Research

Amid rising global polarization, finding ways to disagree constructively is vital. This paper examines whether the medium of disagreement—spoken or written—shapes conversation outcomes. A series of randomized experiments (n = 1,576 conversation partners who had 1,842 conversations; n = 1,432 observers) suggests that spoken conversations with a disagreeing counterpart lead to greater understanding, lower conflict, more favorable impressions of one’s counterpart, and greater attitude alignment than written ones. Across experiments, speech also fostered more conversational receptiveness—cues in language that signal openness to opposing viewpoints—which partly mediates the effects of medium on these constructive disagreement outcomes. The conversation medium further moderated the association between language and outcomes: receptiveness was a stronger predictor of constructive disagreement in writing than in speech, suggesting people use less receptive language in the very medium in which it may be most effective (i.e., the written medium). A final study suggests that people may misjudge the effects of medium, wrongly believing spoken (versus written) disagreement will be less constructive and preferring to write to disagreeing counterparts. Despite people’s erroneous beliefs, spoken conversation offers a promising path to disagreeing constructively.

Organizations are filled with conversations, and how people treat each other can have a big impact on their performance, trust, learning, and satisfaction. Politeness is a critical dimension of those conversations. While most analyses of organizational text focus on content - the topics, ideas, and beliefs being talked about - previous work has suggested that how a topic is talked about can also have a large impact. In particular, elements of sentence structure—how a thought is phrased—can influence how a message is perceived. In this paper, we discuss and update the politeness R package, which applies linguistic theory to extract features of sentence structure from natural language text. While early models of politeness features have been discussed in computer science journals, we integrate that work into the study of organizations and introduce major improvements in the package. We also report new empirical findings showing that the current version of the package outperforms all previous versions (and other common benchmarks) for reproducing human annotations in new data.

High-stakes problem-solving requires exploring different paths to solutions, yet this often triggers unconstructive disagreements. Using dyadic video-call data from contexts with higher (N = 4,153 turns) and lower stakes (N = 63,416 turns), we examine how disagreements relate to perceived constructiveness. In constructive dyads, partners engaged their differences clearly with question-asking, positive framing, and inclusive language. Conversely, dissatisfied dyads avoided direct engagement and eventually exhibited jarring breaks from politeness to abrupt commands, negation, and low concern for others. These findings link effective problem-solving to robust engagement of differences with maintenance of mutual regard. This evidence of constructive difference engagement suggests benefits to not just mitigating the risks of disagreement, but also to more actively pursue the rewards of disagreement.

Research consistently shows a partisan well-being gap, with liberals reporting lower well-being than conservatives. We test whether differences in social media use explain this gap. To test this possibility, we test whether liberals’ lower wellbeing is mediated by their greater social media use. Students from UT Austin (N = 1,578) reported their political orientation, wellbeing (i.e., affective wellbeing, life satisfaction, loneliness), social media app use (hours and minutes on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit and YouTube), at monthly, weekly and momentary levels. Replicating prior research, we found that liberals had lower overall wellbeing, life satisfaction and felt lonelier. Critically, we also found that liberals used more social media (i.e., TikTok and Twitter) than conservatives, which mediated the relationship between liberalism and lower wellbeing at the weekly level. We plan to replicate these findings in a broader young adult sample to assess generalizability.