Imagine you're across the table from someone whose mind you need to change. A peer in a planning meeting, a board member with a strong opinion running counter to the data, a customer who has built a story about your product that simply isn't true. You've thought carefully about the issue and, frankly, you're pretty sure that you're right and they're wrong. So you say so, clearly and calmly, with all the necessary evidence at hand.
When you finish your case, there's a pause. And then, almost predictably (but nevertheless frustratingly), they double down. From here, the temperature of the conversation slowly rises until you've not only failed to make your point, you might have actually ended up driving the wedge between yourself and the other person even further.
Now imagine the same conversation, with the same content and the same evidence, but with one variable changed. The variable isn't your tone, your volume, or your word count. The variable is the language you use to surround the content of your argument — words and phrasings that signal, beneath the substance, that you aren't stubborn or arrogant; that while you feel strongly, you know you aren't perfect; that you're, in short, someone worth continuing to talk to.
This time, the conversation goes somewhere. Not all the way to agreement (sometimes the gap is too wide for that in a single sitting), but to a place where the other person can imagine extending the conversation rather than being desperate to end it.
Something has shifted, and it shifted because of language that, on the surface, may have seemed almost incidental.
This hypothetical isn't actually much of a hypothetical at all. It's an empirical finding, and it has a name: conversational receptiveness.
The term comes from a 2020 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Michael Yeomans, then at Imperial College London, teamed up with Harvard's Julia Minson — who has spent her career studying how people receive opposing views — along with Hanne Collins, Frances Chen, and Francesca Gino. Their hypothesis was that receptiveness isn't only an internal disposition (i.e., something you either have or you don't); it's also a set of behaviors, observable in how people carry themselves and in the words they choose, and one that can be detected, taught, and trained (Yeomans et al., 2020).
To test this, the team built a machine-learning model that could read written exchanges between people who disagreed and identify a linguistic profile of those who exhibited "receptiveness" (which the authors defined as the use of language to communicate one's willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views). They then trained participants in a brief "receptiveness recipe" and asked them to write arguments on genuinely contested topics — vaccines, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, counterterrorism. The results found that the participants who used the recipe were rated by their disagreeing counterparts as more trustworthy, more thoughtful, more objective, and more desirable as future collaborators — even though those counterparts still disagreed with them on the substance of their arguments.
That last point is really important. The intervention did not, in most cases, change minds about the underlying issue; these people still didn't agree with one another on topics that many people feel very strongly about. What did change, however, was something more durable: whether the conversation could, in spite of these differences, continue. Whether the other person, having heard you out, was willing to hear you out again.
Now, I can already hear the skeptical reader in the back of the room. This sounds like manners. Or worse — like pretending to agree when you don't. I'd argue that it's a bit more than that, and I also believe the distinction here matters. Receptive language doesn't ask you to soften your position; it asks you to surround your position with signals that you've actually considered the other one (and also considered the potential flaws of your own). The argument stays, the evidence stays, but what changes is whether the argument lands — whether the person across from you is still in the room (literally or figuratively) by the time you've finished making it. I wouldn't call that simple capitulation — I'd argue that that's the precondition for any real exchange (and change!) at all.
There is also, I'd note, a particular cultural headwind running against this kind of language use right now. Hedging — qualifying a statement, marking its scope, acknowledging exceptions — is increasingly read in our public discourse as a sign of weakness. Decisiveness gets rewarded; nuance gets mocked. The communicators who go viral are the ones who speak in absolutes, and the rest of us are quietly trained, day by day, to mimic that register if we want to be taken seriously. Which is a shame, because the empirical record is fairly clear on this: definitive language and uncompromising statements may energize the people who already agree with you, but they rarely change the minds of the people who don't. They are, in other words, a tool for rallying — not for persuading. If your goal is the former, by all means, plant the flag. But if your goal is to actually move someone toward your view, the language that gets you there will almost always sound, to a casual listener, a little less certain than the language that doesn't.
Minson has since distilled the research (with help from her own students) into a four-part mnemonic: H.E.A.R. (Minson, 2026). We'll come back to what each letter means in a moment, but first, one more finding — because it's genuinely counterintuitive, and most communicators get it exactly backwards.
When you have a position to defend in front of an audience that doesn't share your opinions, are you better served framing your argument in terms of what you support, or what you oppose? Ask a roomful of communicators and the answer comes back almost unanimous: support framing wins ("I'm in favor of X"). It sounds more constructive, more grown-up, more solution-oriented — exactly the posture we're told to bring into difficult rooms.
But here's the thing — across five studies and nearly six thousand participants, researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Business found the opposite. Disagreeing audiences were more receptive to oppose framing ("I'm against Y"), assuming the majority of the audience was against Y, as well. The mechanism is what they call value congruence: opposing what someone else opposes signals that you share something important, even when your preferred solutions diverge.
