Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today's Monday, March
twenty third, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria, And as always, before
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This week, I had the opportunity to speak with doctor
Julia Minson, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She
is a behavioral scientist who researches the psychology of disagreement,
including you know, conflict, communication, negotiations, and decision making. Really
to understand better how people engage with opinions, judgments, and
those decisions that differ from their own. You're going to
learn a lot today. You're going to learn, as the
title of the book implies, how to disagree better. So,
without any further ado, here she is doctor Julia Minson. Well, Julia,
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk about your new book, How to
Disagree Better, But I'm also excited to talk about what
go you to the place in your career where you know,
this book is the book that you are writing. So
you're a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm
always really interested in like behavioral scientists who are multi disciplinary.
So I studied clinical psychology, which is a very kind
of classic psychology route. It's quite prescribed at this point.
There are very specific things everybody who wants to go
clinical has to do and has to study in order
to be able to get licensed. But I know a
lot of people who are researchers in human behavior who
came from cognitive neuroscience or even economic social economics or
you know, kind of classic psychology departments. So I'm curious
how your academic story was woven to get you to
where you are today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, so I actually wanted to be a
clinical psychologist. And my mom was also a psychologist, and
she said, no, no, no, you don't want to be
a clinical psychologist because it's it's just it's just too hard.
You know. You listen to people who have sort of
really you know, profound challenges every day and like it's
it's hard and it's sad, and don't do that.
Speaker 2: But you have to write grants, right, that's hard.
Speaker 3: To Well, I'm at a public policy school, so that's
a little easier. We're a professional school. But so I
became a social psychologist, and you know, I don't know,
maybe three or four years into graduate school, I discovered
the field of judgment decision making, which is an inter
disciplinary field, right, So it's psychologists and economists, and you know,
occasionally we get like, you know, confused sociologist wandering in
that sort of thing. And so there's you know a
few JDM people in lots of behavioral science departments. So
we're kind of all over the place, And I really
I got drawn to the fact that they were like
right answers. So I really enjoyed like studying something that
had like correct answers that people mostly get wrong, and
and I just found that terribly interesting.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: So a lot of myth busting, a lot of pseudoscience
that you have to kind of sniff out, and really
just I think it's about cognitive biases. It's about that
intuitive way that a lot of people go, well, this
feels right, so it must be right. You know a
lot of times we think things intuitively that turn out
to not you know, kind of be the way that
the brain works, or to not be effective in a
social setting. So before we get into you know, all
of the really interesting insights that you write about in
your book, tell me a little bit more about You
use the acronym JDM judgment and decision making. Like on
its face, you know, we know what those words mean.
We think judgment and decision making. What is that field?
Speaker 3: So you know, the best the best way I've heard
and described is is behavioral science that looks at how
people make decisions sort of descriptively, right, like what do
actual people actually do, uh, And how does that compare
to prescriptive rules of decision making that usually come from
you know, economics or sort of formal logic. Right, So
there's certain things that we can sort of all agree on,
you know, this is the right thing to be doing, uh,
And then you run a study and you show that
you know, a large proportion of humans doesn't do that
thing we've all agreed on as rational, and then you're like, oh, okay,
this is a decision biased. So what we study those
types of things.
Speaker 1: So when we say we can all agree on certain
things as being kind of the rational way to go,
are we saying because like, statistically and experimentally, if you
made this decision, it would have some sort of optimized result,
Like this is the way you should do it, because
that's how you get what you want.
Speaker 3: So either statistically or logically. So, for example, in my
in my own kind of area of you know, studying disagreement, right,
a lot of the work I did in graduate school
doesn't sound at all like what I ended up doing.
So in my own area of disagreement, when I you know,
when I was in graduate school, I started from like
a very very different place than where I ended up.
I used to study how people may quantitative judgments in
certain uncertain situations. And so you can imagine like a
simple example where I give you, you know, a jar
of eminems and you have to estimate how many eminems
are in the jar. Or you can imagine a much
more practical example where let's say you're a military commander
and you're like looking over some ridge and you're estimating
the number of tanks you know on the other side
of the ridge. Right, it's an estimate under uncertainty. You're
counting things. There's a correct but you have no idea
what the correct number is. And when you have two
people make estimates in those types of situations and they disagree,
the kind of normative, prescriptive thing to do is to
average your two estimates. Right, So like statistics will tell
you that you know, if you are averaging uncertain estimates,
the bigger the sample, the closer you get to the
right answer. And like it's not even sort of like
very hard math, it's pretty basic arithmetic. You can show
that you know, some people underestimate, some people overestimate. If
you average it, you get closer to the truth. What
people do in reality is they make their estimate, you
tell them, here's this other person who made this other estimate.
They often don't adjust their own estimate at all. Right,
So probably, you know, thirty to forty percent of people
just stick to their guns. And if they do adjust,
they adjust a relatively small amount. So if you, you know,
average across a sample of people, you end up with
folks adjusting on average a third of the way, which
is not optimal if you're going for accuracy, and it's
not optimal if you're going for logic, right, because everybody
can't be twice as right as like the other person, right.
And so that's a very typical judgment and decision making
sort of line of research, right where you say, okay,
there is like a logical thing, and now let's see
what people really do, and then let's see what we understand,
what we come to understand about psychology based on that distinction,
based on the divergence.
