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TalkSmart, the podcast. One of the most challenging communication situations we confront is conflict
and disagreement. I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate
School of Business. Welcome to ThinkFast, TalkSmart, the podcast. Today I'm excited to chat
with Julia Minson. Julia is an associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School
in a graduate of the Stanford Psychology program with her PhD. Her work focuses on decision-making,
conflict negotiations, and the psychology of disagreement. She explores how people engage
with opinions, judgments, and decisions that are different from their own and investigates
the psychological biases that hinder maximizing the benefits of collaboration. Welcome, Julia.
I look forward to our conversation. Thanks, Matt. I'm really excited to be here.
All right, let's get started. So I'm curious, how did you get into the work you do? I believe
you looked at decision-making to begin. I was always really interested in collaboration and teamwork.
In fact, since my undergraduate days, I wanted to understand how people work together,
specifically how they make decisions together, how they navigate,
disagreement, and what people have different opinions. And one of the things that I find
particularly interesting about disagreement is that people believe it to be a good thing.
Disagreement is good because it brings different points of view to the table. It gets people
engaged. It gives you the ability to correct errors or have more creative decisions.
And at the same time, it's very, very clear that people don't like it. And it often then leads to
conflict and negative emotions. These two sides of the coin, this idea that on one hand,
it's good for you. On the other hand, people avoided like the plague, is kind of got me thinking
about, well, what can we do to disagree better? And what have you found? What are some things that we
can do to disagree better? I personally am very conflict-averse. And I try to avoid conflict
as best I can. What are things we can do to be better at disagreeing and to help us achieve some
of the goals we have? You being conflict-averse, I think makes you just a person, right? Everybody's
conflict-averse. Conflict does no fun. Nobody likes it. But there is sort of a really important
wrinkle there, which is disagreement and conflict are not actually the same thing. One of the reasons
we struggle with disagreement is because we equate it with conflicts. Disagreement is, I think we
should do this and you think we should do that. And we have a conversation about it. And I hear
your views and you hear high views. And we might reach consensus or we might walk away disagreeing.
But nobody has any particularly strong feelings about. Conflict by contrast has two components.
Obviously you have the disagreement to start with. But then also, usually an important precursor
of conflict is that I attribute disagreement to there being something wrong with you.
So it's not just that we disagree because you know things that I don't know or because we've had
different experiences or because we've looked at different data, it's because you're not smart enough
to get it or you are somehow biased or have some kind of self-serture and a furious motive that's
preventing you from getting it. And so the way we go from disagreement to conflict is by making
negative attributions about the source of the disagreement and basically blaming the person saying,
you know, something is screwed up about them. And then once I go down that path in my mind,
of course, that brings out the negative emotions that we commonly associate with conflict.
And so you get into what people then call a conflict spiral where the more I see all these things
about you and the more I express them, the more you feel those things about me. So I think the
pre-answer to your question of what to do about it is first of all to recognize the difference
between those two things and think about, well, okay, if disagreement is good and conflict is
at the very least unpleasant, how do we stay in the domain of disagreement before it becomes conflict?
I really appreciate that distinction. And I think many of us, myself, included, conflate the two.
So let's tease it apart. But when it comes to disagreeing better and trying to leverage the
benefits of disagreement, what are some things we can do to disagree better? I find myself often
invoking persuasive techniques trying to persuade people to my point of view. And I'm not sure
that's the best thing to do. We actually did a series of studies a couple years ago where we
asked people who disagree on a variety of things, who looked at people who disagree about all
matter of topics, what are their goals in talking to somebody they disagree with? It turned out that people
offer a mix of two things. Either they offer what you named, which is the desire to persuade the
other party. I want to convince them that I'm right, that they're wrong, that my arguments are
better and make them change their mind. And then the other thing people bring up is that they want
to learn from the conversation. Did they want to understand where the other person is coming from
and they want to get a better sense of the arguments for the opposing perspective? And what's really
interesting is that people name both of those categories of goals for themselves in roughly equal
proportion, but they seem to believe that other people don't want to learn about them.
