How to keep a disagreement from turning into toxic conflict

Some of these are grand gestures. Other leaps are small but still powerful, like spending time with people we disagree with. This sounds simple, but it’s started to feel impossible. As recently as 2016, 51% of Americans said it would be “interesting and informative” to talk with a rival, edging out the 46% who said it would be “stressful and frustrating.” Five years later, this enthusiasm had evaporated: Fifty-nine percent said these conversations would be frustrating, and less than 40% said they’d be interesting. Asked to compare talking with rivals to other activities, both Democrats and Republicans said they’d prefer a painful dental procedure.

In a divided world, bringing people together is not like pulling teeth; it’s harder. Chatting with rivals feels dangerous and even immoral—like the Romans inviting Visigoths for a beer during the siege. Even if they could get over their distaste, people don’t see the point of cross-party conversations. In 2022, my lab asked hundreds of people what would happen if Republicans and Democrats talked politics. Most believed that people would agree with one another even less after the conversation. One Democrat from Pennsylvania wrote, “Political dialogue is doomed.” A Texas Republican said, “Civility is dead. Respectfully disagreeing is dead.”

They were both wrong, as is most people’s pessimism about cross-party conversations. In the summer of 2022, my lab invited over a hundred Americans to set aside their trepidation and join twenty-minute Zoom calls with a rival. After logging on, tidying the rooms behind them, and remembering to unmute, the pairs talked about issues like gun control, climate change, and abortion. Our team had ensured that each person truly disagreed with their partner. We also set up contingency plans for what to do if people insulted or threatened each other.

To everyone’s surprise, these conversations were wonderful. People clashed, but also listened. When we asked them to rate the experience on a scale from 1 (very negative) to 100 (very positive), the most common response was exactly 100. After talking with a rival, participants’ dislike of rivals plummeted by more than twenty points on a hundred-point scale and remained lower three months later. If the rest of the country joined them, the clock on our nation’s partisan aggression would roll backward from 2020 to the Clinton era: not an entirely peaceful time, but not nearly as vicious as our politics are today. People also left these chats less likely to dehumanize the other side, and humbler about their own opinions.

If social shark attacks scare us away from everyday interactions, they terrify us of rivals. And if conversations with strangers are surprisingly positive, meeting across difference is astonishingly useful.

Of course, not every conversation softens conflict. Thousands of Thanksgiving dinners have disintegrated before the pumpkin pie arrives, because people can be just as mean in person as they are online. It’s not enough to talk at rivals; to be productive, encounters require mental and emotional work. Studies reveal a recipe for disagreeing better:

1. Good disagreers ask questions instead of making statements.
2. They work to get underneath people’s opinions to their stories.
3. When they spot common ground, good disagreers name it.
4. When they are unsure about something, they say so rather than pretending to be confident.

These ingredients each decrease the chance dissent will devolve into toxic conflict. But good disagreement is more than nice; it’s powerful. In experiments, people given the recipe you see here listened more intently and asked better questions. But the people they talked with also became more open-minded, even though they received no training. Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

Adapted from Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, PhD, published by Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2024 by Jamil Zaki. Reprinted courtesy of Grand Central Publishing.