Getting Along Is Overrated
Episode Stats
Summary
In his new book, "Conflicted: How Provenly Propositions Lead to Better Outcomes," author Ian Leslie explores the surprising benefits of disagreement and conflict, and offers ways to approach conflict that'll make it more productive.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast a lot of people
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really dislike conflict and have a low opinion of it they're uncomfortable with disagreements
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at the office think there's no room for contention at church worry that fighting with their partner
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means the relationship is destined to dissolve and generally feel that heated arguments tear
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communities apart my guest today ian leslie used to be one of these conflict diverse people but as
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he discovered in researching his new book conflicted how productive disagreements lead to better
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outcomes conflict not only brings us together the lack of it he says just plain makes us stupider
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ian unpacks some of the myths around difficult conversations such as the idea they have to be
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done in a strictly rational unemotional way to be fruitful and he offers ways to approach conflict
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that'll make it more productive especially remembering to prioritize the relationship
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above all after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash conflict
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all right ian leslie welcome to the show thank you brett very good to be here so you got a book
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out called conflicted how productive disagreements lead to better outcomes i'm curious how did you
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take a deep dive into the nature of social conflict well you know i i think like a lot of things we can
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blame twitter for it i my last book was about curiosity and i was looking for i guess another
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aspect of human nature that i thought hadn't been fully investigated or not not in a really interesting
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way and as i was thinking about this i was both observing and then sometimes participating in
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really stupid toxic arguments on twitter kind of futile bickering and again i think that really is
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what brought it to mind i was thinking there's so much bad argument out there why is that and what can
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we do about it and i felt it particularly because i'm a pretty conflict averse person myself i actually
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try and stay out of conflict or direct disagreement or at least i did but the more i looked into it the
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more i thought and more i kind of researched this topic the more i came to think that actually
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the problem is not that we have an excess of disagreement it's actually the opposite the
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problem is people like me the the problem is that people like me see all this uh the kind of top of
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the iceberg that the the toxic stuff on social media and on on tv and we think wow this just confirms
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what i thought which is that disagreement and argument is really something uh to be avoided
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and i'll do anything if i can to do so but what happens when you do that is you make yourself a little
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bit stupider to be blunt um you know conflict is one well really the central way disagreement is kind of
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the central way in which we do our thinking collaboratively and it's also something as we'll talk
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about that that i think brings us together ultimately even if it puts stress on relationships
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in the meantime so we can't do without it we might pretend we might think we can we might try and avoid
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it but actually when we try and avoid it things just get worse yeah we'll dig into some of the
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benefits the surprising benefits of disagreement and conflict a lot of it's counterintuitive from
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popular advice out there but before we do i think people that do have this in general hunch that okay
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through disagreement you can do sort of the synthesis right where you can get a new idea
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and so that's why we we go into debates with that idea it never turns out that way because it becomes
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acrimonious like you said like twitter is a perfect example and so we think okay to make these debates
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more productive or these conflicts more productive we got to use some certain techniques and approaches
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so it's more rational what are some of these popular approaches that people typically take to make
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sort of corral debate and discussion and conflict and then why don't they usually work well i mean one
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of them is is just to as you indicated is to become extremely rational is to say look we're going to
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discuss this let's take all the emotion out of it let's model our discussion on a kind of oxford
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seminar or something where we just talk about the facts and we talk about reason step by step and that
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is really first of all it's kind of implausible i mean your emotions are nearly always invested in
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what you're the point you're arguing to some extent and as much as you try and suppress them they find
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their way out and people can can sense it right but secondly it's just in a way it's naive because
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actually your emotions help you to do thinking right we we think with our emotions as well as our faculty
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of reason and this has been demonstrated many times in different ways by cognitive scientists
