Bridging the Divide: How to Have Difficult Conversations
“Lauren Smith, my next guest blogger, was my wife’s former colleague in her PhD program, and was instrumental in starting the Young Greens at UWaterloo several years back. Today, Lauren is writing about a topic that speaks directly to my political style: how to handle conversations across ideological divides. As you will read, seeking to find common values through listening, and emphasizing positive emotions, tend to have much more of an impact. These are skills I learned well when volunteering for Mike Morrice, and continue into my Green Party activities today!” - Nick
I’m writing this just before Canada’s Thanksgiving long weekend. A tumultuous ‘holiday’ already considering Canada’s violent relationship with our Indigenous peoples, Thanksgiving is also when families and, often, conflicting opinions, views, and values come together in many meme-worthy ways. The last few years in Canadian and American politics and media have seen increasingly fervid outbursts and demands from all sides, creating a potently divisive atmosphere – though perhaps not the most polarized we’ve ever seen.
As someone who works in and has researched climate communication and behaviour change for the better part of a decade, it can certainly feel contentious trying to convince people to make changes to their lives that they won’t immediately see the benefits from – benefits that also rely on others making the same changes. My goal with this post is to – hopefully – help you communicate tough topics better – to share what I’ve learned about communicating difficult, at times life-threatening, subjects without having your listener or conversation partner immediately tune out or get defensive. We need all the help we can get to make a just transition a reality; preparing for challenging conversations can help us along the way.
Conversations can be difficult. Let’s be thankful for memes.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
What we often try to do when faced with someone who doesn’t see things the way we do, is to provide the information and facts to help them understand. If only they knew the impact of that overseas flight! If only they knew the real cost of electric vehicles! If only they understood how universal basic income works! This urge to inform and educate others is based on the information-deficit model and the assumption that if we knew more about a particular topic, we would make better decisions. Unfortunately, despite entrenched beliefs otherwise, we are not purely rational decision-makers.
Think about a habit or two in your own life that you know you should change, yet haven’t. Whether it’s opting for active or public transportation, more exercise, spending less, eating healthier, or getting started on that task early, we often fall short of things we know we should be doing even when we have the facts to support the change. Now, the reasons for this intention-behaviour gap are not on the individual alone and may have deep, systemic barriers also holding us back, but it’s safe to say that more information probably isn’t going to help if it hasn’t already. We see this disconnect when public figures espouse climate policies, but jet-set across the globe. Psychologists have even studied this disconnect within climate change believers and skeptics specifically.
So what can we do?
VALUES AND COMMON GROUND
When communicating a challenging topic with someone who may hold an opposing view, rather than providing more facts and figures, find out what is important to that person. What is it that they value or is a central part of their identity? You might need to take the conversation in a slightly different direction to find this out. You may find where you share common ground along the way – maybe a shared memory about a nearby forest or community centre. By identifying what you hold in common and what both parties value, you’ll likely have an easier time talking about things that are more contentious. By connecting with things that are already important to them, you may find an easier time bringing them on board or in seeing the issue from a different point of view.
This helps us to confront and tackle our interpersonal biases as well: while the research is (more than) a little complex, the more time we spend with people who are different from us, the more we can understand and empathize what it is like for them. This fostered empathy is important; emotions’ role in tough conversations and decisions is often ignored – but I’ll speak more on that below.
NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
When engaged in conversation with someone who doesn’t see things the way you do, it’s easy to focus on the negatives and consequences of inaction. You may feel you need to convince them of just how important and dire the situation is. Despite headlines and the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ adage, communicating the dangerous, potentially life-threatening, results may actually have the opposite of the desired effect. My doctorate focused on this dynamic with the communication of different water crises that are expected to increase with climate change. In brief, reminding people of their mortality in these ways makes them more likely to deny their immediate risk, and, over time, to increase their identification with their values and social groups. What this means in a climate context is that reminding deniers of fatal climate risks can cause them to further dig their heels into their beliefs and to strengthen their ties with those who think like them. Not the mutual understanding we’re hoping to achieve.
SO EMOTIONAL
Instead, it may be more helpful to weave in space for hope or opportunity in these tough conversations. Avoid an overly utopic scene that seems ‘too good to be true’, as that could be a tough sell, even for yourself. Rather, identifying opportunities for hope or specific actions available to avoid the threat, can help offset the threat-based anxiety that emerges from these topics and the undesired behavioural responses. Similarly, there is growing evidence that recognizing emotions’ roles in our decision-making and intentionally including positive emotions (like hope, empathy, or awe) can help people to think and behave in more socially responsible ways. Perhaps by framing our conversations in ways that evoke or include these emotions, we can more easily – and less painfully – communicate across historically entrenched divides.
REMEMBER YOUR GOAL
While not the only steps to take to ease tough conversations, hopefully these suggestions make the journey a little smoother. Remember to avoid information overload, connect over shared values and common ground, avoid discussing only the negative consequences, and recognize the emotions involved, particularly areas for hope and care. A final point to consider is the goal of the conversation. Are you interested in what your conversation partner believes, in changing their mind, or do you want to ‘win’? The latter will make for the most difficult conversation, and least likely to be fulfilling or to change minds. Aims to deepen connections, to invite others in, and to ask others to join your journey may be more fruitful than striving to be ‘right’. While this post is too late for the Thanksgiving dinner table, the winter holiday season is around the corner.
Lauren Keira M. Smith, PhD
Lauren Smith is an interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Roads University, residing in Waterloo, Ontario, where she completed her PhD (2023) with Dr. Sarah Wolfe. Lauren is a founding member of the Society, Environment, and Emotions Lab, where she and her colleagues examine the intersections of emotions and climate change. Beyond climate and gender issues, Lauren is passionate about sustainable death care, and serves on the Executive Board of the Collective for Radical Death Studies and is a Science and Research Advisor for the Green Burial Council.
