CAUTION: This email originated from outside of Penguin Random House. Please be extra cautious when opening file attachments or clicking on links. 1 Disagreement, Conflict, and What''s Wrong with Everyone Around You Here is a poorly kept and perpetually embarrassing secret about my academic career-my passion for the science of disagreement did not come from observing the harm that violent conflict sows in the world or studying the academic literature and identifying theoretical gaps that needed filling. My passion for disagreement was primarily fueled by my years as a competitive ballroom dancer, training with, competing with, and regularly fighting with my partner and later husband, Ryan. I began ballroom dancing as a little girl in Russia. This might seem strange to many American readers, but in Eastern Europe in the eighties, taking ballroom dancing lessons was as common as taking ballet or tap lessons is in the United States. All the little girls wanted to do it, and all the little boys were forced into dancing with their sisters. By the time I had met my husband, I had thousands of hours of training and years of competitive experience under my belt.

Ryan, who had never danced a step in his life, wanted to learn to dance because he had grand plans to flirt with a woman he expected to see again at a friend''s wedding. I was his teacher. My husband has an infuriating quality. He is just good at things-not necessarily amazing, but notably above average at almost everything, especially things that require physical coordination and musicality. When it came to dancing, he improved quickly because of his talent and interest-and also because his teacher (soon his girlfriend) had endless time and energy for teaching him. We practiced during every available hour and on every patch of hardwood we could find. I quickly came to realize that I had more fun dancing with this complete beginner than with my competition partner. As weeks turned into months, I decided that I would rather break up the competitive partnership I was involved in and dance with Ryan, even if that meant going back to the basics.

There are several unique aspects to ballroom dancing that make it the perfect microcosm for the study of conflict. First of all, the two partners are in perpetual intimate physical contact. The front of your body is literally plastered to your partner''s, meaning that you can feel their most minute movements, down to their breath and their heart rate. Good physical contact improves your ability to lead and follow-to coordinate your movements wordlessly and instantaneously. Indeed, after dancing together for years, I could move my body in response to Ryan''s much more quickly than it took my conscious brain to understand what was happening. And when everything worked, when we moved in complete harmony, when we felt in sync with the music and with each other-it was like telepathy. To this day, few experiences I have had compare to this feeling of "oneness." But of course, it didn''t always work.

One of us would lose our balance, move too slowly, stretch too far or not far enough, and the other person would get annoyed. And the finely honed sense that allowed us to feel each other''s every movement also allowed us to feel each other''s every mood. I''d get upset with his tightened grip on my back, he''d get upset that I was upset, and the magic would dissolve in an instant. Left in its place was another couple glaring at each other across several feet of empty dance floor. Like every dance partnership, when things went badly, we tried to diagnose the cause. Predictably, the cause was the other person. His claim that I had moved too slowly was met with my claim that he had not provided enough momentum. When I said he miscounted the rhythm, he said I was the one who started counting from the wrong measure.

When he said I was leaning too far back, I said that he was not counterbalancing enough with his own weight. In fact, every practice, two hours a day, seven days a week, featured a dozen instances where we were both absolutely sure that the other person caused the problem and was simply failing to acknowledge it. This state of nearly perpetual conflict on the dance floor was especially baffling since we knew each other and the choreography as well as any two people possibly could. We were in love and rarely fought about anything outside of dancing. We had world-class coaches to help us solve our problems, and we were both highly intelligent and analytical people. So how could he be so sure I was to blame and I be so sure that he was? And why did our different perspectives have to lead to so many ugly spats? My only consolation was that just about everyone around us had the same problem. Observing other dancing couples, ranging from relative beginners to nationally ranked professionals, I saw the same strange phenomenon: Highly trained people who deeply cared about improving their performance were similarly unable to agree on the basic physical facts of which one of them missed the beat or rotated too far. In my early twenties, I decided to get a PhD in social psychology, not because I had ambitions to bring peace to the Middle East or to restore democracy but because I wanted to figure out how to stop fighting with my dance partner.

Psychological Causes of Conflict I applied to graduate school and was fortunate enough to be admitted to Stanford. There, I studied under the legendary psychologist Lee Ross, who at that time was scientifically proving a truth that, while seeming obvious, has profound implications: Most conflict stems from the simple fact that everyone thinks they are right. In his work, Lee argued that most people go around the world believing that their perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of events reflect an objective, knowable external reality. Lee called this phenomenon "naïve realism"-a term borrowed from philosophy and intended to highlight that people "naïvely" believe that their perceptions and judgments are "realistic" in some deep, fundamental sense. Through many clever experiments, Lee and his students demonstrated how this stance then led to conflict across a broad variety of contexts and topics. Because of naïve realism, any time a person had an opinion (which is basically always) and encountered another person (often), they both entered the conversation with a firm conviction that they "got it." Because both people believed themselves to be fundamentally reasonable and objective, to the extent that their opinions diverged, the seeds of conflict had been sown. As soon as I encountered Lee''s work, I realized that I had found my intellectual home.

From that time forward, naïve realism and its logical extensions formed the basis of my research program. In retrospect, it is likely that Lee, who had spent decades working on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, found my desire to apply his theories to squabbles between ballroom dance partners silly. But as an immensely curious person, who found almost all human behavior fascinating, he also recognized what was unique about this particular context: If people who were as close and aligned as Ryan and I were couldn''t get past the differences in our perceptions, what hope was there for the rest of the world? Was there some fundamental psychological commonality in conflicts between lovers, colleagues, and nation-states? Indeed, over the years it turned out that competitive ballroom dancing was an excellent laboratory in which to study conflict-a context wherein two parties often saw things fundamentally differently but deeply cared about the outcome and had to reach consensus in order to move forward (or backward, or sideways). I quickly realized that naïve realism was exactly what was causing the issues between Ryan and me. A unique feature of ballroom dancing is that the partners spend the vast majority of the time facing each other. This means that when Ryan and I passed by a mirror on the wall of the dance studio, I would see my front and his back, but he wouldn''t see us at all, because at that moment he would be facing in the opposite direction. As we would move and rotate, our perspectives would shift, but there would literally never be a time when we would both be seeing the world (and ourselves) from the same vantage point. In other words, we would see the same performance, but never at the same time or from the same angle.

It turns out that this curious physical arrangement was the perfect metaphor for naïve realism-both partners could grow increasingly certain in their convictions about the quality of their dancing or the source of their mistakes without considering the fact that those convictions might be entirely different if they only saw the world from their partner''s point of view. An important thing to keep in mind is that naïve realism actually serves people quite well, especially in navigating their physical world-a world that even under the simplest circumstances requires humans to make hundreds of tiny judgments every hour. Thanks to this mindset, we quickly assume that when our feet encounter resistance, they must be on solid ground; when a predator seems very small, it must be very far away; and when green strawberries turn red, they''re ready to eat. We thus form the habit of treating our perceptions as accurate reflections of the physical world around us, completely ignoring all the distortion and processing that happens in the split second between sensory contact and the interpretation that our conscious mind imposes on the incoming signal. We do not stop to consider that in a different light, in a different gravity, or with a different set of sensory organs, we would have a completely differen.