Chicago Booth Review Podcast Should We Debate Less and Dialogue More?

Jane Risen: If you are interacting with someone who you think has the goal to learn from you and understand you, then you're more likely to adopt the goal of understanding them, whereas if you think they're out to convince you, it's more likely that you're going to then try to convince them.

Hal Weitzman: We've all been in a conversation in which our goal is to prove ourselves right and someone else wrong. But even if you win the argument, how much is the other person really won over? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman.

Today, I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Jane Risen about her research on dialogue and debate. When does it make sense to hear people out rather than explicitly try to win them over? And if you find yourself in a debate, how can you steer the conversation more towards dialogue? Jane Risen, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Jane Risen: Thank you for having me.

Hal Weitzman: We are delighted to have you, and we're here to talk about your research, a growing body of research you're putting together about dialogue versus debate. We've probably all found ourselves in a debate and thought, "This is not going anywhere." How do you define dialogue versus debate? What makes one different from the other?

Jane Risen: So I think of these as two different orientations to disagreement, and I think the easiest way to distinguish them and define them is the goal that you have. So in debate, I think of the goal as being a persuasion goal. My goal is to convince you that whatever I say is correct and the way that I'm viewing things is correct, whereas with dialogue, I think of the goal as being to understand each other.

So my goal is both for you to understand me and for me to understand you, which means that if we're both entering with those goals, then in the dialogue world, we have the same goals, to understand each other. In the debate version, if we're both trying to persuade each other, our goals are in conflict, because we're both trying to persuade each other. And so, because of that, debate will end up feeling more competitive, and dialogue will feel more collaborative.

And there are behaviors that fall from those assumptions and those goals that you have. So in debate, we tend to try to poke holes in each other's arguments, because we're trying to show that there's something flawed with the way you're thinking about it and better about mine, whereas that's not really constructive in a dialogue more if I'm going to ask more questions, because I need to understand what you're saying.

And if I don't fully understand, I'm going to ask, and I might not assume that I already understand. It's going to require more testing, whereas in debate, one of the assumptions we see is this kind of a zero-sum assumption where if you are more right, then I must be more wrong, whereas in dialogue, we can allow for both perspectives to have truth in them.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So the way you describe debate, you almost feel like a courtroom. I'm the prosecution. You're the defense, and I must destroy you, but then I'm not trying to win you over. I'm trying to win over the jury or the judge or whatever. So you're talking about a specific situation where I am trying to win you over.

Jane Risen: So yeah, I'm thinking about this as the people who are involved in the disagreement. And so, I think of debate as really being my goal is to win the other side who is in this debate with me over, and they're trying to win me over, but you make a good point that there's lots of times where these are on display for observers. And so, the audience may be a very different goal of mine.

And so, I could debate with you not because I want to change your mind, but because I'm trying to persuade the jury or I'm trying to persuade all of these other people. We are thinking about it more in terms of my goal with the other person that I'm in disagreement with. But I think the question of how observers change both the goals that I'm likely to start with or the consequences of holding those goals is super interesting, but we haven't kind of gotten quite there in the research yet.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, let's talk about what we have gotten, and actually taking you back, because I know that this research actually stems from your own experience as a teenager when you attended a conflict transformation program and learned so much and did research subsequently as an adult about this. So tell us about this experience you had and how it shaped your research agenda.

Jane Risen: Sure. So this is a program called Seeds of Peace, which is a conflict transformation program that brings together teenagers from regions of conflict around the world to spend three weeks together at a summer camp, and you do lots and lots of things at the summer camp that would be familiar to anyone who's been to a camp in terms of sports and drama and singing and sitting by a campfire and all of that good stuff.

But they also spend almost two hours a day in dialogue groups. And so, this is really where my introduction to the idea of dialogue came from. The campers spend all of this time engaging with one another on the conflict, but what's important is that it's not a debate, that the goal of dialogue is never consensus or agreement. The goal is to understand yourself better, to understand people with different perspectives, and especially from the other side, how they're thinking about it, and to understand the dynamics of the conflict and why it is what it is.

I was lucky enough to participate as a teen, as you mentioned. This was totally lucky for me, and it was the reason that I went into psychology as a field, because being able to watch people who have been taught something their whole lives, there have been a few areas of conflict that have been focal, but the Middle East, and thinking about Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, has been a focal point of the program since it started in 1993.

Watching people who had been taught their whole lives to be enemies come together for three weeks and discover that the people on the other side are actually not at all the way they had been described, and watching them wrestle with this new information and what are my beliefs now was sort of a magical thing for me to be able to watch largely as an outsider, because I was not coming from this conflict per se, but it made me interested in the idea of how people navigate their beliefs and, in particular, when their beliefs are in conflict, and they're getting different sources of information, how they follow it.

