How to Disagree Better: Strategies for Constructive Conversations

Disagreement is a part of everyday life, yet most of us avoid it whenever possible. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Julia Minson knows where and why our conversations often go wrong and how we can learn to disagree better.

Minson, whose research focuses on how people engage with opposing viewpoints, says fear drives avoidance. “Most of these conversations are a pleasant surprise, but people don't expect that. And so they just continue going around with the worst-case scenario in their heads, instead of exploring the reality that's out there,” she says. People worry that disagreements will be unpleasant, fruitless, or that the other person’s perspective will be shocking or even “crazy.” Research shows these assumptions are often wrong: When we actually engage, opposing views are usually more reasonable, moderate, and defensible than expected.

The problem isn’t only avoidance. Many conversations fail because participants focus on persuasion, treating arguments like battles to be won. Minson says that shifting the goal from winning to understanding changes the dynamic entirely, turning disagreement into an opportunity to learn rather than a contest to conquer.

To help people navigate challenging conversations, Minson and her colleagues developed a practical toolkit called conversational receptiveness, or the framework they call HEAR. Minson emphasizes that these skills take practice. Starting with low-stakes conflicts, like deciding when to set an alarm at home, helps build habits that carry into more emotionally charged conversations at work or in classrooms. “I really think that practicing on small, daily disagreements makes you more able to come up with the words when it's a big, important one and you're really frazzled,” she says.

In this episode, the Harvard EdCast explores how to disagree better, practical steps for transforming conversations, and the obstacles that often get in the way of constructive dialogue.

Transcript

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JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

Julia Minson believes we struggle with disagreement, so we avoid it even though it can benefit society. She's a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, whose research focuses on how people engage with opposing viewpoints. Her work centers on conversational receptiveness, or the words and behaviors that signal openness and curiosity during disagreement. Constructive disagreement, she says, prioritizes understanding over persuasion, and leaves people more willing to engage again. 

I wanted to know more about why disagreement feels so risky, how avoiding it shapes our lives, and what it's going to take to disagree better without trying to change someone's mind. First, I asked her what happens when we avoid disagreement. 

JULIA MINSON: I think most people, having been in disagreements in the course of their life, can easily imagine how it goes badly. The most obvious way in which it goes badly is it often feels like a waste of time, because people go into a disagreement with the intention of changing the other person's mind. And if that's your goal, and you are an adult human that has been on this planet for a while, you know that most of the time you're not going to achieve that goal. 

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah. 

JULIA MINSON: If I go in and I say, I'm here to convince him that XYZ is true, I'm pretty prepared for it being a fruitless conversation. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: So already it feels like, what's the point. And then, besides being fruitless, it could be unpleasant. And it could be unpleasant for a variety of reasons. It could be that the other person doesn't take it well. It could be that they start explaining their point of view, and their thinking is even more distressing than I thought. 

I thought they were confused, but now I realize they're full-on crazy. And now I have to work with this person, and I wish I didn't know. So there's this feeling of, I'm going to open this can of worms. 

And of course, sometimes it leads to outright conflict. I say things, they say things, things escalate. And next thing you know, you're not speaking to each other anymore. 

I think people can pretty readily paint a vivid set of reasons why they don't want to get into it on many occasions. And the things that we lose in the process, I think, are really important, because they're intimately connected to why we don't want to have the conversation in the first place. 

If we don't want to have the conversation because you don't want to think negatively of someone who you're close with or who you have to work with, that comes from an assumption. The assumption is, once this person starts talking, I'm going to hear things I don't want to hear. But of course, if you don't let them talk, you won't find out if that assumption is accurate. 

Most of the time — and we certainly find this in our research, and there's all kinds of other evidence for it — when you talk to people you disagree with, their views tend to be more sensible and more moderate and more defensible than you expected them to be. So most of these conversations are a pleasant surprise, but people don't expect that. And so they just continue going around with the worst-case scenario in their heads, instead of exploring the reality that's out there. 

JILL ANDERSON: I know we've been talking a little bit about this tendency to avoid, but of course, there's the flip side of that. There are people who often very much engage with disagreement, and it does not necessarily lead to something fruitful. 

JULIA MINSON: Interestingly, I think the root of the problem is the same. It's lack of skill, and it's a fundamental commitment to the goal of persuasion. You very rarely see people who say, I am going to engage in this disagreement, because I want to truly understand where this other person is coming from, and then that somehow goes badly. That's rare. 

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah. 

