- As a young man, I heard Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky argue that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

Today's guest has made a career out of how to disagree better, and she has the science to back her claims.

She's Julia Minson this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(lively thoughtful music) (lively thoughtful music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Julia Minson.

A professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, she's also the author of an important new book, "How to Disagree Better."

Julia, thank you so much for being with us, and congratulations on "How to Disagree Better."

- Thank you, Jim.

I'm thrilled about it.

- You know, I learned a lot.

One of the things that I learned is that by want of practice, that we're all pretty good psychologists, but maybe we need a little help disagreeing.

Let's start at a real foundational level.

Why do we disagree?

- Well, you know, I mean, we disagree because we're all different people, right?

We disagree because we've had different experiences; we've been raised with different values; we've met different people, read different things, right?

People just have a variety of backgrounds and experiences that they bring to any situation, and so disagreement is inevitable just because we're human and there's a bunch of us.

- So are there sort of regular ruts or traps or pitfalls that we all tend to fall into when we disagree poorly?

- Yeah, I think so.

So, you know, there's lots of benefit to disagreement, right?

So if you have different opinions, if you've read different things, it's fun.

It could be enlightening.

It could prevent us from making some really terrible mistakes.

The problems we run into usually happen when we want to change somebody's mind, and that person doesn't want their mind changed because they're perfectly happy with how things are.

- Is there a cost to disagreeing poorly?

- I mean, yes, absolutely.

And I think we're seeing it everywhere around us right now.

And probably the cost that's the most noticeable is the level, kind of the tenor, of our policy discussions and the tenor of our public sphere.

But, you know, even sort of in families and workplaces, when people don't disagree, well, they can't make good decisions together.

They can't have interesting conversations.

So, you know, absolutely is a cost to not being good at this very, very important skill.

- Yeah, I was thinking about this in the context of different boards and sort of organizational structures that I'm a part of.

And when we have really productive disagreements in a meeting room, they're remarkable because we wind up in a stronger place than we were going into that conversation in the first place.

You know, I'm sort of distilling a lot down to very little.

Is that essentially the value of disagreement?

- Yeah, I think so.

So, in the situation you described, right, you could imagine at least two really important things that you get out of disagreement.

One is you get new ideas, right?

So when you bring people together to sit on a board or be on a team, you're bringing them together because you want them to contribute something.

And that's, you know, hugely important.

And the other piece is sometimes we make just disastrous decisions on our own, and we rely on other people to correct us and sort of get us out of trouble, which could be, you know, like a terrible product launch, or it could be a lawsuit, or it could be, you know, just a very embarrassing typo.

And that's why you need people to disagree with you.

- Is there a difference between a disagreement and an argument, and when does one become the other?

- (laughs) Yes, absolutely.

So, you know, a disagreement is just seeing the world differently, right?

I don't even have to necessarily voice it.

I could be kind of aware of the fact that you believe something different than I do and have my own opinion in my mind and not really say anything and just know that, hey, you know, Jim and I disagree about this thing.

An argument is when I start to try to convince you that I am right and you are wrong, and, you know, I'm not okay with you continuing to hold your belief.

I am going to sort of force my belief upon you.

And that's where things, you know, quite often go south.

- It seems that it's also sort of the basis for a whole lot of, like, you know, toxic work environments and toxic relationships.

- Yes.

You know, and part of it is that we sort of think of disagreement intuitively as a good thing, and we don't draw the distinction between disagreement and, you know, through kind of argument, when it turns into conflict.

Where people get very frustrated with each other, they can't believe that the other person hasn't changed their mind yet.

Sometimes, you know, emotions escalate, voices escalate, and so then the environment does become toxic, and it becomes toxic in two ways.

Because on one hand, there is sort of, you know, all these negative interactions.

But on the other hand, there's people who observe it and say, "Well, if this is how it's gonna go, I'm just not going to speak up."

So sometimes the most toxic environments are very, very silent because people have observed poorly handled disagreement, and then they say, "Well, I am keeping my ideas to myself because I don't want to have this experience."

- Yeah, it's a fascinating field.

And you've made a career studying disagreement.

I have to ask, how did you come to study this in the first place?

- Ah, well, Jim, so this is a story that I have kept quiet for a very long time, but now that I'm opening my book with this story, I guess it's going to going public.

So I, many years ago, used to be a competitive ballroom dancer, and my dance partner is now my husband.

