How to Say What You Mean without Sounding Like You're Mean

Opinions fly high during the political season, and as a result, you may find yourself in situations where you’ve been asked to provide yours. Depending on who you’re with at the time, you may worry that if you speak from the heart, you’ll offend your conversation partner. However, you are becoming increasingly vexed by what this person is saying. You just don’t agree with those opinions and feel an increasing need to express yours.

The conflict you experience when you’re placed in these situations can be uncomfortable, to say the least. In way, these feelings are similar to the state of cognitive dissonance when your attitudes and behavior are directly opposed to one another. Assuming you’re with people you like (or should like), it means that by being with them, whether at their house, in an office, or in a larger social setting, your presence signifies that you accept their views. However, you absolutely could not disagree with them more.

One way to resolve cognitive dissonance is to change your behavior to become lined up with your attitudes. This would mean that you would have to give up your friends, family, or office associates. Not a very plausible strategy. You could change your opinions to match everyone else’s, but then you would feel that you’ve betrayed your values and belief system. This seems just as difficult.

Here’s another scenario. While waiting in line at a coffee shop counter, headline news flashes across the TV screen above describing a shooting, political speech, or celebrity revelation. Disturbed or perhaps disgusted, you turn to the person behind you and provide your first, honest, reaction. As it turns out, though, your fellow customer has a completely opposite take on the news story. The awkwardness could not be more acute and each of you steps away a little bit from each other while you fiddle with your phone to give yourself something to do. You don’t have quite the same cognitive dissonance you would feel when your opinions differ from people you actually know, but it does feel very uncomfortable regardless. What can you learn from this to help you the next time you’re faced with this dilemma?

Work by Cornell University’s David Bindel and colleagues (2016) provides some ideas about how to handle yourself when you are diametrically opposed to the opinions of others in a social situation. Bindel and his team argue that our opinions are constantly and dynamically shifting, influenced by a variety of sources including the people around us.

Based on the Nobel prize winning economist John Nash’s game theory, the Cornell team tested a mathematical formula that calculates the social cost that occurs when people with opposing views don’t achieve agreement among themselves. The Nash model of game theory proposes that participants in a social network will ultimately evolve into consensus through repeated averaging, but from a cognitive dissonance point of view, this doesn’t always happen. As Bindel et al. note, “when consensus is not reached, it becomes natural to ask about the cost of this lack of consensus, as a measure of the dissonance created” (p. 249). By assuming that not everyone will reach consensus in every situation, Bindel and his co-authors showed through mathematical proofs that you can compute an actual cost of dissonance.

This approach shows, then, that coming to agreement isn’t always a natural outcome when people have opposing viewpoints. You probably already knew that from your own experience. However, that idea of repeated averaging is an interesting one. Can you resolve some of the dissonance you feel when you’re with people who voice opinions that differ from yours and still feel true to yourself?

Let’s return to the coffee shop scenario and imagine that you start to engage with that coffee shop patron instead of retreating to the comfort of your phone’s apps. On a scale of -10 to +10, you’re at the extreme negative end and this other person is at the extreme positive end. After recovering from the feeling of embarrassment at having created a potential conflict with a stranger, what if you decided to take the plunge and start to explore why each of you reacted as you did? Could you come to a score of zero by the end of your conversation? Or could you still come away with your original opinions (maybe a minus 6) but feel better informed by the mini-debate you end up having? There’s not really that much to lose because even if you offend the other person or feel that you’re being insincere to be polite, there’s a good chance you’ll never see him or her again.

When you’re with people who you know very well and have an ongoing relationship with, the costs become a bit higher. You clearly don’t want to offend or alienate them, but you feel that you have to make your position clear. Here’s where you can take a page from the conflict resolution playbook. Before things get too heated and you say something you’ll regret later, pause and try to understand where your debate partners are coming from. Is there some legitimacy to their arguments? Did they form their opinions through experiences you haven’t had yourself? Similarly, you could share your views from the standpoint of helping them understand the formative influences on your opinion.

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As you start to explore some of the common ground or history of opinion differences, the conversation can start to shift away from accusatory or inflammatory statements and instead toward logical comparisons. That averaging process described by the economists may not result in a net difference of zero between you and the others in your group, but you can reduce the emotional cost of the remaining divergence.

By using opinion conflict to inform and even enhance your relationships with others, you can develop a greater sense of fulfillment as you enrich your understanding of the world and the people in it who don’t always share your views. Becoming open to new ideas and experiences can only help you develop greater flexibility and even build and broaden your identity.

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Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2016

References

Bindel, D., Kleinberg, J., & Oren, S. (2015). How bad is forming your own opinion?. Games And Economic Behavior, 92248-265. doi:10.1016/j.geb.2014.06.004