JULIA MINSON: It's rare for people to approach a disagreement with a commitment to learning and understanding. And then given that, it's rare for those conversations to go badly. 

JILL ANDERSON: What is being receptive mean, and why does that work more than just persuasion, which we talked about as being relatively ineffective? 

JULIA MINSON: Yeah, so, I started studying receptiveness early in my graduate school career. And at that time, it was just based on this intuition that, if you look around the world, some people seem to be better at disagreement and some people seem to be worse. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: And so I had a classmate at Stanford, Frances Chen, who is now a professor at the University of British Columbia. And we wanted to understand what this thing is. So we called it receptiveness, and we developed a self-report scale, and we validated it backwards, forwards, and inside out, and really defined it as a person's tendency to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. 

So physically expose yourself to opposing perspectives, you have to either listen to it or you have to read about it. Then you have to also think about it for a bit. So you can't just read about it and throw it away. And then you have to evaluate that opposing view using the same level of critical scrutiny as you would for perspectives that support your own side. 

And so initially, we started out thinking of receptiveness as this set of cognitive processes where I treat arguments for my side and arguments for the opposing side in a pretty similar, even-steven way. Actually, you can take the survey yourself. If you want to measure your own level of receptiveness, you can go to receptiveness.net. And we've made the survey publicly available so you can get your own score. If you want to give it to your significant other, it's also a very fun exercise. 

JILL ANDERSON: Why is that more effective than traditional persuasion? 

JULIA MINSON: We thought it would be more effective than traditional persuasion. When we developed this scale, we thought, look, we're going to measure these people, and then we're going to study them, and then we're going to see what they do better. And part of the reasoning was that, on very hot button topics, or at least on topics that really matter to us, persuasion is just so extremely unlikely. 

We all go in with our arguments, and we all think that we have the missing piece, that if the other person only knew, they would change their mind. And often it turns out that they already know. And they don't think that it's the winning argument. Or, they didn't know about our special winning argument, but they have six of their own. 

And so persuasion as a starting point of comparison is almost a very, very low bar, because it almost never happens. And part of the reason it never happens is because nobody wants to lose. People think of arguments as battles. You win an argument or you lose an argument. 

And if being persuaded means being the loser, then people don't like that. So the question becomes, what is an exercise we can engage in that doesn't leave winners and losers, so that we can have a process where everybody gets something, and we don't have to give anything up. And so this idea of approaching conversations with a goal of learning gives you that kind of blueprint, where you can say, I can learn all about your view, and you can learn all about my view, and we both just came out more informed, smarter people as a result, and nobody lost anything. And so we can both feel much more comfortable engaging in this conversation, because it has a lot less risk. 

And so we thought receptiveness was going to do that for us. And then research often has a plot twist. Turned out that people who are quite receptive in their brains, people who answer our scale and get a high score and show that they can really think hard about opposing views, it turned out that they were quite bad at expressing it in conversation. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. So in practice, it's hard to execute. 

JULIA MINSON: In practice, it turned out to be quite hard to execute. Yes. So we ended up pivoting. And this was years later, and I met an amazing colleague, Mike Yeomans, who is now at Imperial College in London. And he trained in natural language processing. And at some point, we realized that if two people are in conversation, unless they're mind readers, they can't tell what the other person is thinking. The only thing they can tell is what the other person is saying. 

And so Mike had the skill set to say, OK, can we take language and figure out what comes across as receptive? Independently of what people are thinking in their brains, what is it that they are saying that make their counterparts say, oh yeah, this person is really thinking about my perspective and really engaging and really paying attention. And so we called that new thing conversational receptiveness, which has since then led to a lot of confusion, because now we have two different flavors of receptiveness. 

JILL ANDERSON: So maybe a good idea would be if you can walk us through what it looks like to have an open learning experience talking to someone with an opposing view, and how you can bring some skill into that and be open. 

JULIA MINSON: There's really two things that are happening. I am trying to gather information from you. And the other thing that's happening is I'm trying to tell you information. Most things we're doing fit into one of those two buckets. 

And so the first thing that I would say is people spend way too much time and way too much effort and attention on the telling the other person their stuff, and not enough time and attention on the kind of information-gathering piece interesting. Some of it is this shifting of perspective, or shifting of attention, really. 

And so in the information-gathering piece, we've done a lot of work with Hanne Collins, who is a professor at UCLA now, and Charlie Dorison, who is a professor at Georgetown, where people have much better conversations if they explicitly state their desire to learn about their counterpart. And it sounds obvious. But if you stick around and listen to other people disagreeing, you will be shocked at how infrequently we do this. 

