The psychology of disagreement with Julia Minson

- [Narrator] Welcome to the Wiener Conference Call series. These one hour on the record phone calls feature leading experts from Harvard Kennedy School, who answer your questions on public policy and current events. Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener's role in proposing and supporting this series as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy school.

Mari Megias:

Good day everyone, I am Mari Megias, of the office of alumni relations and resource development at Harvard Kennedy school. And I'm very pleased to welcome you to this on the record Wiener Conference Call, which is kindly sustained by Dr. Malcolm Wiener, who supports the Kennedy school in this and many other ways. Today, we are joined by Julia Minson, who is associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy school. A decision scientist whose research explores conflict negotiations and judgements. Professor Minson explores how people engage with opinions, judgements, and decisions that are different from their own and how psychological biases prevent people from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. Given the current challenges in the world we're so fortunate that she has agreed to share her thoughts today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends. Professor Minson.

Julia Minson:

Thank you very much for that introduction Mari. I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully we will have good, good technological magic here. Alright, so I'm going to hope that everyone can can see where I'm going here. It's a real pleasure and privilege to be here and to be able to share this work with everyone. Thank you to Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener for making this work possible and giving us this opportunity to engage with each other even during this very, very unusual time, when it's hard to have thoughtful meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. So as Mari mentioned, I am a decision scientist and the work I want to share with you today really gets at one of the most fundamental challenges I think facing most democracies right now, which is how do we get people who have very different attitudes, very different beliefs, and even sort of fundamentally different perceptions of what's true and what's false to have thoughtful, engaged conversations about their perspectives? Of course, we see conflict all around us, right? We have conflict with our friends. We have conflict with our significant others, there's conflict in the workplace. And then it quite often spills out into sort of very public sphere. So this is Google employees protesting and impacts policy in ways that really can be dramatically, dramatically life changing. So for the last, goodness, 10, 12 years, my students and I have been really trying to understand a psychological construct that we call receptiveness to opposing views. So we define receptiveness as the willingness to access, consider, and evaluate supporting and opposing views in a relatively impartial manner. And this is sort of a dense academic, you know, definition, but it's really worth thinking about for a second. Because it gets at the heart of what does it take to engage with somebody else's perspective? Well, first you have to access it, right? You have to hear it or you have to read it or you have to see something on TV, then you have to consider it. You have to give it some mental space instead of just throwing it out because you're absolutely sure that it's invalid. And then you have to give it some final evaluation in terms of is this good, is this bad? Is this true, is this false? How do I feel about it now that I have spent some time thinking about it? One thing that I want you to notice about this definition is it doesn't have any mention of sort of compromise or attitude change in it. So part of what we argue in our work is that people can be receptive. People can think very hard about what the other side has to say, and they don't need to change their views at the end. So thoughtful people who have evaluated evidence on both sides can say look, I understand where you're coming from, but either I have more evidence from my perspective, or my perspective is more relevant to the current situation we're facing or our predictions about the future are different and I believe that my predictions are more likely to be true. And so we can agree to disagree, but still believe that the other side has sort of valid points that they're offering. Part of what we have done in our work is develop a very simple measure of receptiveness. So this is an 18 item questionnaire. I'm showing you six items from it. You see that people look at statements and rate them on the seven point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Takes about five minutes to fill out all 18 items. And so we can get a good measure of how receptive a given individual is in terms of how they process information. Because we now have a definition and we have a measure we can see what behaviors receptiveness predict in the world and what we find is indeed people who are more receptive on the scale are more likely to expose themselves to information on both sides. So for example in a study, if we give liberal and conservative study participants a choice of which senators they would like to learn more about, whose platform they want to read, people very very consistently go to their own side, which is ironic and unproductive because of course most people already have information about their own side. However people who are more receptive are more willing to consult their own side, as well as the other side. We also know that if we put more or less receptive people in front of information, in other words, we're not giving them a chance to choose, but we're saying, watch this video, people who are more receptive are better able to maintain attentional focus on information that they agree with versus disagree with. In other words they don't space out just because they don't like what they're hearing. And finally when people evaluate arguments, again, we find that receptive people evaluate arguments in a more even handed manner. We also know that people's level of receptiveness is somewhat stable over time. We can measure it sort of several months later and get similar scores. And we know that it predicts behavior outside of the psychological laboratory. So for example, in 2016, right after the election, we measured the level of receptiveness of a large group of registered voters and we found that liberal voters who were more receptive at the time of the election were also more willing to watch President Trump's inaugural address several months later. We are trying to sort of get this information out into the world. And one of the ways we're doing that is we created a website. So everyone here can go and measure their own level of receptiveness, it's receptiveness.net. It looks like this, and there's a button there that says take the quiz and you can take the quiz and you can see how receptive you are. And part of what we built into it is how receptive are you relative to other people of your gender, of your age group, of your level of education? So we have sort of an underlying database where we can rank your receptiveness