I Really Like This Strategy For Talking With People You Disagree With

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I have shared a lot over the years about strategies for talking with people we disagree with – you can check those previous posts out at The Best Ways To Talk With Someone Who Disagrees With You and The Best Posts & Articles On Building Influence & Creating Change.

I even have designed an AI chatbot designed to help people figure out these strategies.  In fact, folks have given me positive feedback about how much the chatbot assisted them in dealing with difficult family conversations.

Recently, The Washington Post published an article that I think offers useful advice in this area.  It’s based on recent research.

It’s headlined Defuse political tension in your family with one simple question and, I think, reflects somewhat similar thoughts to what I’ve previously shared at Leading With Inquiry, Not Judgment.

Here’s an excerpt from the Post article:

“One of the worst questions that you could ask people, politically, is … what they believe and why, and that’s what most people do,” Kashdan tells me. Instead of asking them why they feel that way about abortion or immigration, he says, tell them: “I’m totally hearing what you’re saying. I’m wondering, how would that work?”

It is the “how” question and not the “why” question, Kashdan continues, “that gets people having to really think through it and realize, ‘Shoot, I don’t even know what fracking is. Shoot, I don’t even know what DEI stands for. Shoot, I don’t know what Marxism or socialism is.’”

The “how” question shouldn’t be posed as a gotcha but with humility: I don’t know this stuff as well as you. How would it work? Once your interlocutors realize they don’t know, they become more open to new information and ideas. By abandoning the attempt to persuade Uncle Billy and Aunt Sally to change their minds, we actually make it more likely that they will.

This is consistent with many other recent studies of curiosity. “We found in a series of experiments that if you ask a question and then you justify that question with your curiosity, it almost doubles the amount of interaction with the question — whether you’re looking at Twitter data, Reddit or personal interactions,” says Spencer Harrison, a professor of organizational behavior at the European business school INSEAD.

Interesting stuff…..