How To Disagree Better

Many people are gearing up for holiday conversation with loved ones who may disagree with them -- on everything from politics to religion and lifestyle choices. These conversations can get personal and come to a halt quickly. But today on the show, we get into neuroscience and psychological research showing that as much as we disagree, there are ways to bridge these divides -- and people who are actively using these strategies well in their daily lives. (encore) Want to hear more neuroscience and psychology? Email us your ideas to [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+ at plus.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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Emily Kwong?

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• 0:12Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:17Emily Kwong?

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

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hey, Emily.

• 0:24Emily Kwong?

  Hey.

• 0:24Speaker 01

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

• 0:30Emily Kwong?

  That's the understatement of the century, Rachel.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Truly. 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.

• 0:38Emily 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 close-minded. So it's not just in our imaginations. We really are becoming more divided.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  So Emily, 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.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  And he's adorable. So he's like 92 feet tall.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I asked them how they met.

• 1:32Speaker 03

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

• 1:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:51Speaker 03

  1977.

• 1:53Emily Kwong?

  You know, they say singing like syncopates your heartbeats. So maybe that worked out in bringing them together.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  It's the Renaissance music.

• 2:00Emily Kwong?

  Absolutely.

• 2:01Speaker 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.

• 2:07Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 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.

• 2:22Speaker 03

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

• 2:41Speaker 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.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:05Speaker 03

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

• 3:17Speaker 02

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

• 3:20Speaker 01

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

• 3:25Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 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.

• 3:37Emily 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?

• 3:53Speaker 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.

• 4:11Emily Kwong?

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

• 4:18Speaker 04

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• 4:23Emily Kwong?

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• 5:41Emily 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?

• 5:56Speaker 01

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

• 6:00Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more. And that, of course, just breeds. Guess what? Mis-trust. That's Rudy Mendoza Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Rudy co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we might not even notice these things while they're happening to us, but on top of all of them, we start making these split-second decisions about whether or not we trust someone just by looking at their faces. Those decisions, though, aren't always accurate.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  There's lots of research showing that there is this discordant perceptions of trust and how trustworthy people actually are. And so it takes getting to know someone and assessing them again and again through different types of interactions and becoming close with them to understand whether people are indeed trustworthy.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Who's that? That's Oriole Feldman Hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University. And she says when we interact with someone we've decided is untrustworthy, or even someone who just belongs to another group than us, our amygdala starts to respond.

• 7:04Emily Kwong?

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

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. Activity there increases.

• 7:11Emily Kwong?

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

• 7:17Speaker 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.

• 7:40Emily Kwong?

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

• 7:42Speaker 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.

• 7:49Emily Kwong?

  What is little thingies? What's that for?

• 7:52Speaker 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.

• 8:07Emily 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.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner. 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.

• 8:38Emily Kwong?

  Oh.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:47Speaker 06

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

• 8:56Emily Kwong?

  No, they're just people out here living their lives.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:59Emily Kwong?

  And she's looking at their brain activity. What did she find?

• 9:03Speaker 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.

• 9:17Emily Kwong?

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

• 9:20Speaker 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...

• 9:32Speaker 06

  The sharing of information involves a higher levels of communication, that people are learning. So that there's a consensus of what is being shared, what's going on.

• 9:47Speaker 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.

• 10:06Speaker 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.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  Others might have other interpretations.

• 10:45Speaker 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.

• 10:55Emily 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?

• 11:14Speaker 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.

• 11:21Emily Kwong?

  You can always walk away.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 06

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

• 11:28Speaker 01

  That's clinical psychologist Alison Briscoe Smith.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:45Speaker 01

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

• 11:49Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

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

• 11:58Speaker 06

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

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Alison 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.

• 12:23Emily Kwong?

  Right, like she described it as an intention?

• 12:26Speaker 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.

• 12:38Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  But Alison 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.

• 12:48Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:04Emily 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.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Emily Kwong?

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

• 13:17Speaker 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.

• 13:31Emily Kwong?

  OK, 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?

• 13:48Speaker 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.

• 14:03Emily 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?

• 14:11Speaker 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. So when we learn personal details about others, details about their job and their family, and even what they'd like to have for breakfast, what science showed was that immediately, people were able to view them with more warmth. Just knowing those details made them change their perception

• 14:52Speaker 01

  and made them see the other person less not like them. 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.

• 15:22Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, humility seems like an important way forward.

• 15:25Speaker 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.

• 15:39Emily Kwong?

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

• 15:42Speaker 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.

• 16:03Speaker 02

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

• 16:25Emily Kwong?

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

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Of course. Thanks for having me, Emily.

• 16:34Emily 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.

• 16:44Speaker 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.

• 16:52Emily Kwong?

  I'm Emily Kwong.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And I'm Rachel Carlson.

• 16:55Emily Kwong?

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

• 17:03Emily Kwong?

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