What I mean is something like, hey, Jill, this is a really important topic, and I understand that we have different views on this. I'd love to understand where you're coming from. Or, I'm curious about your perspective, or I want to know about what you've read that led you to holding your beliefs. So these are not profound statements, but they're just very explicit signals of the fact that I want to learn. 

And what we found in our studies is that most people don't think that their counterparts want to learn about their perspective. You're fighting an uphill battle. And so because of that, you want to be very explicit and you want to be a little repetitive about it so that the other person really believes that, oh, yeah, Julia actually wants to learn about Jill's perspective, because she's genuinely curious. But then what we've also found is that when you instruct people to express their desire to learn in that way, they're super reluctant to do it. 

JILL ANDERSON: Interesting. 

JULIA MINSON: It's wild how hard it is to make people say, hey, I'd like to understand where you're coming from. And I think it's just folks like, they want to win the argument. They don't want to seem like the student. They want to seem like the person who already knows all the answers. And so it's a very simple thing, but it is really hard to get people to do. 

JILL ANDERSON: That's so fascinating because they don't want to say that, then you wonder, are we just stuck in this mindset of winning so much that we can't open ourselves up to listening. 

JULIA MINSON: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's a funny little wrinkle to it, which is that, if you look back at your own behavior in a prior conversation and you decide to give yourself a grade, what are you grading yourself on? It's very easy to say, well, I was curious and I was a good listener when there's nothing explicit or concrete that you have to do. Right. If you get to judge your own listening by some vague, fuzzy thing in your head, we can all tell ourselves that we were good listeners. If you have to hold yourself to a more concrete standard of, I said this thing, then it's harder to grade inflate yourself. So I think we often claim that we were curious when we really didn't do anything at all that our counterpart could have benefited from. 

JILL ANDERSON: How hard is it to actually put this into practice? 

JULIA MINSON: I think how hard it really depends on the situation.  

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: If you are at work and you say, look, this is going to be this difficult meeting with my boss, I am going to follow all the steps and exhibit all the curiosity. People definitely can do it in those settings, or at least some people can do it in those settings. 

But then you take the same person and they're at home in the evening with their kids and their spouse, and they're tired and they've had a glass of wine, and then somebody says the same thing that has set them off 17 times, they're going to immediately forget their skills and their good intentions, and they just have less self-control at that point. So I think the question, the important question is what practices can we put in place to make this habit so that even when you're tired, even when you're cranky, even if it's like the 15th argument on the same topic, you can automatically execute signals of curiosity without having to be in your best mental state. 

JILL ANDERSON: Interesting. So how do we do that?

JULIA MINSON: Look, I still fail on a regular basis, but at least I give myself credit for noticing when I'm failing. I think like any other skill, you have to practice and you have to start by practicing on easy things. 

JILL ANDERSON: Easy things. 

JULIA MINSON: Right. The idea is you start small. So imagine you're setting the alarm for the next morning and your spouse wants to get up half an hour earlier than you want to get up. It's exactly the kind of trivial disagreement that all of us have every day that most people wouldn't say, oh, I have to bring out the constructive disagreement playbook for this one. But it's a missed opportunity, 

Because you could say, look, you said you want to get up earlier, and I'm just curious why. Because it's midnight, and so it's pretty late already. I'd like to sleep in, but I want to make sure that that's OK for you. Tell me what your plan is for tomorrow morning that makes you want to set the alarm for 6:00.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. Low stakes. 

JULIA MINSON: Low stakes. And it feels a little silly, frankly. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: And it took me three sentences to get to the point, which was, why the hell do you want to get up at 6:00. So it takes a little bit of patience. But I really think that practicing on small, daily disagreements makes you more able to come up with the words when it's a big, important one and you're really frazzled. 

JILL ANDERSON: How do you go through those conversations? What is the end goal? 