relative to people with similar characteristics and you can get the feedback. We have also been using this website in classes and we're starting to use it in executive education so that we can give people sort of real-time feedback about themselves and talk about how does sort of this style of interacting with information really impact their day-to-day lives. Then, let's talk about what you know we're interested in with receptiveness is not just how people process information, but how do they really engage with conflict right? Information processing is something that happens inside your own head, but most conflict involves two people or more interacting with each other. And so what we wanted to know was is receptiveness impactful in terms of face-to-face conflict outcomes? And so I want to show you a little bit of data that we collected actually in the course of Harvard Kennedy School executive education. And this was one of the things that I love about the school is sort of the ability to work with top researchers and also work with top policy practitioners and sometimes have those practitioners be part of the research. So this was a group of state and local government leaders. And we did a study over the course of two days where on the first day we gave them the questionnaire and measured their level of receptiveness. And then we asked them for their views on a variety of extremely controversial political and social issues. And then on day two we paired them up with each other based on disagreement. So basically we knew people's attitudes and we paired them such that you were always talking to somebody you strongly disagree with. And then we put them into an interaction where they could talk over chat while maintaining their privacy and anonymity, but they knew they were talking to somebody they disagreed with and they had about 20 minutes to discuss sort of a hot button policy topic. What they then did is they rated how receptive they felt during that conversation and how receptive they thought their partner was during that conversation. They then also told us what professional intentions they had towards this person. Remember they were all here for an executive education session. So we asked them sort of how much would you want to be on a work team with this person? Do you think they have good professional judgment? Do you, do you trust them? And so here is what we find. So a couple of different things. Here we take on the y-axis these questions about how, you know, what are your intentions towards this person professionally, right? So trust, wanting to be on the same team, thinking they have good judgment, and you see that that is strongly and positively related to how receptive you believe your partner to be. So in other words when I think my counterpart is receptive, even though we disagree on important topics that both of us know a lot about because we're both senior folks in state and local government, that belief about receptiveness makes a big difference in my willingness to interact in the future. And this is sort of holding constant, the actual level of disagreement and holding constant the fact that at the end of these conversations, nobody actually changed their mind on policy. So it wasn't that people were persuaded, it's that there's a signal that comes across that makes people think that their counterpart is sort of willing to engage with their point of view. But this data also led to a fairly substantial mystery, which was twofold. One, when people say, well you know, my partner seems receptive, we actually have no idea what they're reacting to, right? This is an anonymous chat. So they're not reacting to body language. They must be reacting to words, but we don't really know what words signal receptiveness. And secondly, what we saw was that there was a very low correlation between how receptive people thought they were being and how receptive their partners thought they were being. So somewhere along the way the signal got broken, right? I'm thinking I'm being very receptive and my partner doesn't see it that way at all, or vice versa. So basically to untangle all of this, we turn to sort of the, you know, modern tools of natural language processing. So there's a lot of computational linguistics work being done at the Kennedy School and across Harvard where people are really leveraging the power of algorithms to understand a very, very complex multidimensional space, such as a language. And so first here's sort of how this works, right? For those of you who don't do natural language processing for a living, but this is kind of the high level. So the first thing we did is we collected texts of conversations between two people who disagree, right? So this is now hundreds of conversations from online participants. The second step is we get another very large group of participants and we asked them to read the transcripts of the conversations in step one and to evaluate the receptiveness of the person they themselves disagree with right? So we're essentially saying how receptive does this person sound to other humans that happen to disagree with that person? And then in step three we train a machine learning model to identify features of language that are positively correlated with these receptiveness ratings right? So we basically asked the algorithm to pick out which words and phrases are highly correlated with receptiveness ratings in staff here. This all sounds super abstract. And I'm going to give you all a concrete example okay? So we're gonna pretend that we are in our city. So imagine you're the algorithm and I'm going to show you two pieces of text from this site. So there's a, there's a questions in the chat about whether the conversations were written or oral, that conversations were written. So we're only looking at language, we're not looking at facial expressions or eye contact or any of those other good things. So I'm going to show you two pieces of stats from the study that are both responding to the same prompt. And the prompt has to do with confrontations between police and minority suspects. And you will see that these two responses feel quite different. And what I'm going to ask you to do is use the chat function and in the chat, tell me whether you think the first bit of text is more receptive or is the second bit of text more receptive. So put a one in the chat if you think the first bit of text is more receptive and put a two in the chat if you think it's the second one. Starting to see some votes, give it a second to get, ah, now they're coming in fast. Okay. So you folks can see from the chat this is a very, of course typical level of consensus in part because I cherry picked the data. So the first response you saw is what most people believe to be more receptive. And in fact that is one of the most receptive pieces of texts in response to this particular prompt in our dataset. The second response is one of our least receptive responses. And so what you see here right is that we can all sort of agree on it. We get that the first one is more receptive than the second one. The trouble is it's really really hard to pinpoint what exactly is the thing that makes us feel that way, right? And that is what the algorithm is doing for us. So what the algorithm does is it produces essentially a set of linguistic