How To Have Hard Conversations

Many people are gearing up for holiday conversations with loved ones who may disagree with them — on everything from politics to religion and lifestyle choices. As the conversations unfold, these divisions are visible in our brains too. These conversations can get personal and come to a halt fast. But today on the show we get into research in neuroscience and psychology showing that as much as we disagree, there are ways to bridge these divides – and people who are actively using these strategies in their daily lives. Want to hear more neuroscience and psychology? Email us your ideas to [email protected] mailto:[email protected] — we'd love to hear from you! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ atplus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Total Wine & More. Check them out before football Sundays. Cold beer for the group is a given, but this time of year, bring in some fall flavors. A bottle of maple whiskey and a salted caramel whiskey. Get everything you need at the lowest prices at Total Wine. Discover new favorite fall flavors at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:29Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with producer Rachel Carlson for an episode on disagreement.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hey, Emily.

• 0:36Emily Kwong?

  Hey.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  So it is no surprise that there is a lot of disagreement and division out there in the world right now.

• 0:43Emily Kwong?

  That's the understatement of the century, Rachel.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Truly. I mean, Donald Trump was just reelected as the 47th president of the United States after a campaign season filled with divisive and sometimes downright hostile language.

• 0:54Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  And a lot of people are gearing up for the holidays where you might not always see eye to eye with the people you love in your life.

• 1:01Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, this is true for many people I know. It is feeling tense, and data supports this. Polling data from SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University shows that almost half of the US electorate thinks members of the opposing party are downright evil. In a 2022 Pew study, growing numbers of Americans said members of the other party are dishonest, immoral, and closed minded. So it's not just in our imaginations. We really are becoming more divided.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  So Emily, this week NPR is exploring these divisions and finding stories about people trying to bridge their divides, successfully or not. And since we're a science show, I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise? And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years. Jeannie Safer is a psychoanalyst. She's liberal, and she's married to Richard Brookhiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  And he's adorable, so and he's like 92 feet tall.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I asked them how they met.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  We met in a singing group. So that was good because we shared an interest that was not political.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  It was very important, actually. It was also an unusual singing group.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Because it was Renaissance religious music, not for religious purposes, but for singing purposes. When did we meet?

• 2:23Speaker 04

  1977.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26Emily Kwong?

  They say singing like syncopates your heartbeats. So maybe that worked out in bringing them together.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  It's the Renaissance music.

• 2:33Emily Kwong?

  Absolutely.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And they told me they sang with this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together.

• 2:40Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  They eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talked through and ultimately disagreed on a lot of things. They said there have only been a few times where they voted for the same people. And over time, they've set some boundaries with each other.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  The thing we could not talk about really was abortion. We both had strong opinions that were opposite. And so we realized we can't talk about this, so we won't.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  So we didn't.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  We won't. Then you also figure out ways that you can talk about other stuff.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  This was so striking to me, Emily. Like, they're really reflective about each other's opinions and about each other as people in general.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  It really opens your mind to think that somebody that you just agree with takes care of you, helps you, is there for you. It was really a revelation to me, actually, how much that means.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Well, and not just me. I mean, you met colleagues of mine that you'd like. And I met your mentor, who was a communist. And but he was a good boss. He treated you very well.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  He was a wonderful boss.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  Wonderful.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  But we also were able to join each other's worlds.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And this joining of worlds was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen.

• 3:58Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Jeannie and Richard have been married for a really long time, and they have so much mutual respect for one another. That's a really key baseline component of these conversations. And it's not a given for everyone you meet.

• 4:10Emily Kwong?

  Absolutely. These conversations aren't always possible because there isn't that baseline of respect or even safety. But presuming both, presuming the person you're talking to has those qualities towards you and you towards them, how do you have a conversation?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  It's not easy, but we're going to try to work through it. So today on the show, the neuroscience of disagreement. When we have the opportunity to engage with someone who thinks differently than we do, what's going on in our brains? And how can we make the most of those conversations? I'm Rachel Carlson.

• 4:43Emily Kwong?

