Understanding Is Not Agreement
Updated: Aug 31
By Howard J. Ross
A number of years ago, while I was writing my book, Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect Is Tearing Us Apart, I started doing something uncomfortable: I began talking with people who had voted for Donald Trump.
I wasn't doing it because I was politically undecided. I wasn't. I have spent most of my life working for causes that would generally be described as progressive. I began working in civil rights as a teenager, organized in support of the grape boycott in the 1960s, and have spent decades working on racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of exclusion. My commitment to those issues was not in question.
What was in question was whether I understood the people on the other side. So, I started asking. Some were cab drivers and Uber drivers. Some were people sitting next to me on airplanes or in airports. Others were people I met through my work or online. Eventually I spoke with dozens of Trump voters.
I usually began the conversation by saying that I was writing a book about polarization, that most of the people around me had voted for Hillary Clinton, and that I wanted to understand why they had voted differently. I also told them that I wasn't there to change their minds. Almost everybody I asked agreed to talk. Some conversations lasted ten minutes. Others went on for an hour or continued over email for days.
What struck me was not that their arguments suddenly became persuasive to me. Most didn't. What changed was something subtler. People who had existed in my imagination as a political category became actual people.
I heard economic anxiety. Religious conviction. Distrust of government and the national media. Anger about cultural change. Fear of losing status or security. Occasionally I heard things that I found deeply disturbing. But I also heard concerns and experiences that were much more complicated than the caricatures circulating in my own political world.
I came away from those conversations thinking about a distinction that seems increasingly important to me: understanding is not agreement. And yet we often have somehow begun to treat those two things as though they were the same.
If I try to understand why you believe what you believe, some people assume I am excusing it. If I acknowledge your humanity, perhaps I am being insufficiently committed to the people harmed by your beliefs. In activist circles particularly, compassion toward people on the other side can sometimes be treated almost as a moral weakness. I think that is a mistake, not a moral mistake but a strategic one.
After more than five decades around movements for social change, I have become convinced of something that may sound contradictory at first: we can be uncompromising about injustice and still refuse to become contemptuous of the people we believe are perpetuating it. In fact, if our goal is transformation rather than simply denunciation, we may have to.
Anger has an essential place in movements for justice. There are things happening in our country and around the world that should make us angry. People are denied rights and dignity. Immigrants live in fear. Racism and antisemitism continue to shape people's lives. LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, find themselves increasingly turned into political targets. Rights that people fought generations to establish can be weakened or lost.
Anger tells us that something matters, but anger doesn't necessarily tell us what will change it.
There is a moment that can occur almost imperceptibly in political life. We move from I believe what you are doing is wrong to there is something wrong with people like you. Then another shift follows: people like you becomes simply “you people.” Human beings become objects. Once that happens, curiosity becomes difficult.
One of the central ideas in Our Search for Belonging is that the human need to belong has a shadow side. The communities that tell us who we are also help define who “they are.” Our identities are partly constructed through affiliation, but very often through opposition as well. The stronger our tribal identification becomes, the easier it is to experience the other tribe not merely as mistaken but as threatening. I am hardly exempt from this. None of us are.
I think we tend to become more like lawyers than the scientist. The scientist begins with curiosity: What is actually happening here? What don't I understand? What might I be missing? The lawyer already knows the desired conclusion and assembles the evidence necessary to prove it. Political discourse increasingly trains us to be very good lawyers.
We gather the latest outrageous example of what "they" have done. Social media feeds us more of it. Friends send us clips that confirm it. Before long we have an airtight case explaining why the people on the other side are ignorant, immoral, dangerous, or insane.
What we rarely ask is whether making that case helps us reach any of them.
It’s difficult sometimes, but I know it’s possible to validate the humanity of someone on the other side of an issue even while disagreeing completely with their point of view. Not because everyone deserves to be protected from criticism. They don't. Not because all opinions are equally legitimate. They aren't. And certainly not because injustice should be met with passivity. It most definitely should not!
The question is, “What we are trying to accomplish?”
If I want to demonstrate my moral outrage, contempt may do the job very nicely. It can feel very satisfying. There is a particular pleasure in the perfectly devastating social media post, the meme that makes our friends laugh, the line that exposes the absurdity of the other side.
Our tribe rewards us for it.
The problem is that the people whose minds we supposedly hope to change are generally not applauding. They are usually becoming more convinced that we despise them.
Psychology gives us some clues about why that matters. Research on what psychologists call “reactance” or “the backfire effect,” shows that people frequently resist messages they experience as threats to their freedom or identity. When people feel pushed, shamed, or controlled, they often do not become more open to persuasion. They become more committed to defending themselves.
This is especially significant in political life because political beliefs are rarely isolated intellectual propositions. They become bound together with identity, family, religion, community and belonging.
So when I attack your political position, you may not experience me as challenging an idea. You may experience me as attacking you and the people you love, and once that happens, the brain becomes very creative at rejecting what comes next. The bottom line is that most human beings, having a strongly held point of view and evidence to the contrary, will quickly go about rejecting the evidence!
This is why I find research on moral reframing so hopeful. Psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg and their colleagues have found that people can become more receptive to political arguments when those arguments are expressed through moral values that matter to the listener rather than exclusively through the values of the speaker.