Speaker 1: M It kind of reminds me of I remember these
classic studies, and who knows how much they've stood up
over time, but where a bunch of Americans were surveyed
about their I think they were college students were surveying
about their sort of academic prowess and how well they
do on exams and how basically how smart they are
compared to their peers, And like the vast majority of
people thought that they were significantly smarter than everybody else,
which is statistically impossible, you know, like.
Speaker 2: No, the math isn't mathing there. We can't all be
smarter than everybody else.
Speaker 3: Right, right, right, So that's a classic that's a classic
example of overconfidence. And I'm happy to tell you that
that stuff stands up really well. People are in fact,
like wildly overconfident in some domains, like not in every domain.
And that's a perfect example of we could all agree
that we can't all be above average, right, yet people
seem to believe that they are. What does that tell us?
Speaker 1: So I'm curious, you know, obviously, we're going to be
getting into a lot of different domains, a lot of
cognitive biases, a lot of kind of conventional wisdom that
maybe it's time to throw out the window, and uh
experimental knowledge that we should start utilizing when engaging in
conflict or engaging in debate.
Speaker 2: But I'm sort of curious.
Speaker 1: From from you personally, what domains of this work really
got you interested, Like are you interested in the political sphere?
Are you interested in interpersonal conflict? Like where did you
start kind of developing a keen hunger to learn more
about this?
Speaker 3: You know, I think I came at it initially from
the interpersonal side, and uh, you know this is part
of me, like, you know, being an unrealized clinical psychologist, right,
Like I love I love relationships. I love trying to
understand relationships when I you know, I talk in my
book about how I was actually a competitive ballroom dancer
when I was young and my now husband was my
dance part and you know, we danced together for years.
We were very serious. We were you know, nationally ranked,
and you know, this was like our whole life outside
of you know, outside of trying to make a living
and pay the rent, Like this was when we lived
and breathed. And the thing that's really unique about dancing
is that you are in such close physical proximity that
you're like almost literally occupying the same space. Right you know,
your bodies are touching, you're dancing to the same music,
you're listening to the same instructions from your coach, you're reviewing,
you know, like you're watching yourself sort of in the
mirrors as you're going around dance studio, and so you
would think that you would have perfect information and therefore
perfect alignment on what is happening, right, and that just
was not the case. Like, we fought constantly. And the
thing that was weird is that we didn't fight about
anything else, right. So it's not like we were like,
it's not like we were one of those couples that
just fights a lot. We never fought except for when
we were on the dance floor, right.
Speaker 1: So the thing you're supposed to be most in sync about,
you were.
Speaker 2: Most desparate on right, right, right.
Speaker 3: And it's not like we didn't know how to get along,
because like we got along in every other domain, right.
And what I sort of came to realize eventually is
that there's this very curious arrangement, specifically about ballroom dancing,
where the entire time you're facing each other, which means
that you are never looking in the same direction at
the same time. And so you're like going around a
dance studio, you see a mirror and you see your
partners back and you say, like, oh, you are like
lilting to the left, and of course he's got no
idea that he's lilting to the left because his back
is to the mirror. And then as you rotate, he
sees something that I don't see. And so you are
you have this illusion that you're having a shared experience,
but you're not really having a shared experience. And you
know that observation of you know, and all ballroom dancing
couples fight like you know, you stand in a dance
studio and everybody is, you know, going at it. And
what's really you know, funny is people who are very
very good who argue just the same way that complete
beginners argue. And I thought, you know, if people who
share the same information on are in the same space
and our long term successful competitive partners, many of them
are romantic couples, and like they can't have a sensible
conversation about this. You know, this is interesting to understand,
like what is happening here? And so that's what actually
drew me into my PhD is studying ballroom dancers.
Speaker 1: I love that because it's such a perfect you know,
metaphor or example of so many instances of course as
a psychologist, but also as a human being who lives
in the world. I see the kind of what happens
when two people who are occupying a similar space have
wildly different perspectives and are struggling to kind of empathize
with each other's viewpoints. We see this in politics all
the time, we see this in the social arena that
you know it, and it can be of really frustrating
experience that you're like, we're both looking.
Speaker 2: At the same thing, how do you see it so differently?
Speaker 1: But it is true that, for example, if I'm talking
to a man about, you know, an interpersonal experience, we
may see the same thing in the moment, but the
context is wildly different. Right, I'm seeing it through the
eyes of a woman, And you know, my experience in
a let's say, patriarchy is wildly different than his, and
there's certain privileges that I might have or that he
might have. I mean, there's just so many reasons that
perspectives are different when we come together with other people.
Speaker 3: Right right, right right, And that's you know, and I
think that's to me probably is one of the most
kind of like underappreciated dynamics of any kind of relationship
or any kind of interaction, is just how incredibly blind
we are to the contents of other people's minds, right, like,
you know, like if you you know put you know,
if you put, if you hold like an ice drink
in your hands, right and it feels cold, and you
have somebody else hold the same ice drink next to you,
They're going to have a different subjective experience of how
that exact same thing feels. And we never think about that.
We never think about the fact that the same level
of pain, the same level of pleasure, the same level
of interest you know, from the same stimulus, is actually
experienced differently by other people. And furthermore, we don't even
have a scale of like we can't even put it
on the same scale because my one to ten is
different than they're one to ten.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we can't even have a conversation about it. Really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the ways that we test these kinds of things
in psychological experiments are loose at best, because, yeah, we
have to think about where people are anchoring and you know,
all of those different issues. I would say that it's
probably the number one, if not in the top five things.
