Julia Minson: How to Disagree Better

Nancy Gibbs:

Hi everyone. I'm Nancy Gibbs. I'm the director of the Shorenstein Center, and welcome to today's session of Policy Spotlight Insights from Faculty. I am here with my colleague, Julia Minson, who is a professor and leading scholar of conflict, conflict management, negotiation, the importance of understanding how disagreement functions and how we can learn to do it better. And importantly, the author of brand new book coming out tomorrow, How to Disagree Better. So Julia, lovely to be here with you.

These policy spotlights are always a chance to get to see behind the curtain of what's going on at the Kennedy School, what faculty is working on. Your work, I think, is so particularly timely as we think about how we can have the kind of really robust conversations and productive arguments that make us smarter as a school, as a community, as a country. So I'm thrilled that you're going to get the chance to share some of your thinking.

We are so grateful to the Malcolm Hewitt-Wiener Foundation for supporting these calls and for Malcolm Wiener's role in supporting the Kennedy School, proposing and supporting this series, the Wiener family has been instrumental in advancing our mission. And there are few parts of our mission that are more central than the kinds of skills and tools that you are helping us develop. So let's start there.

You start out by saying that disagreement isn't the problem, which is surprising because I think so many people feel, whether within their family or their community or the country, that we are so fiercely divided. You say that the problem is lack of skill at disagreeing is the problem. What do you mean when you make that distinction?

Julia Minson:

Well, first of all, welcome everyone. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for the introduction, Nancy.

So disagreement is actually good for us. So if you have different opinions, different views, have different information, it's useful for me to know about these things. The reason we bring people onto our work teams is because we expect them to disagree with us. The bedrock of democracy is we assume that when a bunch of people who disagree with each other debate a topic, they will come to some new insight that they might not have arrived at on their own. The problem is that in the course of disagreement, disagreement often turns into conflict. So we reach a set of conclusions about how no reasonable, well-informed, moral person could possibly hold the views that our counterpart holds. And once we make that judgment, things can get out of hand pretty quickly.

Nancy Gibbs:

I thought one of your most surprising insights was that it isn't that people are afraid of opposing views, they're irritated by them. What's that about?

Julia Minson:

So I think we have convinced ourselves that people who don't want to talk to us about our beliefs don't want to talk to us because they're threatened by our good arguments and sort of the fundamental correctness of our positions. And I think that's a very comforting and self-serving view like, oh, you just don't want to talk to me because you are afraid of the truth. Whereas there's quite a lot of psychological research that says people are not afraid. People are deeply confident in their own beliefs, and because they're deeply confident in their own beliefs, they are very annoyed with other people who believe differently.

Nancy Gibbs:

So you talk about, there's a core idea about constructive disagreement, which I think sits as a little oxymoronic of what we think of disagreement as the thing that tears friendships apart, can tear communities apart. What's the difference between constructive disagreement and any other kind?

Julia Minson:

Yeah, so everybody's got their favorite term. Constructive disagreement is one that I particularly like for two reasons. One, it includes the word disagreement in it because like I said, I think disagreement is good and we should preserve it. It's not sort of being civil, it's not being polite.

Nancy Gibbs:

This is not about finding compromise and consensus building.

Julia Minson:

Right. It's not civility, not any of those things. We are going to disagree, but we're going to disagree constructively. And then the question becomes, what does that mean? And very literally, what are we constructing? I think of a constructive disagreement is any disagreement that increases the odds of the two parties speaking to each other again.

Nancy Gibbs:

Why is that good?

Julia Minson:

Because to solve most complicated problems, we need to keep talking to each other. To reach solutions, to make good decisions, to negotiate anything, we need to stay in dialogue. Once people retract to their corners, it's very hard to make societal progress happen and it's very hard to have accurate information about the other side if you don't talk to them.

Nancy Gibbs:

And one of the core skills, qualities, ingredients to the kind of constructive disagreement you talk about, and so much of your experiments and your research is about receptiveness. What is that? How do you measure it? How do you know it when you see it?

Julia Minson:

Yeah. So very early on in my research career, I realized that we don't actually have a scientifically validated measure for differentiating between people who thoughtfully engage with opposing perspectives and people who very consistently push them away. And so a lot of my early work was developing this measurement scale for a trait we call receptiveness to opposing views.

Nancy Gibbs:

Is that just open-mindedness or is it something beyond being open-minded?