And, you know, for many years we danced together; we competed at a very high level.

And the thing about ballroom dancing is that you literally cannot move without the other person sort of being in consensus with you about which way you're going.

And so ballroom dancing couples fight a lot because it can get very frustrating.

You know, another thing that's very, very interesting about ballroom dancing in particular is that there's this funny aspect to perspective-taking when you're dancing together because you're facing each other.

And so you're never actually looking at the same thing at the same time because you're looking in opposite directions.

So, you know, spending years observing dance partners fighting, I started thinking about how this is really a metaphor for the way we disagree in lots of other spaces, because we simply don't see the world from the same angle, and we blame our partner for seeing it the wrong way.

- That's a provocative metaphor.

But you're not just someone who's, like, you know, sort of, like, doing self-help; you're an actual scientist, a social scientist trying to understand what makes some disagreements worse and how to disagree better.

What does that research actually entail?

- So my PhD is in experimental social psychology, which means that I apply, you know, the experimental method, like, you know, clinical trials in medicine, for example, to understanding how to make people disagree more constructively.

And so what that means in practice is that we run randomized controlled experiments.

We, you know, randomly assign people to different conditions.

And in one condition, we say, "Well, you know, go ahead and have this conversation and disagree however you will."

And in another condition, we usually teach them a skill or provide some kind of intervention that we expect to improve their experience.

And so then if we see a difference in how the disagreements happen between those two conditions, we can be very, very confident that that difference stemmed from our treatment, right?

Because the people were initially randomly assigned to one condition or another.

And so that's a very, very different method than how people normally think about disagreement, because we are really applying very rigorous social science design to the question instead of, you know, relying on our own intuitions or sort of, like, you know, relying on what, you know, we may have been taught by people who are very wise and insightful, but haven't carefully tested their recommendations.

- Is this a field with a long history?

You know, I... Yeah, that's the question.

How long have people been studying a sort of disagreement, for lack of a better term?

- You know, so social psychology is actually a relatively young field.

It came about around World War II, and social psychologists study all kinds of things that are related to disagreement, right?

So people study motivation, people study group behavior, people study stereotyping.

A lot of my work is motivated by the work that my PhD advisor, Lee Ross, did back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s with his previous students.

So, you know, there's... You know, it depends.

You know, if you're comparing us to, like, astronomy, we're a relatively young field, but we've also been at this for a few decades.

- You know, I think about disagreements, I'm gonna think about lawyers, I'm gonna think about diplomats, I'm gonna think about advice that, you know, my grandmother gave me.

Between lawyers, diplomats, and grandparents, is the advice that they would give about how to disagree borne out by any of the science that you've developed?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, you made a point earlier in our conversation about how people are pretty good intuitive psychologists.

And I think that's a really important point because, you know, all of us adults have been around for decades and, you know, we figured out how to get other people to take care of us, how to get fed, how to make friends, right?

How to find mates.

That is all very sophisticated social psychology.

Each one of us is quite good at dealing with other humans, but because we don't study these things experimentally, you know, maybe we're right, like, 70% or 80% of the time, but we're wrong the rest of the time.

And so I think if we're trying to give people recommendations, we want to kind of shave off those errors so that people don't spend their time trying to do things that don't work, right?

And, you know, people who have been in the practice of disagreement for their entire careers, right?

Diplomats and lawyers and mediators and grandmothers have figured out a lot of things through trial and error.

And I think what science gives us is we sort of get rid of the error because the scientists have done the trial and error for you, and we give you this nicely packed set of recommendations that you can apply and, you know, invest your resources in a more productive way.

- You know, so you ultimately come to something called receptiveness as the key ingredient to disagreeing better.

Would you explain to us what receptiveness is and how to practice it?

- Certainly.

So receptiveness really means engaging with opposing perspectives in a way that's similar to how we engage with ideas that support our own beliefs.

It doesn't mean changing your mind; it doesn't mean reaching agreement.

It simply means that I'm going to really seek out and pay attention to and think hard about ideas that might be quite foreign to me, or, you know, in tremendous opposition to ideas that are in line with my own beliefs, right?

So people who are more receptive just spend more time thinking hard about both sides of the issue.

And, you know, it's a really useful mindset and skillset because in the end, it makes you a better-informed person.

- I read that in the book, and I hear you talking about it now, and I'm thinking about Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso throwing darts in the bar and saying, "Be curious."

