If you are interested in a constructive dialogue, you should send signals of your own openness to the person you are talking to.
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Discussing constructively with people who disagree is not easy. Social psychologists have suggestions on how to overcome existing hurdles.
fFor Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, a functioning exchange of opinions is a matter of course. “Just a note to encourage people with different political or other views to engage in a civil debate on Twitter,” he wrote on Twitter in late November: “In the worst case, the other side gets a little better understanding of your views. But is it really that easy to develop and convey understanding among political opponents?
How difficult it is to openly engage with other opinions and beliefs can be seen from the many well-researched psychological mechanisms that stand in the way of this. A current overview article in “Personality and Social Psychology Review” (doi: 10.1177/10888683211061037) provides an impression of this. Julia Minson and Frances Chen from the Universities of Harvard and British Columbia first found that it takes far more cognitive effort to deal with positions that contradict one’s own. Already according to the assumption that we are “cognitive cheapskate” and like to save time thinking, we avoid information that contradicts our practiced conclusions. In addition to this cognitive effort, there are also emotional hurdles, because the ideological opponent not only evokes rejection on an argumentative level, we sometimes don’t like him as a person simply because he has a different opinion. So in a disagreeable exchange, you have to regulate strong emotions and put in a lot of cognitive effort.
