I use experiments and data to help people make better decisions in their everyday lives. And the decisions that I’m going to be talking about today are perhaps some of the most difficult and most fraught decisions we make on a daily basis, which is how do we behave and what do we say and what do we do when we’re confronted with somebody we strongly disagree with? Ironically, this is a set of decisions that most of us have been grappling with since roughly the age of two. And there is absolutely no doubt that disagreement on identity relevant important topics is really on point. But also there is decades of research out there that says, look, there is a solution. So since the 1960s, when the pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers proposed that making your counterpart feel heard is the solution to this problem, researchers have been trying to understand what is the magic of making your counterpart feel deeply listened to. And there’s a lot of modern research that basically suggests that, look, making your counterpart feel heard is like pouring oil over troubled waters. It sort of allows both sides to get to the end of the conversation safely and with minimal emotional damage. We know that when patients feel heard by their doctors, they’re more likely to adhere to their medications. We know that when employees feel heard by their bosses, they’re less likely to quit their job. And now we even know that feeling heard activates the pleasure centers in our brain, decreasing anxiety and increasing positive emotions. But here’s the problem. The problem is that in many conversations about opposing views on hot button issues, our counterparts don’t feel heard. In fact, they come in expecting to be argued with and expecting to be interrupted. They don’t have the expectation that you’re going to actually listen to them deeply and give them respect and faith. And so those expectations, of course, shape their perceptions. So how do we overcome this problem? How do we help people who are sharing their stories with us feel that we’re truly engaged with their perspective? How do we give them that gift of listening? So in my lab, we have been using natural language processing and computational linguistics to identify something we call conversational receptiveness, which is the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. Conversational receptiveness has a specific linguistic signature, and we know from our studies that it strongly predicts conflict outcomes. Importantly, we identify conversational receptiveness by having an algorithm analyze thousands of conversations between people who disagree. So I’m going to show you how we did that. I’m going to show you two pieces of text, and I’m going to ask you to pretend that you’re an algorithm. These are pieces of text from our prior research, and both of these people are responding to something they disagree with on the topic of the Black Lives Matter movement. What you will notice is one of them is quite receptive, and one of them is not. And I want you to guess which one is which. Okay, so here’s the first piece of text, and here’s the second piece of text. I want you to take a second to read them and consider them. Now a few folks are like most audiences that I have talked in front of. We will reach a quick conclusion that the first one seems more receptive. In fact, it’s one of the most receptive responses in our data set. The second one is by far less receptive. But the question is, how is that expressed? What are the words and phrases that lead us to this conclusion? So what our algorithm does is it puts out a chart like this that has a list of linguistic features that are used more or less frequently in language that’s judged as more receptive or less receptive by humans. In fact, the two pieces of text I showed you differ on these five features, the presence of negation, reasoning, acknowledgement, hedging, and agreement words. I’ll show you what I mean. I understand is an acknowledgement. Probably is a hedge. I can also see is a way of expressing agreement. Of course, I agree is also a way of expressing agreement, but possibly sometimes is another hedge. By contrast, do not and can’t are negations and therefore because and because are reasoning words. Now our algorithm identifies about 30 features of language and adds them all up to form an impression of how receptive a particular piece of text is. That’s too much for any normal person. So we can boil down the four features that do the most work for us and teach them to people to help you be more receptive in all your conversations. These four features conveniently fall into the acronym here. So the H in here stands for hedging your claims and can be expressed with phrases like, I think it’s possible that or this might happen because or some people tend to think the E stands for emphasizing agreement. I think we both want to or I agree with some of what you’re saying or we are both concerned with the A stands for acknowledging other perspectives. I understand that I see your point or what I think you’re saying is and the R stands for reframing to the positive. I think it’s great when I really appreciate it when and it would be so wonderful if the key insight here is that listening is something that happens in our minds and our counterparts can’t actually tell what’s happening in our heads. They can’t read our minds. So using language and words to express your listening sends an honest accurate signal of the fact that you’re actually engaging with that opposing perspective. And our follow-up research we found that conversational receptiveness is easy to learn. Using conversational receptiveness turns out is actually more persuasive than using straight argumentation. And finally and perhaps most importantly, people imitate conversational receptive. If I am receptive to you, it makes you receptive to me. I will leave you with a final bit of a little bit of advice. In every conversation about a hot button issue with somebody you disagree with, make demonstrating listening your goal, not just listening, but showing that you’re listening. The acronym here gives you a bit of a toolkit for how to do that. And I suggest that we all work on training our organizations, families and communities in these schools so that we thread a little bit of listening love in the world. Now as Liz mentioned, if you don’t want to be receptive, sometimes there are good reasons not to do so. And so it’s a time to thoughtfully reflect on why. Thank you.