You know, I work in a cancer center, so I
kind of have a specialized practice. But even given that
I would say probably working on empathizing with other people,
utilizing the principle of charity when thinking about other people's perspectives,
and then also softening our anger towards other people who
can't or won't or aren't empathizing with us. I mean,
those are probably some of the top things that we
work on in therapy because they really are a huge
cause of most innerpersonal conflict.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 1: So of course if we could do that, the world
would probably I mean think about all the way right
diplomacy and war and politics and marriage and and yeah,
just like the functional kind of civic engagement and society.
I mean, there are so many downstream problems that I
believe they're getting worse in a way, right, not because
human nature has changed fundamentally, but because the context in
which we live has changed. We live online now, and
that'll affords us, you know, whole new ways to not
have to empathize with other.
Speaker 3: People, right right right, Well, And that was the thing,
is I you know, I had my like ballroom dancing ideas,
and then I showed up at Stanford and my PhD
advisor was Lee Ross, who is you know, passed away
a few years ago. But he was sort of an
incredibly influential social psychologist. He's the guy that came He's
probably the most famous for the fundamental attribution error. So
people always say, who's Lee Ross. I'm like the fundamental
attribution era guy, you know. And he was doing a
lot of work in the Middle East, you know, Israel, Palestine,
he did some stuff in Northern Ireland, and so, you know,
I like Waltson with my ideas about ballroom dancers, and
he immediately saw the connection in terms of misunderstanding and
sort of like failure to appreciate the opposing perspective. And
one of the things that he really drew my attention
to is all the situations in the world where people
have to find a way to coexist and work together
but will never ever ever agree, right, So, you know,
I mean, like that's that's the Middle East, right, Like,
people have to find a way to work together. Nobody's
ever going to go away, right.
Speaker 1: And they're not going to radically change their you know,
their worldview.
Speaker 3: They're just not right right right, right, So so those
types of situations where persuasion and sort of added to
change are just not on the menu. How can we
have better conversations and you know, and so we we
started working together from like these two like wildly different,
you know, perspectives of you know, I've got the ballroom
dancing and he's got like the Middle East conflict. Uh.
And then we ended up running all these studies, you know,
where people had to estimate, you know, the length of
the Amazon River and how many eminems are in this
jar and things like that.
Speaker 1: Wow, and so okay, before we get to oh gosh,
there's so much I want to talk about, I do
think it's probably important to at least define the fundamental
attribution error for those who maybe don't know it by
that name, because a it's such a kind of basic
cognitive I guess bias or way of thinking that we
all are subject to all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a very important bias, and I think it
plays hugely into conflict. And Lee had a habit of
sort of naming things in ways that nobody will ever
understand in the future. So I often find myself defining
his charts for people. So the fundamental attribution err is
our tendency to attribute somebody's behavior to their stable internal characteristics,
usually their personality, and overlook the influence of the situation
on their behavior. Right. So you you know, you see,
you know, you see some guy like you know, screaming
at his car, uh, and you think like, oh, you know,
he has a temper, and you know men have tempers, right,
And so you're kind of like attributing a set of
personality traits and you know, you're saying, like it has
something to do with his gender, right, And it could
be the case that like, you know, this is the
third time he you know, his car broke down this week,
and he's missed an important job interview and you know whatever,
his dog just died, right, and maybe in that situation,
all of us would be screaming at the car. And
so you you made an attribution based you know, about
his personality for behavior that's actually fully explained by the
situation he's in.
Speaker 2: And we do the opposite for ourselves, right.
Speaker 1: We tend to think that everything we do is because
of the situation, and everything other people do is because
that's just who they are, right.
Speaker 3: And that you know a little bit is related to
the whole ballroom dancing thing. Is it has to do
with the attention that the way our attention is deployed right,
Because when I'm looking at another person and the situation
they're in, kind of they're my focus. The focus of
my attention is the person, right, And so I explain
behavior in terms of what is most salient to me,
which is like the human performing the behavior. Whereas when
I'm explaining my own behavior to myself, I'm looking out
into the world right through my eyes, and what I
see around me is the situation. Right. I don't see myself.
I see all the things around me that made me
do a particular thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an interesting way to frame it to because
I'll often say with patients, you know, we're all the
main character in our own play, right, So like we've
got to remember that when we're when we're dealing with
other people, because they're the main character.
Speaker 2: In their own play.
Speaker 1: But in a way that almost implies that we're outside
looking in and we're not. We're the main character in
our own like autobiography, where we're.
Speaker 2: Actually watching it through the camera.
Speaker 1: Which is which is kind of a fascinating experience. But
you're right, that explains so much. And I think one
of the things that I would love to kind of
dig into a little bit deeper is that context, that
social context that we were talking about. And I had
a supervisor when I was on clinical internship, and I
used to love the way that she would phrase this,
and so I use it all the time, and people
listening to the show have probably heard me say it
all the time. I'll often use, you know, patriarchy as
an example, but it could be literally anything. It could
be white supremacy, right, like racism, or it could just
be like capitalism, anything like that. But she would always say,
it's the water we swim in, so we don't always
notice it because it's around us all the time, and
our my yes, we are all at certain macro levels
swimming in the same water, but at you know, kind
of lower levels. My water is different than your water,
and we are not even accounting for those sort of
cultural biographical developmental all the differences that make up why
I see the world the way I see it and
why you see it differently.