features and gives us an account of which features are more prominent in texts that's considered less receptive by actual humans versus which features are more prominent in texts that's considered more receptive. So for our full data set, we have all these features, but the two pieces of text that you saw actually differ along these five. So what we see in these pieces of text is that the less receptive piece of text has more negation. It has more words that convey reasoning. So therefore, however, although, words the academics like to use to sound smart, but that actually sound very condescending in the real world. And a very important driver of receptiveness is acknowledgement and so I'm seeing that hypothesis in the chat. I understand is one example of acknowledgement, but also are things like I hear you, I think you're saying that, you just mentioned X, Y, Z. Right, so there's a lot of ways to capture acknowledgement and language and the algorithm basically counts all of them up. And then expressions of agreement right? So agreeing on some things even if we largely disagree about the larger issue. So if we go back to our two statements, here's what the algorithm picks out. So I understand this acknowledgement, probably is what we call hedging, right? So it's making your speech a little bit less dogmatic and certain, and I can also see is agreement. I agree as obviously agreement, but possibly sometimes is again hedging. And then if you look at the unreceptive response, you have do not and can't, which are negations. And therefore because and because which are reasoning words that as I mentioned in this kind of context tend to sound sort of very condescending. So essentially what we have here is what we've come to call conversational receptiveness, a set of very specific words and phrases that make people feel heard during active disagreement. Notice that those pieces of the speech, both of them were a person arguing for their own point of view, right? So it's not a person sort of politely listening and saying, well, you know, I understand where you're coming from and tell me more, right? It's a person arguing and expressing themselves, but in a way that is seen sort of more positively. So we know that a conversational receptionist can be measured and we know that it's strongly predicts conflict outcomes. So if people who are more receptive are rated as better partners for future interaction, opponents want to work with them. They want to negotiate with them. They want to have them on their teams. They find the conversation more pleasant and more civil. We also know that the algorithm measure has high consensus with human raters. And we've now done this across a sort of variety of datasets. Importantly, an algorithm can be applied to large bodies of tests, right? So now if we have a data set where we have a lot of conversations, so you could imagine something like a Reddit thread or the common section in a major news outlet, we can evaluate the receptiveness of those conversations very quickly instead of, you know, using thousands of hours of coder time to have human coders evaluate it. One of the things that we have learned from our follow-up research is sort of this gap between self-rated receptiveness and receptiveness as it is evaluated by your counterpart comes from the fact that people have the wrong idea of what receptiveness sounds like. So remember I told you when we were initially looking at our data from our state and local government leaders, we were sort of puzzled by the fact that there was such a low correlation between self rated receptiveness and partner rated receptiveness. We have now figured out that this has to do with the fact that when people are trying to be receptive and think they're being receptive sometimes what they do is engage in politeness and formality instead of really sort of thinking hard and showing that they're thinking hard about their counterpart's point of view. When we train people to use conversational receptiveness, they pick it up very, very easily. These cues you can see are quite simple and easy to learn. And we've also found that when we measure persuasion that conversational receptionist is more persuasive than straight argumentation. So there isn't sort of the sense that you come off as like uncertain and wishy-washy. People are more willing to listen to your argument and are more persuaded by it. But and finally, and very importantly, and I find this to be kind of an exciting opportunity for future research, conversational receptiveness is in some ways contagious in conversations. So it sets a norm for how we speak with each other. And people tend to very easily imitate social norms and almost sort of subconsciously mimic their conversation counterparts. So ironically the best way to make somebody receptive to you is to sound like you're being receptive to them. So setting that, setting that tone. why does this work for improving conflict? So there's a big psychological literature that basically says that feeling heard really powerfully de-escalates conflictual interactions, and makes people much more willing to engage with each other in the future. And the problem is that people don't know how to make their counterparts feel heard. Listening is something that happens in your head, right? So your counterpart can't tell is that you are working very, very hard to listen to them and be engaged because listening is a private cognitive process. Active listening is sort of a skill set that has been written about for many, many years. Which is a very important therapeutic skill and a very important mediation skill but becoming a great active listener takes years. And so people tend to struggle with expressing their good intentions. What we're hoping to do is give people sort of the right words so that we can prevent unforced errors. Unforced errors being situations where you want to engage, and you want to have a positive interaction, but while you're sort of fumbling around for the right way to express yourself that moment has gone. One way we're doing it in teaching at the school is by coming up with sort of a very short acronym that captures the main ideas of conversational receptiveness, that acronym is HEAR. And it stands for hedging your claim. So here are phrases that allow you to show hedging. Emphasizing agreement, right? So finding specific areas of disagreement even when you, specific areas of agreement even when you disagree on the main point. Acknowledging the other perspective. So this is back to that I understand phrase and reframing towards the positive. And so one of the things we have been working on with the incoming class of students is giving them these tools and giving them sort of physical reminders so that they can pull up some of these ideas in more challenging conversations and readily be able to put our research into practice at the school. So that's sort of a little sample of what we have been working on. I am very eager to engage with the many questions in the chat and anything else that comes up. My email is right here on the slide. I'm always happy to hear from folks after a talk and you're welcome to play around with the receptiveness website and get some feedback and learn more about that work as well. I'm going to stop sharing. And here's the questions.