Many years later, I came back to start partnering with them as a research project, because this is such a unique and wonderful group of people that are brought together. And so, we started tracking their attitudes from the beginning of the program to the end of the program, as well as the relationships that were forming. And in one early paper, we found that the campers who formed at least one close relationship with someone from the other side showed stronger attitude change during the program and also maintained that attitude change once the program ended and they returned back home, and when we checked in on them nine to 12 months later.

Then in more recent work, we started to try to understand, where are these relationships developing? And so, we were putting together the social networks that people would report. We would ask campers on the last day of camp, "Who are the people that you're closest to?" And we would look at what was producing these relationships, and what we found specifically within the dialogue groups was that if you didn't share a dialogue group with another camper, and we looked at who you're most likely to be close to, you're more likely to be close to people who share your nationality.

So if I'm just thinking about some random other camper in the program, I'm more likely to be close to someone who is of my same nationality than a different one. This is not surprising. This is the homophily effect that you would expect in all sorts of contexts. The piece that was so surprising was that this fully reversed within the dialogue group.

So for campers who share a dialogue group, so they're talking to that same group every day through the whole program, we found that Jewish Israelis were more likely to list a Palestinian in their group as someone that they're close to than one of the other Jewish Israelis in their group, and Palestinians were more likely to list a Jewish Israeli in their group than another Palestinian in their group, and that full reversal was beyond what I was expecting.

I had been at camp myself. I knew that these out-group relationships would form. I knew that dialogue was a remarkable experience where people could sort of sort through very difficult content and emotional content in ways that were productive, but I was surprised to see that they actually ended up forming these relationships more so with the out-group in this context, which in my mind just sort of... It speaks to how powerful dialogue can be.

And what I'm doing in my mind, I'm running the counterfactual, what if you spent two hours a day in debate? Right? What if we set up these sessions where you had the Israelis on one side and the Palestinians on the other, and for two hours every day, they disagreed about the conflict in a debate form where they were each trying to persuade the other side that they were right? Which is what we see in the rest of the world, but not in these dialogue groups.

And I don't think that these relationships would form. I think the relationships, these cross-group relationships that are forming are largely because of the understanding and the fact that they're working through some negative feelings and negative experiences to get somewhere that's more positive, and I don't think that that same relationship would form if they were in a debate.

Hal Weitzman: But as you say, the interesting thing is that it was the other group that... The person from the other group was a better friend after this dialogue. I mean, how do you explain that? Is it because, I'm guessing, they haven't had a lot of experiences of encountering people who are from the out-group? So when they encounter them and, "You know what? They're actually okay," then it's suddenly they're warmer to them than they would be to somebody else who they have heard what they've had to say before.

Jane Risen: Yeah. You captured that well. I think what's different is, what do we do spontaneously? And we sort of spontaneously engage within group members in all the ways that allow for friendships to blossom. We don't often do that with out-group members. But when we think about the structure that is created by these groups, I think it kind of produces the opportunity to engage with out-group members the way we might spontaneously do with in-group members and helps form the relationship.

We looked at a few different groupings that they use at camp though. And so, for example, when they share a bunk, we find that at the end of camp, they're equally likely to be close to an in-group or an out-group member, whereas when they're not sharing a bunk, it's always the in-group member. So the pattern and the attenuation pattern when you share a group is similar, but it doesn't fully reverse.

So I think that dialogue is more than just giving people a chance to interact, but it's actually providing a structure to connect on very important, deep, personal topics and vulnerabilities. And so, I think it is partly, it's the intimacy that is created in these dialogue groups that's allowing for those relationships to form to the extent that they are.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, we covered this research many years ago in Chicago Booth Review, but you and I haven't had a chance to talk about it. I don't think so. I'm sure that some people will be listening and thinking, "Yeah, but it's a camp. You go on a retreat with your colleagues? Of course, you're going to talk about lots of things, and it's going to be a different atmosphere, and the whole point of the retreat is you come back and you have new relationships that aren't just about what happened in your cubicle and their cubicle."

So it's taking people out of themselves and out of, in this case, the conflict that must help at least make things different. It's not just the structure. It's also the fact that you took them out of the situation. So I'm just wondering, in real life, people get het up about whatever, the people that they live with or the people they work with, and this is where some of this debate-dialogue dynamic happens. What do you think is it that makes conversations in the regular world, not a camp or retreat, gravitate more towards the dialogue or more towards the debate?