Julia Minson:

So depends on what you mean by open-mindedness. The way we think of receptiveness is your willingness to give as much mental attention and processing effort to views that you disagree with as views you agree with, which really importantly does not include changing your mind. So if you're receptive, I expect you to seek out information you disagree with. I expect you to think hard about it. I expect you to evaluate it with the same level of critical scrutiny as ideas you do agree with. But at the end of the day, you can still say, look, I thought hard about it and I still believe what I believe.

Nancy Gibbs:

Right. So it's not that you were threatened by it. It wasn't that you were hostile to even, but you aren't ending up necessarily changing your mind.

Julia Minson:

Right. So you could thoroughly understand another party's arguments and you could say, I get where you're coming from now, but there's more evidence on my side. Or, the evidence is more important to me and my people. So I get you and your people, but I'm going to stick with my beliefs because this is what makes sense for my group. Or, I think the events that I'm concerned about are more likely than the events you're concerned about. So having thoroughly understood your position, I'm going to stick with mine.

Nancy Gibbs:

So being receptive sounds like something we all want to be or at least aspire to be. How can I tell if you are a receptive person?

Julia Minson:

So therein lies the rub. Receptiveness, as we learned over years of research, is a mindset. And as many mindsets, it requires you to express it in order for another person to be able to tell that you're being receptive. People are quite bad at expressing receptiveness. I think partly because if the hallmark of receptiveness is thinking hard about something-

Nancy Gibbs:

Or listening closely, attentively.

Julia Minson:

Or listening closely. Right. What does that look like? And so a lot of the research has sort of pivoted from this question of how do you get people to be more receptive internally to how do you get them to show receptiveness so that their actual conversations can go better?

Nancy Gibbs:

So is that something that you can teach or is that an innate quality that we're either stubborn and never want out of our comfort zones or not? Is that something that we can get better at?

Julia Minson:

So I sure hope so. As a social psychologist, I like to think that most of our qualities are something that we can improve with time. I think that changing your mindset towards opposing views is harder than changing your behavior when you encounter them. So a lot of my work and a lot of what I talk about in the book is about concrete behaviors that people can enact in conversation to come across as more receptive, even if maybe in their mind they're gnashing their teeth and really wishing to be out of the conversation, at least you are enacting the correct behaviors so that it creates this positive conversational spiral with your counterpart.

Nancy Gibbs:

So give me an example of if you wanted me to think that you were really listening, really weighing my arguments, how would you signal that to me?

Julia Minson:

So the first thing I would do is try to show curiosity and my desire to really learn about and understand your perspective. And so there's tones that have been written about the value of question asking, but questions can be curious or they can be snarky. And you can express curiosity without a question. So I could say something like, Nancy, I'd love to understand how you think about this question. I happen to disagree with you, but I want to hear your perspective. There's no question mark in anything I've just said, but I signaled that I would like to know more about what you're thinking.

Nancy Gibbs:

Suppose I start explaining my thinking to you and I'm expressing a point of view that you find, or we're in a meeting and someone in a meeting is making an argument, making a proposal that you find particularly offensive or counterproductive, how does that unfold constructively versus destructively?

Julia Minson:

Yeah. So I think what normally happens is that we tend to reach a conclusion very quickly about whether a perspective is counterproductive, whether it's offensive, whether it comes from misinformation or negative intent. And so having reached that conclusion, usually in the blink of an eye, we then quickly jump to correcting the other person. So I ask a question, I let you get 10% into the answer, and then usually I interrupt and tell you that you're wrong about what you think. Most of the time, those conclusions are premature. So a lot of the effort has to be put into slowing that down and sort of forcing yourself to stay with the question asking and interrogate the perspective longer and in greater depth before you really draw a conclusion and reach a verdict.

Nancy Gibbs:

Some of the most interesting examples I've heard you talk about are what happens if a healthcare provider, for instance, is dealing with a mom who's hesitant about vaccinating her children. And typical doctor, nurse could give tons of evidence, data about why we know these vaccines are safe, all the benefits of that. What's an alternative way of just trying to argue that you're wrong to be resistant? These are some of the greatest life-changing, lifesaving accomplishments of modern medicine. What's the other way of?