Is that the essence of receptivity, being curious about the argument you're encountering, or the disagreement you're encountering?

- Yes.

You know, and I would say two things differentiate receptiveness from curiosity.

There are lots of people in the world who are quite curious, but they're often less curious about things they disagree with than things they agree with, right?

So being sort of curious about photosynthesis is quite different than being curious about a policy position that you are just completely not on board with.

So receptiveness really demands people to be more even-handed in how they deploy their curiosity.

And really requires them to be curious towards things that you really, really don't like.

I think another piece about receptiveness that we discovered several years into doing the research is that it's not enough to be curious or open-minded inside your brain, right?

You need to show that curiosity through behavior.

And so a lot of the research and a lot of what I talk about in the book really focuses on behavioral displays of receptiveness so that the other person in the conversation can tell that you're trying to do something different.

- For example?

- So, for example, a lot of folks fail to tell people that they're trying to understand their point of view.

So I, you know, might get into a conversation with somebody because I think I'm being curious, but I will spend most of that conversation explaining my argument, and then I might say something like, "Yeah, but I can see how some people see that differently."

And it's sort of this half-hearted attempt at inviting the other person into the conversation that your counterpart is likely to miss because they've just heard, you know, this whole paragraph-long argument about why you're right, and they're wrong.

So a lot of what we advise people is to very explicitly signal their desire to learn.

Something like, "I know we disagree about this, but I would love to understand your point of view and how you came to hold your beliefs," right?

And then I can say whatever it is I came to say, and then I can finish with another expression of my desire to learn, right?

"That's what I believe.

But I understand that you see things differently.

Can you please tell me how you think about it?"

- What does that do?

Like, why does it work, I guess, is what I'm curious about?

- It works, so for a couple reasons.

One is that in disagreement, people make the assumption that the other person has no interest in understanding their point of view.

So we have done a number of studies where we ask people about their own motivations in disagreement and about other people's motivations in disagreement, and we find very consistently that people say that they want to learn about the other person, but that the other person has no interest in learning about them.

And of course, both of those things, you know, can't be true at the same time, if everybody wants to learn and everybody thinks the other person doesn't want to learn.

And learning is really something that we associate with intelligence and benevolence, right?

Like smart people want to learn, and people who are kind and sort of thoughtful want to learn.

And if I think my counterpart doesn't want to learn, well, it's because they're not very bright and they're kind of a jerk.

When I dispel that set of stereotypes, it really, really improves the conversation.

- You know, so you teach at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

If we think about politics in 2026, disagreement is probably putting it nicely, right?

(both laughing) You know, how do we reconcile this research with the practice of politics in the world today?

- So I think, you know, it's important to draw a very big distinction between how citizens interact and how politicians interact, because we all have our different goals and we have our different incentives.

If I'm a politician, and, you know, if I'm elected, I am very interested in getting my base fired up.

And so that might mean actually coming across as quite unreceptive, because I want my side to see me as sort of, like, a firebrand.

It turns out that that can be costly, as we have seen, and that is perhaps not the behavior that the rest of us who are sort of regular people living in the world want to be either practicing ourselves or incentivizing.

Concern with polarization is one of the top bipartisan issues that Americans really agree on.

You know, we disagree about many, many things, but one thing we strongly agree on is that the state of politics right now is not productive and good for the country.

So we are all in a position where we can sort of work towards improving our own disagreement and electing folks who are, you know, doing this differently.

- Yeah.

I'm old enough to remember Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky, who used to love to tell people that you can disagree without being disagreeable.

Is that still... I mean, you make a great point about the dynamics in politics where you wanna turn out your base and fire up your supporters, but is there enduring wisdom in what Wendell Ford was talking about 40 years ago?

- I mean, I believe so, and I think there's some experimental evidence that supports that.

So there are studies that look at politicians being more or less civil, you know, and people in the media being more or less receptive to the opposing argument.

And those studies consistently find that even voters on your own side prefer greater civility and prefer greater receptiveness.

I think sometimes we put up with uncivil politicians because, you know, along with the incivility, we're having some other set of goals met, but in general, and on average, voters on both sides want civility and want greater receptiveness to a variety of perspectives.

- You know, one of the things that I found absolutely fascinating, you share some evidence from Wikipedia and how engagements in the editing of Wikipedia actually sort of demonstrate the power of receptivity.

