Navigating Divisive Conversations: Why We Underestimate the Benefits

Why do we shy away from discussing divisive topics like politics and religion? Are our fears of negative reactions justified or off-base?  

In this episode, APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum speaks with Kristina Wald from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Wald shares findings from a recent research article published in Psychological Science, which shows that people often underestimate the benefits of talking about divisive topics, even with those who disagree. The conversation offers insights into why we prefer talking with those who agree with us, and how we can better approach polarized discussions. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].

Unedited transcript

[00:00:00.270] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Have you ever been told to steer clear of politics and religion in conversations? Why do we shy away from discussing these crucial topics? It is often to avoid the negative reactions that can arise from disagreements about deeply held values. But in a world where political polarization is on the rise, are these fears even more justified? I am Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Today, we will talk about what makes us hesitant in participating in crucial discussions. I am joined by Kristina Wald from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Kristina recently published an insightful article in APS’s journal, Psychological Science, looking into why people are often reluctant to have confrontational conversations. Kristina, welcome to Under the Cortex.

[00:01:03.000] – Kristina Wald

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:06.190] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Please tell us about yourself first. What type of psychologist are you?

[00:01:11.550] – Kristina Wald

I’m a social psychologist, and so my research has a particular focus on interpersonal dynamics, so things like how we form impressions of other people, how we communicate, have conversations, and things like that.

[00:01:26.590] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

How did you first get interested in studying divisive topics?

[00:01:32.070] – Kristina Wald

Well, I’m generally interested in how people can just have better social interactions, whether that’s how they choose to present themselves to others or how they choose to have conversations with others. I think encountering disagreement on divisive topics is a common experience that people have to decide how to navigate. My collaborators and I wondered whether people’s choice is to avoid discussing these topics with people who disagree with them were really calibrated to their actual experiences of doing so, or whether people might instead be missing out on conversations that they might actually have been happy to have had.

[00:02:13.210] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, great. From your research, we learned that people underestimate how positive the experience of discussing divisive topics with those who disagree with them will be. Can you tell us about the three experiments that led to this finding in your study?

[00:02:32.140] – Kristina Wald

Absolutely, yeah. In our first experiment, we just focused on looking at people’s expectations. What we found, probably not surprising to most people listening, was that people’s expectations of discussing political or religious topics with someone they disagree with were a lot more negative than their expectations of discussing those same topics with someone they agree with. So again, probably pretty intuitive. And also, we found that people reported being less willing to engage in conversations with someone they disagree with on those topics compared to someone they agree with because of those negative expectations. So again, finding That finding is probably pretty intuitive, but we wanted to see whether those negative expectations were actually calibrated to people’s experiences. Are people’s experiences of discussing disagreements really that negative? In our next two experiments, we had people actually have conversations on a political or religious topic with a stranger, another participant in the study, and we randomly assigned them to discuss that topic with someone who either agreed with them or disagreed with them. So first we had participants fill out a questionnaire reporting how they expected the conversation to go. So things like how much they would enjoy the conversation, how awkward it would feel, how hostile they thought the other person would be toward them, how much they would learn, and so on.

[00:04:03.110] – Kristina Wald

Again, they knew at the time that they filled this questionnaire out, whether the other person agreed or disagreed with them. Then we had participants come together. They talked with one other participant in the study, and they actually discussed that topic. And then afterwards, they filled out another questionnaire with the same questions that they had filled out beforehand, but this time reporting on how the experience actually went, so how much they actually enjoyed it, how awkward what it was, and so on. And so what we found was that people… Actually, both when people agreed and disagreed with the other person, their expectations of the conversation were more negative than their actual reported experience. However, we found that the gap between expectations and experiences was even larger when people disagreed than when they agreed. So another way of describing our results is that people’s expectations of discussing with someone who who agreed with them were more negative than their expectations of discussing with someone who agreed with them. But in reality, their actual experiences of the conversation were pretty similar regardless of whether they agreed or disagreed.

[00:05:13.080] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

I go into a conversation with a stranger, I know that they are going to disagree with me, and I have all these negative expectations. But as it happens or right after it happens, my thinking is, it wasn’t that bad. How do you think we can communicate this is bitter to the public and say, It is not going to be as bad as you think it will be.

[00:05:38.770] – Kristina Wald

Well, my hope is that just knowing about this research that supports that finding might be enough for people to overcome some of their initial reluctance to engage in those conversations. I think over time, if people have more conversations with someone they disagree with, then their expectations might actually become better calibrated because they have experiences to give them a more accurate picture of what those conversations are actually like.

[00:06:07.650] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, hopefully. Your findings suggest that people’s expectations about divisive topics are systematic dramatically miscalibrated, especially for those they disagree with. We talked about this a little bit, but I would like to go into the details of this a little bit. Why and how does that happen?

[00:06:27.550] – Kristina Wald

We think there are at least a few reasons why people have these miscalibrated expectations, especially around disagreement. So one reason is that people seem to underestimate how much common ground they’ll have with someone who disagrees with them. So in other words, if they learn that you disagree on a political topic, they might assume that you disagree on all aspects of the issue when in reality, there might be some aspects of the issue that you still agree with each other even if you disagree with the issue as a whole. And having a conversation often reveals those areas of common ground. So in our experiments, we found that people, when they disagreed, they underestimated how much similarity of opinion they would find with the other person. So that’s one reason. Another reason is that people seem to fail to appreciate the social forces in conversations in particular that create social connection. So in other words, conversations Cooperation is an opportunity for cooperative exchange. It creates opportunities for responsiveness from the other person. But people seem to fail to appreciate this. So even outside the context of disagreement, other research has shown this for conversations in general, that people expect them to be more negative than they actually are.