JULIA MINSON: So I think that's a really terrific thing for people to think about, because most people, again, think that their end goal is to change the other person's view. And they think about that idea so embedded, that what I often hear is students who, let's say, they take my course, they do some exercises at home, and then they come back to me and they say, professor, I talked to my sister about this, and it didn't work. She didn't change her mind. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: That's not the goal. The goal isn't to change minds. But we're so committed to that goal that we forget that that's not the goal. So what I would think is a much better goal, especially when you're talking about those very difficult topics, is to have the kind of conversation that makes both people want to come back and have another conversation. So my slightly hokey definition of constructive disagreement is any disagreement that constructs the bridge to the next disagreement. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

JULIA MINSON: Most of them don't do that. Most of them make either one party or both say, I never want to touch this again, and possibly I never want to talk to you again. But if you manage to have some kind of conversation that made you feel like, oh, we could do this again, and she said something interesting, and I don't understand what she meant by this, and, well, it wasn't as bad as all that so maybe we can go again, to me, that's a win. 

JILL ANDERSON: So this idea that we don't need to be so afraid to have these conversations that we either go down screaming or we just totally avoid it and walk away from it. 

JULIA MINSON: Right. And the idea that success doesn't mean that I changed their mind. The other piece of this that is often overlooked is how much patience is required. Most silly disagreements about alarm clocks can be resolved in under three minutes. But if you're talking about abortion policy or immigration or the environment or what you and your sibling think about your upbringing, these are topics on which people have spent years forming their opinions. It's incredibly naive to think that anybody will make any shift in one conversation. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: So if you're serious about it, then it's like a multi-conversation exercise. 

JILL ANDERSON: Well, it's really actually encouraging, though, in a lot of ways, because it does feel simple to do, if you can have the restraint to just try to be open and curious. 

JULIA MINSON: There's sort of an information gathering part, and then there's the talking part. And I think part of the reason that people struggle is that they like the talking part. Information gathering is wonderful. And we all say, yeah, OK, I guess I should be curious. But at some point, you have your own perspective, and you want to tell the other person what you think, in part because you still, somewhere in the back of your mind, believe that you can persuade them. 

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah. 

JULIA MINSON: In part because it just feels good to be honest and authentic. And that second piece also has a set of tools associated with it. So conversational receptiveness is the words and phrases that make people think that their counterpart is being receptive to them, even as they're making their own argument. 

JILL ANDERSON: Oh, interesting. 

JULIA MINSON: Right. So you can imagine the situation where I ask you a bunch of thoughtful questions, and you have explained your point of view, and then I come in with my argument, and I destroy all the rapport we've created, because my argument is so dogmatic and completely oblivious to the perspective that you just spend time telling me about. So conversational receptiveness is a toolkit for how to avoid that situation. 

We train it with an acronym, and the acronym is "hear," as in I hear you. And so the idea behind "hear" is that by using natural language processing, we've basically identified categories of words and phrases that make people think that their counterpart is being receptive. So the H in hear stands for hedging, the E stands for emphasizing agreement, the A is acknowledgment, and the R is reframing to the positive. 

And you can think of lots of different ways of deploying each one of those. But essentially with hedging, what I'm trying to do is say things like, maybe, sometimes, some people, to make it clear that I recognize that even the thing I believe strongly isn't 100% true 100% of the time. So you don't need to argue with me about it, because I already get the fact that there are exceptions to the rule. 

The E for emphasizing agreement is just taking a second to find something that we as two thoughtful humans can agree on. We are both really concerned with the state of polarization in this country. Or, I would also like to understand how this policy is going to impact low-income school districts. So words like "also" and "we" and "both" are words that signal that we're on the same team. 

The A for acknowledgment is probably the thing that most people are the most familiar with, and it just essentially means taking a few seconds to restate your partner's perspective before you launch into your own thing. And that doesn't mean agreeing with it. It just means saying things like, I hear that you're really concerned with XYZ, or I understand that you are upset about what has happened in such and such a state. So it's just showing with behavior that you actually did hear. Because if you didn't hear, you wouldn't be able to say it back to them. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: And then the R is trying to take out some of the contradictory and negative words like "no," "can't," "won't," "terrible," "horrible," "kill," "hate," and replace them with more positive words. So instead of saying something like, I hate unfair policies that force people to give up important rights, you could say something like, I would love to find a fairer policy that enables people to fulfill their basic needs. So same idea — I don't want that policy, I want a different policy — but stated in an affirmative way. 

JILL ANDERSON: There's so much here. And as you're talking, I keep thinking to myself about ways that anyone can really use this and model it for — whether it's their kids, whether it's their students, their colleagues at work, and how that could have a potential ripple effect. We hear a lot about what's modeled for you as a child growing up becomes your basis for how you maybe engage with arguing — or maybe you don't engage with it. And so that's what I find myself thinking about, that power of, if you can make even a small shift, it might become a model for your kid, a student, your partner.

