“Most people pick a side and argue because that’s how we are sort of trained,” Coleman said. For example, if an issue like abortion is presented as anti-choice or pro-choice, people are prepared to argue. In contrast, the more productive conversations were where the participants thought through the process of the conversation and had more complex discussions.Ĭoleman’s team has been using these observations to alter the conversation’s framing and complexity to see how it changes the outcome, he said. The conversations that were less constructive were the ones where participants began to think of the issues they were discussing in simplistic terms: wrong or right, truth or lie, good or bad. The conclusions the team have reached so far depend on the complexity of the conversation, Coleman said. The lab has conducted several hundred conversations, and the research is ongoing, he said. “What we’re doing is not some sort of magical experience that transforms people,” Coleman said. It is not that participants are solving the issues themselves, but they are creating the space to learn something about themselves, the issue, and other viewpoints. Researchers study the conditions under which the conversations go well, or well enough, whether the participants continue to speak with each other, and where they stop the conversations out of frustration, he said.Ĭontrary to expectation, these conversations do not always go sour and are sometimes constructive, Coleman said. They choose currently relevant topics like abortion, free speech, race relations, and politics. He based his idea for the lab on other projects like the Gottman Institute’s Love Lab for couples therapy.Ĭoleman said researchers at the lab measure people’s attitudes on a series of issues through surveys, then find people who are on opposite sides of a particular issue and invite them to the lab for a conversation. He wanted to understand why conflicts in families, communities, and in the international arena get stuck in a destructive pattern. He said the lab was created to study deeply rooted, complicated, and hard-to-solve conflicts. The Difficult Conversations Lab was founded in the early 2000s by Peter Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. Putting two people with diametrically opposed viewpoints in a room together may seem frightening to most, but one research lab has been doing it for nearly 20 years.
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