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Social psychologist Peter Coleman has studied conflict discourse styles, and his research clearly points out what many have come to realize: arguments don’t get resolved by facts. Despite our best desire pose facts and arrive at the truth, in the end, emotions intrude and winning can become most important. People tend to select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information. A series of psychological experiments suggest that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Coleman suggests there are 4 reasons why arguing about perceptions is almost always a losing battle:
(1) What’s the point? What are you hoping to gain?
(2) Both of your perceptions may be correct.
(3) You risk losing intimacy with the other person.
(4) People tend to become even more attached to their opinions when they have to defend them.
Coleman continues: “The thing to remember is that it takes time to get to a place where you can trust someone and enjoy them enough and have enough rapport to have a difficult conversation and say no, I completely disagree yet have them hear you and you hear them...Productive dialogue is a very counter cultural thing in America, right now. We just are not trained to do it...So we have to build up the muscle, the understanding and the capacity of incorporating dialogue, ideally first in these exchanges, so that people can get to a place where they can disagree and learn from it. If you don’t have experience with dialogue, and you want to understand or reach out across a difficult divide, there are great resources online, such as Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which has mapped thousands of groups dedicated to building bridges so that you can find one in your community.”
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