Transcript of The Science of Disagreeing Well

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday, we do something special. We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Now, I don't need to tell you that there is a lot of disagreement in this country at the moment. Donald Trump has been elected as the 47th President. A lot of people are elated, a lot of people are upset, and soon a lot of people who disagree will be sitting across from each other at the holiday dinner table. We've dealt with a fair share of disagreements in my own family. I won't go into all the bloody details, but generally someone will start talking, and then I will realize that they're wrong, and I start delivering the facts. My brother likes to argue, so whether he really believes it or not, he'll start being contrarian. And other members of the family, aunts and uncles, they'll jump in and They'll have their opinions, and it all be going well, we'll be all loud and stuff, and then it'll go too far. And I don't know if anybody else has this. I should stop arguing you in the point, but there's a part of me that goes, Keep going.

Keep talking because I'm right. Sometimes when you get that last word in, that's what ends up tipping just a disagreement and to an all-out emotional fight, and tears are flowing and things like that. And that's what you don't want. But one thing I've always felt in all my arguing my points and trying to get the last word is I have never really been able to convince anyone of my rightness. I do wonder, why is it so hard to convince people of things, to persuade people? Is there maybe another way that I should be approaching these conversations? Which is why I wanted to share this episode from NPR Science Podcast, Shortwave. Turns out they've been asking saying basically the same thing.

I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise?

That's producer Rachael Carlson in an episode hosted by Emily Wong. This week, NPR is exploring America's divisions and sharing stories about people who are trying to bridge their divides. So today we're following Rachael on her scientific pursuit of this question.

And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years. Jeanie Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richardbrookeheiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.

And he's adorable, and He's adorable, and he's 92 feet tall.

I asked them how they met.

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

It was very important, actually. It was also an unusual singing group because it It was Renaissance's religious music, not for religious purposes, but for singing purposes. When did we meet him?

1977.

They say singing syncopates your heartbeats, so maybe that worked out in bringing them together.

It's the Renaissance music. Absolutely. They told me they sing with this group for six hours every single week, so they were spending so much time together. They eventually got married. When they first got married, they talked through and ultimately They 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.

The thing we could not talk about, really, was abortion. We both had strong opinions that were opposite. We realized we can't talk about this, so we won't. So we didn't. We won't. Then you also figure out ways that you can talk about other stuff.

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

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

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. He was a wonderful boss.

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

This joining of worlds was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen. Yeah. Jeanie 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.

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?

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?

Ever look up at the stars and wonder, what's out there? On Shortwave, we ask big questions about our universe. From baby galaxies to the search for alien life, we explore the celestial science behind these questions. Listen now to the Shortwave podcast from NPR.

Hey, everyone. I'm B. A. Parker, a host of the podcast Code Switch. On my show, I get to dig into With all of the facets of being a Black woman, from honoring my ancestors to exploring representation in reality TV. Code Switch is a place where I think out loud about how race and identity are connected. Join me on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.

The election is over, but the story is just beginning. Listen to Here and Now anytime. We're talking to everyone, Democrats, Republicans, independents, covering the political stories that to you and your community. We promise to bring you stories outside Washington, too. That's on Here and Now, Any Time, wherever you listen to podcasts. 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?

Okay, Emily, imagine that you and I are about to We have a disagreement. Our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.

That, of course, just breeds, guess what?

Mistrust. 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.

There's lots of research showing that there's this discordant perceptions of trust and how trustworthy people actually are. 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. Who's that?

That's Orielle Feldman-Hull, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University. 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.

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

Exactly. Activity there increases.

If we're disagreeing and our amygdala is going off, what else is happening on our brain?

I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that. 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 talk 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. Right.

You're just like, slid under an MRI machine.

Exactly. 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.

What is little thingies? What's that for?

It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it. She told me they're technically called optodes. Some of are 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.

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. 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. 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, These people were not pretending.

They were not like debaters that take a negative side and a positive side.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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. Others might have other interpretations.

Joy is hypothes 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.

Okay. 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 What do you guys say on that?

First, 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.

You can always walk away. Yeah.

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

That's clinical psychologist Allison Brisco-Smith.

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. Actually, your humanness is there. We can all discern, and bridging difference is actually doesn't require or ask us to do that.

That's like step zero. Decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person? But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple. Focus on your breathing.

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

Allison co-teaches that bridging differences class with Rudy I 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.

Right. She described it as an intention?

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. Yeah. 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.

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.

This absolutely reminds me of Jeanie 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, and they're ultimately putting the good of their relationship first.

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

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

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.

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

Totally. No, I think so, too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole, but it is like how Jeanie and Richard met in their singing group. They got to know each other's hobbies. They learned about their families, their careers. 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 and made them see the other person less not like them.

That's Julianna Thafour, 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.

Humility seems like an important way forward.

Yeah. I know I don't know everything, and even the things that I think I know well, 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.

Yeah. And that doesn't seem like the goal.

No. For Jeanie 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. I think what's most important here is they try to understand why they each hold the opinions they do.

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. Also, if you really care for somebody and admire them, if they have certain opinions, it slightly changes how you feel about it.

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

Of course. Thanks for having me, Emily.

That was Rachel Carlson for Shortwave. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Kim Naderfein-Petursa. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones and Rachael Carlson. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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Arguments happen, and our body's automatic response to conflict doesn't always help. We may start to feel anxious or angry, making it even more difficult for us to see eye to eye. Over time, that becomes contempt.

Contempt is a very destructive interpersonal process.

Hear how science can help us reframe and make the most of our conversations on the Shortwave podcast from NPR.