Julia Minson | How to Disagree Better | Talks at Google

Give a warm welcome to Dr. Julia Minson. Julia, thank you so much for being here today, especially because today is actually the launch day of your book.

Yeah, yeah, it's a big day. Thanks for having me here, guys. I really appreciate it. This is a really fun venue from which to start this new venture.

So a huge congratulations, and may your day be one filled with fewer, or at least more constructive disagreements. So Julia, I have a family member who I love, but disagree with often. Sound familiar? So this past Christmas, instead of gifting them an item, I decided to try something a little different.

Okay.

I gifted them 30 minutes of my undivided attention.

Oh my God, what a gift.

And so I literally set a timer and sat there without saying a word for 30 minutes.

Uh-huh.

Let them say what they wanted to. Timer went off. I said, your time is up. The good news is we did not have an argument.

Mm-hmm.

But at the same time, I can't really say that I engaged with their ideas either, right? Which is why this possibility of learning how to disagree better feels so compelling to me. And so to kick us off, I was curious if you can talk a bit about what are some of the psychological obstacles that get in the way of us doing this?

Yeah, so I love your example because it, I think, really showcases what a lot of people go through, right? Like we could all basically go through life without ever having one of these big political arguments, but family is different and the workplace is different. There are situations where you really care about people or you have to get something done with them, and so you need to disagree with them. And so the question is, well, how do you do it? And your approach is really interesting because it's grounded in this recognition that a lot of people have, and there's a lot of kind of research support behind it, that when you make somebody feel heard, right, it's a wonderful experience. It's a gift, right? Like, you treated it like a gift, and it is a gift. I have students that come back to me after I assign essentially that exercise in class who say, Oh my God, my mom wants me to thank you because it's the first time she's felt heard in years, right? But here's kind of the trick. When you're listening to somebody, you're listening between your ears, right? Hearing literally is an internal cognitive process that happens inside your brain. And so the other person actually can't tell if you're listening or not. So if you are doing all the work of sitting there and not interrupting and like working really hard on your self-control, it still doesn't necessarily feel like engagement to them because, you know, you could be, you know, meditating, right? You could be planning your next vacation. Like you could be solving a work problem in your head. They have no idea. And so a lot of what I talk about in my book is how do we demonstrate our, engagement behaviorally so that the other person can tell so that it actually has those benefits that we are hoping for.

Absolutely. And importantly, I did not tell this family member about your study that shows how easy it is to fake listening.

Right.

And what's also interesting is in addition to not showing this with our behavior, we also have this tendency to believe that if this other person only had the right information that we had, they would come to the same conclusion as us, this bias that you call naive realism or established.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So naive realism, I think, is one of the most important ideas in social psychology. So this is like, you know, big, big news, big news over here. It's not my research. It's research by my PhD advisor Lee Ross and his former grad students. But I think it's a really powerful idea. The idea is that we walk around the world assuming that we kind of get it, right? Like, I'm a reasonable, objective, smart person. I see the world as it is. And so we naively believe that our assessments are realistic, right? They reflect some fundamental reality that, like, exists out there. It's actually a term that's borrowed from philosophy and is often used to talk about physical perception. Now, it makes sense to walk around the world assuming that you get it because if you were to stop at every point in your day when you make a judgment and question yourself, you wouldn't get very far. The problem in a sense is not naive realism itself, it's the kind of process that it kicks off, which is that one, we tend to assume that a lot more people agree with us than happens to be the case in reality, because if I get it and this is just how it is, then all of you probably see the situation the same way. The other problem is that when I encounter people who I know I disagree with, I have to sort of diagnose it. I have to say like, well, why do we disagree? And if I start from the assumption that I get it, I see the world as it is, it must be the case that they don't get it. And them not getting it takes on usually one of three interesting flavors, right? Like either you don't get it because nobody's told you, right? So let me tell you about this thing I just read in the New York Times. They have this study and the data shows that this is how it is. You're welcome, right? Or if I tell you the facts and you still don't change your mind, I'm like, huh, they're not as smart as I thought they were, right? And then if I explain it slowly, right, using shorter words at a level that I think anybody with half a brain will understand, and you still don't change your mind, I reach sort of like the final step on this train, which is you are biased by your own self-interest. You're biased by your ideology, you're biased by the, you know, interest of your in-group, and you just don't want to get it, right? Like, I can explain this to you all day long, but you are a fundamentally flawed person who just doesn't want to see the light. And so to me, this is, you know, a theory that really explains a whole lot of how we end up in conflict, because once you get on that train of thought, it's not going to go well.

