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An Excerpt from How to Disagree Better

by Julia Minson

In this "brilliant" (Arthur Brooks) and "both timely and timeless" (Adam Grant) book, pioneering Harvard Kennedy School professor and behavioral scientist Julia Minson reveals the counterintuitive secret to a life of less drama and more impact.

We are in a disagreement crisis. The average person would rather go to the dentist than have a twenty-minute conversation with someone that they strongly disagree with. Yet disagreement is both inevitable and essential for everything from navigating decisions at home to running innovative and agile companies to governing democratic societies.

In How to Disagree Better, Julia Minson brings to bear her decades of research into understanding the psychology of disagreement and its relevance to negotiations, conflict resolution, and decision-making, revealing the hidden skill that all the best mediators and negotiators share: displaying receptiveness to opposing views.

The science shows that receptive individuals don’t just fight less, they also get more done—they are better decision-makers, better peacemakers, and yes, better influencers than the rest of us. Through original research and case studies, How to Disagree Better will show you why traditional persuasion strategies don’t work as well as you think they do, how you can bridge division and reach better outcomes simply by utilizing receptiveness strategies, and that disagreeing better is a skill all of us can learn to apply at home, at work, and with our neighbors.

The excerpt below comes from Chapter Two of the book, "Discovering the Receptive Mindset."

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WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT HIGHLY RECEPTIVE PEOPLE 

Over two decades and dozens of studies, we came to define receptiveness as a person’s willingness to access, consider, and evaluate supporting and opposing views in an impartial manner. 

We eventually created and validated a personality scale to measure a person’s habitual level of receptiveness. You can take the survey here and learn about how receptively you engage with opposing views on issues that matter to you. 

The survey was the culmination of our work to understand what exactly receptiveness is and how to measure it. Having administered the survey to thousands of people under a variety of different conditions, we now know some things that set more receptive people apart from their less receptive peers. 

First, extensive research shows that people in general are less willing to access information that opposes their perspectives than information that supports those perspectives. This is called “selective exposure” or the “congeniality bias.” In other words, we selectively expose ourselves to information that is congenial to our prior beliefs. This is one reason that American liberals are more likely to watch MSNBC than Fox News, and American conservatives are more likely to do the opposite. People who are concerned about pesticides on their produce are more likely to click on the latest social media posts about how the “dirty dozen” will kill us all. And people who already think that women regularly experience workplace discrimination are more likely to read the latest research supporting this conclusion. Pesticide-related health risks and gender-based discrimination are both undoubtedly bad things, but the human brain seems to get a strange satisfaction from encountering evidence that supports existing beliefs, even if objectively we’d be better off being wrong. However, if you recognize that diverse information helps people make better decisions by offering them a more accurate view of the world, you might also recognize that selective exposure is harmful. By seeking out more and more information that supports our prior beliefs, we are wasting time and energy learning what we already know. 

Nevertheless, selective exposure, especially on hotly contested topics like politics, is an incredibly powerful bias. In one of our studies we told liberals and conservatives that in the course of the study they would have to read the websites of famous politicians but that they could choose which websites to read. Indeed, we found that people on average chose 70 percent of webpages be-longing to politicians from their own party. However, people who scored highly on the receptiveness scale showed a lower amount of selective exposure, choosing significantly more information from the other side. And this pattern is not unique to politics. In another study we asked baseball fans to list their favorite Major League Baseball team and the team they considered to be their favorite team’s greatest rival. We then asked them how willing they would be to have a conversation with a fan of the rival team. Again, people showed an overwhelming bias against talking to a fan of a rival team, but those who were more receptive were more willing to do so. These studies provided evidence that people who are more receptive do indeed expose themselves to more varied information across topics that matter to them. 

Secondly, and in line with our theorizing, people who are more receptive do seem to pay better attention to arguments they disagree with. In a study evaluating this tendency, we recruited people who strongly supported or opposed the Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) and asked them to watch two senators make speeches about the law, with one senator praising it and the other calling for its repeal. The participants had to watch the entire long and boring speech to get paid, so they were stuck. Four times during each speech the video paused so that we could ask participants whether they were truly paying attention. Interestingly, people had no trouble admitting that they were spacing out roughly a third of the time—research participants are generally quick to tell you when they are bored. Importantly, they also reported that they spaced out more listening to the senator whose argument they disagreed with. 

But not the receptive people. They also spaced out, but they spaced out more evenly when watching a senator they agreed with and the one they disagreed with. In other words, receptive participants didn’t somehow have greater control of their attention and they weren’t generally better at listening to congressional de-bate. They were better at giving equal treatment to both sides and letting both sets of ideas permeate their consciousness to a more equal extent. 

The final question we were interested in was whether people who were more receptive were better at being fair-minded when they saw arguments they agreed with versus arguments they dis-agreed with. Most of us think that arguments for the positions we hold are more true, more reasonable, and more relevant to the question at hand than the arguments for the opposition. That's not completely unreasonable: If I thought that the other side's arguments were better, I should have changed my mind. But when two people on opposite sides of an argument both think that their side is more reasonable, more honest, and fairer than the other, one of them has to be wrong! 

It turns out that just like everyone else, people who are more receptive evaluate the arguments for their own side more positively. However, in their case, the gap is not as dramatic. They see some merit in opposing positions, and they see some flaws in their own. They don’t lionize their own perspective and villainize the other. Instead, they are more willing to acknowledge the nuance and trade-offs that are inherently present in any complex debate. 

Future studies yielded additional insights about receptiveness. To see if receptiveness affects the way that people actually behave when left to their own devices, we conducted a study where we recorded the “social networks” of students from master’s degree programs at several different universities. A person’s social network is simply the people they interact with regularly—friends, colleagues, and family members. Social networks are important, especially in graduate school, because people get information, social support, and access to opportunities from the members of their network. The more people you are friendly with in school, the more likely you are to hear about new internships, popular seminars, ski trips, or free furniture. However, it is also the case that most people are overwhelmingly likely to be friends with those who share similar characteristics—women are more likely to be friends with other women, people of color are more likely to be friends with other people of color, math majors are more likely to be friends with other math majors, etc. Some of this has to do with the opportunities you have to make friends—math majors share a lot more classes with each other than they do with anthropology majors—but some of it has to do with preference. Being around people who are like us is comforting in a way that constantly navigating difference is not. 

However, our research shows that people who are more receptive are different in this regard. Across the universities we studied (both with liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning student bodies), master’s degree students who were more receptive had more ideologically diverse friendship networks. In other words, in their lives outside of a controlled experiment, they were better at forming close relationships with people they strongly disagreed with than their less receptive peers. As a result, they were able to benefit from more regular in-depth conversations across a variety of controversial topics and sat at the intersection of multiple diverse peer groups, being able to glean ideas and insights from all sides. 

 

Adapted from How to Disagree Better by Julia Minson, published by Avery Publishing Group. Copyright © 2026 by Julia Alexandra Minson. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Julia Minson is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral scientist with extensive research experience in conflict, communication, negotiations, and decision-making. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement”—how people engage with opinions, judgments, and decisions that differ from their own. Her work has been published in top academic outlets and covered by CNN, TIME, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

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