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neuroscientists and so on and philosophers talked about this you know david hume said reason is the
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slave of the passions and and it should be because when you're emotional you you actually you drive
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yourself to come up with better answers and and better arguments so i i don't think that taking emotion
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of it is is a wise idea nor do i think you know falling back on a kind of very strict series of rules
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about going step by step you know taking one point at a time all this stuff can be useful in in certain
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limited contexts but for the most part i think you have to go with the grain of human nature rather than
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against it all right so this idea of you can take emotion out of a debate that will solve it that's
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naive and plausible and actually you you make the case and we can talk about this later as we go
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throughout our discussion it makes discussion or debate kind of impotent kind of limp and it takes
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some yeah yeah but another thing you you make a point you make about conflict that people often
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overlook conflict isn't often over facts it's usually about a relationship can you flesh that out a
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little bit more for us what you mean by that yeah so if you talk to communication scientists
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psychologists who kind of study communication conversation they they will tell you in in and i'm
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putting it in kind of very simple terms but there are there are fundamentally always two channels of
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communication that are open during any tense conversation actually any conversation but they
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become very apparent when there's some sort of conflict at stake one is the content channel and
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that's the kind of the content is the thing that we are ostensibly arguing about right right we're
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arguing about you know who should be running the country or for a home you know we're arguing about
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who should take the trash out whatever it is that's the content of the of the disagreement and then
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there's this other level which is actually not verbalized most of the time not articulated but it's the
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relationship level and that's kind of going on underneath right sort of submerged and that's about what i think
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about you and what you think about me do you like me do you respect me i'm thinking that and you're
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thinking that or if it's a group of people we're all thinking that to some extent right and until that
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relationship level is settled in some way then the the content level is going to be disrupted
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and it will kind of go off the rails and often when arguments disagreements go wrong
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and the participants are thinking wow this is going badly you know why is he being so crazy or why is he
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being irrational why is he not listening to me why is he so sullen why is she being so sullen whatever
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it is it's always because there's some unsettled dispute at that kind of invisible
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relationship level and you need to get to that first and this is where you know the smart
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disagreeer somebody who's skilled at productive disagreement productive conflict this is what they're good at
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they're very good at being attentive to that relationship level and working out ways to fix it
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when it needs fixing once it's fixed and you have a kind of mutually satisfactory relationship in the
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conversation then you can really get into the content level and have a really vigorous disagreement
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because nobody is feeling slighted put out ignored and so on so just bearing in mind those those two
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levels i think is really important yeah i mean i think people will see this in relationships like
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marital relationships when couples argue about something like you know cleaning out the egg pan
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after you finish it it's really not about the egg pan it's just about a mutual it's about respect
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basically i mean i would say more that it's about both and it's always about both at the same time
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and you kind of have to keep your eye on on both and when people have studied this
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you know i hate to be kind of to conform to or to confirm stereotypes but it is more often than not
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the men who are not paying attention to the relationship level of an argument and only focusing
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on the content so they'll they'll they're usually the ones thinking oh well i'm just being very rational
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and focusing on the thing that we're arguing about why is she getting so upset and and meanwhile
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the woman is actually paying attention to the relationship level and she's saying you know why
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is he being patronizing to me or why is he bossing me around or why is he not recognizing how much work
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i do in in this household you know there's some underlying thing going on here that she's attentive
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to and the man's not and you get that imbalance now one of the interesting things about that line of
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research is that it's not that men are hardwired you know to in inverted commas to only focus on the
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content level because actually when they're given an incentive to do so they actually give the man
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money to pay attention to it they can do it perfectly well it's just that they're not motivated to do it