Yeah, and that sounds really familiar, this tendency for us to be really anchored on our point of view and to try really hard to change the other person's mind. And so you have spent a lot of time looking at this idea of receptiveness, the receptive mindset, being receptive to opposing views. Could you tell us a bit about what does it look like to have a receptive mindset, and what does that help with?

Yeah, so, you know, when I started doing this work in graduate school, I was sort of surprised that we don't have a great measure to identify and kind of capture, you know, people's tendency to really engage with opposing perspectives, right? Like some people seem very, very thoughtful when they hear new information and even information that they really disagree with, you know, and some people just sort of like brush it off, shut it down, sometimes, you know, start yelling. And I thought those people are different. And I would love to know precisely what is the difference between them and how you can quantify it and sort of what it predicts. And so this is what we ultimately came to call receptiveness to opposing views. Now, what's very, very important about being receptive is that it doesn't mean changing your mind, right? So to be receptive to opposing perspectives, you need to seek them out, right? So you need to actually talk to people who you disagree with, or you need to like read or listen to things you disagree with. You need to think about them because quite often what we do is, you know, we sign up for that, you know, news feed from, you know, the other side because we want to think of ourselves as an open-minded person, and then we never like actually read it. So you have to really think about content from the other side of any given argument. And, you know, political arguments, again, are the most common example. But, you know, this can be an argument about anything. And then you have to subject it to the same level of critical scrutiny. So we tend to be very good at finding merits in our own side and flaws in the other. But you have to be, you know, kind of even-steven about both sides. And so that's what receptiveness is, is really thinking as hard about the other side as how hard you think about your own side. You don't have to change your mind. You don't have to compromise. You can say, look, I thought really hard about this and I still think my arguments are more powerful or more valid or more realistic, or, you know, I care more about these concerns than about these concerns. And that's fine. But now you are the kind of person that really understands both sides, which, you know, helps with a lot of things in life.

Yeah, that's really good. And it reminds me of— I feel like starting a decade or so ago, I started seeing more newsletters where people would take a topic that was covered in the news and show the coverage across the political spectrum to expose us to different arguments. And I think so far this kind of makes intuitive sense, right? It seems like a good idea to be open-minded, to hear other ideas. But I think what really distinguishes your work is there's a lot of people with very reasonable-sounding advice on— how we should talk to each other, right? But you actually put this under a microscope and, you know, with scientific rigor, test like what things actually work and don't. And so I'm curious, when you were actually observing conversations, what were some of the interesting things that you found? Were there perhaps any surprises based on what you expected going in?

Yeah, so I am an experimentalist, right? So I spent my career sort of running controlled experiments. And, you know, the thing that's interesting about being a social psychologist is all of us are kind of good at social psychology, right? Like there's no way you reach the age of being an adult human without having some understanding of how humans work. And so a lot of the ideas that just like random people on the street will tell you about psychology are true, and that's okay. And when you see behavioral science that's wildly counterintuitive, you should question it because most of us are pretty good psychologists. But pretty good doesn't mean perfect. And so there are some things that I definitely found very surprising in our own data. So for example, there's a lot of advice out there about approaching disagreement with an inquiry mindset. So there's multiple Harvard Business Review articles about this inquiry mindset. And the inquiry mindset is the opposite of an advocacy mindset, right? So you're supposed to be curious. And at some point I thought, well, is there any evidence that this actually works? And in fact, do we even know what kind of mindset people approach conversations with? Like, has anybody actually measured this? And so we ran a bunch of studies where we simply asked people like, you are going to go into a disagreement, what is your goal, right? What do you think is the other person's goal? And so what we find is that people on average tend to be equally interested in inquiry and persuasion, right? Because like, well, I'm kind of curious about what you believe, but I also want to tell you what I believe. When they think about the other person, they think that the other person is 5 times more interested in persuasion than inquiry. So I'm curious. I'm here for the learning. You are the jerk who is here to just persuade me. And so that seemed kind of in line with what sort of these ideas about inquiry. We thought, OK, well, there's an interesting self-other difference. Let's see if we can induce this inquiry mindset and have better conversations because that's the claim in the practitioner literature and it seems like a reasonable claim and it seems like it ought to be true. And we ran like failed experiment after failed experiment after failed experiment where we kept telling people to be more curious and then absolutely nothing happened, right? So like we told them to be more curious and we're like, oh no, they didn't read the instructions. Let's quiz them on the instructions. Okay, now let's underline the important bits. Now let's tell them that we'll pay them for being more curious. And like conversation after conversation, like it sounds exactly the same. The other person is having exactly the same experience. And then what we realized is sort of twofold. One, remember, people already think that they're being the right amount of curious. So when we tell them be curious, they're like, yeah, I'm doing it. Like, I got this, right? And then the other piece is that we're asking them to, uh, take on a mindset, and they have no idea how to translate it into behavior. And since their counterpart can't read their mind, then they can be just like endlessly curious, but until it comes out in some behavioral way, it's not gonna help. And so that to me was sort of the biggest surprise and the biggest pivot from a lot of conflict management research for me is that we've really started thinking, okay, what are the behaviors that truly communicate something in a disagreement? Because changing people's mindset seems to have sort of very limited effectiveness.

