The Science of Disagreeing Well
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Am I shara? go. 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 forty seven, the 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 lid.

We've doubt, with a fair share of disagreements in my family, I will go into all, you know, the bloody details, but generally someone will start talking, and then I will realize that they're wrong. And I start delivering in the fact my brother likes to argue. So whether he really believes in my heal star being contrarian.

And you know, other members of a family, ops and apples, they are jump in and and they have their opinions. And IT will be going where we'll be all loud and stuff and then they go too far. And I don't know if anybody else.

Ys, this I should stop you know, arguing the point, but there's a part of me that goes keep going to talking because i'm right. And sometimes when you get that last word in, that's what is up tipping, just a disagreement and to an allow 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 kind of arguing my points and trying to get the last word, is I have never really been able to convince anyone of my rightness.

And I do wonder like why? Why is this so hard to convince people of things, to persuade people and and is there maybe another way that I should be approaching these conversations, which is why I wanted to share this episode from imp r science pot cash short wave? Turns out they've been asking basically the same thing I wanted to know.

what do science have to say about how to manage conflict, well, political or otherwise?

That's producer Rachel carlson in an episode hosted by Emily quang this week in pr, is expLoring america's divisions and sharing stories about people who are trying to bridge the divides. So today we're following ratio on her scientific pursuit of this question.

And that I ended talking to two people who've been disagree eed with each other for almost forty five years. Gene safer is a psycho analyst. She's liberal, and she's married to Richard brook iser, a conservative republican who works for the national review.

IT is a durable, so IT is like ninety two feet.

I asked how they met.

We met in a singing group. So that was good, because to be shared interests, that was not important.

Actually, IT was also an unusual singing group, because IT was renaissance religious music and not religious purposes, but were singing purposes.

When did we meet? Nineteen seventy seven?

You know, they say singing like singing your heart beat. So maybe that work down and bringing them together.

It's the on music ABS. And they told me they this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together ah they eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talk through and ultimately disagreed on a lot of things. They said they've never been a few times where they voted for the same people and over time theyve set some .

boundaries with each other. Talk about really was abortion. We both had straw opinions that that we're opposite.

And so that we realized we can talk about this. So we we won. Then you also figure out ways that you can talk about other stuff.

This was so striking to me, Emily, like they're really reflective about each other, other's opinions, and about each other .

as people in general. IT really opens your mind to think that somebody that you just agree with text care of you helps you is there for you. IT was really a revolution to me, actually. Uh, how much that means?

Well, and not just me, I mean that colleagues of minds you like, and I met your mentor, who was a communist st. And but he was a good boss. He treated you very onerous. wonderful.

But we also were able to join each other. These words and this .

joining of world was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen. Yeah, junior Richard had 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?

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dot work.

On the ted radio hour, clinical psychologist john and Julie gotten our marriage experts. And after studying thousands of couples, they have found couples .

who were successful had a really different way of talking to one another when there was a disagreement or a conflict.

How to be brave in our relationships? That on the ted radio hour podcast from N P R.

i'm rato Martin, host to N P S. Wild card podcast, i'm the kind of person who wants to skip the small talk and get right to the things that matter. That's why I invite famous guests like ted dancing ing, jeff gold bloom and isar ay to p the surface stuff. We talk about what gives their lives meaning, the belief that shape their word view, the moments of joy that keep them going. Follow while dart wherever you get your podcast only from .

N P R OK Rachel, you have ventured into the world of disagreement like the neuroscience of um and retrieve some info to help us have Better conversations. Let's start with what happens in our bodies when we disagree.

what goes down OK. Emily, imagine that you and I are about to have a disagreement. So our pupils might get, our heart might start racing and we might start to sweat little more.

And that, of course, just breeds. Guess what, miss trust.

that's rudy man dose a denton. He is a professor of psychology at uc. berle. Rudy code teaches a class from berkeley, greater good science center on bridging differences. He says we might not even notice these things rather happening to us.

But on top of all of them, we start making these split second decisions about whether or not we trust someone. And just by looking at their faces. Those decisions, though.

aren't always accurate. There's lots research showing that there's this discord, perceptions of trust and how trust for the people actually are. And so IT takes getting to know someone and assessing them again and again through different types of interaction ors and becoming close with them to understand um whether people are indeed .

trust for the who .

is that that's oria felman hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown university and SHE says when we interact with someone we've decided is untrustful the even someone who just belongs to another group than us. Are a middle starts to respond?

Are a middle a that is like our brains threat detector. It's like a smoke alarm.

Exactly activity there increases.

So if we're disagreeing and our middle is going off, um what else is happening on our brain?

I found a study from twenty twenty one looking at exactly that. So I called up the lead researcher, joy harsh, to talk about IT. She's a neuroscience professor at yale school of medicine and the beauty this study is that joy and her team monitor the brains of multiple people at once while they talk to 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. You're just slipper machine, actually. And in this case, people wear these things that looked like swim caps on their head. And they have these little things is all around the caps.