Speaker 3: M Yeah, no, that's that's exactly right. I fully agree
with you. I say something very similar. I say that
the fish doesn't know it's in water.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, there you go, love it because we don't.
Speaker 1: We don't until it's made, you know, acutely evident to us.
And even then sometimes there's sort of a refusal. And
I think that this is a political tactic. Sometimes sometimes
it's a self preservation tactic. It can be an ideological difficulty,
but like a refusal to accept the very fact that
we are products of so many different forces, and the
way that we think is not in a vacuum. It's
not independent of how we were raised, or independent of
all of the marketing messages we've been fed, or independent
of our you know, race, or our religion or our
you know, whatever cultural values or ideals. It's just not
we are products of so many influences.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I think that's I mean, that's sort of
factually true, and I think it's it's hard to always
be aware of for just sort of like cognitive attentional reasons.
I think the other piece of it is very cultural. Right,
So in an individualistic culture that pride prizes agency, people
are taught from, you know, the cradle that you are
a unique, you know, one and only person who is like,
you know, the archae of their own destiny. If you go,
you know, if you spend time in any East Asian culture,
that's not how people think right. So there, the cultural
emphasis is much more on you being a product of
your situation and a member of you know, a family,
a group of society, like you are a part of
a greater whole, whereas in the US, like everybody is
the kind of lone cowboy, you know, writing off into
the sunset.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes me wonder. And we're going to talk
about tactics next, or you know, biases, tactics, cognitions, ways
of thinking, ways of changing our thinking that can positively
influence our ability to communicate, especially in sort of like
high conflict situations, and also some of the things that
we do that are absolutely detrimental to our ability to communicate.
But I'm curious if one of the most fundamental ways
that we as human beings can sort of increase this
empathic capacity is just to travel. It's just to meet
people and go places where it's it's different and it's uncomfortable,
and start talking to people about how they live their
lives and recognizing that all of those different ways of
being exist and they're valid and ours is not the
only way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think that's I think that's a
great idea. It's you know, obviously one not available to everybody.
And two, I think a lot of people maybe who
would benefit the most would be the least willing to
try right.
Speaker 1: Right, or even if they do travel, there's like ways
now where you can just insulate yourself completely and you
basically hole up in a resort and it's just like
Baby America in another count.
Speaker 3: So there's actually there's a great there's a great nonprofit
organization that I've done some work with called the American
Exchange Project, and they have fully embraced your idea. And
what they do is they recruit high school seniors and
send them on an exchange trip to like some random
town in the US, so, you know, and they are
now in you know, hundreds of schools and they send
thousands of kids every year on these trips. And it's
basically they you know, you like, tell them where you're from,
and they will send you to a town that's on
their roster that is as different from the place you're
coming from as possible.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's really it's really neat. And so
you spend a week there with all these other kids
from like all over the place, and then the local
like it's usually a high school teacher from the local
high school. Will you know, the local kids host you,
and the teacher organizes sort of a week's worth of
like here's what we do around here kind of programming,
and it's just it's just incredible variances to you know,
just really help kids kind of broad that broad the aperture.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, I can't help but like comment that right now,
because I apparently have watched all of TV and have
run out of things to watch with my partner. We
are I'm rewatching now and he's watching for the first
time Friday Night Lights. And I grew up in Plano, Texas,
like in a suburb of Dallas, and this was home
to me, and I was a high school cheerleader, and
it's you know, it's like, on the one hand, a
little bit like traumatic to watch. On the other hand,
it's it's very nostalgic and familiar. But he grew up
in Michigan and he is.
Speaker 2: Like, what is happening? But this is not what it
was like.
Speaker 1: And it's so interesting to watch these like formative experiences
that we all had that were so different that shaped
either our and I see this a lot, right, Sometimes
they don't affect us deeply. Other times they really codify
things in us and kind of re enforce them, and
other times they make us run as far as possible
from those influences and triggers. But regardless, you can't get
away from your childhood, you can't get away from your
from your community, from your religion if that's something that's
you know, a part of your life, from your work,
culture and environment. It's just these things. They shape us,
They influence us, and we cannot We are not impervious
to influence.
Speaker 3: Right right, right, No, I think that's I think that's
absolutely true. And then you know, we kind of I
think in your own like if you then have kids, right,
it's you are either amplifying the things that you liked
about your upbringing or you're fighting the things that you
like that you didn't like about your upbringing. But one
way or another, they're influencing you absolutely.
Speaker 1: And so those influences are strongest when we're young. They
do continue through the life span, but of course we
can point to more I would call them like sensitive
periods of development where they heavily influence us. And there's
a lot of research that shows like that is why
we listen to the same music we listened to in
high school and college. Right, that is why we have
these anchor points where we compare everything to these years
of our lives that were so influential. But of course,
now we are who we are. We are still always changing,
we are still always growing. Those of us who want
that are probably doing it at a higher rate. But
now we're engaging with people that came from all over
the place. And there are times in our lives, whether
it's at work, whether it's in a personal relationship, whether
it's in play where whether it's on a political stage
where we just disagree, and I think I can't think
of a better time to be having this conversation, because
we are in a political landscape that is very polarized
and very sort of.
Speaker 2: Uh, I guess we could say siloed, right, where people.