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most of the time and you see that in other contexts too often the person who's on the kind of wrong end of
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a power imbalance is the person who's really paying attention to that more emotional relationship
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level and the person who's not is just kind of looking at the surface content level okay so i think two
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takeaways so far we've gotten is that when you're in a conflict or a discussion that's
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conflicted don't discount emotions don't discount the relationships you got to keep those two things
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in mind it's not just about facts and we'll talk about how some advice or i'm not going to call them
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techniques but principles that you can use to use your emotions in your relationships to make conflict
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more productive but before we do i think a lot of people have this feeling that you had looking at
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twitter i mean they look at it and they're like man this this is just terrible i get into these debates
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no one changes their mind everyone's angry this was not useful this was not a productive use of time
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and i think what you talked about you know that we don't always have a strong relationship or any
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relationship with the people we engage with online is part of the reason for that and then another
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thing you talk about in the book that i thought was really interesting and that i think can help us
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understand why online arguments are so unproductive is this idea of high context and low context and
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online communication is primarily low context can you can you flesh that out for us yeah it's a
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distinction from anthropology they talk about it in terms of countries and and sort of global cultures
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but actually you can apply it in in all sorts of ways but but let me explain explain it through that
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lens so they would say these are two types of communication culture a high context communication
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culture is an example would be china or japan usually kind of the asian countries are more high
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context and what that means is the con the social context in which you're in does a lot of the talking
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for you so a conversation around you know a boardroom table in japan you you would find compared to
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to a western boardroom there's there's less kind of verbalizing of people's opinions people are
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really kind of express themselves much closer according to the roles everybody has in the room
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you don't have to say much everything is said obliquely and you don't really kind of have direct
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disagreements that's seen as very kind of gauche and rude and disruptive and that can work because
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everybody understands the context everybody has a very kind of deep immersion in the the kind of
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relatively homogenous culture of chinese boardroom in a western boardroom or western office or any
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kind of like western context you have much lower context culture because you have you you know more
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diverse groups of people from different cultural backgrounds different belief systems different
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religions religions just different kind of like ways of behaving and speaking thrown together and
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everybody has to articulate what they're saying they have that they have to kind of spell things out
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right when you don't have all that context guiding you in terms of what you can say you actually have
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to be more kind of articulate more verbal and that leads to the situation where you've got everybody
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speaking their minds right and when everybody's speaking their minds you're bound to have more
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clashes of opinion and by the way you know nobody's saying high context is better than low context or vice
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versa that's completely beside the point these are just two ways of communicating but the the low context
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way will give rise to more disagreements because you've got yeah as i say lots of people speaking
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their minds and lots of people kind of talking across purposes because they have kind of different ways
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of understanding cultural norms now this is a long-term trend right as societies become more diverse and
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people move to cities and all sorts of different people from different backgrounds meet each other at work
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and so on but it's been accelerated and amplified by the internet because if you think about it
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the internet and social media is like the ultimate low context culture you're just you're engaging with
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and talking to and seeing people you have no idea who they are and all you have is to go on is these words
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in a box right you have no kind of sense of uh it's very hard to intuitively understand where people are
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coming from a lot of the time and so no wonder you have this all these kind of disagreements there's just so
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much kind of you know dry tinder there for things to explode into into toxic conflict yeah with low context
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online people are typically just responding to the most recent thing yeah and that just causes these flame wars
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because like they're ignoring or they don't have they're not privy to all the other communication like the
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unspoken norms that might be in that online social group i think people see this like on on reddits or like
