Greater Good · 16 hours ago

Is Talking or Texting Better for Disagreements?

When Dylan Marron received comments like "you should kill yourself" on his YouTube channel, he responded not with rage or silence, but with an invitation: would you be willing to talk? What followed - dozens of conversations with people who had wished him harm - became both a podcast and, it turns out, a quiet confirmation of what UC Berkeley behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder has spent nearly two decades studying. Her research, drawing on 1,842 conversations between political opponents, found that people who spoke with each other reported greater understanding, less conflict, and more openness than those who exchanged the same ideas in writing - and that speakers were also more accurate in understanding their partner's actual views. The explanation points to something worth sitting with: online comment sections are designed to strip away the very cues that remind us we are talking to a person, while a voice, even without a face, restores what Schroeder calls the "humanizing" quality of the other. "Ten minutes of speaking," she writes, "could save you a lifetime of misunderstanding" - a modest prescription that carries, beneath it, a larger truth about how much of our conflict is a failure not of conviction, but of medium.