Little thing is, was that for literally .

the term that joy used when we were talking about IT, SHE told me they're technically called optos. So some of these are like little lasers that amid 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 enjoy study SHE just had people sitting around having a conversation like one wide at family dinner except her research participants are wearing these swim cap things.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Family dinner. They surveyed a bunch of people on yells 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 red 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 to other topics.

Joy told me these people were not pretending they were not like debates that take a negative side and a positive side.

No, there are just people out here live in their lives here, and she's looking at their brain activity. What did you find during .

agreement? joices? 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 synchro. What does that mean?

So joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looks pretty similar. So certain areas LED up in similar ways while they talk. And her working hypothesis for what .

this means is the sharing of information involves at higher levels of communication um that people are learning um so that there's A A A consensus of what is being shared, what's going on VS when .

participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as picked up IT was kind of like a cocoon ony instead of a harmonious do. And as they disagreed, joy 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 of a very important behavior, huh? Others might have other interpretations.

So joy is hypothesize. That disagreement might be really taxing on us like you're expanding more energy when you disagree with someone, then when you agree with them. Okay.

so clearly, disagreement sets off a waterfall of reactions and behaviors that lights up all these parts of the brain. Uh, when that is happening to us, which seems fairly inevitable, how can we approach disagreement Better?

What does the science say on that? First, kind of like we said before, we decided if we want to have a conversation with someone, and also if that .

person is gonna receptive, you know, walk away.

I hear often if I talk to that person in my subject of violence, that clinical .

psychologist alan briscoe smith.

I am not hiding people to have a conversation with people that are violent towards you, dehumanizing towards you. That's not a required like actually your humanist is there. We can all kind of decision in bringing differences actually doesn't require us do that.

So that kind of like step zero decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person? yeah. But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple, focus on your breathing.

Can you take a breath? Can you slow this down just a little bit so you can kind of come back into yourself of your back here you take a breath and an a line with the intention.

Alan code teaches that bridges 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.

Right like SHE describe a dozen and and chin .

yeah why we're having IT what we're looking get out of IT because research shows its not super easy to change someone's mind and I can be pretty and effective to spout fact that someone to try to do this yes, but Allen and rudy both told me we can find more common with someone when we try to understand their perspective instead of trying to convince them .

that they're wrong. I'm not talking about persuading debate. I'm not even talking about having my mind change when I talk about breaching differences, I mean, about the mirror connection with another person and the space around seeing that person as a human.

This absolutely reminds me of genuine Richard. They are not trying to change each other's minds. They are trying to create space for each other to talk about what they feel yeah and they're ultimately putting the good of their relationship first.

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 away from those conversations with a more open perspective.

Okay, so arguing to learn helps us sleep in open mind about the topic at hand. But you mentioned earlier, rich l, 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?

Yeah, that's a great question, Emily. And it's our third step, apathy. 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 bringing up these feelings?

I think this way 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 totally.

No, I think so too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole, but IT is kind of like how jian Richard met in their singing group, like they got to know each other, other's hobby. They learn 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 you'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 percent less not like them. That's Juliana to forth.

the director of the .

bridging differences program at U. C. Berkeley, greater good science center. That's where ruin elson 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 believes might be limited. Yeah, humility seems like an important way forward. 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 are even all of them together is a magic one that suddenly going to help us all agree .

yeah and that doesn't seem like the goal.

no. Like Virginian Richard, they both told me neither of them have really changed any of their opinions in the last forty four 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 told the opinions they do.

When will somebody for how many thousand and of years that we have? Um do you know that some of the things that you thought were wrong IT maybe weren't. And you know if also if you really care for somebody and admire them, if they have certain opinions, slightly changes how you feel about .

Rachel carlson. Thank you for giving us a ticket for moving forward in these divisive times.

Of course, thanks for having the family.

That was right to croson for short wave. This episode was produced by hana chen and kim nature found Peterson IT was edited by rebec over mirrors and fact checked by Tyler Jones and Rachel carson. The audio engineer was Patrick murray.

Am I jasko? And this is a sunday story from up first. We will be back tomorrow with all the new you need to start a week, until then, have a great rest year week.

This week on our podcast here and now anytime have you had a frustrating conversation about politics with someone you disagree with lately. Most americans have according to a new survey from before the election. So i'm going guess that has only gone up.

We're kicking off a series on finding common ground called conversations across the divide. This is now on here. And now anytime you.

How much can one person change in four years? The answer comes down to who he puts in charge trumps terms as podcast, where you can follow npr coverage of the people who will shape Donald trumps first hundred days in office, what their goals are, we will track his cabin picks. His political team has taught military leaders to understand who they are, what they believe at. Hello, govern, listen the trumps. ms. From npr.