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you know some internet forms where there might be a community there where people have been together
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talking to each other for a long time so they kind of they know each other they have some sort of
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unspoken ground rules yeah and then a new person comes in yeah and that new person that you typically
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don't go through the archives and see what everyone's been talking about you just throw something out
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there and it's typically often inflammatory or it breaks this unspoken rule and everyone just gets upset
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by it and then the person who did the initial bomb throwing is like well i don't know what the
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problem is i just want to talk about this and exactly and it's because it's low context like
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there's it's a low context communication medium exactly and so you know what that means is well
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first of all it means social media is just always going to be hard for productive conflict right i don't
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think there's a kind of answer to that i just think in a sense my art my suggestion to a lot of people
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is don't get into too many conflicts on social media or over email whatever it is or
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on slack you know try where you can to try and have your disagreements in person or over video
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where you can get more kind of a richer sense of of the relationship channel right your richer sense
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of the other person's background and context or you know where you are encountering people who are from
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a different kind of micro culture it doesn't have to be a completely different culture but as you say
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it can be just somebody coming into it to a forum where people have established norms and not
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understanding them help them understand it quickly like get them up to speed on the rules don't just blame
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them for being rude or stupid and so on just say look this is this is how we do things here
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quickly try and establish some context where there is none we're going to take a quick break for your
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word from our sponsors and now back to the show okay so you made this point you know when people
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see conflict people who are conflict avoidant they're like i just don't i want to opt out i'm just
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going to avoid conflict as much as possible but as you said earlier when you do that you miss out you
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become stupider and then there's also you miss out on strengthening relationship through conflict
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let's talk about this idea that conflict can actually strengthen relationships because this
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seems counterintuitive it's like well conflict's the thing that separates people that's why people
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get divorced all right it's conflict about an issue so how can conflict bring people closer
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together it is counterintuitive and it's it kind of goes counter to our feelings about things
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because disagreement direct disagreement with people is a little bit stressful it does put stress
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on the relationship but i think about it in terms of exercise right i mean i i am not necessarily
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enjoying myself when i go to the gym and i can feel uncomfortable and and and sometimes i'm in pain
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but i i go back every week whatever it is because i know that actually the muscles grow back stronger
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and and ultimately and it's same same with relationships they need some kind of stress
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in order to grow back stronger there's a really interesting line of research from scientists who
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study marital relationships or you know long-term couples where and and and in this field it used
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to be thought the norm was that couples who argue a lot are the couples who who split up because
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they'd look to couples who split up and they said did you argue a lot and they said yes i mean actually
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and they started doing more kind of sophisticated experiments of this they got a different story
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and what they do is just briefly to explain you know the model of this research is they'll they'll
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get couples into the lab and they'll say you know can you just discuss an issue of contention a long
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running bone of contention in your relationship um we'll leave the room leave the camera on and you
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two just talk about it and actually couples usually get into it pretty pretty quickly and and start
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talking and kind of forget that the camera's on and and then they track the progress of that
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relationship over the coming weeks months and years so these are kind of longitudinal studies
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and what they have found this has really only become apparent over the last sort of 10 years
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or so is that the couples who are quicker to rise to argument and and have quite often quite kind
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of heated back and forth are the ones who are more likely to stay together over the long term
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and to be happier and to have solved the the problems that they are discussing so number one
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you know i just think that's hilarious and and and great you know some of my favorite couples are
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are the ones who just really have no hesitation in kind of getting into it and having a big row but
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still love each other right i i think that's kind of really interesting but also you know begs the
