How to Disagree Better | Julia Minson

**Emma** (0:07)
Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with professor and behavioral scientist, Julia Minson. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com/talks at Google.
Julia is a behavioral scientist and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research dives deep into conflict, communication, and how we make decisions. She specializes in the psychology of disagreement, how we handle opinions and judgments that look different from our own. Her groundbreaking work has been published in top academic journals and featured everywhere from CNN and Time to The Atlantic and The New York Times. Julia joins Google to talk about her book, How to Disagree Better, a guide to cutting out the drama and making real impact. She breaks down the one skill that the world's best mediators and negotiators all have in common, a genuine receptiveness to opposing views.
Here is Julia Minson, How to disagree better.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:29)
Thank you so much for being here today, especially because today is actually the launch day of your book.

**Julia Minson** (1:35)
Yeah, yeah, it's a big day. Thanks for having me here, guys. I really appreciate it. This is a really fun venue from which to start this new venture.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:44)
So a huge congratulations, and may your day be one filled with fewer, or at least more constructive, disagree events.
So Julia, I have a family member who I love, but disagree with often. Sound familiar? So this past Christmas, instead of gifting them an item, I decided to try something a little different.

**Julia Minson** (2:05)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:06)
I gifted them 30 minutes of my undivided attention.

**Julia Minson** (2:09)
Oh my God. What a gift.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:10)
And so I literally set a timer and sat there without saying a word for 30 minutes. Let them say what they wanted to. Timer went off. I said, your time is up.
The good news is we did not have an argument. But at the same time, I can't really say that I engage with their ideas either. Which is why this possibility of learning how to disagree better feels so compelling to me. And so to kick us off, I was curious if you can talk a bit about what are some of the psychological obstacles that get in the way of us doing this?

**Julia Minson** (2:43)
Yeah. So I love your example because it, I think, really showcases what a lot of people go through. We can all basically go through life without ever having one of these big political arguments. But family is different and the workplace is different. There are situations where you really care about people or you have to get something done with them. And so you need to disagree with them. And so the question is, well, how do you do it?
And your approach is really interesting because it's grounded in this recognition that a lot of people have, and there's a lot of kind of research support behind it, that when you make somebody feel heard, right, it's a wonderful experience. It's a gift, right? You treated it like a gift, and it is a gift. I have students that come back to me after I sign essentially that exercise in class, who say, oh my God, my mom wants me to thank you because it's the first time she's felt heard in years.
But here's kind of the trick. When you're listening to somebody, you're listening between your ears, right? Hearing literally is an internal cognitive process that happens inside your brain. And so the other person actually can't tell if you're listening or not. So if you are doing all the work of sitting there and not interrupting and working really hard on your self-control, it still doesn't necessarily feel like engagement to them because you could be meditating, right? You could be planning your next vacation. You could be solving a work problem in your head. They have no idea. And so a lot of what I talk about in my book is, how do we demonstrate our engagement behaviorally so that the other person can tell so that it actually has those benefits that we are hoping for?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:35)
Absolutely. And importantly, I did not tell this family member about your study that shows how easy it is to fake listening.

**Julia Minson** (4:42)
Right.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:45)
And what's also interesting is in addition to not showing this with our behavior, we also have this tendency to believe that if this other person only had the right information that we had, they would come to the same conclusion as us. This bias that you call naïve realism or established.