B (12:42)

Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm actually of the Utah Minsons. That's my husband's last name and they come from Utah.

A (12:49)

I see. But your people are. You're a Utah Jewish and you were born in Russia. Lived in Russia for a while, danced in Russia.

B (12:58)

I was born in Russia. My father's side of the family is Russian. My mother's side of the family is Ukrainian Jews. So I am a hot mix of all kinds of things.

A (13:08)

Is there some reason in the familial background that you were drawn to understanding others better and disagreement?

B (13:16)

Yeah, so my actually my mom was a psychologist, so I followed in the family trade, so to speak. And, you know, I've just always found disagreement fascinating. I don't know. I have a hard time coming up with sort of more interesting topics around human behavior than how we treat other people's opinions and sort of why we do the things we do with them.

A (13:39)

So I want to solicit some of the insights from the book, and it was very insightful. And then I want to get to, I think, something that you won't disagree with me about, but maybe it's the idea that we're playing different games. Not you and I, but people who go into this disagreement field. So, first of all, I don't usually do interviews like this, but I don't want to leave without just putting a few key concepts on the table. So I'm going to jump ahead to something called boomer asking, which is not. When I ask you about Your very successful 401K or the classic rock radio station you listen to, it's not that kind of boomer. What is boomer asking?

B (14:17)

So boomer asking is a term that was coined by my colleague Mike Yeomans and some of his other co authors. The idea is that you ask a question simply with the goal of having it boomerang back to yourself. Right? So, like, you're not asking, how are you? Because you want to know how the other person is. You're asking, how are you? Because you want to tell them how you are. And the polite way to do that is to first ask the question so that then they have to ask you the question back. Like a boomerang.

A (14:49)

Yeah. And I haven't been on a date in a while, but I remember this is you might not know this if you go out on dates, but your date partner. Partner can figure that out. And they don't know why, but they don't like it.

B (15:01)

Yeah, yeah. So this is a funny thing, right? Is we think it's a good strategy, but what Mike's research actually shows is that it backfires pretty consistently.

A (15:11)

Yeah. So does the idea of listening and nodding with clearly the intent just to jump in to say your own opinion. It's performative. Fake listening.

B (15:20)

Yeah, Right, right, right, right, right.

A (15:23)

Another great concept that I want to put on the table, and you talk about this with your dance partner, was naive realism.

B (15:31)

Yeah. So this is, I think a really important. Like, this is the most important idea that nobody's ever heard of. So naive realism is sort of this mindset that we walk around the world with that we kind of believe that we get it, that we see the world in this objective, reasonable, realistic way. We naively believe that our perceptions are reality. Um, and, you know, it kind of makes a lot of sense because, you know, what else are my perceptions? Right? Like, I'm not sort of hallucinating but what we don't account for is all the things that shape our perceptions and all the ways in which we are actually sort of biased and unobjective and imprecise in what we see around the world. So we just go around and say, I'm a reasonable person. I am smart, I am objective. I get it. This is how things really are.

A (16:27)

What do you think about objectivity, by the way? The entire idea of objectivity?

B (16:32)

I think that there's a huge academic field that studies objectivity and has shown really consistently that humans are not very objective. Right.

A (16:40)

But there. But there's such a thing that exists. It's not just a false notion that the postmodernist would say is all based on entirely perception.

B (16:49)

No, I mean, I think there are, you know, there are certain situations where it's very hard to know what the objective judgment is, but there are other situations where we know what the objective judgment is. And this is what, you know, the kind of academic field of judgment decision making does is we create situations where we can all agree on what is objectively true. And then we look at what people do in those situations and show that they're pretty consistently biased away from that objective, you know, understanding.

A (17:21)

So the dancing analogy to demonstrate naive realism was when you were. Was it a ballroom dancer?

B (17:28)

Ballroom dancer, yes.