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question what what is that what's going on there and when i asked one of the psychologists who run
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these studies runs these studies about that she said conflict is information and what she meant by
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that was when you're in an argument you're really learning about what the other person really thinks
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and really feels right you're getting a little glimpse into their soul the veil of politeness or
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just passivity is dropped and you say oh right wow i didn't realize you cared about that so much or
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that's that's what you think is it my goodness right and in the moment it can be quite uncomfortable
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and stressful but you're updating your model of your partner and it's a really important thing to do
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because if you don't do that you have this stick with this model of your head of what your partner
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is like you think you know them really well you know them better than they know themselves
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five ten years down the line turns out they're completely different from the person you had in
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your head and the relationship comes to an end so arguments and conflict are giving you information
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about what your partner is thinking and feeling they're keeping you up to date on on their emotions
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and ultimately bringing you closer together and that can showcase like how not arguing can cause
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relationships to go south because you have all those emotions kind of seething beneath the surface
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and there's a lot of resentment and then there might express itself in passive aggressiveness
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yeah i mean so the psychologists and you know organizational psychologists look at this as
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well right people who study workplaces and so on that they will talk about how different kinds of
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aggression are productive in different ways you know depending on direct aggression versus indirect
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conflict and so on the one form of conflict that nobody's found any benefits what for whatsoever
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is passive aggression right passive aggression comes to no good it's corrosive and it's what
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happens when disagreements and conflict aren't aired right the the disagreement the issue of contention
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does not disappear it does not dissolve into the ether it is merely swept under the carpet it goes
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underground and it and it kind of corrodes the the basis of of the relationship and whether it's
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in a marriage or or in a workplace you you should really be trying to to minimize that and that
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means having your getting used to having your disagreements out in the open and not feeling like
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it is actually a huge terrible high stakes dramatic thing it's just the way we are it's the way we do
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things and i think a key to making these like having a row with some your spouse or a kid or someone at
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work is as long i think it's gotman as long as you avoid contempt like that will be fine because
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as soon as you go into like i think you're little i think you're less than what you think you are i'm
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going to call you names that's not going anywhere but if you can passionately argue without going
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there it'll be productive yeah exactly and again it's that thing of you know trying to pay attention
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to both things at once which is hard when when you're emotional and you're getting upset about
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something but just keeping one part of your brain which is like what's going on with the
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underlying relationship here are there things that i need him or her to know about what's going on
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okay well let's let's try and air those but am i kind of pressing in areas that's just going to make
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them feel kind of small or to make them feel crushed that's that's not that's not good and that's you
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know that's not going to lead to a productive disagreement and it's not good for the relationship
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so my advice is not to you know just have get it all out there and and and scream and have terrible
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arguments it's more kind of you know try and secure the the good basis on which you can have
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a good relationship basis for you to have arguments that kind of stick to the thing that you're meant
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to be talking about all right so conflict can bring us together because it's a medium through
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which we can gain more information about the person yeah i mean another a more blunt way of putting
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it is it's how you learn the truth about the other person right it's when you speak truths to
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each other well another benefit of conflict is it makes us smarter and this can this again this is
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counterintuitive because i think a lot of people they get in debates online like i'm dumber what was
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that that's from billy madison like we're all dumber from experiencing this uh conversation but you make
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this in counterintuitive case that even unreasonable unreasonable positions we take in a debate actually
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can make us smarter how does that happen yeah so it's often said that our way the problem with
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disagreement is that we're we all have confirmation bias you know and we're all just motivated to make