That sounds simple, but it asks something difficult of us. It asks us to know the person we are speaking to. If my concern about immigration grows largely out of compassion and fairness, I can make an argument based on those values. But imagine I am speaking with someone whose worldview is more strongly organized around patriotism, family responsibility, loyalty and contribution. I might talk instead about generations of immigrants who have built businesses, served in the armed forces, worked difficult jobs, raised families, and become part of the American story.
I have not changed what I believe. I have simply stopped insisting that the other person enter through my doorway before we can have a conversation. That is not selling out. It is organizing.
Something similar happens in what activists call deep canvassing, which looks almost nothing like the stereotype of political persuasion. The canvasser doesn't simply arrive with the perfect argument and deliver it. They ask people about their experiences. They listen. They share personal stories. They invite the other person to remember a time when they felt misunderstood, judged, or excluded.
Researchers David Broockman and Joshua Kalla demonstrated the power of this approach in work involving attitudes toward transgender people. Brief face-to-face conversations that encouraged perspective-taking produced reductions in prejudice that were still measurable months later. I find something deeply important in that. The mechanism wasn't rhetorical domination. It was human connection.
That connects to something my son Jake Ross and I have been exploring in the new edition of my book, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives. Bias isn't simply something bad people possess. It is part of the machinery of ordinary human cognition. We categorize. We filter. We generalize. We take tiny amounts of information and construct stories around them. We then experience those stories as reality. We do that to people across racial and gender lines. We also do it politically. And activists do it too.
That last sentence may be uncomfortable, but I think we need to say it. If we believe that bias is a human phenomenon rather than simply the pathology of our opponents, then we must apply the insight to ourselves. In the new Everyday Bias, one of the themes Jake and I return to throughout is the role of curiosity in interrupting automatic judgment. Awareness creates a small space between what appears in the mind and what we choose to do with it.
That space may be particularly important when the stakes are high.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this distinction better than almost anyone. We often sentimentalize King now, as though nonviolence meant politeness. But there was very little polite about the civil rights movement. Demonstrators disrupted businesses, occupied segregated spaces, boycotted transit systems, marched where authorities told them not to march ,and deliberately filled jails.
King was not asking people to avoid conflict. He was asking them to engage in conflict without allowing hatred to define the relationship. The goal of nonviolence, in his formulation, was not to humiliate or destroy the opponent but ultimately to create the possibility of reconciliation. Think about how demanding that is.
It is relatively easy to fight somebody once I have convinced myself that they are a monster. It is much harder to oppose them fiercely while remembering that they are a human being, shaped as I am by family, fear, history, belonging, experience, and bias.
That does not mean I allow them to do whatever they want. There are times to march. There are times to boycott, litigate, organize, vote, obstruct, protest and say, simply and unequivocally, "No." Compassion does not require compliance.
But perhaps we can confront behavior without making contempt our identity. I have seen too much in my work to believe that people are incapable of change. I have watched people who entered conversations suspicious and angry become unexpectedly vulnerable. I have seen adversaries discover that the stories they carried about each other were incomplete.
The remarkable thing is that these transformations rarely happened because somebody finally delivered an argument devastating enough to defeat them. They happened because something interrupted the pattern. Sometimes that interruption was information. Sometimes it was a personal story. Sometimes it was the experience of being genuinely listened to by someone they expected to condemn them.
That is one reason I remain so moved by the work of Pádraig Ó Tuama and the Corrymeela community in Northern Ireland, whose story I included in Our Search for Belonging. Corrymeela has spent decades bringing together people divided by a conflict in which the wounds were hardly theoretical. People had lost homes, family members, safety, and trust. Yet the work of reconciliation did not begin by pretending those wounds did not matter. It began by creating enough human relationships that people could tell the truth about them.
Perhaps that is what we need more of now.
Not less truth.
Not less activism.
Not less willingness to fight for justice.
But a deeper understanding of what fighting for something actually requires.
Before we enter the next difficult conversation, post the next furious response or confront the next person whose politics we find incomprehensible, it might be worth asking ourselves a simple question: What am I trying to produce here?
If the answer is that I need to express my anger, that is one thing. Sometimes we need that. But if the answer is that I genuinely want something to change, then effectiveness matters. We need to know not simply what makes us feel morally clear, or justified, but what might create movement in another human being.
Sometimes it will be pressure. Sometimes consequences. Sometimes an election. And sometimes it may be the profoundly disarming experience of meeting someone who fiercely opposes what you believe but refuses to treat you as less than human.
That doesn't feel like weakness to me anymore. After all these years, I increasingly think it may be one of the hardest disciplines of social change. We need activists with fire. We need people who cannot look away from injustice, who are willing to stand in the street, challenge power, and insist that the lives and dignity of people who are being marginalized matter.
But if we really believe in human transformation, then somewhere inside that commitment must also be the possibility that today's opponent does not have to remain tomorrow's opponent. Otherwise, what exactly are we fighting for?
We can fight like hell for justice without giving up on each other's humanity. And in a culture that is constantly teaching us that the people on the other side are beyond redemption, perhaps refusing to do so is not merely an act of compassion. Perhaps it is an act of resistance.
Howard J Ross is an organizational change consultant and author. The second edition of his best-seller, Everyday Bias, written with Jake Ross, will be released on September 3, 2026. You can pre-order here.