Jane Risen: So we've started to explore this in the work outside of camp. Right? So we can't manipulate what happens in these groupings. We can't create dialogue versus debate there, but when we move out of the camp and we move to the lab, we can do all sorts of different things. And one of the projects we've been working on is to think about what situational features spontaneously lead people to engage more with dialogue or more with debate.

And some of the things that we've found, I think, are not terribly surprising, but we find that the more disagreement, the stronger the disagreement is, the more likely you are to engage with a debate orientation. Weaker disagreement is more likely to lead to dialogue. We find that the more certain people are of their personal opinion, the more likely they are to engage in debate, whereas being less certain makes people more open to dialogue.

Another feature that matters is the extent to which the topic is seen as moral or not. And so, for moral topics, people are more inclined to debate, because there's this idea that this should be universal. Everybody should have to see it my way, whereas for topics that are more about personal taste or conventions or things that don't have that same moral tinge or quality, it's easier to say, "We can agree to disagree. I just want to understand where you're coming from." And so, we see more dialogue.

The other person's goal also has an important effect on your goal. So if you are interacting with someone who you think has the goal to learn from you and understand you, then you're more likely to adopt the goal of understanding them, whereas if you think they're out to convince you, it's more likely that you're going to then try to convince them.

We also see some differences on this in-group and out-group dimension we were just talking about at the camp. So people are more likely to engage with dialogue for in-group members, but for an out-group member, you're more likely to start with debate, which is why I think the dialogue sessions at a program like Seeds of Peace are so important, because what would naturally happen between Israelis and Palestinians, all of those features suggest debate. Right?

There's strong disagreement, a lot of certainty. There are a lot of moral topics involved, and we're out-group members. All of that would lead you towards debate, but when you set it up as a dialogue, you can encourage people to do something different from what they might spontaneously do. But in terms of these everyday conversations, those are some of the features that we have found predicting the tendency towards debate or dialogue.

And I'll add one more thing, is that a lot of the features that seem to promote dialogue seem to do so because people perceive themselves as sharing goals and values with the other person. So when we're in-group members, when you're trying to understand me, oh, another one is when I care about the impression you have of me, all of those things tend to be aligned with believing that we share goals and values. That seems to be kind of underlying why people are willing to enter into a dialogue. When they don't perceive shared goals and values, that seems to lead them more towards debate.

Hal Weitzman: No. Everything you're saying, it sounds like debate is sort of a bad thing. Is it, or it depends what you're trying to achieve?

Jane Risen: I think it depends on what you're trying to achieve. So I think there's lots of times that debate can be very productive. I do have this tendency to sort of, I think, promote dialogue more. It's largely because I think we don't do it enough. So it's not to say that debate doesn't have its time and place, but I think we sometimes jump to debate maybe before we're even ready. So even simply like, "How can we have a true debate if we don't understand what each other's positions are?"

And so, when we're talking past one another or we're debating straw men, that, I think, is likely because we've jumped to debate too quickly. So even if the debate would be a useful exercise, I think starting with dialogue may sometimes make that exercise more effective or more productive, because we have to understand each other before we can actually persuade one another.

I will say one of the things that's interesting is that we find that dialogue does lead to more understanding. So if your goal was to understand, then dialogue seems to help. What's interesting is that debate doesn't actually lead to more persuasion. And so, you might think, "Well, debate is a good thing to do when my goal is to persuade." But I'm not totally sold on that, because if my goal is to persuade, but so is yours, then we don't actually see much movement.

In fact, if anything, we tend to see more willingness to change your attitude following dialogue. And so, I think debate can still be useful, but when the goal is persuasion, it's not obvious to me that debate is always the best way to get there, even though it feels like the best way to get there.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the stories behind the pivotal scientific breakthroughs and research that are reshaping our world. Change how you see the world, and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Jane Risen, in the first half, we talked about your research about dialogue versus debate, or maybe not necessarily versus, but dialogue and debate, two different ways of thinking about interacting with other people. And I'm sure that some of us are thinking... You talked about how you should start... It might make sense to start with dialogue even if you really want to win people over, and maybe even end there.

If you find yourself the other way around though, which many of us will, you know you're in a debate. You know it's not really leading anyway. You're not going to win somebody over, but you're sort of stuck. How can you think about going from that situation and steering it more towards dialogue?

Jane Risen: That's a great question. I think there's both more implicit and explicit ways to do this. So as we were talking about before, you tend to respond to your partner's goals and your partner's behaviors. If I want you to be more likely to engage in a dialogue, one of the best ways is for me to approach it as a dialogue. So if I make my goal about understanding you, and I make that clear to you in the ways that I'm interacting and asking questions, being open to your point of view, then it's more likely that you are going to respond in a dialogue-like way, because you're picking that up from me.