A (17:30)

Yes. Great. So you would look now an Olympic sport. So you would look in the mirror at your partner and yourself and see what was going on. And at the time you were looking at the mirror, he was looking away from the mirror and could not see. And therefore you each had different perceptions of the reality of what was occurring. It's a great analogy to understand how the other person might not see. I mean, you with the mirror had more insight. And that's usually what we think. I'm sure many people hearing this would say, yeah, that is true. A lot of other people think they're right because of their own experiences. And maybe the person would say, and I have that too. But I have been engaged with, as I'm sure you have, so many exercises in questions like how do you convince people who believe in conspiracies not to believe in them? How do you believe. How do you convince qanon people to come back off the brink? How do you convince Covid deniers to take the vaccine? And as you can hear the animating, all of these questions is that all those people are wrong. So let's just take one Covid denial. What do you do? What's a way. What are some methods to get them to take the vaccine or should you not have a goal like that?

B (18:46)

So, you know, I like the goals question because that to me is a really big part of all of this is why are you having this conversation? Right? And you could imagine a variety of reasons to be having a conversation with somebody who, you know, either doesn't think Covid is as bad as it sort of cracked up to be, or doesn't think that the vaccine will be helpful or thinks that the vaccine could be dangerous to them. Or, you know, whatever the case may be, many of us enter these conversations by default with the goal of persuading the other person, right? Like I'm going to change their mind because their position is is crazy, not supported by science, and I'm going to tell them how it is, and then I'm going to expect them to actually act on my recommendation and perhaps even be grateful. And of course, most of us who have attempted that feat have realized that it doesn't get us very far. But the question becomes, why are you doing this? Why are you in this conversation? You could imagine that it's your job, right? You're a physician and it is your job to get this person vaccinated. It. But that's not the case for most of us. Most of us, we have some casual encounter with a person we barely know, they say that they don't want to get vaccinated, and we decide that it is upon us in this next five minutes to convince them that their medical choices are wrong. And that is just deeply, deeply naive because you're not going to be able to do that, right? So part of the question is what are you really hoping to accomplish and why are you hoping to accomplish it and what is actually realistic? And in most conversations about deep seated beliefs, persuasion is not a realistic goal. And so as soon as you start recognizing that persuasion is most likely to just get you into sort of an escalating argument that doesn't go anywhere, you start thinking, okay, well what could I be doing? Instead of said, right, if I care about this topic and if I care about this person, and if for whatever reason I decide to stay in this conversation, what could I be doing that's actually effective?

A (20:54)

Right? So what's the answer? I'm thinking of a specific example I'm going to lay on you in a second. But okay, I'm not talking to this person because I'm interested in doing a survey of people who are Covid deniers or vaccine skeptics. I'm talking to them for a reason or it Came up in a conversation. I want to extract myself in a way, but still assert my opinion in. In the best possible way. But, you know, maybe not alienate them. So I know I can't persuade. What can I do?

B (21:23)

Okay, so again, that sort of like we've cut off one branch, which is persuasion. Right. But again, there's several other options. Right. One option that I think is probably very common, that people maybe don't articulate to themselves is I am talking to somebody who I have a relationship with that maybe I'm close to close with, who I want to have a good relationship with. And one of the things that gets in the way of having a good relationship is thinking that they believe something that's absolutely unacceptable. And I feel sort of, you know, a diminishing level of respect for them because I'm like, how can this person that I love and care about, who I think of as a smart person, be believing this, like, crazy stuff? Right. And so quite often the reason we try to persuade other people of things is because we want to continue thinking positively of them. And we can't think positively of them when they're doing things that seem to defy logic. And so what I think is very, very helpful is trying to actually understand where they're coming from instead of making the series of assumptions that we normally make that they are misinformed or that they're selfish, or that they don't understand science, or that they read the wrong media or whatever it is, asking them why they believe what they believe. And that can go sort of a very long way towards helping you decide your next moves. Because now you're not operating blindly. Right. You actually have some information about where this other person is coming from.

A (22:58)

Right. And you don't want to attack. It's not to do the thing where a defense lawyer listens very intently because they're looking at the vulnerabilities to poke holes. What do you want to do with that information once you understand where they're coming from? A. It could just be elucidating and beneficial for your expansion as a human, the expansion of your mind. I kind of operate like that sometimes, but most people don't. Or most people aren't using most interactions just to educate themselves.

