Talking Across the Divide Quotes

“It’s easy to decide that the other side’s real motivation on an issue is prejudice or selfishness or greed. And sometimes, unflattering descriptions may in fact be true. Unabashed racism or sexism or selfishness or cruelty may in fact be someone’s primary motivator. But unless they see themselves as unabashedly racist or sexist or selfish or cruel, there’s still an unanswered question, the question of what they think their motivations are. There’s nearly always more to the story.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Have you ever been in the middle of an argument, when the other person made a good point but you couldn’t bring yourself to admit that they might be right because you were afraid of looking foolish? If so, then you’ve experienced the ego-protection barrier firsthand.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Even when we know certain people well as individuals, we don’t understand their echo chambers well enough to change their minds on the things we care about, so we end up surprised when they’re not persuaded by arguments that seem obvious to us. Each side is so focused on fighting the other that there doesn’t seem to be any room for understanding them. As a result, each side unwittingly sabotages their own efforts to change the other side’s mind.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“In an echo-chamber world, objective truth carries less weight than truth-as-defined-by-my-social-circles.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“It’s important to distinguish between explaining and excusing. Explaining why something happened is vital if you want to stop it from happening in the future. If a train derails, experts are going to do their best to determine what went wrong—they want to explain the wreck. The more accurately they can explain it, the better chance they have of making sure it doesn’t happen again. However, by explaining it they’re not lending it any kind of legitimacy or taking away from the tragedy of what happened. They’re just trying to understand why it happened.

The same is true for people. It’s possible that there’s no excuse for the behavior of someone you’re talking to on the other side. Okay, then. Don’t excuse it. But it’s still important to try to understand and explain why they do what they do—what they understand to be motivating their behavior—even if you completely disagree with their rationale.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“The ego-protection barrier can be easily summed up in a few simple sentences:
Nobody wants to look foolish.
Nobody wants to be wrong.
Nobody wants to feel manipulated.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“There’s something weird about arguments: They’re the first thing we reach for when we want to change someone’s mind, and yet they’re not very effective at actually changing minds. The more desperate we are to change someone’s mind, the more passionately we argue. And the more passionately we argue, the more defensive each side gets. It’s as if we’re trying to force them into our way of thinking by making our words louder and harsher, but in so doing, we only cause them to dig in their heels more and more, as both sides grow increasingly angry and irrational.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Increasingly, we take our disagreements not to the people we disagree with but to our own echo chambers—spaces where we can talk about, rather than to, the other side—where like-minded people echo our own beliefs right back to us.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“If the person you’re talking to has been motivated by patriotism or economic need or a desire to protect children, show them how a new course of action is actually the most patriotic, the most economically beneficial, or the most protective of children. This way, they’re still working for the same underlying cause, even if they’re shifting course. That’s much easier to swallow than “all your past effort was wasted.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Similarly, it can help people be more honest with themselves when you talk about their past behavior as perfectly understandable given the circumstances: “Of course you supported that cause. So many of us did! But now that this new information is coming out, I think it’s time for all of us to rethink our support.”

Or: “There’s no way you could have known about the damage that group is doing. Who has time to do all that research, especially with a busy schedule like yours? That’s why I knew you’d want to hear about this.”

The point is, you’re not blaming them for the past, so they don’t have to get defensive. Even if you do privately blame them for things in the past, playing the blame game doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s better to offer them a narrative that allows them to change their mind and still save face. Their past behavior is understandable, and now there’s a reason to do something different—and they still get to be the protagonist.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Basically, our brains want to make sense of the world, so if we try to hold two competing ideas at the same time—say, “I’m a good person” and “I’ve devoted years of my life to something bad”—our brains will reinterpret one of those two ideas to make them fit again: “Good people don’t devote years of their lives to bad things, so that thing I devoted years of my life to must be good.”

This can make it very hard to convince someone to change their mind on something they’ve invested themselves in.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“This is a choice between “winning” and winning: If you want to succeed in bringing the truth to light, you have to give up the urge to “win” the argument by proving you know more than they do. Resist the urge to antagonize them or bash their ego. Let them recognize the limits of their knowledge, then back off.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“She may not have been emotionally prepared to consider in that moment that she was wrong—but maybe my comment prompted her to look it up and learn the truth once she was back at home. (Have you ever insisted something was true, only to look it up later and discover you were wrong? Boy, is that embarrassing.)”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Before you start digging into the details of your disagreement, take the time to clarify the basics: What is the situation you’re facing? What courses of action are available? What potential consequences are there? Instead of just telling them what you think the answers to these questions are, ask them for their answers, and pay attention to any ways in which their answers are different from what you expected.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“When there were news stories about a rash of gay teen suicides, my gay friends understood this as evidence of how depressing it was for gay teens to have to deal with so many negative messages about their unchosen, inborn sexuality. Some of my straight evangelical friends, on the other hand, took the opposite message from the tragedy. Since they believed those gay teens could have chosen to be straight at any time, they were convinced that the choice to be gay had led to their depression and that, if anything, this meant there should be more societal disapproval of homosexuality so that fewer teens would make that choice.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“I recently witnessed a huge fight between two people I know over the concept of “white privilege.” They’d been arguing for quite some time before either of them thought to define what the term meant, at which point it quickly became clear that they had very different ideas of what they were talking about.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can never disagree with the beliefs, values, or practices of someone else’s team if you want to get out of this stage. People at any stage can disagree with one another. But many of us fool ourselves into believing that’s all we’re doing, when the truth is that we’re allowing our legitimate points of disagreement to bleed over into caricatures, stereotypes, and demonization of the other side. If you can’t yet tell a convincing story with their team as the protagonist, there’s a good chance this is the stage you’re in.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“When people feel trapped or disadvantaged, it can change their perspective. They’re no longer just fighting for what they believe in; they’re fighting for their right to exist. When people believe they’re acting in self-defense, they’re often willing to go to lengths they wouldn’t normally go to. They get scared and angry. They lose their willingness to compromise or see other people’s points of view, because they’re afraid of being taken advantage of or losing what’s important to them. They shift into a mindset of “I need to protect myself and my people,” and they aren’t typically very receptive to hearing about how bad someone else has it. Caring about other people feels like a luxury when you’re worried about your own team’s survival.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

“Every time I run a public dialogue event, I always begin with a quick explanation of what dialogue is and isn’t: It isn’t saying “everyone is equally right,” and it isn’t debate or argument. It is a chance to hear one another out and seek to build understanding while acknowledging that we still want to change one another’s minds.”
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World