Julia Minson:

I mean, the other way is understanding what the source of hesitancy is. So I've spent quite a lot of time talking to physicians about vaccine hesitancy, and there's a great spectrum from the people who just say, "I will absolutely not get my child vaccinated for anything under any circumstances." That's a very, very small percentage of the population. There's a huge percentage of the population, I mean, a few years ago it was in the 30% range, it's probably higher now, of people who are uncomfortable with some part of the vaccine schedule for some very special reason.

And in order to convince anyone of anything, you need to understand what it is they're objecting to and what are the fears, what are the concerns. Now, in healthcare, this is a two-edged sword because on one hand, that takes more time. The downside is that it definitely takes more time. The flip side of that is that patients, to some extent, like many other people we disagree with, have the freedom to just walk out of the room and never come back if they are not feeling heard and respected in the conversation. So the risk of not investing the time is that the unvaccinated child leaves your office and you forever lose the ability to influence them or the parent.

Nancy Gibbs:

But it's not like a doctor can waiver on whether these are safe or not. It's not as though they can express any uncertainty about that. So how can they express that they're receptive to a parent's apprehension without compromising what the science tells them?

Julia Minson:

Yeah, absolutely. Remember, receptiveness doesn't mean changing your mind or compromising. So not compromising on the science is totally fine, but there is an opportunity to show that you're listening and that you care and respect the experience of the patient. I think often the hesitancy on the part of doctors is that if I let the patient talk about their concerns, they're going to grow to believe in those concerns even more. So it's sort of like if you let it out into the ether, somehow it will grow in power. But it turns out usually quite the opposite that when you convince people that you've heard them and that you're interested in their perspective, it kind of brings down the desire to debate it.

Nancy Gibbs:

So you have a very handy acronym for how we can remind ourselves if we find ourselves in that situation of how to go about doing that. Can you give us your secret tools?

Julia Minson:

Yes, yes, yes. So one of the tools I talk about in the book is a tool we call conversational receptiveness, which is essentially words and phrases that we have found through empirical research that convince the other person that you're listening to them. And as you can imagine, there's thousands of words and phrases and infinity of combinations. So how do you remember the most useful ones? So we made up an acronym and that's hear as in I hear you, H-E-A-R. And every letter stands for a theme. So the H stands for hedging your claims. So it's phrases like sometimes, possibly, maybe. So vaccines are a great example. I might want to say the COVID vaccine is safe and effective. Or I could say most physicians tend to believe that the COVID vaccine is largely safe and effective.

Nancy Gibbs:

So that's three hedges in one.

Julia Minson:

That's three hedges in one sentence, right. And ironically, the statement is actually truer because it incorporates the nuance of the world we live in. The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So the idea is that in any disagreement, people do agree on some set of values or some set of goals.

Nancy Gibbs:

So we both care about our children and want them to be safe and healthy.

Julia Minson:

Exactly, exactly. So we both want to, I'm also interested in, I agree with some of what you're saying. So again, we're not compromising, we're not reaching agreement, but we are highlighting something we already agree on.

The A stands for acknowledgement. So if anybody's ever been in family therapy, this is what they tell you to do, is you take a few seconds to restate your counterpart's perspective before you launch into your own argument. So it's things like, I hear that something, something, something. I understand you're very concerned with the effect of vaccines on the immune system. I understand that you would like to spread out the schedule further. So it's restating your counterpart's view so that you show them with behavior that you were listening instead of assuming that they got it.

And then the R does double duty. It stands for reframing to the positive, and that means dropping some of the negative and contradictory words like no, can't, won't, don't, terrible, hate, and replacing them with some more positively valanced towards like wonderful, terrific, appreciate.

Nancy Gibbs:

So if someone wanted to start disagreeing better starting tomorrow, this is my last question, then I'm going to open the floor because I know we have lots of people who are curious to follow up on some of these things. What's one behavior I could change?

Julia Minson:

So you could memorize the HEAR framework and you could make a list of phrases for showing your curiosity. I would like to understand why you believe X, Y, Z. I am curious to hear your perspective. I'd like to know about the experiences that led to your views and just start throwing them into conversation and see what happens.

Nancy Gibbs:

That's fantastic. Thank you for that. I'm very curious to hear what some of our guests are thinking as they hear this. There's so many directions we can take this between the functioning of our politics, to the functioning of our marriages, to the practice of our parenting. It's just a widely valuable toolkit.

Betsy Viani:

Hi, everybody. I'm Betsy Viani, Director of Engagement here at Harvard Kennedy School. And I first want to thank our speakers for their thoughtful and insightful comments. We're going to now open up the floor to questions.