- Yes, thank you very much. So we're gonna open up the session for your questions. To ask a question, please use the virtual hand-raising feature of Zoom, and please, and true Kennedy School fashion keep your question brief and end it with a question mark. We'll notify you via Zoom's chat feature when it's your turn to speak. Note that you may experience a short lag time. So make sure to unmute yourself when you hear from the staff and also just let us know your Kennedy School affiliation when you're called on. So I'm gonna start things off with a question that was submitted earlier by Peter Wardsman, MPA 2003. And that question is how can we remain open to listening and understanding another's point of view based on a different underlying belief? What does the process look like for people changing their beliefs?

- Alright, that's a great question. And I think part of the reason it's a great question is it really revealed something very deep about how we think about disagreements. So if you listen to the wording of that question carefully, there's part one that talks about listening and engagement, and there's part two that very quickly jumps to persuasion and belief change. And I think that's really interesting because I think most of the time when we talk about engaging with people we disagree with, we go at it from the something that our ultimate goal is persuasion and changing their mind and bringing them through sort of the right side of things. And of course we run into problems when both sides feel like they're on the right side of things, and then nobody changes their mind. I think that a really important feature of what we've been doing in our work is distinguishing the different goals that people could have in conversation. So persuasion is one goal, but the key needs that was central to the first part of the question really understanding what their beliefs are, is a different goal. And you can't really do both at the same time. So if you are really interested in understanding where somebody is coming from, you can't sort of ask them a question and then as soon as they say something that sounds nonsensical jump in and correct them with like your own superior facts, right? Part of really sort of doing this well is taking the time to deeply understand why it is a person has different beliefs, right? Is it because they've been exposed to different information, is it because they have the same information, but they interpreted differently? Is it because they weighed differently relative to sort of what's important to them and what's important to the constituency they're representing? So I would say, you know, most, most of the trouble we run into comes from not spending enough time, like really deeply exploring before we jump into the attitude change.

