Kelly connects with Julia Minson, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral scientist with extensive research experience in conflict, communication, negotiations, and decision-making. She has a new book: “How to Disagree Better.” 

It seems pretty clear that your upbringing had a lot to do with your chosen field of study which led to a book titled, ‘How to Disagree Better.’ 

“This is one of those examples of all research that is me search, right? So, it’s funny, because both of my parents were psychologists, but they were very different psychologists. I was born in the former Soviet Union. And my mother, who was Russian, was a psychologist and through that work she met my stepfather who was an American psychologist. And so, they got married and that’s what brought us from Russia to the United States. And imagine being in middle school and being thrown into this like completely crazy world where all of a sudden you have an American stepfather; you have American step siblings; you’re living in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, because that’s where my stepfather was from. And so, you know, there was a lot of disagreement about everything. I mean, I remember the first time my mom tried to make popcorn; she thought it was corn and therefore ought to be boiled. And she boiled it and boiled it and boiled it and nothing happened. And so, my childhood was just sort of full of those sorts of events and the discussions around them.” 

And then there’s the ballroom dancing… 

“Yeah, yeah. So, this also sort of connects to the whole Russia thing. In Russia, lots of kids ballroom dance. Here they do jazz and ballet and hip hop; in Russia, they all ballroom dance and do figure skating. And so, I came to the States already very committed to it and very into it. And the thing that’s really interesting about ballroom dancing is that the entire time you and your partner are facing each other – which, you would think, is great, of course, how else would you dance? But what that also implies is that when you are seeing yourself, you’re looking in opposite directions, right? Like you’re literally looking 180 degrees in opposite directions. And so, as you are practicing, as you’re watching yourself on video, you’re just having wildly different experiences. And yet you are physically in the same very, very small space, right? You are touching, you’re moving to the same music, you have taken the same coaching, you’re executing the same choreography. If you’re serious, you’re doing this for hours and hours a day. When you’re not dancing, you’re watching videos of yourself dancing. And so, it is just this crazy juxtaposition of having physically an identical experience, but actually seeing it differently because you’re facing an opposite direction.” 

You and were talking about the “Thank You, Because” exercise we teach to get people to more adroitly speak through difference and we find that almost like clockwork everyone likes this exercise except for one guy – and he really doesn’t like it. 

“I mean, I think it’s great and what I’m hearing is a few things. One is that you have had a similar experience to what we’ve had, which is recognizing that when you teach people techniques to have more constructive disagreements, they tend to become contagious. And I think people like having good conversations, like people who say, ‘I just like to have a good fight.’ Those people exist, but they’re the minority. On average, people like to have interesting conversations that don’t leave them sort of battered and bruised.  Because, when you hand me a life raft, I’m totally happy to jump on. So that’s sort of the experience we’ve had as well. And of course, what you’re talking about to me closely dovetails with our work on conversational receptiveness, which is concrete language that allows you to express receptiveness, right? And I also have this experience. In fact, I just had it in a course I was teaching over the weekend where I showed people very receptive language and very unreceptive language. And I say, which one do you like better? And I had a class of 63 students and 62 of them liked the more receptive one. And, you know, the one guy liked the less receptive one.”