Some brief housekeeping. To ask a question, please use your virtual hand feature of Zoom. It's down on the bottom ribbon of your Zoom screen, and I'll call on you when it's your turn. Note there might be a slight delay while we unmute you, and don't forget to tell us your name and Harvard Kennedy School of Affiliation. And finally, keep your question brief.

While we're waiting for folks to get into the queue to ask questions, I'm going to go ahead and ask a pre-submitted question from Venicius Bueno, MPAID 2024. How can we have productive conversations with people who quickly become very emotional, angry, or upset?

Julia Minson:

Okay, that's a great question. Yeah, that applies to all the domains you just named, politics, marriage, healthcare, all of these things. I think quite often the reason people become emotional, angry, and upset is because we go into the conversation with the goal of convincing them. So if you get in the habit of pausing yourself in the middle of a disagreement and asking yourself, what am I trying to do? Most of the time you're going to notice that what you're trying to do is convince the other person that they're wrong and potentially score a rhetorical point. And that makes people angry because that's very frustrating. If you reshape your goal as, I want to understand where this person is coming from, because remember what I'm trying to do is build a bridge to the next future conversation, that tends to elicit a lot fewer negative emotions from folks. People love being heard and you start noticing that the conversation just takes on a very, very different tone.

Betsy Viani:

Great. Thank you for that thoughtful answer. I think we're going to go to our audience. We have some hands raised. First, we're going to call on Farah Arabe. Farah, we're going to unmute you and then please share your Harvard Kennedy School affiliation and ask your question. Yes, you should. You were just unmuted, Farah, but it looks like somehow you got muted. Oh, here we go. Farah, go ahead. And can you speak so we can hear you?

Farah Arabe:

Yes. Thank you very much. My name is Farah Arabe. I'm an HKS Executive Education Graduate, 2018. Thank you for the wonderful conversation today.

I had a couple of questions. The first one is that often disagreement doesn't come out of different values or perspectives, but it actually comes out of different facts, baseline facts. Sometimes people have the same values, same deduction, same logic, but arrive at different conclusions because the facts are just different. In this case, is it still possible to hope for an agreement or some kind of reconciliation, or do we just need to accept that we're living in two different worlds with two different baselines? That's my first question.

My second question is the way the attention economy works, there is a systemic incentive to create disagreement, unfortunately. So what can we, as a society, create a systemic incentive for agreement to be foster rather than disagreement?

Thank you.

Julia Minson:

Two good questions. So I think the different fact one is interesting because even the way you asked it implied that the goal is reaching agreement, which is very interesting. The goal doesn't have to be reaching agreement. It could be that the goal is to understand why your mom believes whatever your mom believes, or it could be that you need to continue working with a person and you need to continue to believe that they're a reasonable human being so that you can work with them on future projects and you don't actually need to convince them of climate change or the perils of immigration policy as it stands right now. It's just you need to be able to have a professional relationship with this human and this conversation is just something that needs to be had in order to enable that. So I think we're back to this question of what's the goal.

But the other thing that I like to think about is really the relationship between facts and opinions. I think we tend to put facts on this elevated position of I know this to be true because it's a fact. But as you said, many of our facts differ because our information sources differ and what information sources we trust are a matter of opinion. So anything Nancy tells me, I automatically believe because I trust Nancy, but that doesn't mean that those things that are now ensconced in my brain as facts because Nancy said so, I directly observed personally. And so I think sometimes we treat facts and opinions as very, very different things. But in reality, what we consider facts is very much shaped by who we trust, our ideology, our upbringing, what we consider reasonable, well-vetted sources. And so I think quite often instead of debating the fact, it's useful to explore why the person believes what they believe and where they're getting it from and why they find it trustworthy and why they find the other side untrustworthy. And that can be, I think, a much more productive foundation to that conversation.

Betsy Viani:

Thanks so much, Julia. Before we go to the next question, just a reminder to ask a question, raise your hand on the virtual raise your hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. I also see some people on the telephone, so you can join the conversation, if you want to raise your hand by pressing star nine on your telephone, to raise your virtual hand and star nine on your telephone to lower your virtual hand. Little Zoom trick for those that don't know it.

We're going to go next to Josephine Heath. Josephine, please, we're going to unmute you now and please share your Harvard Kennedy School affiliation and ask your question.

