Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes

Ian Leslie, columnist for the New Statesman, had such interesting things to say about the "universal grammar of productive disagreement" in his book that I had to share my takeaways.

Helps with my growing mediation practice too!

1. Conflict is not something to be avoided at all costs. In the right circumstances, it has immense and gratifying benefits. For example: children are happier when they have open disagreements with their parents - as long as those disagreements don't turn poisonous; couples who have vigorous arguments are often more content than those who avoid confrontation; workplace teams function at a higher level when they know how to disagree directly, even passionately, without tearing at the fabric of their relationships.
2. Disagreement is a way of thinking that is critical to the health of any shared enterprise - from marriage to business to democracy. We can use it to turn vague notions into actionable ideas, blind spots into insights, distrust into empathy.
3. William Brady, a computational social psychologist at NYU, analysed over half a million tweets made about controversial political issues. He found that using moral and emotional words in a tweet increased its diffusion through the network, via retweets, by 20% for each additional word. Users who post angry messages get the status boost of likes and retweets, and the platforms on which those messages are posted gain the attention and engagement that they sell to advertisements. Online platforms therefore have an incentive to push forward the most extreme and triggering versions of every argument. Nuance, reflection and mutual understanding are not just casualties of the crossfire, but necessary victims.
4. The modern workplace puts a great emphasis on getting along with colleagues and creating psychological safety. In the worst version of this, everyone feels compelled to nod along, suppress doubts and swallow awkward questions. Different parts of an organisation should be in tension with one another and staff should discuss these tensions openly, rather than silently pursing their own priorities. A culture that tacitly prohibits disagreement makes the organisation more vulnerable to petty office politics, errors of judgment and abuses of power. People around a table should feel not just able but compelled to speak up when they think something, or someone, is wrong. Frequent and open disagreement makes a relationship better able to withstand a serious challenge - such as your business imploding.
5. Abraham Tesser, a social psychologist at the University of Georgia, found that kids who had a relatively high number of disagreements with their parents were happier, more socially adapted and more successful at school. This applied only to those who had calm disagreements, where the underlying family relationships were warm and supportive.
6. For married couples - disagreement, criticism and even anger can, over time, increase marital satisfaction. Falling out has its benefits.
7. William Ickes, a research psychologist at the University of Texas, found that people are really bad at mind-reading. On a scale from 0 to 100, the average empathy accuracy score was 22, and the best scored only 55. (Ickes noted that people on first dates can relax; there little chance their companion knows what they're thinking). It's the relationship that makes the biggest difference. Ickes found that friends are better at mind-reading than strangers, because they have a shared store of information about each other, which they can draw on to make quick and accurate inferences. Another way of putting this is that strangers communicate in a low-context environment, in which it pays to be explicit and get all the information out there, whereas friendship in a high-context environment, in which we can deploy heavily coded, highly compressed messages. Friends and strangers process new information about each other different. Strangers pay close attention to it because it helps them form a picture of the other person. Close friends, who rely on what they already know about the other people, tend to discount the importance of new information about them. They don't listen as hard because they don't feel they need to.
8. There is a disturbing finding in the field of relationship science. While couples gets better at reading each other's minds in the first months and years of a relationship, the longer they stay together, the worse they become at understanding each other. Once you think you've got your partner worked out, you stop noticing new information about them. You might even come to believe that you know them better than they know themselves. However, no matter how close you and your partner are, you are having different experiences every day, and while people tend not to undergo radical shifts in personality as they age, they do develop and change. Over time, as the gap between model and person grows, your reading of your partner worsens. The model becomes an ill-fitted stereotype, a simplified and inadequate image of the real thing. If that process continues for long, it can end in a shocking rupture - like when when your partner turns around and tells you they're leaving.
9. Anger is information. Expressing negative emotions can convey investment. E.g. pressure and confrontation by a child reliably alerts parents to how their children are feeling. Parents who want a deeper understanding of their children can't simply expect them to 'open up' whenever a problem arises. Greater understanding develops over the course of what Alan Sillars terms 'frequent and unrestrained conversation'. When you keep being candid about the little stuff - including the stuff that annoys you - the big stuff is easier to deal with when it comes up.
10. Psychology as a whole tends to undervalue the role of negative emotions and behaviors. They can be useful and adaptive. Sometimes you need to feel bad about yourself.