I feel like There's so much insight in what you just said. Two things that I'll kind of draw out are, number one, when we talk about how to give more helpful feedback to coworkers, right? It's really important to be specific about what you actually want them to do. And then the other piece you kind of highlighted was this gap behind what's in our minds, our intentions, and what we're actually doing in practice. It makes me think of— there's a phrase that's used in sports sometimes. Feel versus real. I don't know if you've heard of this. And the idea is, let's say you're working on technique for tennis or something, and you think you're swinging in a certain way. Then you watch back the film, and you're like, oof, that does not look as good as it did in my head. And so with this observation, you actually were able to develop some specific instructions to help us to improve our receptiveness in our conversations. Could you tell us about the HEAR framework?

Yeah, absolutely. So the HEAR framework is something I love because it's so actionable, and we have a lot of evidence that it works. So we ran a study at one point where we said, you know, we paired a bunch of people up. They had to talk about something they disagree on, and we had them talk over chat. And that's important because, an amazing amount of your intellectual energy as a social scientist goes towards stupid logistics. And so the stupid logistics problem here was that we put people into a lab and we had, we told them like disagree about this policy topic and they just talked about their kids and they talked about the weather and we're like, oh, people hate disagreement. That's right. And so then we put them on a chat platform so that they had anonymity. And so then they went for it, right? Then they can say everything they came to say. And so we have all these people disagreeing and we have the transcripts of those chats, which is important. And we asked them to rate how receptive their counterpart was in this conversation and how receptive they themselves were in this conversation. And, you know, exactly, I'm going to adopt I'm going to adopt your feel versus real phrase here because I've never heard of it before, but I just learned something really useful. They felt that they were being receptive, or at least some of them did, and that feeling had like no correlation with partner evaluations, right? But that is not to say that people were uniformly unreceptive, you know, there's like statistical variance in the receptiveness ratings of the partners. So what we did is collect a lot more data and then write a natural language processing algorithm. And this is like back, this is like pre-gen AI. So this is like old school NLP from 10 years ago that essentially captured the words and phrases that predicted human ratings of receptiveness. So we are trying to say, what do people what do they say who are rated as receptive, not what do they feel on the inside. And, you know, NLP, right, spits out just sort of like words and phrases. And where you get to be a psychologist is actually trying to look for some rhyme and reason in all of this. And also, you know, you get a regression coefficient that tells you which ones are the most important and increase receptiveness the most. So that's what turned into the HEAR framework, right, is out of this barrage of words, we came up with 4 signals of receptiveness that are the most predictive of human ratings, and so H-E-A-R. H stands for hedging your claims. So it's words like sometimes, maybe, perhaps occasionally. It's really inserting some uncertainty into your claim so that your counterpart doesn't feel the urgency to do it for you. Right. They're not trying to point out all the exceptions to the rule because you've already shown them that you get that there are exceptions to the rule. So I could say COVID vaccines are safe and effective. Okay. True statement. I believe it. I like to say that to people. I could instead say, most physicians tend to believe that COVID vaccines are largely safe and effective. Okay, so I said the same thing, I shoved 3 hedges in there, and I've made a statement that's actually more accurate, right? The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So remember I said that receptiveness is not about like reaching consensus or compromising. So emphasizing agreement means that in any disagreement, we agree on some things, right? And so it's good to kind of highlight those things before you dive into the thing that you actually differ on. So it could be something like, we both agree on, or I am also interested in, or we are both concerned with. Right? We both want to work in a company where everybody feels respected and valued. It is hard to disagree with that, but it just sort of shows that you have something in common. The A is acknowledgment. So, you know, anybody who's been in family therapy has heard that you're supposed to acknowledge other perspectives. Anybody who's ever been like in a leadership course know that you're supposed to acknowledge other perspectives. The problem with acknowledgment is most people are lazy about it. So it's things like, I hear you, but here's why you can't have more staff. All right? It's like, well, no, how do I know you heard me? This is back to that, like, I can't read your mind thing, right? You need to show me with your words that you heard me. So I hear that the team is working really hard and that you're concerned about the impending client deadline. But you can't have more staff, right? The outcome is still the same, like you still can't have more staff, but I showed you that I was listening when you were talking about how stressed out the team is. And then finally, the R stands for reframing to the positive. So it's avoiding words like no, can't, won't, hate, terrible, and replacing them with some more positively balanced words. So you're saying what you would like to see and what you would sort of appreciate instead of what bothers you and what doesn't work about a particular plan. So H-E-A-R.