Speaker 1: Are actively avoiding alternate perspectives, or when they hear them,
they're prejudging them so deeply and acting as if they
know all of the motivations, all of the reasonings, and right,
you know, So, so tell me about some of the tools. Well, first,
maybe let's let's bust some myths. What are the ways
that people have been attempting to engage for so long
that just doesn't work, and we just, for some reason
keep beating our heads up against the wall.
Speaker 3: Hmmm hmm. Okay, well, so let's start with maybe not
maybe not necessarily the myths about how people engage wrong.
But let's pick up on the piece that you just
said about people assuming that they know about the other side.
So I think that's a huge myth we need to bust.
So you know that you us because of our two
party system, right there's this very clear continuum from left
to right, blue to red that creates this US versus them,
And indeed, we have a tremendous amount of polarization right now.
But one important myth is that people tend to overestimate
how much we disagree, and they overestimated by quite a lot,
and so there's a lot of there's a lot of
really good research on this. The thing that's interesting is
that that research has started a very long time ago,
so we can't blame it on social media. People have
overestimated the divergence in opinions between themselves and somebody they
disagree with, like this has been documented since early eighties.
So it's not the Internet It's just that when we
disagree and we put people and to serve a category,
we tend to assume that everybody in that category is
pretty extreme and pretty homogenous in their views.
Speaker 1: Right, So we're sort of looking at you know. I
remember watching this phenomenal documentary called The Mask You Live In,
which is about gender differences and how we raise boys
in our culture, and a lot of experts weigh in,
and there's a section and I feel like this. Bear
with me for a second, but I feel like this
speaks to what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: There's a section where.
Speaker 1: They draw two normal curves and they're overlapping, and there's
only a little bit of sort of like if you
imagine them as a Venn diagram, there's only a little
bit like shoulders on either side where they don't overlap.
And they go, Okay, if this is the boy curve
and this is the girl curve, these shoulders are how
we tend to caricature what it means to be masculine
or feminine, what it means to be a boy.
Speaker 2: Or a girl.
Speaker 1: Whereas ninety percent of the variance is overlapping, and all
of those people are still boys or girls or nonvite whatever,
but on these extreme ends, that becomes our definition of
gender as opposed to the extreme version.
Speaker 3: And we do that. So we do that same thing
with liberals and conservatives, right absolutely. And there's a great
way to sort of experience this. There's a think tank
called More in Common and they did a research project
a few years ago that you know, like they sort
of did the research, publish the paper, but also they
build a website that people can sort of tinker around with.
The website is perception gap dot org. And the idea
is that you go in, you say, if you're a
Democrat or a Republican, and then you answer a bunch
of opinion questions, and then you answer a bunch of
the say, you answer the same questions estimating how the
other side would answer them, right, and then you know,
the the database crunches the numbers, and what you see
is that actual answers from the other side versus your
own estimates versus the estimates of other people on your
side and so right, So the perception gap is sort
of like how extreme do I think the out group
is relative to how extreme their actual reported views are? Right,
So it's like those shoulders.
Speaker 1: Probably also compared to myself, right, because I can imagine
that most people are pretty moderate, and so they're like, well,
look at where I am on the curve, and I
assume all of the people who think who are in
the other party are way off to you know, I'm left.
So let's say, I don't know how much this would
apply to me. This So I'm very curious in this
because I have a feeling I'm very far left. But
let's say that I met out much more moderate than
I think. But I'm assuming that most people on the
right are far right, and they turn out to be
kind of closer to me than to the extreme in
their own party.
Speaker 3: Right, right, right, And what that you know, the kind
of the reason that that matters, right is because if
you think of somebody as pretty extreme, you think of
them as quite unreasonable. You might think of them as
quite uninformed, you know, potentially immoral or unethical. And then
the like obvious implication of that is you shouldn't have
to talk to them, because why would you talk to
this jerk who you know is like a crazy extremist.
Speaker 1: Exactly like maybe even dangerous or violent, And you know
that would be threatening to me. So I don't want
to engage with them at all. Like, yeah, we build
these narratives where it's it's it's unhealthy to engage, right,
and that helps us stay insulated.
Speaker 3: Right, it could be unhealthy to engage. It could be
sort of like they don't deserve my attention because nothing
they say has any merit to it. And so the
consequence of that is that we don't engage, and then
the only thing we know about the people on the
other side is what we get from social media, which
of course then gives us the most extreme caricatured version, right.
And so there's this like cycle where you know, we
have bias beliefs, we act on those beliefs by insulating ourselves,
which only sort of further entrenches us in our bias beliefs.
So that's a huge that that's a huge thing. I
wish we could sort of get over as get start
having slightly more realistic ideas about what folks on the
other side believe.
Speaker 1: And of course I think we're all sort of both
victims and perpetrators of this. I think about my own father,
who is you know, still in Plano, Texas. He's Mormon,
he's voted for Trump, both times, and when we do
in gauge honestly, kindly and patiently with each other, it
almost always ends up the same way. We sort of
come to this place where we're like, we mostly agree
about everything, we just are wildly divergent in how we
think those things should be accomplished. It's like our core
values are not that different, but there are, you know,
just a hand full of sticking points where he might
be kind of entrenched or I might be kind of entrenched.
Speaker 2: Obviously my view is that he's entrenched and I'm not
because I'm a human being.
Speaker 1: And then we disagree about how to get that thing
that we want, you know, how do we get to
a more egalitarian society, How do we get to a
place where there's less income inequality, or where the poorest
and the sickest and the most vulnerable among us get
the help that they need.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like, ultimately he is not the boogeyman that it
feels sometimes like the far right is or is creating.