Josephine Heath:

Good morning. This is Josie Heath. I'm in Boulder, Colorado, and I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics in 1991. And my question is, what if somebody says, I just don't want to talk about this?

Julia Minson:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a perfectly fine choice for people to make. Conversation is an opt-in exercise, and to the extent that people have other ways that they would like to spend their time, or this is not a good time for them, or this is a topic that they don't feel comfortable addressing either with you or right now or ever, I think that's a valid choice.

What we can do is make it easier for people to have these conversations. I think right now there's sort of a expectation that any conversation that has to do with politics or social policy or international events could be very ugly. And so people are opting out who might have interesting things to say or who might enjoy learning if they felt like this is going to be a respectful conversation. And so there are certainly people who have a reputation for being very receptive in how they talk, and so they're more likely to draw folks in. But some topics are just not good for some people, and I think that's a fine choice.

Betsy Viani:

Thanks, Julia. We will now go to Nazar Farsak. Nazar, we're going to unmute you. Please share your Harvard Kennedy School affiliation and ask your question.

Nazar Farsak:

Sure. So mid-career MPA at the Kennedy School, graduated 2010. My question is, I agree that the purpose is to understand, but when somebody has a value system of people are not equal or some people are going to hell and some aren't, there's a fundamental value that we disagree with. What do you suggest is a good way to make a constructive conversation as opposed to just confirming that the other person has a fundamentally unacceptable point of view, let's say, or value?

Nancy Gibbs:

I'm so glad the values question came up. It's always an interesting piece of this.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think so very relatedly to the earlier question about people who don't want to have certain conversations, sometimes I'm the people who doesn't want to have the conversation. So I think there are situations where you have really strong evidence that this person doesn't share your values in a way that you just find either hurtful or deeply disturbing, and you just say, look, I'm not going to talk to this person. I don't need to talk to this person. There's absolutely no point here. What I would say though is that most of the time we reach that conclusion too early. And when we say, well, this person just doesn't value humanity or doesn't value equality or doesn't see that this particular group has rights, often if we really interrogate that position with that person, they would come back and say, well, no, that's not actually how I feel and that's not what I believe. So that's kind of one piece of it.

I think the other piece of it is thinking about, again, why are we in this conversation? Because if this is a stranger on the street, then maybe we don't need to talk to them ever again. But if this is a dear friend or a relative or a colleague, then you might have to put the work in order to truly understand the person's underlying interests and beliefs rather than assuming whatever it is you assumed and walking away from the conversation. So there are choices that have to be made based on the circumstances.

Betsy Viani:

Yep. Before we go to our next question, I just want to read a comment from Zeb King. He mentioned that he's found that it's rare that people radically change their opinion based on opposing claims. And we have a society that seems to treat disagreement as a zero 100 game rather than nudging people towards a broader view or shift. We want a knockout point or we want to know the other person wants that. It may be wise to consider a more humble goal of nudging versus convincing. Any thoughts that you might share on that? I thought that was an interesting comment, so I wanted to be sure to pass it along.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, no, I love that comment. And in fact, it sort of squares with our research and probably squares with most people's experience, which is that any belief that you hold with any seriousness cannot be changed in one conversation. If I've walked around the world for a few decades believing what I believe, somebody tells me something in 20 minutes, I am not going to change my mind. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to try to change their mind. And so this is that zero-sum thinking that we're talking about where both people are trying to convince and both people are trying to defend themselves from being convinced.

By contrast, if you think of understanding and learning from the other person as the goal, then this is sort of a win-win situation because I can learn from you, you can learn from me. There's an infinity of learning we could do. There isn't a winner, there isn't a loser. And so it creates a dynamic where people are much more willing to have the conversation, they're much more willing to come back to the table because they don't feel like they're sort of under attack.

Betsy Viani:

Thanks very much, Julia. As a reminder to ask a question, please raise your virtual hand on the bottom ribbon of your Zoom screen. We're now going to go to David Levy or Levy, depending on your persuasion. David, please, we're unmuting you now. Share your Harvard Kennedy School affiliation and ask your question.

David Levy:

Hi, both of you. Thank you for this session. David Levy. That's my persuasion. NPP 1992, I've worked a career in local government planning, which has its own versions of conflict and a cooperation. I find that for me, and I don't know, people throw out their middle child stereotypes about trying to get people to get along, but that if you're ... and I do, I work hard to try to work with people who may not be seeing things the way that I do necessarily, but I like when you used the word work because it is work. And I don't know if your research supports this, but you almost have to show that you're willing to move. And it's not just a, I'm going to nudge you. I'm going to say nice words. I'm going to use my HERE acronym. You say, oh, I see what you mean. Okay, I can get that.

