https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/relatio ... spiraling/
Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling
When it comes to conflict, most of us just want to shut it down. But researchers are increasingly finding there’s a better way to handle disputes. This week, we kick off our new Relationships 2.0 series by asking: what if we stop trying to eliminate conflict and instead ask how can we do conflict better?
You can find read more of the work of Julia Minson at her website.
For more on conflict resolution, listen to our episode on how we grapple with contradictions.
Additional Resources
Toward a Psychology of Attitude Conflict, by Julia A. Minson and Charles A. Dorison, Current Opinion in Psychology, 2022.
Receptiveness to Opposing Views: Conceptualization and Integrative Review, by Julia A. Minson and Frances S. Chen, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2021.
Conversational Receptiveness: Improving Engagement With Opposing Views, by Michael Yeomans et al., Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2020.
From the show's transcript:
Julia Minson:
So conversational receptiveness is the use of words and phrases to demonstrate to your counterpart that you're engaged with their point of view. Quite often when we give people advice about conflict and how they should handle conflict, we tell them, try to be more empathetic, try to take the other person's perspective, try to exercise intellectual humility. And what we found was that their counterpart has no idea that they're doing any of that. It's not transparent. And because it's not transparent, it has no effect on the conflict. And so conversational receptiveness is basically predicated on the idea that we need to demonstrate to people that were engaged with their point of view in a way that's visible and very easily recognizable to counterparts because you can't get credit for things in your head.
Shankar Vedantam:
Julia discovered through her research that there are four specific techniques that communicate conversational receptiveness.
Julia Minson:
And they make a nice acronym. The acronym is HEAR, as in 'I hear you.' The H stands for hedging. So it's saying things like perhaps or sometimes, or maybe. The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So I might say I agree that the last couple years have been really hard on people, or we both think that it's really important to make school safe for our kids. That A stands for acknowledgement. So it's essentially using some of your own airtime to restate your counterpart's position. And then the R stands for reframing to the positive. So you can basically say the exact same idea using positive words instead of negative terms, right? You might say, instead of saying I hate it when people interrupt me, you might say, I really love it when people let me finish.
Julia Minson:
This was five days, eight hours a day of nothing but mediation. And an important technique that mediators use is something they call the listening triangle, which is very conceptually related to conversational receptiveness. You ask a party in conflict a question, you listen to the answer, and then you say, well, I just heard you say X, Y, Z. Is that right? And then that starts the next round because you just asked a question. And so now you have to listen to the answer and then they finish talking and you say, aha, so it seems like you're saying blah, blah, blah. Is that right? And then you're just supposed to do this endlessly until the person you are listening to says, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got it. Like I'm done. And I was impressed with this technique and I thought that this was really related to conversational receptiveness because it's all based on acknowledgement.