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the argument that we're making and and again it kind of goes back to this thing of and it just gets
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emotional and nobody's kind of thinking rationally there's a grain of truth in that but it's not the
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whole story because if you think about it if you are really strongly motivated to make a case there
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was some emotional motivation for you to to make an argument to a larger extent you're going to make a
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better argument because you're going to be working harder to think of of more reasons why you're
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right to to pull up or to find information that that supports your case and to look for weaknesses in
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the other person's argument right emotion is is the great motivator right and when we're working hard
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at something we're more likely to be to be good at it so there is some benefit to to confirmation bias to
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this feeling that i want to make this case because it's my case you know if you think about a
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disagreement where the party's involved as soon as they hear a good counterpoint they go okay yeah
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yeah right you're probably right what happens then okay not much i mean the the disagreement effectively
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comes to an end because everyone's just too kind of calm and rational and nice and goes yeah yeah
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you probably got a point really good productive kind of insightful disagreements come from people who tend
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to be quite vigorously engaged in in in what they're arguing who have some kind of incentive to really
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to really make the case and to take it maybe a little bit too far sometimes now of course if you take it
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too far and you never back down you're completely inflexible that's not good either so but so we have to
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kind of be somewhere in the middle here you have to kind of ride your biases learn to ride them you know
00:25:21.480
give them kind of some free reign um but don't let them control you but but don't shy away from from
00:25:28.140
you know having your heart in in the disagreement as well as your head yeah and you use a socratic
00:25:32.920
dialogue as a great example of people being unreasonable but allows you to get to a truth
00:25:38.020
right you know socrates often engaged with these interlocutors who were just like you could tell they
00:25:42.520
were they were just they were digging in their heels but through that process you're able to get
00:25:47.580
closer to you know trying to figure out what justice is that's right and socrates was actually
00:25:53.160
good at he he sort of underrated as an emotionally intelligent interlocutor you know he was good at
00:26:00.080
kind of managing his interlocutors responses you look at the dialogues there are moments where he is
00:26:04.600
effectively saying hey you know there's no you shouldn't get angry when i say this but let me put it
00:26:09.800
this way and he's kind of calming them down because even in athens at the time argument was seen as this
00:26:15.920
kind of zero-sum game of persuasion where you win or i win i persuade you to do something or you
00:26:21.740
persuade me to do something socrates was very innovative when he came along and said hey look
00:26:26.500
it doesn't have to be like that we we can all be in this as a collaborative endeavor what we're trying
00:26:30.980
to get at here is truth right so it doesn't matter if i'm right what matters is that we are right as a
00:26:37.460
group and the best way to get to truth is in discussion right so socrates understood something that i think
00:26:43.380
we've lost sight of to a certain extent which is that intelligence is collaborative it's it's
00:26:49.400
interactive we do our best thinking with other people even when we're thinking by ourselves
00:26:55.120
we we do our thinking often because we've internalized other voices you know we've been
00:26:59.820
reading or talking to people that disagree with us and now we kind of how we play out the argument
00:27:03.680
in our mind we put so much emphasis especially recently with the advent of neuroscience and fmri
00:27:09.960
scanners put so much emphasis on the individual brain what's going on in the brain what's the brain
00:27:15.540
doing that we forget that actually the process of reasoning and thinking debate is a social one
00:27:21.960
well i think you just brought another point this idea that with the the sophists in athens who their
00:27:26.800
whole their whole approach to this debate was someone has to win winner take all yeah i think a lot
00:27:32.220
of people today they have that approach to a conflict like there has to be a winner
00:27:35.540
and so with that mindset our typical approach to debate is on on persuasion like we read books
00:27:42.020
on persuasion yeah i mean how we could be more persuasive so we can show that this guy is wrong
00:27:46.740
i mean this is exactly like the the sophists like they use rhetoric right to to win arguments and
00:27:52.400
persuade people and then socrates comes along is that it doesn't have to be that way like we don't
00:27:56.700
have to we don't have to have debate or discussion like that there has doesn't have to be a winner
00:28:00.920
we can just have this conversation this conflict and hopefully get a little bit closer to the truth
00:28:06.260
so i guess i mean one takeaway too is just be more like socrates and less like the sophists
00:28:10.300
yeah absolutely and you know that's why he didn't write anything down you know
00:28:16.360
obviously writing has been a net boon for us as a civilization but when he was around it was
00:28:22.840
relatively new technology it was like you know i don't know the iphone or something like that you
00:28:28.320
know you kind of take it or leave it and he he didn't like it and the reason he didn't like it
00:28:32.880
is that it couldn't talk back to him you know you write something down on a page and it just kind of
00:28:37.160
sits there he really liked the idea that when you put a proposition forward somebody comes back and
00:28:41.900
tries to knock it down and you you say well yeah i disagree but i see i see your point here and you
00:28:47.080
move the conversation on and the kind of the thing kind of unfolds um but yeah he had to
00:28:52.580
really he was really introducing the whole idea of an intellectual inquiry to to to western
00:28:57.720
civilization that's what made him such a kind of great figure up until then as you say the process
00:29:03.020
of reasoning and debate was really about who wins who's going to come off best here in this battle
00:29:08.260
of wits and socrates his point was no actually we can use our reasoning for this other thing which
00:29:14.820
is getting to the to the truth together acting collaboratively all right so knowing that conflict