But he still votes along lines that I have moral
problems with because you know, of these kind of smaller,
more logistical allegiances. But when we really talk about, yeah,
our ideologies, our core values. There's so much more alignment
than we give each other credit for. At the beginning
of the conversation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what's you know to me, like, what's really fun?
You're like a funny experience of that is, you know,
I teach at a school of public policy, right and
our students are often very eager to have disagreement, and
you know, like like they want to practice, they want
to practice you know, dialogue and debate, and you know,
they come to me and they say, Professor, you study this.
Can we, you know, put together a discussion group. I'm
like sure, And you know what you need to do,
right is you need to find topics on which they disagree.
So I give out a survey and I'll say, okay,
here's twenty different topics. You know, fill out your opinion
on each of these topics, and then we'll you know,
partner everybody up and assign them a topic on which
they said they disagree, and then they sit down and
then they have the conversation, and then half of them
come to me complaining that I mismatched them because it
turns out they didn't disagree very much. It's amazing, And
I'm like, no, no, no, see, it's psychology. It's not
that like I can't do math. This is how things work.
Speaker 1: Lesson number one check mark.
Speaker 2: I love that. That's so funny.
Speaker 1: So we already know then that we are overestimating the
kind of differences in viewpoints, and we tend to think
that if somebody identifies with a certain label or a
certain you know, political party, whatever category, that they become
the caricature of that category, the most extreme version of
that category. Right there, just knowing that the misinformation does
bring us closer together, but there are obviously ways that
we can work to become closer together, or at least
to be comfortable with our differences.
Speaker 3: Right yeah, And I really you know, here's another you know,
since we're in sort of this mythbusting land, one of
the things that I sort of really struggle with, as
you know, as a researcher and sort of now as
an author and a speaker, is that a lot of
the things that you know, we talk about in this
in those domains seem like very familiar and very simplistic,
and oh, you know, everybody knows it. So one of
the things that everybody knows is that you're supposed to
be more empathetic and try to take the other person's
perspective and you know, be more humble and then that
will help. And that's one of the things that doesn't
help as much as we wanted to help, unfortunately. And
the thing that gets in the way, it turns out
is that even when people try really hard to do
all of that mental and emotional work, I mean one,
you know, following through those intentions is difficult, right Like
when you actually sit down with another human and they
start saying the things they want to say, sometimes your
head explodes and it's really hard to live up to
the level of empathy that you initially aspired to. And
then the other piece of it is that even if
you do achieve, you know, some amount of empathy and
some amount of humility and some amount of curiosity, that's
an internal psychological experience, right Like in your head you
are thinking, ooh, this is really interesting, and this person
is like whatever, and I am trying to put myself
in their shoes. They have no idea that you're doing
anything right. They are having the experience of I'm talking,
I'm pouring my heart out. Julia here is staring up
at the ceiling. Why isn't she listening to me? Right?
And so there's just this huge gap between our internal
mental efforts and what is transparently and clearly coming out
that our counterparts can actually you know, observe experience and
give us credit for. And so a huge amount of
my work has pivoted towards using spoken language to clearly
communicate our intentions and mental states so that our counterpart
can actually tell that we're doing all this stuff right.
So I have a former student who's now professor at UCLA,
and she calls it listening with your mouth, meaning like,
you know, like if you're listening with your brain, nobody
can tell you're listening with your brain. But if you're
listening with your mouth, that becomes a lot more a parent.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, if I could tell you how often this
is not happening in couple's therapy. I mean, if more
people could verbalize, you know, where they're coming from, speak empathically,
even like when they're talking to each other, steal man
the other's argument instead of straw manning their argument, you know,
just disagree better. As your book implies, tell me a
little bit more about what it means to be like
a receptive person in conversation and how that actually impacts
us in the long run.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we think of receptiveness and conversation as really
the language you use to show your counterpart that you
are engaged with their perspective, and so thinking about it
in that way really makes it like in the eye
of the beholder, Right, it doesn't matter how receptive you feel.
What matters is how receptive your counterpart sees you as being,
Which is kind of a funny definition, right, because it's
really very much about behavior, and it's very much about
linguistic behavior.
Speaker 1: So how like, what do you to say to somebody
who says, why can't control how my partner sees me?
How do I make this that they see me the
right way?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's that's a great question. So the way
we kind of went about the research is we put
a bunch of people into conversation with each other who
disagreed on hot button political topics, and we had them
self report their own receptiveness. Right, So they filled out
a self report scale and they said how receptive they
were in this conversation, and then we had them evaluate
their partner's receptiveness and tell us how receptive they thought
their partner was. And what was incredibly surprising to me
about the study was that people's self reported receptiveness was
virtually uncorrelated with the way they were perceived by their partners,
which I thought was crazy, Like, I thought, we didn't
analyze the data, right, we turned it this way and that,
Like we tried every single thing, and there was just
like no relationship. And I think what's happening is that
people are self reporting based on what's happening in their heads, right,
Like they're self reporting how hard they're trying in their minds,
whereas their partner can't read their mind, and so the
only thing they're partners attuned to is essentially the words
they use. And so what we did kind of as
a follow up is we said, okay, well, some people
were rated as more receptive, right, some people were rated
as less receptive, and it wasn't connected to how well
they rated themselves. But there's definitely variation. So let's see
what drives that variation. And so we wrote a natural
language processing algorithm that essentially went through the transcripts and
picked out the words and phrases that were addictive of
partner receptiveness ratings, right, So, like, what are the actual
things that you can say that make other people see
you as more receptive? And so we're what you were.