11. A crucial challenge for any organisation is to ensure that its employees conceive of conflict as something other than personal rivalry. Management scholars make a distinction between task conflict - arguments over how to solve a problem or make a decision - and relationship conflict, when things get personal. Task conflict, even when it's heated, can be collaborative and productive, if the participants care about solving the same problems. It flushes out new information and stimulates critical thinking. On the other hand, relationship conflict is inherently competitive, and usually destructive. Personally conflicted groups make inferior decisions, and the people in them feel less happy and less motivated.
12. Evidence suggests that when people interpret disagreements as personal attacks, their cognitive function is impaired. They become rigid in their thinking and cling to the first position they choose, even when it is shown to be wrong. They also engaged in 'biased information processing': new information is only absorbed insofar as it fortifies their position. In short, they become exclusively focused on proving themselves right rather than helping the group be right, which makes the group itself a little more stupid.
13. Threat v challenge state. When people evaluate a potentially demanding task, like making a golf putt or giving a public speech, they make an instinctive calculation of whether they have the resources to deal with it. If they feel they do, they go into a heightened state of mental and physiological readiness - the challenge state. If they feel they might be overwhelmed by the task's demands, they focus mind and body on fending it off - the threat state. In threat states, the heart beats faster but it doesn't pump more blood. Blood vessels in the heart raise resistance, constricting the flow. Hence, the distinct sense of anxiety, of being agitated and trapped at the same time. Challenge states involve a measure of anxiety too, but in a way that converts into physical and cognitive horsepower.
14. When people feel challenged but not threatened, confident that they can handle the disagreement without losing face, they can take a looser grip on their own arguments. That prevents the discussion from degenerating into a personal competition, and keeps the group focused on solving the problem at hand. The sweet spot is a culture in which conflicts are played out in the open but everyone is focused on the group being right rather than proving themselves right, a culture in which disagreement is a challenge to be met rather than a threat to be repelled.
15. The example of Southwest Airlines. When there's a problem between functions, we have a "Come to Jesus" meeting and work it out. The meetings were officially termed 'information gathering' sessions before acquiring their more soulful nickname. They have a regular format: one side gives their version of the problem, then the other gives theirs, before a consensus on the way forward is reached.
16. The behavior most deadly to a relationship is contempt, because contempt represents an attack on another person without any focus on the problem, any pretence of a common goal.
17. All emotions are important social information. Even with difficult negative emotions, you can sometimes get a glimpse of the other person's perspective.
18. Evidence shows that there isn't any useful role for passive aggression. Indirect opposition is always a waste of time, whether at home or in the workplace. It neither motivates anyone to change, nor resolves any problems; all it does is corrode trust. If we reach for it often, it's because we want others to know when we are hacked off but are too anxious at the prospect of confrontation to be upfront about it.
19. Under the right conditions, conflict unifies. It can also force people to consider other perspectives, think more deeply about what they're trying to accomplish, and fertilise new ideas. It makes us smarter and more creative.
20. 'When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary' William Wrigley Jr.
21. Devil's Advocate: the practice has its origins in the Roman Catholic Church: when an individual is proposed for beautification or canonisation, the devil's advocate is employed to make the case that the candidate is not worthy. In theory, by explicitly asking someone on the team to argue against whatever decision is being proposed you get the benefits of disagreement - forcing out information and better solutions - without the costs to team harmony.
22. People are more likely to confront the possibility that they are wrong when faced with someone who appears truly to believe what they are saying and who is prepared to take a risk by saying it. Disagreeing productively requires a bond of trust: a sense that we're ultimately working with, and not against, each other.
23. Psychologists have now established that people are more likely to notice and consider evidence that confirms what they believe, and to discount anything that suggests the opposite. Humans have an instinctive aversion to the possibility that they are wrong; they deploy their powers of reason to persuade themselves that they are right even when they're not. Armed with a hypothesis, we bend the world around it. This characteristic, known as 'confirmation bias', is a serious problem for humans. It makes us more likely to deceive ourselves and to believe the lies of others, and less likely to see anyone else's point of view. Cleverness is no cure for this problem; studies have found that intelligent and educated people are just better at persuading themselves they're right, since they are more skilled at generating self-justifying arguments.
24. Confirmation bias is not something to eliminate, it's something to harness. Under the right conditions, it raises the collective intelligence of a group. The conditions are: first, the group must disagree openly, with each individual feeling genuinely compelled, and able, to put their best case forward. Second, the members of the group must have a common interest - in the truth, or the right decision. If each member is only defending their own position, or trying to get one-up on everyone else, then the weaker arguments don't get eliminated and the group won't makes progress. When each person takes a strong position and at the same time allows themselves to be swayed by better arguments, the group moves forward.
