Many people are gearing up for holiday conversations with loved ones who may disagree with them — on everything from politics to religion and lifestyle choices. As the conversations unfold, these divisions are visible in our brains too. These conversations can get personal and come to a halt fast. But today on the show we get into research in neuroscience and psychology showing that as much as we disagree, there are ways to bridge these divides – and people who are actively using these strategies in their daily lives. Want to hear more neuroscience and psychology? Email us your ideas to [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the current divides in our society?
It is no surprise that there is a lot of disagreement and division out there in the world right now. That's the understatement of the century. I mean, Donald Trump was just reelected as the 47th president of the United States after a campaign season filled with divisive and sometimes downright hostile language. Yeah.
And a lot of people are gearing up for the holidays where you might not always see eye to eye with the people you love in your life.
Yeah, this is true for many people I know. It is feeling tense and data supports this. Polling data from SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University shows that almost half of the U.S. electorate thinks members of the opposing party are downright evil. In a 2022 Pew study, growing numbers of Americans said members of the other party are dishonest. immoral, and close-minded.
So it's not just in our imaginations, we really are becoming more divided.
So Emily, this week NPR is exploring these divisions and finding stories about people trying to bridge their divides, successfully or not. And since we're a science show, I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise? And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years.
Jeannie Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richard Bruckheiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.
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Chapter 2: How can long-term couples navigate political differences?
And he's adorable, so he's like 92 feet tall.
I asked them how they met.
We met in a singing group. So that was good because we shared an interest that was not political. It was very important, actually.
1977.
Yeah.
You know, they say singing like syncopates your heartbeats. So maybe that worked out in bringing them together.
It's the Renaissance music. Absolutely. And they told me they sang with this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together. They eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talked through and ultimately disagreed on a lot of things. They said there have only been a few times where they voted for the same people.
And over time, they've set some boundaries with each other.
The thing we could not talk about really was abortion. We both had strong opinions that were opposite. And so we realized we can't talk about this. So we didn't. We won't. Then you also figure out ways that you can talk about other stuff.
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Chapter 3: What neuroscience explains our reactions during disagreements?
And that, of course, just breeds, guess what? Mistrust.
That's Rudy Mendoza-Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we probably won't even notice these things while they're happening to us, but on top of them, our amygdala starts to respond. Yeah, our amygdala. That is like our brain's threat detector.
It's like a smoke alarm. Exactly. Activity there increases. So... If we're disagreeing and our amygdala is going off, what else is happening in our brain?
I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that. So I called up the lead researcher, Joy Hirsch, to talk about it. She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine. And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other, which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world.
Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at Right. You're just like slid under an MRI machine. Exactly. And in this case, people wore these things that looked like swim caps on their head and they have these little thingies all around the caps. What is little thingies? What's that for? It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it.
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Chapter 4: How can we create a respectful dialogue during disagreements?
She told me they're technically called optodes. So some of these are like little lasers that emit light into the brain and then some detect that light. So researchers like Joy can then use these measurements to look at neural activity.
So in Joy's study, she just had people sitting around having a conversation like one might at family dinner, except her research participants are wearing these swim cap things.
Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner. Yeah. They surveyed a bunch of people on Yale's campus and the New Haven area on statements that people tend to have strong opinions about. Like, for example, marijuana should be legalized or same-sex marriage is a civil right.
And then they specifically paired people up so the partners were strangers, they didn't know each other before, and also so that they agreed with their partner on two topics and disagreed on two other topics.
Joy told me, These people were not... They were not like debaters that take, you know, a negative side and a positive side.
No, they're just people out here living their lives. Yeah. And she's looking at their brain activity.
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Chapter 5: What innovative research explores conversations in disagreement?
What did she find? During agreement, Joy says they saw activity related to the visual system and also in the social areas of the brain. But Emily, it wasn't just activity in these places. These areas were also more synchronous when people agreed on the topic.
Okay, their brains were more synchronous.
What does that mean? So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked.
And her working hypothesis for what this means is... The sharing of information involves higher levels of communication, that people are learning... so that there's a consensus of what is being shared, what's going on.
Versus when participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as synced up. It was kind of like a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet. And as they disagreed, Joy says it seemed like each brain was engaging a lot more emotional and cognitive resources.
The... The amount of territory that the brain has devoted to disagreement was astonishing to me. And this is beyond the data. The observation that so much neural energy is consumed by disagreement, and there are so many areas that are coordinated during disagreement, that tells me that this is a very important Huh. Others might have other interpretations.
So Joy is hypothesizing that disagreement might be really taxing on us. Like you're expending more energy when you disagree with someone than when you agree with them. Okay.
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Chapter 6: What are the effects of disagreement on our brains?
So clearly disagreement sets off a waterfall of reactions and behaviors that... that lights up all these parts of the brain. When that is happening to us, which seems fairly inevitable, how can we approach disagreement better? What does the science say on that?
First, kind of like we said before, we decide if we want to have a conversation with someone and also if that person is going to be receptive.
You can always walk away.
Yeah. I hear often, if I talk to that person, am I subject to violence? That's clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith. I am not inviting people to have a conversation with people that are violent towards you or dehumanizing towards you. That's not a requirement. Like, actually, your humanness is there. We can all kind of discern.
And bridging differences actually doesn't require or ask us to do that. So that's kind of like step zero.
Decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person? Yeah. But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple. Focus on your breathing. Can you take a breath? Yeah.
Can you slow this down just a little bit so you can kind of come back into yourself, your body? Can you take a breath and then align with the intention?
Allison co-teaches that Bridging Differences class with Rudy I mentioned earlier. She told me that this moment, slowing down, breathing, can help us move into step two, which is coming back to our goals for the conversation. Right, like she described it as an intention? Yeah, why we're having it, what we're looking to get out of it.
Because research shows it's not super easy to change someone's mind. And it can be pretty ineffective to spout facts at someone to try to do this. Yeah. But Allison and Rudy both told me we can find more common ground with someone when we try to understand their perspective instead of trying to convince them that they're wrong.
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