[00:07:50.540] – Kristina Wald

And so when it comes to disagreement, people seem to really especially expect others who disagree with them to be more hostile toward them in a conversation than they actually are. So again, in one of our experiments, we actually manipulated not only whether people discussed a political issue with someone they agreed or disagreed with, but also whether they had an actual back and forth conversation with the other person about the topic, or whether they just recorded themselves stating their viewpoint as a monolog and then watched the other participants’ recording of their viewpoint without this opportunity for a back and forth exchange. We found that people’s expectations were the most miscalibrated when they were having an actual conversation with someone they disagreed with, more so than when they just exchanged viewpoints in the form of monologs. It seems like there’s something especially unique about conversations that people don’t… Their expectations are especially miscalibrated about that. Then one final reason, miscalibrated expectations can be perpetuated is that because people When they have these negative expectations about discussing disagreements, they avoid having these conversations, and so they avoid having the experiences that could, in turn, calibrate their expectations, so giving them a better sense of what these conversations are actually like.

[00:09:16.670] – Kristina Wald

That could help to perpetuate these miscalibrated expectations as well.

[00:09:21.600] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, I find this really interesting. I’m a language researcher by training, and language and communication is so important for humans. We are different from other species. We are equipped with this amazing tool that really helps us. Yet when it comes to interpersonal communication, we don’t have the best intuitions at times. That is what your study shows. This miscalibration is quite interesting in the sense that I’m wondering about the cognitive mechanisms about those. But let me ask you the following question as a follow-up to this. People have these miscalibrations. Do you think people can learn to have better calibrated expectations? Is there hope about this?

[00:10:14.130] – Kristina Wald

My guess is that if people were willing to engage in these conversations more often, they would, like I mentioned earlier, have more experience that could give them a better calibrated picture of how these conversations actually go. If they had repeated experiences where the conversation wasn’t as bad as they expect, then maybe over time, they could learn to have better calibrated expectations of how they would actually go.

[00:10:41.090] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah. What about possible cultural differences? Do you think you would get different results in a collectivist culture?

[00:10:49.570] – Kristina Wald

We don’t have any data that can speak directly to that, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be cultural differences. I think as long as people perceive disagreements with another person on some divisive issue, then their expectations are probably likely to be more negative than their actual experiences would be of discussing those issues. It’s possible that in some cultures, maybe there’s not as big of a perceived difference between different political parties or different positions on political issues within members of that country. So maybe in those cases, people don’t perceive as much disagreement to begin with. But I think as long as people perceive disagreement, I expect these results to probably be the same.

[00:11:34.540] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

What possible solutions do you envision to encourage people to approach polarized conversations?

[00:11:41.500] – Kristina Wald

Well, again, I guess my hope is that just knowing about this finding might be one way to help people get over their initial hesitation to have these conversations and instead choose to engage with people who have opposing viewpoints more often. Again, hopefully over time, having more of those experiences could better calibrate their expectations and maybe make them less reluctant to engage as well.

[00:12:08.280] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

You suggest that if people are willing to engage in conversation on divisive issues with people they disagree with, it may help them be better connected and better-informed individuals. Can you elaborate a little more on that?

[00:12:23.130] – Kristina Wald

Yeah. What we found in our studies was that not only were people’s experiences a conversation, so again, things like connectedness, enjoyment, learning, not only were those higher or more positive than their expectations, but they were also positive in an absolute sense. This suggests that people, on average, do seem to gain some benefits like social connection and learning from having these conversations.

[00:12:53.690] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, thank you. What about some caveats? Do you see any potential social caveats to your findings?

[00:13:03.060] – Kristina Wald

Yeah. One important thing to note is that we only conducted our experiments among strangers, so we don’t necessarily know how our findings would translate to conversations among people you already know, like friends or family members. Another thing is that we didn’t examine other types of interactions besides face-to-face interactions. We didn’t examine things like an online chat where you’re typing with another person or engaging via social media posts or things like that. As I mentioned, in fact, one of our experiments suggests that the dynamic nature of real back and forth conversations is a key driver of our effect. We wouldn’t necessarily expect to see the same results in other types of interactions that are more static, that don’t involve that back and forth exchange.

[00:13:55.320] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

For those of us who are living in United States, We are entering the election season soon. What do we learn from your research that can be helpful for us in our daily conversations?

[00:14:09.270] – Kristina Wald

I think the main thing is just that it might not be as bad as you expect it to be to have a conversation with a stranger from the opposing political side. It might be something that you actually end up benefiting from in terms of both social connection and learning.

[00:14:27.200] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, like I said earlier, it is not It’s not going to be as bad as you think it will be, right? Maybe that is the message.

[00:14:34.230] – Kristina Wald

Exactly.

[00:14:35.760] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was a wonderful conversation.

[00:14:41.310] – Kristina Wald

Thank you again for having me.

[00:14:43.280] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with APS, and I have been speaking with Kristina Wald from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Do you have questions or suggestions for us? Please contact us at [email protected].