So I'm the kind of person that wants to both persuade and understand, but this jerk over here
only wants to persuade me and they have no interest in learning about me. There's a lot of
advice out there both in the academic literature and in the practitioner literature that says to
navigate disagreement better, you need to be curious about the other person's point of view.
But the problem is people think they're already doing it. People think that they are curious and
that they do want to learn about the other person. It's the other person that's the problem.
All this advice we're giving to folks about being curious, I think to some extent is falling
on deaf ears because we're telling people to do the thing they already think they're doing just fine.
And what seems to be happening is I think I'm doing it, but you're not recognizing it. So we're
not giving people credit and that makes the frustration melt. So a lot of the work we've been doing
as a consequence of that research is saying, well, let's stop telling people to feel curious
and let's start telling people to act curious. And that turns out it is on one hand very easy
and on the other hand, something people are extremely reluctant to do.
Let's tease that out because I find that really useful. It's very practical. So instead of just
thinking that we are being curious and connecting and empathetic, we really have to demonstrate that.
So what are some of the very tactical things that you advise that we do to demonstrate our curiosity?
Is it paraphrasing? Is it asking questions? What are those things that we can do?
So I think the simplest thing is saying in words that you want to learn about the other
person's perspective. For example, we've done studies where we ask participants in a study to
make an argument on a topic and every participant has some point of view and then we ask them to
write a paragraph about what their point of view is. We then take that paragraph and then we stick
two sentences on the beginning and two sentences on the end. And the sentence says say something like,
I understand this is a really complicated topic and I would love to understand your point of view.
And then their old paragraph comes after that. I believe blah, blah, blah. And at the end, we say,
but I get that some people might disagree and I would like to learn about your perspective.
So we didn't change anything about the person's argument. We didn't ask them to do anything
sophisticated like perspective taking. We just slap two sentences on the beginning on the end that
used very simple language to say, I want to learn about your perspective. And then we take that
text and we sent it to other participants who hold that closing perspective on this issue.
And what we find is massive effects on how reasonable and thoughtful and pleasant the
original speaker is relative to their own words, which was the same exact argument, right? Just
without this expression of willingness to learn on the beginning and on the end. And it's very
interesting because it's not exactly question asking. So question asking is another one of those
very popular pieces of advice? Question asking is great of it's the right kind of question.
So if I say, Matt, why do you believe that Palo Alto is a wonderful place to live?
That's a question. It's got a question mark at the end of it. It's fine. I couldn't say, Matt,
tell me about why Palo Alto is a wonderful place to live. It's not a question. It's a command,
but it does the same work, right? I could say, Matt, why would you possibly believe that anybody
would want to live in Palo Alto? That's still a question, but clearly it's not the kind of question
that's going to help us resolve conflict. Right. So the common thread is expressing curiosity
in a way that other people would recognize as curiosity, not necessarily the grammatical form of it.
So it's the actual displaying or demonstrating of the curiosity in a way that is clearly curious
and not have some underlying hidden agenda or perhaps negative tone that matters.
This is what you essentially define as conversational receptiveness, correct?
It's very related. The technique that I just described as showing curiosity implies that you're
going to ask a question and then you're going to stop talking and listen to the answer.
And that's hard because most people eventually want to say what they have to say.
And that's where conversational receptiveness comes in. So I think of conversational
receptiveness as kind of step two in the sequence, which is, I've shown my curiosity.
You have told me what you think. I disagree and I want to voice my disagreement in a way that
will now cost me all the social capital that I just built up with all my curiosity and all my
listening. And so conversational receptiveness is a set of tools that we develop for when you've
already said your piece, I disagree and now I need to respond and how to express my disagreement
without hurting the relationship. And you're right. Psychologically, it has very similar
principles because as I'm disagreeing, I want to keep reminding my counterpart that I'm engaged
with their perspective and I listen to them when they were talking. So we use a framework that we
call here and here as an acronym. So H-E-A-R that H in here stands for hedging and basically
words and phrases that show that you recognize that not every single thing is true 100% of the time.