Consider a leader pitching a new policy to a board that has already telegraphed their skepticism. "I'm proposing this because I think it's the right path forward" is the support frame, but it asks the board to climb onto a platform they haven't yet agreed to stand on. "I'm proposing this because I refuse to accept the status quo of [specific failure mode the board also dislikes]" is the oppose frame; it starts the conversation on shared ground — the thing nobody in the room is willing to defend — and only then asks the board where to go from there.
Same content. Different entry point. Very different reception.
Critically, however, this effect reverses when the audience already agrees with you. Among allies, support framing lands better — telling people who already share your values what you're against can read as preaching, or as picking a fight that doesn't need picking. Oppose framing is a tool for the disagreeing room, not the friendly one. Like most communication tools, it's situational, and the situation is the point.
Receptiveness, in the end, isn't a posture you adopt in order to win. It's the price of admission to a conversation that goes anywhere at all. The best communicators have always understood, intuitively, what Yeomans and his colleagues have now made measurable — that the words around your argument matter at least as much as the argument itself, because those are the words that tell the other person whether you are someone worth continuing to talk to. Minson, at the close of her recent book, puts it more economically than I can. After walking the reader through the whole apparatus — the hedges, the agreement, the acknowledgment, the reframing — she leaves them with a single line: "And isn't that the key to influence?" (Minson, 2026, How to Disagree Better, Avery).
There are five places to put this research to work this month. The first four come straight from H.E.A.R. — Minson's mnemonic for the receptiveness recipe. The fifth comes from the Stanford work.
1. Hedge Before You Assert. When you state a position, mark its scope. Words like "often," "in many cases," and "in my experience" don't "soften" your stance and make your argument "weaker" — they show that you're an individual who recognizes that, while you might hold a different opinion to someone else, you can see the limitations of your own perspective as well as the merits of another's. For a person coming in with an opposing view, this makes you a person worth talking to. If you were to approach the conversation by spouting off definitive statements, positioning the argument as a black-and-white "I'm right, you're wrong" lecture, the person across from you thinks this person A) doesn't understand my position at all and B) has approached the conversation in a way where I now have to "defend" my "foolish" position to them (rather than listening to the potential benefits of the opposing position). Hedging isn't weakness; it's a sign of careful, deliberate calibration. A claim with verbal hedges signals to the listener that you know the world is more textured than a single sentence can capture. Before any high-stakes conversation, write down your three or four most important assertions and add a hedge to each one. The hedged version almost always sounds, to a third-party listener, like the version made by the more thoughtful person.
2. Emphasize What You Already Agree On. In nearly every disagreement, there is at least one small piece of common ground — a shared goal, a shared concern, a shared diagnosis. Most communicators leave it implicit and proceed straight to the dispute. Receptive communicators name it out loud, early, and as the foundation for everything that follows. "I think we both want to make sure the team isn't burning out, and I want to talk about the schedule with that as the starting point" lands very differently than "I disagree with the schedule."
3. Acknowledge Their View Before You Offer Yours. Before you respond, restate the other person's position in language they would accept. There's actually a name for this move when it's done well — the steel man (the deliberate inverse of the straw man, where you misrepresent an opponent's position to make it easier to knock down). Steel-manning means restating their argument in its strongest, most generous form, the version they would nod along to. This single move — which costs you nothing but a sentence or two — does two things at once. It tells them you've actually heard them (which lowers their need to repeat themselves), and it reveals to you whether you actually understood them (which is more often than not the source of the apparent disagreement in the first place). If they correct your paraphrase, that correction is the most valuable information you'll get all day.
4. Reframe to the Positive. "Don't do X" puts the listener on the defensive, even when the underlying instruction is sound. "Let's try Y" carries the same content but delivers it as forward motion rather than constraint. Audit your own language for the next twenty-four hours. Notice how often you reach for "don't," "shouldn't," "won't," "no." For each instance, ask whether the same point could be made in the affirmative. Most of the time, it can.
5. When You Must Oppose, Oppose Specifically. When you and your audience are far apart on values, frame your position in terms of what you are against rather than what you are for. This isn't an excuse for negativity; it's a recognition that opposing what someone else also opposes is one of the fastest ways to establish that you share something. Walking into a polarized conversation, identify one thing you and your audience would both refuse — one outcome you would both reject, one practice you would both find unacceptable — and lead with that. From there, the conversation about what you actually want can begin from a position of established common ground.
References
Minson, J. (2026). How to Disagree Better. Avery / Penguin Publishing Group. Excerpted in the Harvard Gazette, March 24, 2026 (news.harvard.edu).
Yeomans, M., Minson, J., Collins, H., Chen, F., & Gino, F. (2020). Conversational receptiveness: Improving engagement with opposing views. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 160, 131–148 (hks.harvard.edu).
Birnbaum, L., et al. (2025). Talking about what we support versus oppose affects others' openness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (gsb.stanford.edu).