Two perspectives walk into a room — do they compete or collaborate?

Originally appeared on Medium

What would it take to change your mind about something?

Consider a topic, idea, or behavior of which you are quite certain. What would have to happen for your perspective on that to change?

If you are anything like, well, every single other person — then it would take quite a lot; usually an entire paradigm shift.

There are a lot of factors when it comes to arguments and disagreements. There are different kinds of arguments (argumentative approaches), different styles of conflict resolution, different frameworks for determining how you interpret the world (methods of moral reasoning), and an infinite number of ways to navigate an argument (from modes of reasoning to modes of persuasion and a plethora of communication techniques in between).

That being said, there are two overarching ways you can engage with an argument or disagreement once it begins.

Overview:

The problem of perspectives — they are limited, finite, and egocentric.
The Competitive Approach to disagreements — as a result of (1) Resisting change in our perspectives and (2) assuming we are objectively right.
The Collaborative Approach to disagreements — and why it could end arguments.

Choose Your Own Argumentative Adventure

Pardon me if this is unnecessary to say, but your perspective is not going to always align with everyone else’s. In fact, in a very literal sense, it is impossible for your perspective to ever be the exact same as any other person.

Conflicts concerning divergent perspectives are as ubiquitous as conflict itself.

Your perspective, because it is absolutely unique to you, is going to clash with others who have a perspective absolutely unique to them; which means it is different from yours.

The question is not whether we can find a way to share a perspective.

The question is how we will choose to deal with our tenuous perspectives and make our disagreements as constructive as possible.

When it comes to general conflict resolution, a vast number of strategies and styles await those beckoning for meditation. When those specific conflicts deal with the mental variance of our perspectives, there are two methods we tend to choose for embarking on the argumentative journey.

Competition or collaboration.

Most of us are keen enough to realize that competition, by far, gets the most playtime.

Competitive Conflict Mediation — [Defense]

So far, I’m confident that none of this information is surprising. What is important to bring up, however, is:

Why we tend to choose a competitive approach to disagreements.
What tends to be the outcome of the competitive approach.

Resistance to Change

We avoid changing our perspectives for the same reason that we often avoid changing our behavior.

Change is disruptive
Change is a loss
Change is a difficult and slow process

However, changing your perspective differs from behavioral change in two important ways. If you are trying to lose weight or quit a substance addiction, the decision to make that change is incredibly simple. Manifesting the change, however, is vastly more difficult and, often, never comes to completion.

If you are trying to change your perspective on something…well…most people don’t even consider trying to change their perspective because our perspective or ideology is not something we consider to be external to us (compared to, say, our behavior or physical characteristics).

One does not associate their existence with the habit of being a smoker or a heavy social media scroller.

Behaviors exist in our identity very differently than belief.

Behaviors are things we do, not things that we are.

In fact, we often define ourselves based on purely mental constructs and, as a result, see our perspectives as synonymous with who we are.

This means that changing a perspective is both easier and harder than changing behavior.

It is easier because, unlike losing weight or quitting a substance, changing a perspective has no inherent difficulty; it does not require time or energy. You can, technically, choose to change your perspective in an instant with no work whatsoever.

It is harder than changing behavior because you aren’t just disrupting norms or losing a familiar component to your life — changing your perspective is the equivalent of losing and disrupting the very essence of who you are.

Not only will it feel like we have to admit that we were wrong, but we may also feel as if we were wrong for all those years.

Why would we want to consider that?

Assumed Objectivity

When it comes to our perspective, we often choose to defend our perspective in a disagreement because we assume we are right. More than a reluctance to change and an adamancy to avoid it, we genuinely believe that we are objectively correct.

Which means the other person, by default, must be wrong.

When it comes to a disagreement in which my perception is, obviously, reality, then I am not the one who needs more information, they are. Any information or argument that does not fit in the metal detector of our minds is rejected.

As a result, it is the other person who needs convinced that they are wrong.

Defending a position is a means to justify where you are and persuade the other to join your side; which is, of course, the correct side.

This is the result of the nature of our perspectives and the phenomenological egocentrism involved.

Not only do we not need to change our perspective, we can’t comprehend how our perspective is anything but complete. We can’t progress any further. The only practical option left is to argue and competitively defend our perspective from the barbarians who have not quite attained our level of enlightenment.

When we assume our objectivity and fail to acknowledge the finite, limited nature of how our perspective subjectively exists, the only thing left to do is convert or crush.

It is a common occurrence to witness two people with their own perspectives defending their positions in hopes that the other side will accept their wrongness and, potentially, see the world their way. As is the case with the competitive approach to any conflict situation, someone must win and someone must lose.

Ironically, each side tends to see themselves as the winner — returning to their internal tribe with tales of victory and destruction all in an effort to resolve the existential tension of what they just experienced.

What is the result of such a common approach?

Not much.

The best-case scenario is that one group will change its mind. Yet, if both parties assume they have the objective perspective, this is unlikely to occur. Rather, both sides tend to cling to their reality, and change and progress remain inconceivable. Maybe both parties agree to disagree, but again, there remains a lucid stagnancy that fails to harness the potential of diverse yet incomplete perspectives.

Collaborative Conflict Mediation

As a conflict mediation tool, this is not only the most recommended form of mediation, it is the option that best suits the complicated, incomplete nature of two people with two different perspectives.

But in order to have a situation where, instead of defending positions and battling divergence, the two parties seek to cooperate, they must first be willing to change their perspectives. This begins by acknowledging that their perspectives are both incomplete — a natural reality of finite, limited human beings.

How I’d love to see our culture create a normalcy of collaboration — of agreeing, not just that we disagree, but that we can both keep pursuing the process of truth by acknowledging our limitations; our subjective, finite, myopic perspectives; and the various epistemological assumptions that our specific lives have produced.

And then go on to share those perspectives in mutual collaboration with one another toward a better, more complete wisdom than either party had when they first started.

But that would require us to put our perspective in its proper place.

To admit that whatever we know, there is a lot we don’t know.

To embrace that there is a lot of the world left to explore.

Which is only possible when we stop defending the territory we currently hold.

What if we put down our myopic certainty — our small worlds — and utilized our various perspectives to keep trying to close the gap of where are and where we could be?

I’m guessing there would be fewer arguments, fewer attempts to defend incomplete perspectives, and we would trade our debates for collaboration.

It’s outrageous to think that we could end our arguments.

But if we were honest about how our perspectives function, we would see that it only makes sense.

And we’d all be a little better off than we are right now.