Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement

by Buster Benson

redefining these boundaries, but this fact also reveals that the boundaries are drawn by consensus and not according to any absolute sense of universal morality. There is not a single objective authority that all voices of reason can speak to. You can’t use courtroom norms to resolve a disagreement in a relationship any more than you can use scientific studies to resolve a disagreement about your life’s purpose. When we try to apply reason across the boundaries of groups with clashing norms, we set ourselves up for a whole lot of yelling and frustration, often leaving us with feelings of futility. The takeaway here is that the voice of reason relies on having the voice of power to fall back on during escalations, and is best suited to disagreements with people who share respect for the higher authority, and are members of the same groups and institutions, that your reasons draw from. If the voice of reason isn’t working, check which groups you both identify with to confirm that the cognitive dissonance you’re addressing is a concern for at least one group that you both belong to. This brings us to the third voice, the voice of avoidance, to which we are increasingly drawn in these polarized times. When power and reason don’t work, sometimes the only recourse is to avoid the conversation altogether. THE VOICE OF AVOIDANCE “The only winning move is not to play.” “I would prefer not to.” “Leave me out of it.” When I share my fascination with arguments and disagreement with pe...

“strong hire” and “no hire” decisions. The most common way this construction happens is through pattern matching based on stereotypes around gender, ethnicity, religion, and age—all protected characteristics that you aren’t legally permitted to discriminate based on. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, because our associations with these characteristics are often unconscious in the first place. Given limited information, we have no way of evaluating an entire person and will use every proxy we can for signals that point to personality traits, competencies, and other soft skills that are evaluated during the interview process. We use these stereotypes to project thought patterns and future behavior on people. We also favor details that are familiar to us over details that are unfamiliar—our small talk is a subtle way of finding things we have in common with others, which will sway our general opinion of a person. Take, for example, feedback like “The candidate wasn’t able to give a convincing answer to the question I had about how they solved this problem” or “I didn’t feel like they’d be able to rally a team of engineers behind them.” There’s no easy way to tie this feedback to unconscious biases, even when we’re evaluating our own opinions! When I interviewed a few directors of hiring at places I’ve worked in the past, they unanimously acknowledged that this was a known and unfortunately unavoidable situation. You can try reminding interviewers to focus on evaluating spe...

willing to change our minds easily and often, always looking for the positions that are a better fit for the situation. Stinging

year, partially

this book. I’ll get into that in a little bit. But if you asked me a year ago if I believed in ghosts, I’d say that I didn’t, not even a little bit. I’ve even had a few heated arguments in recent years with friends who can back this up. More specifically, I’d say that I strongly opposed the idea that ghosts exist but was open to new information about them. If a ghost appeared on my favorite talk show and answered a bunch of questions to my satisfaction, yes, I’d be swayed by that evidence. If you go back further into my past, I haven’t always been a nonbeliever. In fact, I once experienced a “being” during meditation that could be considered in the category of ghosts. At the time, I 100 percent believed I had seen a spirit of some kind. Now I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Experience and memory are complicated, right? When I was in second grade, a few of us neighborhood kids were playing with a Ouija board and it “instructed” us to search for something in the hills behind our houses. We found a buried box with some junk in it, and our minds were blown. In high school, I got into tarot and had a habit of hanging out late at night in diners and reading cards for other people in the restaurant. One time, a man I read some cards with burst into tears because he believed the cards had sent him a message from his recently deceased horse. I was also very interested in near-death experiences and really wanted to communicate with angels and other beings on “the other side.” One afternoon ...

disagreement that’s oriented entirely around the fruit of security will never yield productive questions, because in those conversations information and questions are used to attack and defend our positions.

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