And have you found in your research, did you look into whether being the first mover ever has any impact in the other person's being willing to be a mover? And that's hard on you, me, whatever pronoun you use. That's hard on the person who's initiating. You have to be ready to move yourself. And then I find that that has a slightly higher elevated chance of moving together.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that's a really good observation because anytime you walk into a conversation, you don't know exactly how it's going to go. So there's some uncertainty, some ambiguity of what dance are we going to do here? And the first person who very clearly signals what the dance is going to be definitely sets the tone. And there's two kinds of evidence of that.

So in my own work, when we have trained people in conversational receptiveness, so the HEAR acronym essentially, you can put people into disagreement and you can train people, you can train one side, and then the other side doesn't know anything is going on, and they're just having a conversation about politics with somebody they disagree with. What we find is that the counterparts of the people who were trained exhibit more conversational receptiveness than the counterparts of untrained partners. So you sort of set the tone and receptiveness seems to bring on some reciprocity. That's exactly right.

And then there's a researcher at the University of Chicago, Shireen Chaudhry, who studies apologies. And what's very interesting because what she finds is that everybody's willing to reciprocate an apology, but nobody wants to apologize first, which is hilarious because if everybody's waiting to reciprocate something that they don't want to do, then nobody's going to do anything. So I think the dynamic you point out is very, very real and does take work because somebody has to bring down their emotions, gain control over themselves and have enough humility to say, okay, I'm going to moderate my claims. I'm going to show you that I'm listening to you. Perhaps I might apologize for the thing I said 10 minutes ago, and then I'm going to set a different tone for the rest of this conversation.

Betsy Viani:

Thanks so much, Julia. I think we have something in the chat, but before we go to that, let's go to Brooke Suder. Brooke, please unmute yourself, share your affiliation, including your alumni board affiliation and ask your question.

Brooke Suder:

Hi, my name is Brooke Suder. I went to the Kennedy School, went in the mid-career program in 2015, and I served on the Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Board for four years. I have done a fair bit of work with Otto Scharmer in the last 10 years at MIT, and that Theory U work brings me to ask a question of you about structure. And I'm curious if things like providing your colleague or speaker a specific amount of time has been studied. So for instance, saying, Julia, I really want to learn more about that. I'm just going to be quiet for the next five minutes while you speak. And also the possibility of a pause stillness after that, for instance, five minutes. I've seen that to be anecdotally very effective, and I just wonder if there's been any research on that that you've done or know of any.

Thank you.

Julia Minson:

Thank you. Yeah, I think that's a terrific question. So a fundamental tenet of social psychology is that reshaping the environment we're in is a better way to influence behavior than trying to change people's personalities. And so quite often, so for example, if you're running a meeting, in every meeting, there's the people who talk constantly, and then there's the people who never say anything. And my assumption is always that the people who never say anything have things to say. There's interesting things happening in their heads, but they're just not fast enough to jump in over the people who are the constant talkers.

So years ago, I was teaching in an exec ed program and we were talking about exactly this idea, structures you can put in place to bring more voices out in a team. And there was this guy who was a police chief, and he said that he brought a plastic egg timer to work, and he would set it to whatever, a minute or a minute and a half, and it would just go around the table with this egg timer, and you had that amount of time to speak. And when the thing was dinging, then it moved on to the next person, and it really erased-

Nancy Gibbs:

The dominance.

Julia Minson:

... the dominance that's due to people's personalities, but also rank. And then he'd have a second round where after everybody expressed their view, they had a certain amount of time to ask questions. So it was very structured. So I think there's lots of different ways to use the situation to structure the conversation more thoughtfully. And I think people very, very rarely consider those tools. I think it's a really useful thing to do.

Betsy Viani:

Thanks so much. So we have a couple questions in the chat and then we have one more hand raised or actually two hands raised. So I'm going to try to do some lightning round. I'll combine the two in the chat because they are not dissimilar to one another. Tina Lori wants to know a bit about why there's no more pragmatism and total silos of information, echo chambers, lack of regret or authentic reflection in conversations. And then Mukhtar Ogle, who's a mid-career 2013, what does it take to build trust and navigate vested, deeply held positions in difficult conversations, especially amidst political conflicts? So I think these things are a little interwoven about current social society, and maybe you can speak to them both in one answer.