Mari Megias:

Thank you very much. If you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand. We have a question from Tess. If you could please let us know your question and your Kennedy School affiliation.

Tess Katsambas:

Hi, I'm Tessie Katsambas here, MPP from a long time ago. 1983, '85 sorry. So my question is this. Usually in conversations there is a goal. And so negotiators for example who seem to be really good at it they have as a goal to make a transaction and save the person. In business you have a goal maybe to sell or maybe to create a partnership. And so can you help us understand the trajectory between this, this piece of being receptive and understanding, and then bridging over to the goal, which, whichever that is. Thank you.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, exactly. Thank you for raising your hand and putting that question out loud. I also really like your question in the chat, which I think is related about sort of genuine versus sort of fake receptiveness, for lack of a better word. And I think both of those things have to do with goals right? What is your ultimate purpose? There's a variety of ultimate purposes people could have, right? So we talked about persuasion, but it could be that you are simply genuinely trying to learn, right? You're trying to understand why this person believes what they believe. It could be that you're trying to preserve a relationship that's sort of floundering because of the underlying disagreement. It could be that you are trying to express your own point of view, and you sort of have the savvy to recognize that if I let this person talk, then they're much more likely to let me talk, right? So there's a huge variety of goals that people could have in disagreement. And I would say that the main issue is that we don't think about goals in a sufficiently explicit way right? I think most people are sort of taken aback by these conversations and, you know, you're sort of surprised like oh, how could this very sensible person believe this crazy thing? And so you just jump into it without saying, well, what do I intend to happen here, right? Do I intend to just quickly correct them? Which his probably an unrealistic goal. Do I intend to truly understand them? Do I intend to schedule a conversation for a later time when we're both more ready to engage in it? So you could have a variety of goals and receptiveness helps with several of them, right? In part because it allows the conversation to proceed right? Having a more receptive conversation allows us to have a longer conversation before people start yelling and slamming doors and leaving the room. So it helps with things like expressing your own point of view in a way that the other person finds more palatable to listen to. It helps with the persuasion goal. It helps with continuing the relationship into the future. So you can work on other common goals. But I would say, I would say sort of to me, the main, the main bit of your question that I would love everybody to think about is how often we go into conversations without a clear goal in mind and how we would do better if we, if we were much more explicit about it.

Mari Megias:

Thank you very much. Reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please use the hand raising feature of Zoom. Our next question is from Pelnar. If you could please let us know your Kennedy School affiliation Pelnar.

Pelnar Aktrosaneva:

