I got a Ph.D. because I couldn't stop arguing with my partner

• Julia Minson is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
• Her book "How To Disagree Better" suggests that disagreeing better is a skill we can all leverage.
• This is an adaptation from her book, out later this month.

Here is a 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. Instead, it 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 80s, taking ballroom dancing lessons was as common as taking ballet lessons is in the United States.

By the time I had met my future 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 another woman he expected to see again at a friend's wedding. I was his teacher.

Ballroom dancing is the perfect microcosm to study conflict

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 unique aspects to ballroom dancing that make it the perfect microcosm for the study of conflict. The two partners are in perpetual intimate physical contact. This 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 felt like telepathy.

To this day, few experiences I have had compare to this feeling of "oneness."

We were sure the other had caused the problem

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, the other person would get annoyed, 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. 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 rarely fought about anything outside dancing.

So in my early 20s, I decided to get a Ph.D. 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.

I learned about naïve realism

At Stanford, I studied under the legendary psychologist Lee Ross, who argued for what seemed like a radical idea. While most psychologists believed that conflict arose from a feeling of threat produced by opposing ideas, Ross was showing that most people go around the world believing that their perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of events reflect an objective, knowable external reality — a belief largely impervious to external threats. Lee called this phenomenon "naïve realism" — a term intended to highlight that people "naïvely" believe that their perceptions and judgments are "realistic" in some deep, fundamental sense.

This idea resonated with me and naive realism became the core of my research program.

Although often deceptive, naive realism can serve 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. Out of necessity, we form the habit of treating our perceptions as accurate reflections of the physical world around us, just so we can get things done. But this thinking doesn't serve us so well when we disagree. Because of naïve realism, each of us walks around certain that we are reasonable, objective, sensible people who basically see the world as it is. So when we encounter someone who sees the world differently — and also believes themself to be reasonable, objective and sensible — it's not surprising that both parties dig in, convinced the other is wrong.

Although naïve realism is impossible to eliminate in situations when we disagree (how would you get through life if you stopped believing your own judgment?), there are ways to minimize its negative impact.

What to do when you disagree

One step is trying to cultivate some minimal awareness of the bias. Here, I am not advocating questioning all of your beliefs all the time — that would leave you paralyzed with indecision. However, questioning the evidence behind your own beliefs when you encounter disagreement is a much more manageable task. The awareness of disagreement and your own (often automatic) judgment about the other person's flaws of logic or character should be like a warning bell to make you consider why their point might have some merit. Could there be information you are overlooking? Do they have different priorities or preferences?

Another step is to stop trying to persuade people that you are right and they are wrong. This is a hard habit to break since the arguments we make in our own heads sound so incredibly compelling. But, people who disagree on topics that matter to them are usually ready to meet any argument you make with an argument of their own. And unlike in a televised courtroom drama, you are unlikely to get all the way to the end of the speech that sounded great in your mind before you get interrupted. It turns out that thanks to naïve realism, everyone feels that their argument is the one that will clinch the win for their team. Because of this dynamic, most people who attempt to change others' minds end up frustrated and disappointed.

In the end, recognizing that others are just as committed to their views as you are should make us stop and consider why a smart and reasonable person might hold the opposing view, instead of writing them off as being uninformed or evil. Such engagement with opposing views does not require you to compromise or change your mind. But it does require you to understand and fairly evaluate the opposing perspective, so that you can move forward effectively, in business or on the dance floor.

Excerpted from "How to Disagree Better" by Julia Minson. Copyright 2026, Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.