Would you explain that for our audience?

- Sure, absolutely.

So Wikipedia is a surprisingly great platform on which to study disagreements, because every Wikipedia article is essentially peer-edited.

If you ever go to Wikipedia, there's a little button on every article that says "talk."

And if you click on that button, you see these lengthy transcripts of the disagreements between Wikipedia editors who are debating the topic of that article.

And, you know, sometimes passionate people get passionate and get frustrated when their counterparts don't change their mind.

And in Wikipedia, even though it's sort of, like, all public in writing, that can result in name-calling.

So Wikipedia has an explicit policy about personal attacks on the platform.

And so, you know, if you call somebody a name while you're arguing with them, you will have your license suspended, you know, either for a period of time or forever, depending on the situation.

And so there was a group of computer scientists from Cornell who gathered lots and lots and lots of these conversations that were on similar topics and matched for length.

And half of them were conversations where somebody called somebody a nasty name by the end, and half of them were conversations that resulted peacefully.

And so we looked at the text of those conversations and measured how receptive the people involved were to each other's perspective.

What we found was that greater receptiveness at the beginning of this long conversation decreased the likelihood that it will end in a personal attack and the suspension of your license by the end.

You know, and the thing that's interesting about Wikipedia, right, is that it's all kinds of different topics.

And so we know that the strategy works, you know, not just in family discussions, not just in political discussions, but really across a huge variety of subjects.

- So does it require both parties to be acting in good faith, though?

I've been sort of playing on the margins of public dialogue and politics for a long time, and there are some people you meet where their intention is to walk into the room and drop a grenade.

And so, I guess, that's the question.

Does it require both parties to a disagreement to be acting from good faith for this approach to work?

- You know, I am actually not sure about the answer to that question for two reasons.

One is, when people exhibit a high level of receptiveness, they tend to inspire receptiveness in the other side.

So receptiveness is very easily mimicked.

If I am highly receptive to you, even if you walk in with sort of the intention of starting a fight, it is quite difficult to do it in the face of unfailing receptiveness.

I actually do this as a classroom exercise where I pair up students to have a debate on a policy topic, and I, you know, teach one of them to be very receptive, and I instruct the other one to kind of be a jerk, (Jim laughs) and the person instructed to be a jerk has a very hard time fulfilling their role, you know?

So it's not obvious to me that good faith is really required, because receptiveness has a tendency to really bring out receptiveness in others.

Another thing I wanted to sort of bring out from your question is the idea of arguing in good faith is a very interesting idea in and of itself, because I think quite often when we encounter disagreement, we assume that the other person is not arguing in good faith because we don't believe that anybody could possibly, you know, genuinely take on this perspective that we so strongly disagree with.

And I think that's sometimes, you know, a risky and often unfounded assumption, people just genuinely believe very different things.

- Right.

Well, and I think that's the next question I wanted to ask you.

There are some things that an individual might feel are so sacred that they can't possibly be receptive to the alternative viewpoint on it, because this is a sacred issue to them.

There are people who are convinced that what the Trump administration is doing around immigration enforcement right now is lawlessness.

There are other people who look at the recent history of immigration to the United States and think that's lawlessness.

How do you disagree when the thing you're being asked to encounter seems so fundamentally, you know, opposed to what your core beliefs are?

We've only got about a minute left for that question.

- Okay.

That's a wonderful question.

I think that's kind of the core question for our time right now.

And I would invite people to think about a couple things.

One, receptiveness does not mean agreement, right?

So if you're going to be receptive to somebody that holds wildly different opinions on something you consider to be a sacred issue, your goal is to learn and to understand, and to build a bridge to the next conversation, not to change your mind.

And the other thing I would invite folks to think about is what are your goals, and how likely are you to achieve them?

I think quite often people go into disagreement with the goal of persuasion.

They think they're going to argue the other person into submission, or maybe they're going to shame the other person into submission, and that just has not worked for us.

The way I think about constructive disagreement is a constructive disagreement is any disagreement that increases our odds of having another conversation.

And so if immigration matters to you, if you have deep, profound, important convictions around that issue, then the way we solve our problems as a country is to have more conversations with people who see the issue differently.

- Julia Minson, this is profoundly important work.

The book is "How to Disagree Better."

Thank you for spending some time with us this week.

That's all the time we have.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Jim Ludes, and I hope I'll see you next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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