So for folks who know me, they probably know that I caveat all that I say. So I'm good at the H. I feel like I'm not as good with the E and the R, more of the kind of like finding the agreement and the things that we all want. I'm curious for you, when you were trying to kind of apply some of this in your own life, were there some that came more naturally and others that didn't?

Yeah, so, you know, as an academic, I've also had the H like beaten into me, like never overclaim, right? And so the H comes quite naturally. The A is hard because I think most of us are in a hurry when we disagree with people. Like, we really want to shut it down and, you know, interrupt the person and correct them and tell them, you know, what they're wrong about. And so that, you know, doing acknowledgement really requires you to slow down and, you know, give that other person the gift of showing them that you heard them. And I think that that can be really hard for people. That was hard for me. Still is hard for me.

So I thought I would shift us a bit. We have this great foundation for, you know, some of the theory and even some practical stuff. And I was curious, you know, if there's any differences trying to apply this in our more established relationships, which you talked about a bit, versus with people who we don't know as well or don't see as often. So for example, I find that sometimes like habits or norms or like your relationship dynamics can introduce quite a bit of inertia, right? Like it feels awkward for everyone if you, you know, try to start being more open and vulnerable with what you share, right? And so I'm curious, like things like that, are there other considerations when we think about our longer-term relationships and how to introduce receptiveness?

Yeah, that's really interesting. So, you know, people have really conflicting intuitions about whether it's easier or harder to be receptive with close others than distant others. And I think part of the, Part of the tension is that people that you know really well, you know, presumably you know them well because you like them, right? Like there are a few people in your life who you just keep hanging out with over and over, but like you can't stand them and you wish you didn't have to. So sometimes, you know, there's sort of, there's trust, there is affection, and that gives you more patience, right? That gives you more patience and gives you more of a willingness to assume positive intent. But also I think, and I did a study on this once a long time ago, where when somebody who you know really well, who you're close with, when they disagree with you, it's sort of more shocking. It's like, wait, what? Right? Like what happened? So when a stranger on the street says something weird, right? Or like when I'm riding in an Uber and the Uber driver says something that like I consider to be completely crazy, I'm like, oh, crazy Uber driver, right? But if it's somebody in my family, I'm like, whoa. And so that, you know, and there's something about people who are close with you that you really want the relationship to work. You want to think positively of them. So that desire to like fix them is extra powerful and like really should be resisted, right? Because the costs of screwing up that relationship are much higher than the cost of screwing up your relationship with your Uber driver.

That totally resonates. It's like, how could I be associated with somebody who thinks this?

Right, right, right. It was like, how did I not see this in the past? Like, what happened to them?

For sure.

Yeah.

Another thing that I was curious about is, you know, with these, like, higher trust, longer-term relationships, you know, we talked about how it's important to demonstrate our receptiveness with our behaviors. We kind of focused on the words that we use.

Yeah.

But is the bar higher for some of these relationships? Like, is it enough to say the right things, or do people expect more across conversations?

