What turns a playful debate into an angry, tearful argument? Or a cheerful Thanksgiving feast into a frosty dessert? America is heading into the holiday season after a divisive election season. So we're featuring an episode from NPR's science podcast Short Wave about what happens in our brains during conflict: Why it tempts us to shut down, and how we can navigate difficult conversations—political or otherwise—without losing control.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the context of disagreement in America?
I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday, we do something special. We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Now, I don't need to tell you that there is a lot of disagreement in this country at the moment. Donald Trump has been elected as the 47th president. A lot of people are elated. A lot of people are upset.
Chapter 2: How can families manage political disagreements during holidays?
And soon, a lot of people who disagree will be sitting across from each other at the holiday dinner table. We've dealt with a fair share of disagreements in my own family. I won't go into all, you know, the bloody details, but generally someone will start talking and then I will realize that they're wrong. And I start delivering the facts. My brother likes to argue.
So whether he really believes it or not, he'll start being contrarian. And, you know, other members of the family, aunts and uncles, they'll jump in and they'll have their opinions. And it'll all be going well. We'll be all loud and stuff. And then it'll go too far. And I don't know if anybody else has this. I should stop, you know, arguing the point.
But there's a part of me that goes, keep going, keep talking because I'm right. And sometimes when you get that last word in, that's what ends up tipping just a disagreement into an all out emotional fight and tears are flowing and things like that. And that's what you don't want.
But one thing I've always felt in all my kind of arguing my points and trying to get the last word is I have never really been able to convince anyone that of my rightness and i do wonder like why why is it so hard to convince people of things to persuade people and and is there maybe another way that i should be approaching these conversations
Which is why I wanted to share this episode from NPR's science podcast, Shortwave. Turns out, they've been asking basically the same thing.
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Chapter 3: What insights can science provide about managing conflict?
I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise?
That's producer Rachel Carlson in an episode hosted by Emily Kwong. This week, NPR is exploring America's divisions and sharing stories about people who are trying to bridge their divides. So today we're following Rachel on her scientific pursuit of this question.
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.
Chapter 4: How can couples with differing political views maintain their relationship?
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. It was also an unusual singing group. Because it was Renaissance religious music, not for religious purposes, but for singing purposes.
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.
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Chapter 5: What physiological responses occur 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. Rudy co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we might not even notice these things while they're happening to us. But on top of all of them, we start making these split-second decisions about whether or not we trust someone just by looking at their faces.
Those decisions, though, aren't always accurate.
There's lots of research showing that there's this discordant perceptions of trust and how trustworthy people actually are. And so it takes getting to know someone and assessing them again and again through different types of interactions and becoming close with them to understand whether people are indeed trustworthy.
Who's that? That's Aurielle Feldman-Hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University. And she says when we interact with someone we've decided is untrustworthy, or even someone who just belongs to another group than us, 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?
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Chapter 6: How does our brain's amygdala react to conflict?
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 a time. 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. Little thingies. What's that for? It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it.
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... pretending. 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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What innovative research is being done on neuroscience and conversation?
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.
So clearly disagreement sets off a waterfall of reactions and behaviors 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.
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