JULIA MINSON: I think that's absolutely right. There's a lot of psychological research on the power of norms. You figure out what's the right way to behave in a particular environment, because that's what everybody else is doing. And you do that thing. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: And so if you create a set of norms that this is how we interact with disagreement in this family or in this classroom or in this office, I think you can really drive a lot of important change. And that says a lot about leadership. The responsibility of leaders to model the kind of behavior they want, to incentivize the kind of behavior they want. 

Because when I'm talking to one of my graduate students in my office, it's a one-on-one conversation. I'm impacting that one person. When I'm talking to a class of 60 and somebody asked me a challenging question, there's 59 pairs of eyeballs watching how I answer that question. And so that's a really important opportunity to model how I would like my students to engage with each other when they disagree. 

JILL ANDERSON: It feels very empowering, like, hey, I can go do this tomorrow at work or something. 

JULIA MINSON: One of the things we've learned in our research is that conversational receptiveness tends to be contagious. 

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah. 

JULIA MINSON: So there was a concern early on when we came up with this framework of, well, if you're really receptive, if you're using the hear framework and you're hedging and you're acknowledging, isn't the other person just going to use that as an opportunity to jump all over you, because you've just given them an opening. And that's a concern that people bring up all the time. 

And so we ran some experiments where we essentially train one side in conversational receptiveness, and then we see what their counterpart does. And the counterpart has no idea that the first person was trained or not trained. So they're just talking the way they would. 

And so what we find is that conversational receptiveness invites mimicry. So that if I am more receptive, it actually doesn't make my counterpart more aggressive. It makes them more receptive. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: Right. So it's like I can change the tone of my conversations without shaking my finger at people and giving them a lecture about how they need to be more civil. I can model it and have more receptiveness come back my way, which I think is really hopeful. 

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah, it really is. I think a lot of people would understand the need for something like this, because we hear it all the time, especially on the EdCast, about the need to be able to model this in classrooms. And yet often there doesn't feel like there's a real roadmap for how to do it. And I think this makes it very feasible for people, which is amazing. 

JULIA MINSON: Yeah, so one of the things we're actually working on right now is building a high school curriculum. 

JILL ANDERSON: Oh, interesting. 

JULIA MINSON: Yeah, how do we take these ideas and really do two things. One, translate them for a high school-aged student. And two, make the curriculum basically just plug-and-play asynchronous, so that educators don't have to get a big binder and have to learn something hard themselves before they can teach it. So we just got a grant from the Alliance for Decision Education to basically do that work so that this material and this toolkit is broadly available. 

JILL ANDERSON: This is something I think about all the time. We're so exposed to people being really rude and nasty to each other in social media, and they're kind of hidden behind a screen. And it's to me very fascinating that this happens in the way that it happens, and whether it has actually caused us to be even more afraid to disagree in person. 

JULIA MINSON: I think definitely social media is part of the story. The reason why all of us have an intuition that social media is part of the story is because there are a lot of features to social media. In other words, social media encourages short, snappy text. Everything about conversational receptiveness and curiosity takes more words and more time than a short, clever zinger. So the format already pushes you in an unreceptive direction. 

There is research by Juliana Schroeder at Berkeley that says, look, people build much stronger rapport when they're talking with their vocal cords than when they're typing or writing. So the medium makes a difference, again, in a negative direction. There's old research, from the '60s about how anonymity makes people less human, essentially. So when you're anonymous and far away from the person who you're inflicting harm on, you're more likely to inflict harm. And so you add all of that stuff together, and all of it pushes people to behave in worse ways. 

And then you take the profit-maximizing goals of the companies and you say, OK, we're going to build an algorithm that promotes the most toxic stuff, because it gets the most clicks. And that changes the norms, because now we as users falsely believe that the most negative stuff is the example of how real people talk. Whereas it's not the example of how real people talk-- it's what the algorithm pulled out that is the most inflammatory and put at the top of the feed. 

JILL ANDERSON: Right. 

JULIA MINSON: So there are all kinds of intertwined factors that make social media like the perfect brew for increasing toxicity. 

JILL ANDERSON: Fascinating. Point is, get out from behind your screen and go talk to one another, openly. 

JULIA MINSON: Yeah, for sure. 

JILL ANDERSON: Thank you so much. 

JULIA MINSON: This was really fun. Thank you, Jill. 

JILL ANDERSON: Julia Minson is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She's the author of How to Disagree Better. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening. 

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