Yeah, yeah. So I guess two things I would say. One is a broader way of thinking about all of this is listening with your words, right? So you're saying the right thing, but it could be in this conversation, if you have a long-term relationship, it can also be a callback to prior conversations, right? So I can show you that I'm listening now, I can also show you that I remember the thing from last time, right? I can show you that, you know, when you talked last week when I saw you about, you know, your cat being sick, I still remember that and I'm still concerned, right? Or when we're having this disagreement, I can say, yeah, I can see how, you know, this could be sort of a really difficult situation for you given the thing you told me about with your dad, right? And so I'm showing you that I was listening last time, I'm still listening now, And in between, I thought about you. So I think that's sort of a very powerful signal of caring. And the other thing that's hugely important about all of this is that there's a lot of behavior that humans naturally reciprocate, right? So like, if I'm laughing, you're more likely to laugh. If I am leaning forward, you're more likely to lean forward. Receptiveness is one of the many, many things that we mimic. And so what that means is that you can literally change the dynamic of your relationship by modeling what you want to see happen, right? Like, you never again have to say, you know, listen to me, like, why aren't you listening to me? You can demonstrate listening with behavior. The other person will start mimicking it, and if you do it consistently, it really starts changing kind of the habits you have in that relationship.

I feel like the memory was a really good example of how you can show that you're listening because clearly you still have it in your mind. So we chatted a little bit before about just like some of your ideas around how to incorporate this into the education system. And I know you've looked at this at different levels of education. I thought that was really interesting, so I thought I'd invite you to share about that.

Yeah, so one of my— I guess one of the things that sort of like really drives me is thinking about how to get these ideas out into the world. I mean, that's why I'm here now. And I think we start too late, right? I think when, you know, people are in their 30s and their 40s and they sit back and they realize that they can't have a conversation with half of their family at Thanksgiving, like that's too late to start giving them the tools. Doesn't hurt, but what I'm really interested in is getting this into every high school, at least in the US. Let's start with the US because we teach kids all kinds of things about socio-emotional skills. We teach them how to deal with bullies. We teach them how to talk to people from different identity backgrounds, all kinds of very important things, but we don't teach them how to disagree. And that's a skill set that I think if you could, you know, carry with you into young adulthood, right, college, the military, the workplace, it could really, I think, change the conversations we have in the civic sphere. So that's what I'm sort of obsessed with at the moment is how do we get high school kids to disagree better?

Yeah, that's super cool. And then I guess my last question, is, you know, it sometimes feels like we see disagreements as like a bad thing, something to damage control. But there's actually a lot of good things that can come out of it as well, right? Like some of the richest conversations that we can have could start from a disagreement. And so I was curious, like, do you have any memorable disagreements that come to mind in your life that impacted you?

Oh God, so many. I mean, I really, you know, the dedication in the book for those of you guys who will like open the book and be like, ooh, says to everyone who has ever disagreed with me, thank you. Because there's so much to learn from other people who disagree with you, right? Like they have interesting things to say. And there's a huge research literature in business about how disagreement is great for companies, right? You know, you avoid like some truly catastrophic errors, you have new ideas, it enhances creativity, it's good for all all kinds of stuff. In fact, I had a disagreement— here we go, here's a perfect example, so meta— I had a disagreement with an editor at the Harvard Business Review where I submitted an article about how disagreement is useful for all these things, and the feedback I got was, this is not interesting because we already know this. And I said, okay, But why isn't everybody doing it? And that, you know, having that conversation really led me to sort of recognize this tension between the thing we know and the gap between people, certainly in the business world, actually enacting it and thinking about where that gap comes from. And I think where the gap comes from is that a lot of the benefits accrue to the organization and the team. Whereas the cost is to the individual, right? Like if I'm the person on the team who speaks up and says, you know, here's the flaw in the plan, here's the error in the code, like here's why this is all a terrible idea, we shouldn't do it like this, I'm the one who's being difficult, I'm the one who's making the meeting longer, I'm the one who is going, you know, against my manager, right? And so the cost is to me. The benefit that we think we know about is to the company and the team. And so I think that's part of the reason why, despite the fact that we think we know this, we still don't practice it. So I'm grateful to that editor for helping me think through this.

I think we're about to wrap it up there, but there's so much more from the book we didn't get to cover. Things like the power of storytelling, techniques that mediators use. So I'm really excited for folks to engage deeper with some of these ideas. But thank you, Julia, so much for joining us today.