  And I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Total Wine & More. Check them out before football Sundays. Cold beer for the group is a given, but this time of year, bring in some fall flavors. A bottle of maple whiskey and a salted caramel whiskey. Get everything you need at the lowest prices at Total Wine. Discover new favorite fall flavors at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, be 21. This message comes from Lexus Nexus. Meet Lexus Nexus Protege, AI built for how legal teams and professionals work. Research, analyze, draft, and verify work you can defend. Protege is AI held to the standard of law. This message comes from Mint Mobile.

• 5:36Speaker 00

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• 5:46Emily Kwong?

  Okay, Rachel, you have ventured into the world of disagreement, like the neuroscience of, and retrieved some info to help us have better conversations. Let's start with what happens in our bodies when we disagree. What goes down?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Okay, Emily, imagine that you and I are about to have a disagreement.

• 6:04Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  And that, of course, just breeds, guess what, mistrust.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  That's Rudy Mendoza Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we probably won't even notice these things while they're happening to us, but on top of them, our amygdala starts to respond.

• 6:30Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, our amygdala, that is like our brain's threat detector. It's like a smoke alarm.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. Activity there increases.

• 6:37Emily Kwong?

  So if we're disagreeing and our amygdala is going off, what else is happening in our brain?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that. So I called up the lead researcher, Joy Hirsch, to talk about it. She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine. And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other. Which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world. Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at a time.

• 7:06Emily Kwong?

  Right, you're just like slid under an MRI machine.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, and in this case, people wore these things that looked like swim caps on their head, and they have these little thingies all around the caps.

• 7:15Emily Kwong?

  What is little thingies? What's that for?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it. She told me they're technically called optodes. So some of these are like little lasers that emit light into the brain, and then some detect that light. So researchers like Joy can then use these measurements to look at neural activity.

• 7:33Emily Kwong?

  So in Joy's study, she just had people sitting around having a conversation like one might at family dinner, except her research participants are wearing these swim cap things. Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  They surveyed a bunch of people on Yale's campus and the New Haven area on statements that people tend to have strong opinions about. Like, for example, marijuana should be legalized, or same-sex marriage is a civil right. And then they specifically paired people up. So the partners were strangers. They didn't know each other before. And also so that they agreed with their partner on two topics and disagreed on two other topics. Joy told me-

• 8:13Speaker 06

  These people were not pretending. They were not like debaters that take, you know, a negative side and a positive side.

• 8:22Emily Kwong?

  No, they're just people out here living their lives. Yeah. And she's looking at their brain activity. What did she find?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  During agreement, Joy says they saw activity related to the visual system and also in the social areas of the brain. But Emily, it wasn't just activity in these places. These areas were also more synchronous when people agreed on the topic.

• 8:43Emily Kwong?

  Okay, their brains were more synchronous. What does that mean?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked. And her working hypothesis for what this means is-

• 8:58Speaker 06

  The sharing of information involves a higher levels of communication, that people are learning, so that there's a consensus.

• 9:10Speaker 07

  Of what is being shared, what's going on.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Versus when participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as synced up. It was kind of like a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet. And as they disagreed, Joy says it seemed like each brain was engaging a lot more emotional and cognitive resources.

• 9:32Speaker 06

  The amount of territory that the brain has devoted to disagreement was astonishing to me. And this is beyond the data. The observation that so much neural energy is consumed by disagreement, and there are so many areas that are coordinated during disagreement, that tells me that this is a very important behavior.

• 10:09Speaker 07

  Huh. Others might have other interpretations.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  So Joy is hypothesizing that disagreement might be really taxing on us. Like you're expending more energy when you disagree with someone than when you agree with them.

• 10:21Emily Kwong?

  Okay. So clearly disagreement sets off a waterfall of reactions and behaviors that lights up all these parts of the brain. When that is happening to us, which seems fairly inevitable, how can we approach disagreement better? What does the science say on that?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  First, kind of like we said before, we decide if we want to have a conversation with someone and also if that person is going to be receptive.

• 10:48Emily Kwong?

  You can always walk away.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 07

  I hear often, if I talk to that person, am I subject to violence?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  That's clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe Smith.

