Short Wave - How To Have Hard Conversations

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Many people are gearing up for holiday conversations with loved ones who may disagree with them — on everything from politics to religion and lifestyle choices. As the conversations unfold, these divisions are visible in our brains too. These conversations can get personal and come to a halt fast. But today on the show we get into research in neuroscience and psychology showing that as much as we disagree, there are ways to bridge these divides – and people who are actively using these strategies in their daily lives. Want to hear more neuroscience and psychology? Email us your ideas to [e-mail] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwapers, Emily Kwong here with producer Rachel Carlson for an episode on disagreement. Hey, Emily. Hey. So it is no surprise that there is a lot of disagreement and division out there in the world right now. That's the understatement of the century. Truly. I mean, Donald Trump was just re-elected as the 47th president of the United States. After a campaign season filled with divisive and sometimes downright hostile language, Yeah. And a lot of people are gearing up for the holidays where you might not always see eye to eye with the people you love in your life.

Yeah, this is true for many people I know. It is feeling tense and data supports this. Polling data from SNF, Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University shows that almost half of the U.S. electorate thinks members of the opposing party are downright evil. In a 22 Pew study, growing numbers of Americans said members of the other party are dishonest, immoral, and close-minded. So it's not just in our imaginations, we really are becoming more divided. So, Emily, this week NPR is exploring these divisions and finding stories about people trying to bridge their divides, successfully or not. And since we're a science show, I wanted to know what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise. And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years. Jeannie Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richard Brookheiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.

And he's adorable, so he's like 92 feet tall. I asked him how they met. We met in a singing group, so that was good because we shared an interest that was not political. It's not important, actually. It was also an unusual singing group. Right. Because it was Renaissance religious music, not for religious purposes, but for singing. purposes. When did we meet him?

1977. You know, they say singing like syncopates your heartbeat, so maybe that worked out in bringing them together. It's the Renaissance music. Absolutely. And they told me they sang with this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together. Yeah. They eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talked through and ultimately 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. And so we realized we can't talk about this. So we won't. We won't. 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'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.

It was a wonderful boss. But we also were able to join each other's worlds. And this joining of worlds was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen. Yeah. Jeannie 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? I'm Rachel Carlson and I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. 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 have a disagreement. So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.

And that, of course, just breeds, guess what, mistrust. That's Rudy Mendoza Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we probably won't even notice these things while they're happening to us, but on top of them, 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. So 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. So 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 talked 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. And 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's 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. So some of these are like 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 switches. 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. And 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, there are just people out here living their lives. Yeah.

And 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? So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked. And 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. Verses when participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as synced up. It was kind of like a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet. And 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 the brain has devoted to the, 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. Huh, others might have other interpretations. So Joy is hypothesizing 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. So 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 science say on that? First, kind of 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, Alison Briscoe 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, like actually your humanness is there. We can all kind of discern.

And bridging differences actually doesn't require or ask. Just to do that. So that's 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, your butt? Can you take a breath and then align with the intention? Allison co-teaches that Bridging 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 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 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 Jeannie 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. 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, 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 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, 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 like leaving these pronouncements in the way.

the comments, you know? Totally. No, I think so too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole, but it is kind of like how Jeannie and Richard met in their singing group. Like, they got to know each other's hobbies, they learned 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. That's Juliana To Forth, 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.

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 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, like for Jeannie 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. And 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. And 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. This episode was reported by Rachel Carlson, and it was produced by Hannah Chin.

It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Rachel, check the facts. Special thanks to Kenneth Barish. He wrote a whole book about some of this stuff called Bridging Our Political Divide, which is going to come out in the next few weeks. I'm Emily Kwong, and I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR. Take care of yourselves.