00:29:21.420
there's an emotional element that we i mean if we try to take it away that's probably futile
00:29:26.380
but it also we also make our debate less potent and then also knowing that conflict is about
00:29:32.200
relationships i want to talk about some of the the advice that you picked up based on research and
00:29:36.480
talking to experts on how you can have more productive conflict by taking these two factors
00:29:41.520
in mind so this idea in order to have a productive conflict with somebody you have to have this
00:29:46.020
relationship with trust where you can vigorously argue and disagree without harming the relationship
00:29:52.260
like how do you establish that trust and how do you allow how do you prevent the the debate from
00:29:58.280
harming the relationship in the process yeah so there's many different answers to that many
00:30:04.260
different kind of ways of thinking about it i talk about this principle of first connect often the
00:30:11.660
reason that a debate or disagreement goes wrong is that we get to the disagreement too quickly we kind
00:30:17.680
of go directly at it before we've really settled the relationship and you kind of got to do that
00:30:24.160
first before you get in there as you know for the book i talked to people who have really tough
00:30:32.140
conversations under very extreme conditions so i talked to hostage negotiators and terrorist
00:30:39.100
interrogators and divorce mediators therapists all sorts of things and this you know they all do it in
00:30:47.200
in different ways but this was the theme of the people who were really skilled at those jobs
00:30:51.940
what they're really skilled at is settling the relationship level before you get into
00:30:57.860
the really tough part so a hostage negotiator does not pick up the phone and say right how are we
00:31:03.780
going to get you down from this roof or how are we going to get the hostages out of this situation
00:31:08.800
they are trained the good ones that spend a few minutes going okay look i just want to say
00:31:14.640
thanks for for doing such a good job here you've stayed calm and we all appreciate that you know
00:31:20.460
you have the right intentions you know and whatever they can do to settle that person down to make them
00:31:28.620
feel a little bit more secure so in the relationship that they have with you that's going to be good for
00:31:35.360
when you get into the actual negotiation right but people are not going to be able to have a good
00:31:41.160
disagreement with you if they're feeling insecure threatened that's when they shut down or they get
00:31:45.760
really really aggressive same with interrogators you know i know you've had lawrence allison on the
00:31:50.680
show he's a brilliant academic who trains terrorist interrogators in britain and around the world
00:31:57.440
and one of the things he says is that bad interrogators are the ones who walk into the room and say
00:32:03.120
right you need to tell me what you know right that's that's going to shut the person down right
00:32:07.940
in a sense you're playing into their hands that they're prepared for that situation they just say
00:32:12.180
okay well i'm not going to say anything they're really skillful interrogators make a big deal out
00:32:17.720
of the the fact that you don't have to speak you know depends what your legal regime is but but you
00:32:23.300
know they'll say you have the right not to say anything you have the right to a lawyer and the fact
00:32:27.900
is i can't tell you what to do they can't tell you what nobody here can tell you what to do
00:32:32.700
it's up to you but listen i really want to hear your story because i'm really interested
00:32:37.280
and you have to be genuinely interested by the way you can't fake it but you know nine times out
00:32:43.240
of ten when they do that the person opens up these hardened terrorists who've been trained for this kind
00:32:49.160
of situation they really want to tell their story and and and your job is to first of all establish a
00:32:55.880
relationship with trust and second of all let them feel like it's their choice to speak and once you do
00:33:01.900
that you know people will open up so it's a kind of long answer to your question but there's several
00:33:07.400
different things going on here yeah i think lauren c calls it you know when you in a conflicted debate
00:33:12.260
or discussion with somebody you have to let go of the rope and not not try to control the person what
00:33:17.440
they think or feel yeah so you know probably the most frequent problem with a disagreement is that
00:33:23.500
it turns into a power struggle of some kind whether an overt one or a covert one well people are kind of
00:33:29.960
trying to establish their dominance obviously or subtly in the conversation and if you wanted to
00:33:37.380
go well you've got to do everything you can to stop that from from happening so as soon as you feel
00:33:42.320
the rope you know tauten into a kind of tug of war lawrence's suggestion is you know let go of it
00:33:50.280
and often terrorists or criminals who are being interrogated and who are used to it and are prepared
00:33:55.420
for it they will try and turn it into a tug of war so they'll do kind of disruptive things you know
00:34:00.640
their feet on the desk and and your instinct as an interrogator as a police officer or whatever is to
00:34:05.760
say get your feet off the desk no i don't want to get your feet off the desk no i don't want to
00:34:09.880
and it's just a you know it's a futile pointless diversion from the thing that you're meant to be doing
00:34:16.400
and lawrence's suggestion in that type of situation is yeah if you want your feet on the desk that's fine
00:34:21.200
well another point that lawrence makes is that even when someone is saying something that you
00:34:26.360
disagree with strongly or it just doesn't make sense to you instead of just dismissing them right
00:34:31.800
away what you want to do is approach them with a kind of intellectual empathy like where you take a
00:34:37.940
step back and try to figure out what's going on in their head and like why they care about something
00:34:44.200
the way they do and why they think you know why they're thinking the way they're thinking because
00:34:48.660
even when someone's position seems just irrational on the face if you listen to them there is sort of
00:34:55.920
a rationality going on to what they're thinking exactly right and and you know you see this with
00:35:02.680
your with your kids actually you know so you you can be very emotional about something and it seems
00:35:07.240
completely trivial to you and your temptation is to say oh don't be so stupid why would you get upset
00:35:13.620
about that thing often there's some deeper reason that they're getting upset about it it's connected
00:35:18.800
to some thing they really do feel deeply about that that does make sense but you can only get there by
00:35:25.140
by taking their initial point of view kind of seriously saying yeah tell well i can see you're
00:35:29.740
really upset about that and you know i want to hear more about it because as you say that the thing
00:35:35.180
that appears irrational might conceal some sort of deeper rational objection deeper disagreement that
00:35:41.700
actually kind of you know is interesting and is worth um discussing but you can only get there if
00:35:46.460
