05/02/2026
In 1993, I learned a lesson that took me 20 years to unlearn. I was one year old, watching two people I loved argue...
Same fight, same words, same volume, over and over. One would shout. The other would shut down. Nobody ever changed their mind.
The lesson I absorbed without realising it was ... if your right, just push hard enough and the other person will eventually come around... or get tired.
At 21, I found myself in the exact same pattern. Mid-argument with my girlfriend at 2am, armed with what I thought was bulletproof logic. I had the facts. I had the reasoning. I was calm, rational, correct.
But the more logical I became, the more she shut down. Like throwing petrol on a bonfire. I thought the problem was her. Took me years and a conversation with a neuroscientist to realise the problem was actually me.
Or more specifically, the order in which I was making my argument. Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL and MIT - I had the pleasure of interviewing her twice for about 6 hours
Her team put 42 people into brain scanners in pairs and asked them to estimate house prices. Each person could see the others answer and how confident they were.
When the pair agreed, their brains synced up. Open. Receptive. Encoding.
But the moment they disagreed, that tracking mechanism just... switched off. The brain stopped weighing the strength of the other persons conviction. It didn't matter how confident they were or how much evidence they had.
Once disagreement was detected, the opposing view got categorised as wrong and the brain moved on. They remembered what the other person said. They just stopped caring how certain the other person was when they said it.
Think about someone in your life who responds to everything with "I disagree" as the first words out their mouth. Maybe a colleague. Maybe a family member?
You know the feeling. Before they've even finished their sentence, something in you has already closed off...
Sharot's answer is simple... don't lead with the disagreement. The moment you say "I disagree" or "your wrong," you've basically closed the door your trying to walk through.
Instead, lead with the thing you both already agree on. She points to a study on vaccine hesitancy. When researchers argued about safety data it didn't work.
But when they reframed around something both sides already believed, that parents want to protect their kids from deadly diseases, minds actually changed.
✅ In practice: instead of "I disagree, heres why" you would say "I think we both want the same outcome here. One thing I've noticed is..."
✅ Instead of "that won't work" you would say "I like this part of what your proposing. What if we built on it by..."
"If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend." - Abraham Lincoln, 1842