So you know, when you do this kind of like
sort of bottom up work, right, you have like thousands
of transcripts and you sort of throw like and you know,
a computer model at it. It pulls out just long
lists of things. And so where being an actual human
psychologist comes in right as you go through all that
mess and you try to find meaning in it and
you try to categorize it. And so we ended up
coming up with these things we call features of receptiveness,
which are kind of categories of words and phrases that
help you sound more receptive and the ones that seem
to make the most difference. Uh, we turned into a
cute little acronym, and the acronym is here as an
I hear you. So the here's the four letters of
here H stands for hedging. So its phrases like perhaps
sometimes maybe right. So, like one of my favorite examples
is I could say, you know, COVID vaccines are safe
and effective, or I could say most physicians tend to
believe that COVID vaccines are largely safe and effective. Right,
So I said the same thing, but I shoved three
different hedges into the sentence. And really what it does
is it it shows that I get the complexity of
the issue. Right. It's not sort of like, you know,
asking my partner to point out all the counter arguments
and exceptions, because I've demonstrated with my language that I
understand that there are exceptions. The E stands for emphasizing agreement.
So I like to be really clear with people that
receptiveist is not about sort of compromise or reaching agreement.
But you know, any two humans that disagree about a
thing agree on some other things, right, And so emphasizing
where we do agree is a really good way to
sort of put us on the same side of the table. Right.
So it could be something like we both want to
work in an organization where everybody feels safe and respected,
or we're both really concerned about how Sally is doing
in math right now, right, Like, there's some commonality that
we share and emphasizing that before you jump into arguing
about whatever it is you're arguing about, I think is
really helpful that a is acknowledgment, and that's probably the
one that people are most familiar with. Right, And I'm
sure you've seen this in your practice. But what I've
always you know, what I always sort of caution folks
against is like what I call lazy acknowledgment. And so
lazy acknowledgment is like, I hear you, but here's where
I'm coming from.
Speaker 1: Right, I hear you, but I'm not actually listening to.
Speaker 3: You, right, Like I haven't given you any evidence that
I'm listening to you. Right, Like I said, I hear you,
but like, what did it actually here? So, you know,
good acknowledgment is you know, I understand that, and then
you say what you understand, right, or you seem to
be saying that blah blah blah, or this is really
important to you, and then you restate the other person's point, right,
So you know, it's showing like I think of it
as showing the receipts. You know, you're showing verbally that
you really did hear. And then the R is reframing
to the positive. So it's dropping some negative and contradictory
words like no, can't, won't, terrible hate, and it is
replacing those words with more positively balanced words. Right. So
it would be so wonderful if or I really appreciate
it when right and so, you know, like you might
want to say, I can't stand it when people push
me into really stressful decisions, right, or you could say
I really appreciate it when people give me time to
make important decisions. Right. So like you're saying the same thing,
you're saying, I need more time to make this decision.
But there's one way that's sort of very negative and judgmental.
In another way that's sort of like more, you know,
asking for what you need in positive terms. So h
E A R.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious, you know, it's so funny. That's such
a psychologist thing to do. I always I guess that's hedging.
And also I'm not really sure here, but I often
will start I'm curious instead of right. Let's say you're
arguing about something with your partner. You say, you know,
I'm curious, and I'm you know, I'm noticing that sometimes
maybe when we talk about these things, it tends to
go in this direction, as opposed to you always right
right right, the kids you alright did? So we hedge
and then we emphasize that agreement, and then we acknowledge
the other perspective. You know, I'm hearing that you're saying this,
and then we reframed to the positive, you know, and
I notice that these are some areas where we have agreement,
and I you know, it makes me feel really good
when X, Y, and Z happens.
Speaker 2: All that is done.
Speaker 1: Let's say somebody is adhering to this framework. What is
the ultimate outcome. Is it that there's just less contention
and there's kind of a softening of any defensiveness and
anger in the person who's engaging, or is it that
there actually is improved conciliation? You know, do people start
to uh, maybe not persuade more effectively, but do they
start to find common ground better?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's you know, it's interesting that, like you're
exactly putting your finger on it, because of course, anytime
I persuade you more effectively, you have become persuaded us.
One of us is won and one of us is lost.
And you know, and of course that's part of the problem, right,
is that people go into these conversations with persuasion as
being their kind of north star goal. And if everybody
has that goal, then nobody's going to get anywhere. So
in the research, what we find is that when people
stick to the here framework, their counterpart sees them in
a much more positive light. So they see them as
more reasonable, as more trustworthy. They want to talk to
them again, which I think is hugely important. They want
to seek their advice on other topics. And what's interesting
is that the counterparts themselves become more receptive. So it's
you know, kind of this really fun like you know
Jedi trick, right, because instead of saying to the other person, like,
why won't you listen to me? Right, you can model
what you're hoping to get and get more of that
thing back in return. So to me, that's really like
the ultimate the ultimate goal here is, you know, have
a conversation that makes you want to keep talking to
each other again.
Speaker 1: And I could see this really playing nicely with a
lot of the research that shows, you know, because there's
obviously all different applications, like we talked about at the
beginning of this conversation about when people disagree and why
we would you know, have an interest in lessening disagreements,
improving communication styles everything from diplomacy to you know, politics,
but all the way down to interpersonal relationships. And when
we look at the research in sort.
