The following excerpts appeared in a syndicated column by Julia Minson in 2024 on the website Greater Good. Julia is a psychologist, negotiating scholar, and computational linguist who has spent years studying the ways that parties in conflict behave, and what she has learned from that research is transformational. I hope you find this as valuable as I have. Enjoy!
At home, at work and in civic spaces, it’s not uncommon to have conversations that make you question the intelligence and benevolence of your fellow human beings.
A natural reaction is to put forth the strongest argument for your own—clearly superior—perspective in the hope that logic and evidence will win the day. When that argument fails to have the intended persuasive impact, people often grow frustrated, and disagreement becomes conflict.
Thankfully, recent research offers a different approach.
For many years, psychologists have touted the benefits of making parties in conflict feel heard. Making someone you’re arguing with feel that you’re listening can calm the troubled waters, allowing both parties to get safely to the opposite shore. Two problems can get in the way, though.
First, when encountering disagreement, most people jump into “persuasion mode,” which doesn’t leave much room for listening. Second, and just as important, is that even when people do wish to make their counterparts feel heard, they don’t know how to do so.
Rather than trying to change how you think of or feel about your counterpart, research suggests that you should focus on changing your own behavior.
Our research has analyzed thousands of interactions between people who disagree with each other on hot-button social and political issues. Based on this analysis, we developed an algorithm that picks out specific words and phrases that make people in conflict feel that their counterpart is thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.
These words and phrases comprise a communication style we call “conversational receptiveness.” People who use conversational receptiveness in their interactions are rated more positively by their conflict counterparts on a variety of traits.
Then we experimented with training people to use the words and phrases that have the most impact. Those who received a brief conversational receptiveness training were seen as more desirable teammates and advisers by their counterparts. Training also turned out to make people more persuasive in their arguments.
We encapsulate this conversational style in the simple acronym HEAR:
- H = Hedge your claims, even when you feel certain about your beliefs.
- E = Emphasize agreement. Find some common ground even when you disagree overall.
- A = Acknowledge the opposing perspective rather than jumping into your own argument.
- R = Reframing to the positive. Avoid negative words such as “no,” “won’t,” or “do not.”
Conversational receptiveness is effective because it makes the interaction less confrontational and therefore less unpleasant. At the same time, it allows both parties to express their perspective. As a result, it gives people confidence that if they approach a topic of disagreement, their partner will stay in the conversation, and the relationship will not sustain damage. By focusing on language that can be easily learned and precisely measured, we offer people a broadly applicable toolkit to live up to their best conversational intentions.
