apply to me. In fact, naive realism is a fundamental feature of human cognition - one that allows us to get through the world without questioning our every belief. But there is a downside - if you are convinced that your views are fundamentally reasonable, it is hard to deal with people who see the world differently and dare to say so out loud.

The framework of naive realism neatly explained why people avoid disagreement — it is annoying, frustrating, and sometimes infuriating to have to debate people who just don’t get it when you know you are right. It also explained why the idea that disagreement is threatening became so ingrained in both the popular mind and in academic psychology. For naive realists it’s easy to believe that the people who disagree (and are therefore wrong), are too threatened by our good ideas and superior arguments. The explanation that others avoid disagreement because they are threatened is a lot easier to reconcile with our own experience of rightness than wrapping our brains around the paradox that disagreeing others may also have good reasons for their views and are just as annoyed and frustrated with our failure to see the light as we are with theirs.

My husband’s casual remark spawned an entire line of research with Charlie Dorison (my former PhD student and now a professor at Georgetown), where we systematically demonstrated that people over-estimate the level of threat and anxiety that others experience in disagreement, while simultaneously reporting primarily anger and frustration when asked about their own emotions. In a related study where Charlie and I offered people the opportunity to read arguments for views they disagreed with, they were far more interested in reading high quality arguments than low quality arguments. In other words, people wanted to learn something interesting and new, not to be further infuriated by poor logic.

Understanding that our reluctance to engage with opposing perspectives comes not from a sense of threat and insecurity, but from a deep conviction that we are right and others are wrong, should lead to different approaches to managing conversations across important divides. For example, telling people to feel less threatened is not particularly useful when they are not threatened in the first place.

But there is also a broader point. Our intuitions about the dynamics of disagreement (just like many of our other intuitions) are often wrong. It takes careful experimental research to sort out the accurate insights, from those that seem to conform with our experience but ultimately don’t stand up to scrutiny.

In my new book, How to Disagree Better, I draw on decades of behavioral science to give readers concrete, behavioral tools for navigating their disagreements and preventing them from spiraling into all out battles. Some of my advice conforms with what most of us already believe, but some of it contradicts popular wisdom. As constructive, earnest disagreement becomes more and more rare in our society, I wanted to offer the world an easily digestible guide, based on the best research currently available for having thoughtful conversations across divides. As behavioral science has become more empirically rigorous and more methodologically sophisticated we have learned a lot about the causes of and the solutions to human strife. Let’s put the science to use so we can all disagree better!