Our goal is to leverage research from the behavioral sciences to create and test cutting edge interventions to help people disagree effectively in personal, professional, and civic spaces.

Everything we do is evidence based

The world is littered with well-intentioned, but ultimately ineffective interventions. From having elementary schoolers listen to classical music to make them smarter to paying for ride shares to get people vaccinated, millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been wasted on approaches that sound promising but just don’t work. Our goal is to come up with interventions based on peer-reviewed research of the highest caliber and then test them again “in the real world.” An idea is only as good as the evidence supporting it.

Focus on behavior, rather than internal mental processes

Our interventions are focused on changing behavior during disagreement rather than changing what people think and how they feel about each other. Disagreement is an interpersonal process that often comes down to the impression you make on your counterpart. Because behavior is observable, it can influence counterpart reactions. Thoughts and feelings are private and thus have less impact on conflict outcomes. Behavior can also be trained and evaluated, making it the ideal candidate for effective interventions.

Scalable asynchronous training

The world is large and training is expensive. Our goal is to create scalable training solutions that can be leveraged both by large hospital systems and small town high schools. We use cutting edge technology, smart instructional design, and our understanding of psychology to make it easier to train more people faster.

Portable to a variety of contexts and topics

Each of us disagrees daily. We disagree with colleagues, classmates, and family members. We disagree about the environment, abortion, the Middle East, COVID restrictions, working from home, and the role of AI. The good news is that the underlying psychology of disagreement is the same, irrespective of topic. As new crises rock our world and our relationships, we prepare our partners with a toolkit for disagreement that can be applied to the next challenge on the horizon. A strong skillset around effective disagreement can be transferred from situation to situation and topic to topic.