Sure, this is Pelnar Aktrosaneva, I am an MPA in 2013, and my question would be, how do we, is there a difference between the sorts of conversations that receptiveness would be seen differently? And in that I mean in, I certainly understand what you're saying for professional conversations, but when I think about more intimate conversations, the kind of hedging for example, or just agreement for agreement's sake, let's say so that the conversation keeps going sometimes can feel very ingenuine and in the long-term I think can maybe hamper the relationship. So I was wondering is there a difference between these sorts of conversations? So professional versus intimate, where we rate receptiveness maybe differently because sometimes for somebody that's very close to us can tell us something very straight and that can have more impact than, you know, if they're hedging their way through. Thanks a lot.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, so, great question. And again, has the sort of underlying a theme of like, is it fake or is it real right? I think the, the distinction between professional conversations and sort of personal conversations is two-fold. One is when people who we're close with express points of view that we strongly disagree with it bothers us more than when people who are more distant from us do it. So ironically it is sort of more okay for a person who is, you know, a colleague or a person we just met to have opinions that are, you know, very different, borderline offensive. When it is somebody who is a close friend or family member, it takes much more of an emotional toll. And so people tend to jump into those conversations probably faster than they ought to, and sort of with more vigor and more emotion. On the other hand, people who we're close with, we also have more motivation to see them in a positive light and we tend to work harder to actually make that conversation work well. So there's sort of you know six of one, half dozen of the other. I think your point about potential long-term costs comes from sort of a slightly different place. So I want to be sort of very clear that when I say hedging, I don't mean faking uncertainty. I mean that almost every question in the world, every statement, right, should not be made with 100% like dogmatic, you know, I am fully perfectly sure I'm right and here all my facts right? If we carefully examine our own sort of beliefs and convictions, even the things that I am very very certain about, and I can still very honestly say, well look, I strongly believe personally that, you know, the COVID vaccines are safe and effective, but I'm not a medical doctor. And I don't work at Pfizer and Moderna, I wasn't there right? So it's sort of a recognition of the fact that none of us have perfect information, perfect omniscience about everything that we claim we know to be the case. And the same goes for agreement. So when I think about agreement, I don't mean, I don't mean agreeing with somebody you disagree with about the thing you disagree on. I mean finding other things you agree on to show that, you know to some extent you're on the same page, right? So again if we take the vaccine example, if I'm, you know, if I'm talking with somebody, you know, I recently had this experience in my family when I'm talking to somebody who doesn't want to get the vaccine because they feel like it has been insufficiently tested, I might say something like, well no, I actually believe that it's been tested very very well. And you know, I can look for some evidence that, you know, to back that up. But I do agree with you that this has been a really hard situation and that most of us are not equipped to evaluate scientific evidence. And I understand and agree why it might be very confusing and hard to think through right? So I'm not agreeing that the vaccines are unsafe. What I'm agreeing with is that the situation is difficult and that this person is not really qualified to evaluate medical evidence and I'm not either, right? So, so that's what I mean by agreement. I don't mean sort of faking it. I mean working hard to find it where it exists.

Mari Megias:

Great, thank you very much for that question and answer. Our next questioner is Lizbeth Sanchez. If you'd like to ask your question.

Lizbeth:

Hi Julia, this is Lizbeth. Quick question. I have deal with a lot of people with, in the spectrum. And I noticed that they, their facial expressions do not match their words. Sometimes they can be very receptive, but their face looks like they're angry or confused. How do we do it so we are like more training or receptive to their different way to be?

Julia Minson:

Yeah oh, that's a great question. I, you know, so, so one of the things that I find sort of really frustrating with kind of the message that's out in the world that, you know, pop psychology has federated for years is that, you know, being a good listener is a very important sort of trait that, you know, when we say, you know, what kind of, you know, mate, are you looking for? Well I would love to be with somebody who is a good listener. What kind of person would you like to hire? Well, I'd love to hire somebody who's a good listener, right? We have this sort of idea that good listening is the end all and be all. But the problem is we can never actually tell if somebody is listening to us right? So listening is something that happens inside somebody's brain. And even if you could sort of get in there, right? There's a difference between physically hearing the sound and even sort of understanding the language versus deeply engaging with somebody's perspective and showing empathy and receptiveness and validation. And so when we're talking about somebody being a good listener we're talking about this very, very complex set of psychological processes that none of us can actually observe.

Lizbeth:

This question derives more because we were find, looking for receptiveness and our brain is the first thing, the first thing that our brain sees is the face. And it's really impactful. It's very hard to stay receptive ourselves when they seem to be like confused or, I don't know, any other emotion they're receptive or listening or agreeing.