B (23:26)

Right. So again, it depends on your relationship and the purpose of this conversation. Right. So are you trying to figure out. So for example, let me give you a sort of like a live example. My brother in law didn't want to get vaccinated for Covid and at the time he was living with my in laws who were in their 80s, it was still the pandemic. So this is a few years ago when it was very, very risky. And I was coming to visit with my husband and my three kids. It was that little period of time where adults could get vaccinated, but the vaccine was still not approved for kids. So the kids are unvaccinated and so is he, but he has a choice. And so there was a very sort of concrete goal, which is that we want to visit, we want you to spend time with your nieces. You want to spend time with your nieces. How do we make everybody comfortable around this? And we had a long conversation about it where I learned a lot of things about why he was hesitant and where his hesitancy came from. One thing it did is it convinced me that he was not being crazy. The information that he got that made him concerned was the kind of information that would make lots of people concerned. It was sort of very well crafted misinformation.

A (24:49)

Okay, so it wasn't accurate. But it was.

B (24:51)

It was not accurate, but it was very credible, if that makes sense. It was an expert with a lot of credentials.

A (24:58)

Sure.

B (24:59)

That was speaking from that credentialed expertise

A (25:03)

as a current Trump administration employee. Jay Bhattacharya.

B (25:06)

No, it was a guy named Robert Malone.

A (25:10)

Oh, that guy, yeah. Rogan Guest.

B (25:12)

Yeah, that guy who has, you know, an MD and a PhD and so early.

A (25:18)

Right, and did early research on MRE.

B (25:21)

Right, exactly. So a person could listen to him and, and believe him and you couldn't blame that person for being a fool because this person, you know, because Robert Malone has every hallmark of expertise. So one, the conversation convinced me that my brother in law is not crazy, which I think is important when you are in a family relationship and you love and care about somebody. And two, what he sort of shared was that what he was really uncomfortable with was MRNA because of the whole Robert Malone thing. So the solution is he went, got the Johnson and John vaccine. Right. Which, you know, wasn't as good, but also wasn't as good, but like it was better than nothing. Right? Yeah.

A (26:09)

And allowed him to see his nieces.

B (26:11)

Right. And so the compromise we kind of struck was like, well, you know, I was concerned about the kids, and the kids are, you know, in reality not that vulnerable to Covid. Right. Their risk is much, much lower if you have healthy kids. You know, all the adults and all the elderly people were vaccinated. He got the Johnson and Johnson and it was all fat. Fine. But we wouldn't have been able to get there if I said you are being selfish and you're being ridiculous and how dare you. Right, yeah.

A (26:41)

Do you think Robert Malone should not have been booked on Rogan? Do you think Rogan should not have been allowed or Spotify should have shut that down before the Robert Malone interview was played?

B (26:55)

You know, I think it's a very complicated question because there are lots of things that we find out to be misinformation after the fact that seem to be good information at the moment and things that we consider to be sort of inflammatory disinformation that we later find out has some validity to it.

A (27:20)

Right. And so Malone's not actually in that category. Right. At the time, people were raising red flags about Malone. But maybe you're articulating a principle of knowing that this happens. We have to have some humility in terms of how right we are in the moment.

B (27:37)

Yeah, and I think that's exactly right. I think having some humility about our rightness in the moment is one of the key kind of arguments that I make in my book is that regular people who are not themselves sort of like world class medical experts should not get on a high horse and say, you are being ridiculous. And I will refuse to speak to you because you are sort of defying science. Because in reality your own information also comes from, you know, a set of imperfect sources that you have imperfectly consumed.

A (28:16)

So from that I extrapolate that on question eight of the Disagreeing Better survey about receptiveness, which is some ideas are simply too dangerous to be part of the public discourse course, from strongly agree to somewhat disagree to neutral to slightly agree to strongly agree, you are. Where would you put yourself?