25. Instituting a norm of open criticism may lower people's anxiety about being judged. When criticism is framed as a way for the group to reach better answers, people take it less personally. The only way to get people feeling more confident about disagreement is for the organisation's leaders to model and encourage a culture in which it's ok to be wrong, it's ok to show vulnerability, and everyone recognises that open disagreement is a source of creative thinking. We need the bad ideas to get to the good ones. Open, passionate disagreement blows away the cobwebs that gather over even the most enduring relationships. Disagreement throws open windows and pulls up carpets, dragging whatever we've chosen to hide under there into the light. It flushes out crucial information and insights that will otherwise lie inaccessible or dormant inside our brains. It fulfills the creative potential of diversity.
26. Before getting to the content of disagreement, establish a relationship of trust.
27. Before leaping into the dispute itself, focus on creating the right context for it. Figure out what the other person cares about and acknowledge whatever that is in how you talk to them. Behave in a manner with which you would like them to respond. Since disagreement makes us nervous, we often put on a mask of invulnerability when we do it, but that's counter-productive. Open up a little to them and they are more likely to open up to you.
28. The late Patrick Phear, a pioneer of divorce mediation, says that he always starts with a point of agreement, however trivial. 'I will, if I have to, start with the fact that we can all agree we are human beings and we are in this room.' Alternatively, I tell them 'you have both agreed to mediation. That's something'. It's a trick, but it works because the act of agreement on something other than the matter at hand is a small reminder that the disagreement itself need not define the relationship.
29. In a highly charged mediation, the best way to proceed is to get the messy stuff out in the open. Ask each partner to give their side - to talk about what they want, how they feel about it. Then ask the other pratner to summarize what they heard, and importantly, to name the underlying emotion. Once the emotion is on the table it's easier for them to be less angry. Unarticulated emotion is like an unexploded bomb, and naming it somehow diffuses it. But you have to be listening. A connection has to be made before the conversation about what to do can begin - and you can't make that connection when you're lecturing the other person on how to feel.
30. Start where they're at. Surveys showed that interviewers who struck up better relationships with suspects elicited more and better information from them. Rapport is the closest thing that interrogators have to a truth serum.
31. William Miller, an American psychologist, who specialised in the treatment of alcoholism, argued addicts are caught between a desire to change and a desire to maintain their habit. Being told what to do had a perverse effect: as soon as they felt themselves being judged or instructed, they thought of all the reasons why they did not want to change. By positioning himself as an authority figure, the counsellor might make himself feel better, but he reinforces the addict's determination to carry on. Rather than insisting on change and instigating confrontation, counsellors should focus on building a relationship of trust and mutual understanding. The patient should be allowed to talk through her experiences without ever feeling the need to defend her choices. Eventually, she will begin making the arguments for change herself. Then, because she has reached her own decision, rather than acting on someone else's instruction, she will be much more motivated to change.
32. When we meet someone who is deluded, or even just someone with whom we strongly disagree, we want to cure them of the belief. By attempting to do so, we only make their condition worse. Better to create conditions in which the patient heals herself. Often there is a kernel of truth to a false belief, and you are more likely to spot it once you put aside your desire to be right. Give up on trying to control what the other person is thinking and you free your mind too.
33. Hostage takers in expressive situations want their importance to be recognised in some way - to have their status acknowledged. The less that people feel compelled to maintain their face in front of allies, the more flexible they feel able to be.
34. Always give someone the 'golden gate of retreat'. Give someone enough rope, enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. When we're in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good - maintain or even enhance their face - at the same time. By showing that we have listened to and respected our intelocutor's point of view, we make it more likely that they will come around at some later point.
35. In a disagreement with someone who isn't using instrumental rationality, rather than assuming they're crazy, you can try to get curious about what mode of rationality they've moved into. When your daughter is being irrationally stubborn about going to bed later, she might be operating in affective rationality. She is looking for a way to spend more time with you. What's the deeper logic of the other person's behavior?
36. The more apologies you get from someone, the less costly these apologies seem. At some point, they start to feel cheap, even insulting. An apology should cost you something. When you say sorry, it has to mean something other than 'let's move on'. When you back down from a position, it's ok to let the other person see how hard it is for you to do so - in fact, it's better that way.
37. Don't continue a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
38. 'Hedging' helps. Arguments that includes phrases such as 'it could be the case' tends to be more persuasive than those that projected certainty. When a commenter signals with his tone that he's not entirely sure of himself, the submitter lets their guard down. Weakness is power.
39. Disagreement should be a way of helping each other overcome the blindspots and refusals of reality that we all have.