• 10:57Speaker 07

  I am not inviting people to have a conversation with people that are violent towards you or dehumanizing towards you. That's not a requirement, like actually your humanness is there. We can all kind of discern, and bridging differences actually doesn't require or ask us to do that.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  So that's kind of like step zero. Decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person?

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple. Focus on your breathing.

• 11:24Speaker 07

  Can you take a breath? Can you slow this down just a little bit? So you can kind of come back into yourself, your butt? Can you take a breath and then align with the intention?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Allison co-teaches that bridging differences class with Rudy I mentioned earlier. She told me that this moment, slowing down, breathing, can help us move into step two, which is coming back to our goals for the conversation.

• 11:49Emily Kwong?

  Right, like she described it as an intention?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, why we're having it, what we're looking to get out of it. Because research shows it's not super easy to change someone's mind. And it can be pretty ineffective to spout facts at someone to try to do this.

• 12:04Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  But Allison and Rudy both told me we can find more common ground with someone when we try to understand their perspective instead of trying to convince them that they're wrong.

• 12:14Speaker 07

  I'm not talking about persuasion, debate. I'm not even talking about having my mind changed. When I talk about bridging differences, I mean about the mere connection with another person and the space around seeing that person as a human.

• 12:30Emily Kwong?

  This absolutely reminds me of Jeannie and Richard. They are not trying to change each other's minds. They're trying to create space for each other to talk about what they feel.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:40Emily Kwong?

  And they're ultimately putting the good of their relationship first.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And it kind of seems like they have the right idea, at least from a scientific perspective. Research shows that people who engage in dialogues or conversations to learn, rather than to win, come away from those conversations with a more open perspective.

• 12:57Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so arguing to learn helps us keep an open mind about the topic at hand. But you mentioned earlier, Rachel, how often making judgments about other people, not just their opinions. So how do you navigate those feelings that can kind of obscure your ability to fully listen to someone?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question, Emily, and it's our third step, empathy. So that includes asking the person you're talking to questions about themselves, trying to humanize them to learn more than just their opinion on whatever topic it is that's bringing up these feelings.

• 13:29Emily Kwong?

  I think this is why things devolve on social media so much, because people are not asking questions of each other. They're just like leaving these pronouncements. In the comments, you know?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Totally. No, I think so, too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole. But it is kind of like how Jeannie and Richard met in their singing group. Like, they got to know each other's hobbies. They learned about their families, their careers. And knowing these details about a person can help us be more open to them. In other words, it's about seeing the person and not the label. That's Juliana Teford, the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. That's where Rudy and Allison teach their class. And these tactics can help us be more charitable towards others, like by looking at the strongest parts of their arguments instead of the weakest. And more humble, just understanding where we might need more information or circumstances where our own beliefs might be limited.

• 14:19Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, humility seems like an important way forward.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I know I don't know everything. And even the things that I think I know well, like, there's always more to learn. So it's not really that any one of these things, or even all of them together, is a magic wand that's suddenly going to help us all agree.

• 14:36Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and that doesn't seem like the goal.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  No, like, for Jeannie and Richard, they both told me neither of them have really changed any of their opinions in the last 44 years of marriage. But it was clear to me, just by talking to them, they really admire each other, they respect each other's beliefs. And I think what's most important here is they try to understand why they each hold the opinions they do.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  When you live with somebody for how many thousands of years that we have,

• 15:05Speaker 03

  you learn that some of the things that you thought were wrong maybe weren't. And, you know, also, if you really care for somebody and admire them, if they have certain opinions, it slightly changes how you feel about it.

• 15:21Emily Kwong?

  Rachel Carlson, thank you for giving us a toolkit for moving forward in these divisive times.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Of course. Thanks for having me, Emily.

• 15:30Emily Kwong?

  This episode was reported by Rachel Carlson. And it was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Rachel checked the facts.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Kenneth Barish. He wrote a whole book about some of this stuff called Bridging Our Political Divide, which is going to come out in the next few weeks.

• 15:49Emily Kwong?

  I'm Emily Kwong.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And I'm Rachel Carlson.

• 15:51Emily Kwong?

  Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR. Take care of yourselves.

• 15:59Emily Kwong?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.