And so, one thing is just because this tends to be sort of reciprocal between people and dynamic, I can just personally orient more towards dialogue, and that should lead someone else that I'm talking to to come that way too. But I also think you can be a lot more explicit about this. And in some ways, I think this could help with a logjam where you say, "I don't think I'm going to convince you, and I don't think you're going to convince me, at least not right now." Right? You can also put a temporal piece on it.

"So what if we just put that aside? Let's forget about trying to convince each other. Let's just make sure we understand each other." And I think you could be very explicit in articulating what the goals of dialogue are and why it might be easier to do that if we just put this other goal aside. I think sometimes the goal of persuasion is so prominent in our minds that even though we have other goals at the same time, we lose sight of those.

So my relationship goals with you and other things are out of my focus when I'm focused on persuading you. And if we can do something to very intentionally put this persuasion goal to the side, it becomes easier to focus on these other goals, like understanding you or our long-term relationship, solving a particular problem that we have, or whatever the case may be.

And I take your point. You said this at the start. I've been talking about them as either-or, but I don't see them as either-or. And in fact, in the studies, we typically measure them as separate indices. We're asking about both your tendencies towards dialogue and your tendencies towards debate, and it's not one continuum.

All of our results suggest that these are two different orientations that can move up and down together or can move separately. And so, we were talking about features that lead people to take more of a debate or more of a dialogue approach, but you can also think of other kinds of features that would make me more likely to engage in a disagreement versus avoid it entirely. And so, those would be different types of features that might not determine how I'm going to interact, but just the fact that I'm willing to interact.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. I mean, I know that a lot of people will be listening to this and thinking about two things. One is social media, which does not lend itself to the kind of dialogue that you're talking about, lends itself much more to me attacking you and saying you're an idiot, and politics where people are paid to say you're an idiot.

And particularly, I think, and I come from the UK, and there's a way that you can design a legislature. A parliament is typically designed with two opposing benches. Now, there are other ways you can design it to look more like a horseshoe and that people feel like that sets up a different type of conversation. I mean, would it be necessary, first of all, but how could we set up a national political conversation, either in person in our legislatures or online, that would look more like dialogue?

Jane Risen: This is the ongoing question. So I'm not going to have good answers, but I like even the simple structure of how we're seated as an important sort of step in the direction. So these dialogue groups that are run at camp, it's a circle, and it's all intermixed. Right? You don't have half of the circle with one group and half of with the other.

And I think that also sets up the expectation that each individual has their own position on this, which I think, again, when we get into the politics of things, we often lose sight of that, because it's just about which team you're on. It's not about what you as an individual think and understand about the issues that you're dealing with.

So some of it could be just literally how we're seated and how we're organized. I also think one of the problems is how... If you think back, I don't know that we're going to solve it in social media or in politics without thinking about earlier rewarding these kinds of behaviors, that I think so much even in schooling, we're taught to present a persuasive argument, but we're rarely taught to better understand what someone else is saying or to have the humility to recognize that I may not be getting 100%, but I'm getting 80%, and I need more effort to get that last 20%.

And so, I think orienting people towards the goal of understanding when we're experiencing disagreement, I feel like doing that earlier may make it a lot easier to then work with people as adults doing this, but then you can also ask the question of, "Can we change some of the incentives and the rewards around social media or around our politics so that it's not about proving that you're right, but really, the people who are most appreciated are the ones who can articulate the other side's position best?" Right?

You think about this in couples therapy, this example of role-playing where you have to role-play the other side. How well can you do that? So imagine, in parliament, it's not you presenting your own position, but you had to present the other side's position. And the better you can present the other side's position, the more you were seen as a terrific politician. You were someone who could step into anybody's minds and make the most compelling argument on that behalf.

That, in my mind, I don't see that happening. I'm not trying to suggest that that's likely to be something we can easily do. But I think if we make that a goal for individuals and if we make that something that is appreciated and rewarded when other people do it, that would go a long way. And so, you think about, in politics, people who are successful at working across the aisle.

In some stretches of time, that was seen as a very positive thing. I think that's probably not so true today, but how could we make that more true today, that if you are able to work across lines of difference, that that would be seen as that you have a talent and a skill that is incredibly useful in our politics? That would be nice.

Hal Weitzman: Well, Jane Risen, this has been a great dialogue. Thank you very much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Jane Risen: Thank you for having me.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website, chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter, so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.