Speaker 3: Of like.
Speaker 1: Romantic relationships, especially committed romantic relationships, it does appear that
the kiss of death, the thing that is the most
predictive of a relationship going awry is contempt. And I
think contempt really builds when there's a lot of defensiveness
and resentment in poor communication. I mean, there are obviously
other reasons people become contemptuous, but you can hear contempt
in poor communication styles.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I agree with you, And I think it
goes back to that winning or losing thing, you know,
because the way we often make arguments, especially you know,
interpersonal arguments, as we make them kind of dripping with condescension, right.
I mean that's kind of the soul of sarcasm, right,
is like what kind of idiot could possibly believe? Right?
And like, technically it's a question, but it's not. It's
not the kind of question that will help you have
the conversation. So I think that figuring out how to
approach the conversation with some other goal besides you know,
showing your own intellectual superiority is like a really important
goal to have.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you said that because working in this
world of sort of scientific skepticism, which was, you know,
has been my career for the past ten to fifteen years.
Long before I went back to school and finished my
PhD and started working as a clinical psychologist, I was
doing a lot of work in public science communication, but
especially in like scientific skeptic circles. And one of the
things that I found that was the most frustrating about
some of the communities is a tendency to be so
concerned learned with having a like logically sound argument, that
there's no empathy in the room. It's like, if you're
more concerned about being right than you are about somebody's
lived experience, then I don't think you're an effective communicator,
and I don't think that you're showing a lot of
humanity in the room. You know. And I'm not saying
that this has to be soft science, it has to
be fuzzy. It has to be you know, you're you're
doing legitimate empirical research to show better outcomes when we,
you know, use these tools to disagree better. But so
often I'll see an individual who's so much more concerned
about being right than they are about being kind that
the person they're engaging with just stops listening altogether.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what, let me be slightly contrarian here.
You know, though I actually largely agree with you. It's
not that they're concerned with being right. It's that they're
concerned with appeering right. Because if they were concerned with
being right, then they would be having the kind of
conversation that actually, you know, elevates all different perspectives so
we can actually figure out which one is right. I
definitely think that, like I know exactly what you know,
the style of academic argument you're referring to, and you know,
it becomes sort of a game of like who's got
the best you know, mic drop moment, And it's got
nothing to do with actually figuring things out together, which
is what science is, right, Like, we're supposed to be
figuring things out together. And to the extent that you
can communicate in a way that brings people into the
conversations that shuts them down, you're going to do better science.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you're going to do better science. You're going to
be more effective in communicating than better. So you know,
like because if a science falls in the forest and
nobody's there to hear it, did it science. You know,
it doesn't really mean anything if nobody's reading your literature,
if nobody is engaging with your arguments as well. So
I just think that there's so many important points made here,
and I want to come back here at sort of
the end of our conversation to the title of the
book itself, how to disagree Better? I mean that is
deceptively simple because it doesn't say how to agree better.
We are going to disagree with people. That is a
fundamental part of life. We're going to disagree with our partners,
with our friends. We're definitely going to disagree with our
family members, and with people who we work with, you know,
relationships where we didn't choose all the parameters, but we
were thrown together because of some external reason. And so
the goal here is not to just always agree with
each other. It's to disagree in a way that we
can be harmonious.
Speaker 3: Still, right, Yeah, so I always you know, I in
the book, I sort of give a definition of what
a constructive disagreement is, uh, And my definition is that
a constructive disagreement is any disagreement that increases our desire
to talk to each other again.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that It's so simple and it just
captures it all. Obviously, I enjoyed that in some way
or another. I got something out of that, and I
want to do it again, and I hope that you
did too. That's what this conversation has been for me,
I admit. So I've got to ask you, Julia, is
there anything here as we as we close out that
we didn't I mean, obviously there's a million things we
didn't touch on, but is there anything that sticks out
to you that's kind of really important to be said
before before we close out the episode.
Speaker 3: I think the last thing that I always like to
remind people of is that this is you know, constructive disagreement,
and really any kind of communication is a skill, right,
and so we have to give ourselves, you know, some
grace because in the beginning, no matter how well you
do it, that's going to feel awkward and weird and
you might not feel super authentic or fluid. But like
any skill you practice, you put in the time, you
get better at it, and then you start reaping the rewards.
So I just I like people to approach this, you know,
like you would approach you know, learning to like serve
a volleyball er learning to play the pianos like it's
not magical, it's just you've got to put the time in.
Speaker 1: Absolutely very very astute and important advice because as you mentioned,
not only will it be awkward at the beginning, you
may not be good at it right away, and so
you know, keep on trying. And I'll often say that
even about things like empathy, which empathy is such a
nebulous concept, and obviously it's baked into so much of
your advice in this book. But these are not things
that some people are born with and others aren't. They aren't,
you know, innate. They're things we have to practice. They
are skills, and the more we practice them, the more
they become kind of second nature and we don't have
to think about it as much and it'll just flow
out of us. So I guess the place to start
is to pick up a copy of your book and
read all about these skills and how we can continue
to hone them. The book is How to Disagree Better
by doctor Julia Minson. Julia, thank you so much for
being here with us.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. This was so wonderful.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and everybody listening, thank you for coming back week
after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time
we all get together to talk and the ready