People underestimate how much their attitudes soften during civil debates, and misjudge how much common ground they share with those of differing opinions, according to a new study
19 December 2025
By Emma Young
There's nothing like a Christmas family gathering for bringing colliding opinions together in an explosive mix. But does it have to be that way? And can a 'civil discussion' between two people with radically different views actually change either person's thinking?
The answer, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is yes. Michael Kardas at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also found that people hold back from discussing differences of opinion, because they mistakenly believe that such conversations will be pointless.
In the first of a series of online studies, 154 US-based participants first rated the extent to which they believed cats or dogs make a better pet. They then spent ten minutes discussing their opinions with another participant who felt differently. Before this conversation started, they were asked to predict how likely it was that their attitude, or the other person's, would change as a result.
The team's analysis of the results showed that participants underestimated not only how much their own and their partner's attitudes would soften, but also the extent to which these changes in their partner's attitude would be apparent. When the team then followed up with the participants a week later, they found that the changes in attitude had persisted.
In a second study, 100 US-based participants who either supported or opposed 'cancel culture' briefly shared their beliefs with a partner who felt differently, then the pair had a ten-minute conversation about their reasoning.
Again, these participants underestimated how much their own and their partner's attitudes would depolarise. The researchers' analysis of more detailed responses to questionnaires revealed the individual aspects of this: the participants under-estimated how much they would agree with each other's reasons, how hard they would try to understand each other and how receptive they would be to the other perspective. They also overestimated how hard their partner would try to defend their own perspective and try to persuade them to feel the same way. (Again, the team found that changes in attitude after the conversation were still present a week on.)
A third study revealed another reason why people with opposing attitudes — in this case, on cancel culture — underestimated their agreement. Though these pairs presumed that their attitudes differed because of a fundamental disagreement about cancel culture itself, it turned out to be more because they were thinking about different individual examples. When they were given some other cases of people who had been 'cancelled' to discuss, they tended to discover unexpected areas of agreement.
In further studies, including some with participants based in the UK, the team found yet more evidence that people underestimate how much their attitudes would soften during a conversation, and overlooked "differences in how they were construing an issue that conversation could bridge rapidly".
This work has a few limitations, including the fact that all the participants were based in the US or UK and, as the authors note, earlier studies suggest that people from Eastern cultures have more tolerance for ideas that appear to contain contradictions. This might make them more open to the idea that people with different attitudes can find common ground.
However, this work does contribute the growing body of work showing that we tend to have misguidedly pessimistic beliefs about how well conversations with other people will go. It also holds some specific lessons — in that it "reveals that mis-calibrated expectations can create an unnecessary barrier to civil discourse, leaving people with diverse points of view more divided, more polarised and less informed than they otherwise would be," the researchers write.
The key adjective in this sentence, of course, is "civil". But if you can manage to keep this year's Christmas family discussions from spiralling into rows, you might find that discoveries of at least some common ground lead to less conflict in future.
Read the paper in full:
Kardas, M., Nordgren, L., & Rucker, D. (2025). Unnecessarily divided: Civil conversations reduce attitude polarization more than people expect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000469
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/change-minds-christmas-dinner-keep-it-civil(accessed 27.12.25)
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