B (28:34)

I'm pretty low on that. I'm. I'm a big fan of the marketplace of ideas and sort of letting. Letting folks say their piece and recognizing that truly terrible ideas usually show themselves to be truly, truly terrible. If you, you know, dig right into

A (28:55)

there, we'll be back with a bit more of Julia Minson and How to Disagree Better. We've been disagreeing pretty good so far, but we're even going to improve it in part two in a minute. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

B (29:35)

Spring is packed. Patios, parties, wedding weekends and RK0 proof keeps you in the mix without the morning after regret as the original Zero Proof Spirits brand, RK's warm molecule gives you that real deal burn of whiskey or tequila with none of the alcohol, zero calories, zero sugar, and a whole lot of freedom to enjoy the moment. Sip smarter this season at rk0proof.com that's rk0proof.com.

A (30:08)

We're back with Julia Minson of How to Disagree Better. Here's a stat from the book. The Average person experiences 6.2 memorable disagreements every week and spends disagreements 3.7 hours disagreeing. For the record, I do not like expressing hours on the 10 point scale. It's a basic should be anyway. But anyway, on actual disagreement, people spend 3.7 hours a week ruminating on their disagreement. So it's not the disagreement where afterwards someone says, I stuck to my guns and I'm glad they ruminate on it. Which says something about the very important metric. Well, how's that going for you? Not good, right? Not so well. Do you, Dr. Minson, have any intuition on if this has increased or decreased societally over time?

B (30:55)

You know, that is like the million. I mean it must be the million dollar question because everybody wants to know the answer. And I don't have data, right? Because you know, I ran through the survey once, but I do have the intuition that that's true. And I think the reason it's true is because we're currently in this weird situation, especially with regard to sort of social and political issues where on one hand many of them have become so politicized, so moralized that it really feels like, you know, a moral violation to disagree, right? Like how can these people on the other side possibly believe these like absolutely ridiculous immoral things? On the other hand, largely because of social media, we are in a position where we're constantly surrounded with people who believe the same things we do do, right? So there's this like duality where everybody I know who are the good people because remember, naive realism makes me think that I basically get it, they all agree with me. And then at the same time there's these like totally crazy people that disagree with me and that feels extra bad because the disagreement is so moral.

A (32:24)

I'd also add, in this age of runaway political polarization, there used to be some issues that didn't have that much of a political valence. And there was the example of the anti abortion or the pro life Democrat, just to take one example, or a whole bunch of other things that you didn't necessarily feel compelled to take a strong stance on. But now. Or even if the individual were to say, here's why I'm a Democrat, I believe in. I'm anti. I'm anti death penalty, and I'm pro choice. But then there might be one or two issues where they totally see the Republican side of things, you know, but it's so much less possible these days because there are. People are compelled to sign on to the entire slate of issues as being part of the good people tribe versus the bad people tribe. So this leads to more disagreement. I would say we are compelled to disagree, lest we show ourselves to be, you know, not pure avatars of the right side of things.

B (33:31)

Right. So I think, you know, I think that's partly true. The good news is it's not as bad as we believe it to be. So there's a lot of evidence of what people call you, you know, your reference polarization. There's this thing that people talk about called false polarization, which is the idea that we actually overestimate how extreme people are on the other side. Right. So, like, yes, people on the right of me are righter than I am, but I assume that they're further to the right than they are in reality. Right. And then it's the same thing. You know, people on the right assume that folks on the left are, like, way out there, you know, and not

A (34:12)

just in their opinions, just who they are. If you survey Republicans, what percent of Democrats or the left identify as gay, they says they say something like 30%. And if you ask Democrats what percent of Republicans are millionaires, they say something like 30%. And so we just have totally wrong opinions about the other side.

B (34:30)

Yes.

A (34:30)

And.

B (34:31)

And the. And the other kind of piece of it is, you know, you mentioned sort of like how consistent people's views are. So this is actually new research that's being done in my lab right now by a graduate student of mine named Max Bone and a former student of mine, Charlie Dorrison, who's a professor at Georgetown. Now, what we are doing is we're asking people for kind of like. Like, their opinions on a bunch of different issues. Right? And what we find is that people in reality do report a pretty complex mix of views where they agree with their party on some things and they still disagree with their party on other things, but when they imagine the views of the opposing side, they imagine it to be, like, very monolithic and very homogenous. Right. So we still. We still have some complexity in our thinking, but we don't give other people credit for any complexity.