So it's words like sometimes occasionally some people, it's words that introduce uncertainty.
The E stands for emphasizing agreement and the idea here is that even if we disagree
dramatically about the thing we're discussing, there are some things we agree on. So imagine that
we work together and we're discussing COVID mitigation policies. You want more masking,
I want less masking or you want vaccine mandates, I don't want vaccine mandates. We could disagree
about the policy, but I could say something like we both want to work in a place that's safe
and welcoming to everyone. Or I agree that the last few years of the pandemic have been really
hard on our company. So there are ways of signaling agreement without giving up on the position
that you're trying to advocate for. The A for acknowledgement is using your own words to show
that you have heard that other person and this is very related to paraphrasing. I understand that
it's important to you that blah blah blah or you said XYZ or I hear that something, something.
And I like to make a little bit of a disclaimer around the A because there's a lot of training
that you hear about where people say, well, you're supposed to say I hear you. And there's a good
way to do it and there's a bad way to do it. The bad way is to say I hear you and then you move
on to making your own point. The good way is that you have to demonstrate what you heard. So I hear
that it's really important to you that you have the flexibility of working from home or working
from the office on days that fit your family. So to say what it is you heard, not just asserted
but actually demonstrated. And then the R in here stands for reframing to the positive. And
essentially what it means is avoiding contradictions and negations and using positively valence
towards instead. So instead of saying I completely disagree that blah blah blah you could say,
well, I think blah blah blah you can make the same exact point in the positive frame instead
of the negative frame. And so it just elevates the tone of the discussion a little bit so it
doesn't spiral into negativity as quickly. So if H E A R. I love a good acronym and I love an
acronym that's well explained. So thank you. I very much heard your definition of here and I really
like how it keeps us open. It keeps us focused on the issue, not the person. And in many ways this
is all about an invitation to continue the dialogue in a way that is civil and respectful of the
other person while at the same time making it clear that you don't necessarily agree with the
person. And I find this really valuable. I would like to switch back to this notion of conflict.
You did an excellent job of distinguishing between disagreement and conflict. I would love to get
some very practical bits of advice for you when we are in conflict. When there is emotion and
there is connection and we do have strong feelings about the other person or people that we are
talking about that might not be favorable or helpful. What can we do to help manage the conflict
that we might find ourselves in? In the end, some conflict happens to everyone.
Constantly happens the most when you really care. You care about the person, you care about the
outcome. And so the people that we're closest with are the ones that get the worst of it.
And I think there's a series of choices to be made. The first choice is, do I even want to get
involved in this? Do I actually need to talk to this person? Do I need to resolve this conflict?
Does it matter in some grand sense what they think of me? So there are many instances where I think
it's really advisable to walk away. And that being said, I think you can still walk away
gracefully. You don't have to slam the door. You can say, look, I understand we disagree about this,
but I'd rather not talk about it anymore. I think when you do decide to engage people
dramatically under plan, they're complex, which sounds like a crazy thing to say. But if you're going
to have a difficult conversation with somebody you know you strongly disagree with, it makes sense
to do it as a controlled manner as possible. So well-rested, well-fed, in-person, are minimal
requirements. Thank you for that insight about the way we can approach conflict and maybe choose
not to engage at all. Very important. And it's very important also, as you talked about with
disagreement, to reflect on our physical and emotional state as we consider the conflicts that
present themselves. What do we actually do when we're in the midst of conflict? When the conflict
is actually happening? So this is where we circle back to where we started the conversation.
