How to Deal with Disagreement

A guide to ending contentious arguments

This article originally appeared on Sarah Hoyt’s blog, but if you haven’t seen it yet, lucky you!

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We live in a very contentious world with constant, angry arguments online and it feels like people don’t even know how to deal with disagreement in a healthy way anymore. Disagreement is a part of life, though, and we have to know how to navigate that. You could just ignore the disagreement, but that seems wrong when you have a strong belief. Instead, you need to learn how to correctly engage with someone who thinks differently than you.

What to Do When Someone Disagrees with You

Get to know the person. When dealing with disagreement, what you need to do is understand the other person’s perspective. So, find out all you can about this person. Check all his social media. Look at his old tweets. Whatever you can find.

Understand his interests. A big part of what makes up the perspective of each person is his hobbies and his job. Find what clubs and organizations he’s a member of. Especially find out who employs him. Then call them up to find out more, saying things like, “I want to tell you what this person you employ believes and see how that fits with this company. Is this something that makes you happy about his employment or makes you rethink it?” You’ll learn a lot this way about whether these organizations could be a source of the thinking that led to this disagreement or whether they might view things differently.

Appeal to those he respects. Another big thing that influences someone's beliefs and may be a source of disagreement is who he confides in. This could be his friends and family. Seek them out and find out what they think. “Did you know your friend has this belief?” you can ask them. “Do you really want to be associated with that?” Again, you’ll find out a lot about who you have a disagreement with by who sticks by him and who becomes more wary.

Try your argument out on others. Maybe, the problem with the disagreement is your argument. You should test it by trying it on others. A good way to try it on a lot of people is social media. That way you can tell thousands at once what this other guy said and see if they agree it was a terrible thing and you are right. If you have the better argument, you should be able to get a lot of people to back you up — a whole mob maybe — who will help you in tackling the disagreement.

Meet the person face to face. To make your argument sincere, it’s best to make sure you’re delivering it face-to-face. Perhaps, though, the person lives far away. For that situation, you can post the person’s home address to the mob you found of like-minded people. Maybe they can visit this person with the bad opinions and confront him face-to-face with better arguments and or fire.

Agree to disagree. Now, if you’ve followed all these steps, the person who disagreed with you should be fired from his job, isolated from his friends and family, and is now being confronted by a mob while his house burns. But perhaps he still looks at you defiantly and says, “I disagree!” Sometimes, despite trying your best, disagreements persist. There’s nothing now to do but to agree to disagree. So what if he wants to continue to mistakenly believe that Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie? I guess as long as no one employs him or talks to him and he lives in a box, that’s fine.