Disagreeing with Respect

Uniting citizens in the United States depends not on having them agree on the major issues, but rather on establishing a norm that all disagreement must be accompanied by expressing confirmation of the others’ competence.

When individuals disagree, one of the most frequent behaviors is for the disputants to make their disagreement personal, by criticizing the character and intelligence of their opponents. Disagreeing with others’ ideas and conclusions in a way that infers that the other disputants are incompetent (see Tjosvold, 1998, Johnson, 2015 and Johnson & Johnson, 2005 for references), tends to make the other disputants defensive, increase their commitment to their position, and increase their rejection of one’s information and reasoning. Another study found that when individuals involved in a controversy had their personal competence disconfirmed by their opponent, the result was a closed-minded rejection of the opponent’s position, information, and reasoning. The amount of defensiveness generated influences the degree to which individuals incorporate the opponent’s information and reasoning into their position.

Instead of making personal attacks on opponents, participants in a disagreement should engage in the skill of “disagreeing with others while confirming the others’ personal competence.” Disagreeing with others involves identifying weaknesses in their positions and challenging the information in and logic of their arguments. Confirming a person’s competence involves expressing respect for their intelligence and complementing them on the skillfulness of their advocacy. Disagreeing with others’ ideas while simultaneously confirming their personal competence results in being better liked by the opponents and in the opponents being less critical of one’s ideas, more interested in learning more about one’s ideas, and more willing to incorporate one’s information and reasoning into their own analysis of the problem. Disagreement associated with expressions of liking resulted in more learning than did disagreement associated with expressions of dislike.

Rudeness, that is, disagreeing with others in a direct and confrontational way, is less effective in generating new ideas and coordinating efforts to achieve than polite disagreement. Competitive goals may be reflected in the lack of politeness and skill with which members disagree with each other. Impolite disagreeing has pronounced negative influences on relationships, achievement, and group success. Cooperative argumentation resulted in deeper arguments and better understanding of what was being discussed than did adversarial argumentation.