Up First from NPR - The Science of Disagreeing Well
Episode Date: November 24, 2024What turns a playful debate into an angry, tearful argument? Or a cheerful Thanksgiving feast into a frosty dessert? America is heading into the holiday season after a divisive election season. So we'...re featuring an episode from NPR's science podcast Short Wave about what happens in our brains during conflict: Why it tempts us to shut down, and how we can navigate difficult conversations—political or otherwise—without losing control.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe 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, you know, 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 you know, other members of the family, aunts and uncles, they'll jump in and they'll
have their opinions, and it'll 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, you know, arguing 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 into 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 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 is it so hard
to convince people of things, to persuade people?
And 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 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 Rachel Carlson in an episode hosted by Emily Kwong.
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 Rachel
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. Jeannie
Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richard Brookhiser,
a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.
And he's adorable, so he's like 92 feet tall.
I asked them how they met.
We met in a singing group. So that was good because we shared an interest that was not
political. It was very important actually. It was also an unusual singing group. So that was good, because we shared an interest that was not political.
It was 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.
Now when did we meet?
1977.
Yeah.
You know, they say singing like syncopates your heartbeats.
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. 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
colleagues of mine that you like and I met your mentor who was a communist and
but he was a good boss he treated you very well. He was a. Wonderful. 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?
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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.
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.
And so 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-Hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University.
And 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.
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 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.
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 swim cap things.
Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner.
Yeah.
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
Oh 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.
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...
This 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 kind of like
a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet.
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. 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. 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 us 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 body.
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 Alison 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
change. 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.
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 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 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.
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 Juliana Tafour, the director of the Bridging
Differences Program at UC Berkeley's Greater Goods 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 gonna 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.
That was Rachel Carlson for Shortwave.
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin
and Kim Naderfein-Petersa.
It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones and Rachel Carlson.
The audio engineer was Patrick Murray.
I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story from Up First.
We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
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