Once you're in that conversation, you think about how can I express my curiosity and how can I
show that I really want to learn about the other person? Then when it's my turn to talk back,
how can I use conversational receptiveness in my responses? And the entire time, the question
you should be asking yourself is, why would a smart, reasonable, sensible person pull the
opinions that my counterpart does? In other words, questioning your own attributions for the
disagreement and trying to pull out little nuggets from what your counterpart is saying that would
help you understand why their point of view is sensible for them. And so I think those three things
really help people come out. And then having better relationship than when they started with
the conversation. I really, really appreciate the last bit of advice to think about why would
the person hold this point of view? I think that's really powerful because that takes you away from
that intense moment and gets you thinking more broadly. So you've given us advice on things to do
in approaching conflict, but also what we can do in the midst of conflict to get to a place of
equilibrium imbalance without doing too much damage. Before we end, I'd like to ask you three
questions, one of which is just for you and then the others are common among all of our guests.
So you up for that? Let's do it. So I want to get a little more insight into you personally. As
somebody who studies conflict and disagreement, I can imagine there's a lot of pressure on you when
you are in the midst of conflict and disagreement. How do you handle that extra pressure?
I think that extra pressure doesn't come from studying conflict and disagreement. I think it
just comes from having a busy career. As I mentioned, I'm married. I have three daughters. I also have
my 94-year-old grandmother living with us. So it is just a very busy household. And so that comes
with lots of conflict, as you might imagine. And I think the thing that makes me chuckle,
and also often gives me claws, is when my kids or my husband throw my own research back at me and
say, Mom, you are not being very receptive right now. And I hear that on a pretty regular basis
because I think doing these things is hard. And doing them again, when you're tired and when
you're stressed and when there's lots of people all talking at you at the same time, nobody's
perfect at it. What I try hard to do is when they call me on end to revert back to the things that
I create to others, which is say, Oh, yeah, I'm not listening, am I? I'm going to stop talking now.
And I'm going to try to do the thing that I teach other people to do.
I can so relate. My kids will often say, Dad, that wasn't very clear. And yet I teach people
to be clear. So I get it. And I appreciate the stresses that that brings. Let me ask question
number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? So I'm sure I'm not the first of your
guests to nominate this particular person, but my top choice is Michelle Obama. I think that she
has an amazing way of communicating very complex ideas in a way that is just so accessible. So that
her ideas aren't just simple enough for everybody to understand, but they retain their complexity
and their memorable. I am a big fan of Michelle Obama as well for the reasons that you mentioned.
And I totally agree she has a way of making things accessible without making it feel like it's
dumb down. Our final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful
communication recipe? I would say curiosity is one. Respect for the amount of bandwidth your
audience does or doesn't have. Can they follow the complex curly cues of your brain or they just
sort of too tired to do that right now? And the third one I think is the willingness to
come across as little foolish. And that could be showing vulnerability or saying, I'm sorry,
that's not what I meant to say. Let me try again. Or I'm sorry, last week when I yelled at you,
here's what was actually going on. And that's not what I meant. Giving yourself the chance to admit
imperfection so you can do better. I really like those three ingredients. Curiosity is not
surprising given what you do and what you've shared with us. We have heard over and over again
on this podcast that we really have to think about our audience in terms of their attitudes,
their knowledge and bandwidth fits nicely into that. I really, really appreciate this notion of
being open and humble and extending a little grace towards yourself to allow yourself to show up
as human in the communication. So that recipe is going to turn out a great interaction for sure.
Julia, thank you so much for your time, for your insights. The challenges that disagreement and
conflict bring are omnipresent and the tools that you've provided. The very specific actionable
guidance is helpful not just to me, but hopefully to all of our listeners. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Matt. This was terrific.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, The Podcast from Stanford
GSB. To learn more about handling conflicting disagreements, please listen to episode 46 with
near Halevi, an episode 67 with Michelle Gelfon. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna,
Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. Please find us on YouTube and
wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and
Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep-dive videos, English language learning content,
and our newsletter.
Hi, Matt here. As you know, I am very curious and I'd love to recommend a show that I enjoy
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