you are genuinely interested in and and why that person is thinking like that and feeling like that
00:35:51.160
and then when you do that you're establishing that trust and it opens up the person to your point of
00:35:56.800
view possibly yeah absolutely absolutely um so it becomes a kind of virtuous cycle so yeah i i think when
00:36:04.200
you're when you're really stuck in a disagreement you think well how can we even find any common ground here
00:36:09.240
then just switching into curiosity mode and saying you know okay i i can at least be interested in how
00:36:14.140
they got there is it it can get you into that that better kind of virtuous cycle yeah it sounds like
00:36:19.860
what you're doing is making the communication more high context right you're you're making unspoken
00:36:24.340
things explicit that's a great way of putting it and you know i i talked about high context cultures
00:36:30.840
and low context cultures in terms of china versus the u.s the west versus the east but look
00:36:36.600
every every conversation is a little culture you know we you and me or we have a little microculture
00:36:43.100
between us you know an agreed and unspoken kind of background set of norms about you know what what
00:36:48.980
what's acceptable and what's not what's interesting and what's not interesting and so your job in a
00:36:53.680
conversation that's a difficult conversation i think is is to try and help the other person understand
00:36:58.680
your culture and to try and understand their culture you know and it doesn't have to just mean
00:37:02.720
you know they're a christian and i'm a muslim or whatever it just means how's this person's well
00:37:07.040
how are they used to thinking and talking and how is it different from me and how can we kind
00:37:11.600
of move a little closer together there another thing you talk about in the book is establishing
00:37:16.780
boundaries for a conflict that make them more productive and this isn't you know using robert's
00:37:22.240
rules of order right but it is sort of having like a loose framework what can that framework
00:37:27.860
look like and how do you get people to agree on the the boundaries of a discussion or a conflict
00:37:33.160
well you know i i think that the the point about setting boundaries is that they can be very very
00:37:42.080
simple in fact one of the most simple ones is just no hostility so actually here's a here's a kind
00:37:50.560
of good real world example um you mentioned reddit earlier there's a great kind of subreddit called
00:37:56.120
change my view set up a few years ago and i and i talk about it in the book the point to change my
00:38:01.840
view is yeah you it's what it says on the tin really you go along and you say look here's a thing
00:38:07.640
something i've been thinking about here is my view on you know feminism whatever it is what what do
00:38:14.140
you think and i and i'm willing to be talked out of it and amazingly this this seemingly kind of
00:38:19.580
like this thing which is so antithetical to the spirit of social media has actually been very
00:38:23.680
successful and been hundreds of thousands of users and they just have a few very simple rules and then
00:38:29.240
they kind of closely monitor they have a set of quite a few moderators who monitor the debates make
00:38:33.980
sure these rules are followed and they also incentivize the people who follow them they kind
00:38:37.720
of give them badges so they're kind of gamifying it as well but the rules are very simple and and one
00:38:42.700
of them is you know just don't be hostile don't basically don't be a dick right you'd be amazed how far
00:38:47.780
that one goes another one is don't just repeat the same arguments over and over again right if if
00:38:55.060
somebody has come back with a counterpoint you have to address that counterpoint just kind of don't stick
00:38:58.960
to to where you are and if you do that you're you're breaking the rules and just being explicit about the
00:39:05.420
rules up top is something we just don't do very much you do it if you can do it at work right it
00:39:12.440
actually can go a long way say at work you know in this workplace we really value open disagreement
00:39:17.460
so we want people to do it a and b here's a few guidelines rules whatever you want to call them
00:39:23.500
to make it go better and this is this is our this is how we do things at our company you know hardly
00:39:28.820
ever happens but um but you know sometimes really good companies like netflix that that's how that's
00:39:34.560
how they operate right they put a great emphasis on on open disagreement and they set those principles
00:39:39.140
out very clearly and it goes a long way well we've talked about some some techniques i don't like
00:39:44.820
calling them techniques they're principles i'm gonna i like i like principles a little better
00:39:47.900
because i think technique is too life hacky yeah i agree and a discussion or debate is really fluid
00:39:53.020
and complex but like what's one thing that people can start doing today to have more productive
00:39:58.040
conflict is there like one thing that you found in all your research that provides a real big bang for
00:40:02.500
your buck well i i think as a kind of general the the as you say right there wasn't like a hack
00:40:09.120
that you can apply to everywhere there are principles and i think probably the most important
00:40:12.780
principle is to try and make the other person feel good about agreeing with you you know and actually
00:40:23.000
you know lower the stakes for them in terms of of coming around to your point of view and that
00:40:28.240
ultimately that means making them feel secure making them feel respected making them sure you know
00:40:33.620
making sure that they feel that you like them and so on if they don't feel any of those things
00:40:38.540
they are never going to have a productive disagreement with you so kind of keep your eye
00:40:45.360
on how the other person is feeling the more relaxed more comfortable in themselves they're feeling
00:40:49.000
that the more likely they are to get into a good disagreement with you well ian this has been a
00:40:54.520
great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about the book in your work
00:40:57.540
sure i mean so the book is called conflicted so you can just google my name and conflicted it'll come
00:41:02.920
up go to my website which is ian-leslie.com and i'm on twitter for my sins at mr ian leslie so you
00:41:13.840
can come and see me there and watch me failing to follow any of the principles that i've just laid
00:41:18.380
out and getting into terrible disagreements online well ian thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:41:22.840
thank you so much brett really enjoyed it my guest today was ian leslie he's the author of the book
00:41:28.140
conflicted it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information
00:41:31.840
about his work at his website ian-leslie.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash conflict
00:41:37.480
where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:41:40.100
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:41:51.380
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00:41:55.040
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00:42:22.180
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00:42:28.120
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