A (35:26)

Yes. So I was thinking when I was asking about the COVID Denier, I was thinking, what if I was an epidemiologist or a public health communicator in the state of Wisconsin in 2022, and my most prominent citizen, Aaron Rodgers, had revealed himself not to take the vaccine. And I was thinking about the HERE framework, which is an acronym. Wait, is it an acronym? Yes, it's an acronym and it stands for H is hedging your claims, and E is emphasizing agreement. And the A is acknowledging other perspectives. The R is we are going to be nice about the things we say. No, it's reframing to the positive. So it's language tools, communication tools, so as not to anathemize the person you don't agree with. I don't think. I don't know what the. Exactly the public health officials did. I know the discourse, which is official statements and how people took the statements, became very angry, became very tribal, became very indignant. I don't know that that could have changed things with Mr. Rogers, but I know that I listened to many interviews he did, including on Rogan. We're talking about Rogan a lot, where how much and the manner in which he was criticized and the vehemence in which he was criticized absolutely added up to him being sure and cementing his position. So I'm sure you would say that there was some more room for people covering the issue to use a little here with Aaron Rodgers, Right?

B (37:06)

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because again, at the time, at the time of. Of COVID right, Everybody was doing their best with extremely, extremely limited information. But I remember thinking, we have thousands of social scientists in this country who are all stuck at home, very limited in what we can do. But, boy, many of us would have gladly volunteered to work. Work on public health communication at the time, right? People who sort of specialize in marketing and communication and conflict and negotiations, who work at some of the world's top universities, who would have gladly stepped up and said, let's talk about how we can communicate this stuff more effectively. And of course, in a massive crisis like Covid was, it's easy to be sort of the Monday morning quarterback. But I do think that there's a real tension in people's beliefs about what's effective, right? And there's one side that says, look, you need to be clear and confident and sort of absolutist in your messaging so that people recognize that you are the expert and you truly know what you're talking about and sort of this is how it is. Right. And then, you know, the kind of side of the argument that my research is on is actually it's helpful to soften the message so that the recipient of the message recognizes that their views are being taken seriously and, you know, their concerns are being met with consideration so that they don't feel the need to keep talking louder and louder and ultimately yelling in order to feel hurt. Right. If you make people feel heard, they no longer need to keep repeating themselves.

A (39:04)

Right. So maybe my Aaron Rodgers example wasn't the best because he has a platform anyway. But I think a lot about it. And here, let me try to articulate this. Everything you're saying about communication not just strikes me as true. I read your books, other books like it. This is where the evidence is. I've done a lot of conversations where we acknowledge in terms of politics, it doesn't play well. The kind of person who comes out and says, well, maybe you might want to any sort of wishy washy speak, which doesn't have to be. I know you'd say it's not wishy washy, it's just expansive enough so as to not castigate. Politicians hate that and they like coming out strong. And then there are people, we get all polarized about vaccines and people cheer you on the more you tell people who don't take the vaccines that they're idiots. So this is the politics that we're dealing with. But here's the complicated thing with Aaron Rodgers. I don't think he was right, but I think in retrospect, the articulation of why he didn't want to take it, there's some stuff about his own allergies or whatever, but it basically rested on his correct assertion that his chances of having any sort of bad effect from COVID was extremely low. He was among the, you know, most skilled athletes and a young man and didn't have comorbidities. And also that when he thought about, I thought the best argument was, well, it's not just about you, it's about spreading the disease. What we know now is that everyone eventually got the disease and natural immunity or having had Covid from other sources, which he had, was as was better than the disease, very protective. I look at his case and I wouldn't have done it. I think it was wrong, but it wasn't nearly as crazy and out there as I think, think most everyone thought at the time. And if you communicate, I do think if you communicate in a way where, you know, in the back of your head all Right. This guy is wrong. You're just wrong on the facts. Like you're like your brother in law was. You're going to communicate in a way that seems diminishing and that seems like you're patronizing someone and it might be better than coming out with a shotgun blasting him, but it's still not really going to meet him where he is because he was convicted about certain facts which line up at least decently with his worldview. So that's a morass. It's not a good question, but you're good at communicating. So do you know what I'm saying?