Julia Minson:

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you. I absolutely agree with you. I think it's a really hard challenge because in part, because as you just pointed out, I think receptiveness has this sort of contagious flavor to it, right. Is when I'm trying and the other person seems like they're not trying I'm going to give up very quickly. So one of the things that I'm really kind of pushing for in my work is saying, let's be receptive with our words, right? Don't look for eye contact. Don't look for smiling. Don't look for like nonverbal signals that are, you know, very, very hard to interpret. Let's focus on the words that people are saying, because that is much easier for everybody to sort of reach consensus around right? So if I say I really want to understand where you're coming from, tell me more, that's a much clearer signal than if I'm nodding or smiling. So I'm really kind of pushing on both the listener and the speaker side for more verbal expressions of interest instead of sort of these more, relying on these more subtle signals that people get wrong all the time.

Mari Megias:

Great, thank you very much for that question and answer. Our next questioner is Mike, if you could let us know your Kennedy School affiliation and ask you question. So Mike, it's your turn to ask a question if you could unmute yourself, there you go.

Mike:

Oh sorry, I thought I had already done that. Can you hear me now?

Mari Megias:

Yes, thank you very much.

Mike:

Yeah, so I'm a 95 grad from the MPA2 program, which I don't even know if it exists anymore, but my, my question here, first of all, just really interesting, great conversation today, thank you. I can see all sorts of utility for learning to practice conversational receptiveness in the workplace and would love to, just any pointers you can send me or, or, or mention for kind of succinct resources for learning and practicing that would be greatly appreciated.

Julia Minson:

Alright, absolutely. So there's the receptiveness.net website, which we have actually designed specifically for teaching purposes. You know, you can do it yourself. You can send it to folks in your organization. We can create some sort of facilitated sessions around it. I am about to publish a paper in Harvard Business Review which is going to be sort of a much more like practitioner and training focused version of this work, right? Right now the version that's published is a lot about the underlying workings of the algorithm and the validation of the questionnaire scale. So like a more user-friendly version is coming soon in the spring. And if anyone is sort of interested in this material, I'm kind of very happy to, you know, to share what I have to share teaching slides. So please just email me. My email is all over the internet and it's on the last line of the talk. I'm very happy to talk about it more.

Mari Megias:

Great, thanks very much. Monty McMurtry you are up.

Monty McMurty:

Monty McMurtry calling from Toronto, Canada, Kennedy School alum many years ago. My question comment to you is what you are saying is totally amicable positive in our political publics in terms of those people that strive for political election. Yet even in parliament in Ottawa and perhaps in Washington, there is a sense of what I call slorotic corrosion in terms of the other side not even responding, let alone listening to what I would consider to be reasoned valid arguments to which a common ground could be obtained. What are your thoughts on this? And I thank you.

Julia Minson:

Thank you. My mother-in-law's Canadian and so my, my I've got, I've got Canadian, sort of Canadian family roots a bit. So nice to hear, nice to hear from Canada. So I think there's, you know, a couple, a couple of dynamics at play, right? One is that there's this question of people's genuine beliefs and people's performance when they're in a one-on-one conversation versus what we observe from our politicians, which is a public performance, right? So people often behave very differently when they're engaging with somebody in a private setting versus when they are being observed by the media. When they know it's all going to be on Twitter, when they're being observed by their own voters, right? So it's really unclear when people, when we sort of say, look, nobody's sort of listening, it's unclear again because listening is a private process. We don't know if they're not listening or we don't know whether they're acting like they're not listening because what their role at the time demands. So I would not as sort of make sweeping generalizations about what's going on in people's heads simply because we don't know what's going on in people's heads. One thing that I often hear when I talk about receptiveness, especially from the students, right, many of whom have political ambitions is, well, wouldn't this be sort of counterproductive, right? Imagine I was receptive to somebody from the other side of the aisle, would my voters feel like I'm failing to represent them with sort of sufficient vigor and conviction? And so we've just started running experiments where we look at perceptions of leaders who confront somebody who is being fully unreasonable and in their response they either say look, I strongly disagree with your position and here's why, or they say I strongly disagree with your position and here's why, but they couch it in that receptive language right? So there's some sprinkling of I understand, and I hear what you're saying and we both agree on, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so we actually find that, we actually find that leaders who express their disagreement and express their arguments in receptive language are evaluated more positively. So it could be the case that there's sort of what we call a broken mental model, where, you know, people in the public eye think that receptiveness will come at a cost, whereas it doesn't actually. Or it could be that sort of all of this, you know, yelling and screaming is sort of more performative than we expect it to be. And there's sort of more, you know, more positive interaction going on behind closed doors, which is certainly the case in high level negotiations.