Julia Minson:

Yeah. So I think there was an earlier question about the online environment that I didn't address. And I think these are also related because a lot of the conversations we're having right now, political conversations people attempt to have online, and that's a terrible, terrible venue for these kinds of conversations, part of what, again, trust building across deep divisions requires is time and commitment to the process and commitment to understanding and showing the other person that you're not assuming that they're sort of a caricature of their party, but are a human that you are interested in. So I would say that all of these things require time and behavioral demonstrations of curiosity and receptiveness.

Betsy Viani:

Great. Thanks, Julia. We have a couple more. We have three minutes left and three people with their hand raised, so let's see what we can squeeze in. Seth Radwell, who had his hand raised earlier, who's an author who actually is an alum who does work in this field. So I'm sure Seth has a very interesting question for us. Take it away, Seth.

Seth Radwell:

Thank you so much, Julia. Thank you so much for being here and thanks for doing this. We've spoken before. One of the things that I discuss in my research on American schism is what I call deep empathetic listening, which is so much like much of what you've talked about. And you just made a point, which I think is so important, which is that most of these conversations can't happen online and so much of our lives are lived online. And the media environment we live in, of course, is incentivized to operationalize a profit from disagreement. So all those things make everything you talked about so hard. And that's what I think we almost have to recognize those obstacles right away to move forward because we need to talk to each other in person. So I just wanted to emphasize that and thank you very much for doing this.

Julia Minson:

Thank you, Seth. That's good to hear from you. Yeah, so I agree with you. And again, the question is, what's the goal? Are you going to win an election by arguing with somebody on Facebook? No, you're not. Are you going to blow up a relationship? Probably. So if you want to have an actual conversation, then pick up the phone.

Betsy Viani:

Terrific. Actually, one person lowered their hand, so I'm going to leave the final question. We must have scared them off. We're going to leave the final question to the wonderful Gary Grimm. Gary Grimm's one of our Dean's Council members. Gary, please, and he's also a Shorenstein board member. Sorry about that, Nancy. Gary, please ask your question and close us out.

Gary Grimm:

Thank you very much. Often I am engaging using your techniques in a constructive conversation, but I interrupt the person because I'm afraid I'm going to forget what they said or forget what I want to say in a polite response. How do I do that? Do I carry a notebook with me or how can I politely pause people?

Julia Minson:

I think it's okay to forget part of what people said, especially if you think of these conversations as long and cyclical. So if somebody's rambling on and you respond to one point and ask them a question about it and you forget the other three points, if those three points are important, they're likely to bring them up again. So I also have a tendency to try to answer in these very, very systematic ways, but that's about making myself look like I have really high cognitive processing capacity, not actually about paying attention to my counterpart and deeply caring about what they're saying at the moment. So I would say just cut yourself a break and occasionally forget what the earlier thing was and just let the conversation unfold naturally. They'll probably repeat their point if it's important.

Betsy Viani:

Fantastic. Julia, thank you so much. We are at time. Any final words or thoughts before I close us out?

Julia Minson:

I think this has just been a terrific opportunity and I appreciate Nancy being here with me and asking all these thoughtful questions.

Nancy Gibbs:

You can imagine how much Julia contributes to the robust kinds of constructive disagreements we get to have here at Shorenstein Center. So I love getting to hear Julia talk about this and find in listening in executive education sessions that we do together, these skills have never mattered more than they do now. So I'm so glad you all have had a chance to get a taste of them. And I urge you, you can really learn way going much greater depth in this book, which is just wonderful to have right now. We really need it.

Julia Minson:

Thank you. And I believe that there's a link that has a place where you can actually go ahead and download the first chapter if you want to get a sense of, learn more about the book and learn more about the flavor of it.

Betsy Viani:

Yes, yes. Never fear, we will follow up to all registrants for the call with how to learn more about Julia's book and how to download that first chapter. Thank you, Julia Minson. Thank you, Nancy Gibbs. Thanks to all of our callers, and we hope you'll join us for our next policy spotlight and keep your eyes on your inboxes for the next one in the queue. We're definitely having Dean Weinstein and Sharon Goal talk about tech policy, but we're also working on some of the moment calls that we hope to have this spring with everything going on in the world. So thanks everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good night, and have a great rest of your day. Take care. Bye-bye everyone.