B (41:32)

Well, I'm going to build on what you're saying because what you painted was this picture that we saw, you know, a number of times and you brought politicians into it, which I think is also useful. Which really what it makes me think about is the entire like social system that exists around any one piece of communication. And usually when we are the communicator, what we think about is this very short term project of, you know, winning the argument with the person in front of us or potentially just sort of scoring, you know, scoring a point. Right. Sort of like saying the next clever thing. And in reality, especially with these sort of high profile cases or you know, situations that are unfolding, holding over time like Covid, there's all these other audiences, right? So when we talk about what politicians should or shouldn't do, it depends who they're speaking to, right. If I want to sort of fire up my base, it might not matter that I'm making the other side hate me more because the other side hates me anyway. Right. It may be sort of like not good for democracy, but it is possibly the right move for my own sort of selfish goals of getting reelected. Right. If I am, you know, one of the things that has happened with COVID is this massive deterioration in trust towards, you know, the scientific and academic establishment. Because everybody can now point to things that we said with great certainty that, you know, in retrospect turned out to be not accurate. Right. And it's not that people weren't trying their damnedest, it's not that anybody was trying to deceive anybody. It's just it was an extremely fast moving public health emergency and people are making decisions with incomplete information and then following this, you know, prescriptive guidance of you need to sound certain for people to take you seriously. Right? Well, if you sound certain and then are proven to be wrong, then then it's easy to see why folks have, you know, where, where the trust has sort of, you know, eroded. And so that's sort of the long term cost, right. It's like you're trying to persuade this one person, but in your persuasion efforts, you might be alienating masses of people who are looking onto this whole thing. And I think that's really important to think about. About.

A (44:12)

There's many streams of advice and insight and research in your book that falls into the category of, I'll be blunt, we need to coddle the wrong. Right. We. And there's much that says we need to reconsider our own opinions. And I sometimes, like with my Aaron Rodgers example, I don't know which was the right approach to take or which is the body of research that best offers the way forward.

B (44:46)

Coddling the wrong is a great expression. I'm going to save it in my brain and use it in the future. I think part of the, part of the challenge that all of us struggle with in conversation or just sort of like in functioning as humans is that we don't know who is wrong and who is right. Right. We think we're right. That's why we're saying the things we're saying. But that is a hell of an assumption, right? And you know, back when I, back when I was in graduate school, the first thing I actually started studying was how people make quantitative judgments under uncertainty. So this is things like, you know, here's a jar of M and Ms. Estimate the number of M and Ms. In the jar, right? And it sounds sort of very trivial, but there's interesting math around it, which is that if you take a bunch of people estimating M and Ms. In a jar, some of them will underestimate, some of them will overestimate, and on average, you will be better if you average with the other person. Right? Like, if you're getting paid for the experiment based on how close your answer is, you should average with the other person. Person. And literally nobody does that. What people do is they say, well, I'm looking at the jar. It looks like there's, you know, roughly 3000m and Ms. In it. And I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you must be looking at the wrong jar because I'm right and you're wrong. And M and Ms. Are great because we know the right answer. And so we can mathematically show that, you know, not giving other people people's opinion heavy consideration is just mathematically wrong. And I think, you know, while you can't sort of do arithmetic on a lot of the issues that you know, I study now. The general intuition still holds in any disagreement. You're like the chance that you're more wrong than the other guy is approximately 50%. And when we start, you know, sort of when we have this intuitive like objection to coddling the wrong, it comes from the assumption that we know that we're right. And that's an assumption that, that I think should be questioned almost at every turn.

A (47:11)

Julia Minson of the Harvard Kennedy Schools Program on Negotiation is the author of how to Disagree Better. Thank you so much.

B (47:21)

Thank you.

A (47:28)

And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. We have a very good substack post, a Pesca profundities post. If you watch the Pit, you want to check that out. Mike pesca.substack.com Jeff Craig runs our video consulting CERN. Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Michelle Pesca, CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Improve G Peru Dupre and thanks for listening. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.