Mari Megias:

Great, thank you very much for that question and answer. We have a question that came in on the chat from Julia Wormser and that question is, let me just pull it up here. That question is a factor that seems implicit in your research but she'd love to hear more about is how much people trust and fear the other person is relevant to receptiveness. She's much less receptive to someone she thinks could take advantage of her and her openness. So do you have any comments on that?

Julia Minson:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, when we, when we think about being taken advantage of in this kind of context, does this mean that I'm going to change my mind and come to believe some sort of terrible things. if I listen too carefully, right? It's in a way it's, it's a negotiation about attitudes, right? It's what am I going to walk away with believing? And again, I think it's really important to kind of keep the distinction in mind between being willing to listen to somebody while recognizing that you are not actually obligated to change your mind, right? So if you listen thoughtfully and understand where they're coming from and, you know, get sort of their arguments and get their perspective, and then you're still free to say, look, I've thought really hard about it. And I now understand sort of your logic and your feelings and the people you're representing. And I just disagree, here are the reasons why I still disagree. And so to me, that's perfectly receptive, but it doesn't mean that I have sort of fallen for whatever the argument is. I think there is sort of the sense that if I listen to bad ideas they will somehow like insect my brain. And so it's better to not listen to them. It's better to argue back right away, very forcefully. I personally haven't seen any evidence of that in our research. Most of the time when people listen, there's very very little attitude change. At best what you hope for is that you see the other person in more positive light, but it's not like you're going to change your lifelong convictions because you know, this person happened to say something. So I am, I am not too concerned about receptiveness sort of opening you to being taken advantage of, because again ultimately what you walk away with in terms of your own convictions, is not sort of impacted by, you know, whether you listen thoughtfully or not, right? And then you kind of have your own faculty to lean on.

Mari Megias:

That makes sense, great. Thank you very much. So one final question that was kind of alluded to in the chat, I'm not sure if you have any comments on any work you've been doing on this area, which is the idea of gender and receptiveness. Have you found any differences in terms of people's gender and their ability to be receptive to others?

Julia Minson:

Yeah, so that's a great question. So here we have to go back to sort of making the distinction between cognitive receptiveness, right? How you process information and conversational receptiveness, which is the language you use when you are in conflict. So when we think about cognitive receptiveness and when we measure cognitive receptiveness using our scale, we do not see a gender differences. In other words, you know, in firms of cognitive processing, most people are very biased towards their own side. And women seem to be just as biased in that. However, when we talk about conversational receptiveness through this ability to show engagement, women, untrained women score much much higher on this than untrained men. So naturally women tend to be much more inclusive of other perspectives in their speech. And, you know, it's like, it's a very substantial gap. Interestingly what happens is when we look at sort of perceptions of male and female leaders who are more receptive or less receptive, we get a bigger boost for training a male leader to sound more receptive, I think because it is so sort of stereotype violating. So that's sort of very very early stage work that we're kind of still exploring, but there are definitely like, I think a couple of comments picked up on this idea that receptive speech that's sort of more inclusive of other perspectives does sound, does sound more female stereotypical. And that, that is certainly true.

Mari Megias:

Great, well thank you very much for joining us for this Wiener Conference Call special. Thank you to Julia Minson. I'd like to save the date everyone for December 2nd for our next Wiener Conference Call, which will be with Professor Desmond Ang. We'll discuss the causes and consequences of racial inequality in the United States. Once again thank you very much and have a great rest of the day.

Julia Minson:

Thank you.