Yes, yes... But anyway...

I was in a conversation recently where someone spent about five minutes on one subject. It started with "Oh, I can't believe people are complaining about ICE. They are heroes and keep us safe." and kept going from there.

When there was finally a gap, I asked "Oh, that's interesting – I wonder what's with the complaints… does ICE do anything at all wrong?"

"Yes, of course, but they are keeping us safe, and they are doing their job and blah blah blah blah...."

I tried again. "I'm interested in the conflict. So what is it the people are complaining about?"

"I don't know why you're asking"… and then more on everything ICE does right… and then a completely different topic.

(This isn't a political rant – I have a lot of very strong opinions on LOTS of topics... working with kids with autism and how people suck at it, ASU Football, showing respect for other people. But these aren't topics I was arguing about, I was just asking a question to increase my understanding of all the issues.)

They "acknowledged me"! Then they essentially changed the subject back to their agenda.

Now flip it around. Someone spends five minutes on the other side… "I can't believe anyone defends ICE. They're tearing families apart." When there's a gap, you ask "Oh, that's interesting – I wonder why people defend them… does ICE do anything at all right?"

"Yes, of course, some of them are just doing their jobs, but they're tearing families apart and blah blah blah blah...."

You try again. "I'm interested in the conflict. What is it people like about ICE?"

"I don't know why you're asking"… and then more on everything ICE does wrong… and then a completely different topic.

It's the same conversation, just from the other side.

The pivot

In the school, a pivot is a skill. On a reverse side kick you pivot on the ball of your front foot, turn your back, look over your shoulder and drive the kick straight back INTO the target. Your eyes never leave the target.

In a conversation people make the same turn… and their eyes never come back. I call it the pivot: a quick touch on your point, then a turn back to their own agenda.

It does not always start with a yes. Sometimes it's:

• "Yes, of course, but…"
• "That doesn't happen very often"… and then on to the next thing
• "I don't know why you're asking"

It doesn't even take politics. Ask a Suns fan (me) whether the front office has made a few bad trades over the years, and you'll hear "Yes, of course… but did you see that fourth quarter last night?!"

Why I was asking (and why it didn't matter)

I bring up a point for one of three reasons:

• A counterpoint. I may not agree, and I want to see how the argument holds up.
• To understand. No agreement or disagreement… I just want to know.
• To support. I may agree and want to make the argument stronger!

The person on the other end often hears all three the same way… as an attack.

Kenneth Dodge found that aggressive boys were more likely to read an ambiguous situation (a peer messing up a puzzle they were working on, with no clear reason why) as done on purpose to hurt them (Dodge, 1980) – what's now called the hostile attribution bias. Adults can do a version of it too.

It gets stronger when we care about the side. Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students the SAME news coverage of a 1982 massacre in Beirut. Both groups saw the coverage as biased against their own side (Vallone et al., 1985).

Lee Ross and Andrew Ward called the belief underneath it naive realism – I see the world as it is, so anyone who sees it differently must be uninformed, irrational or biased (Ross & Ward, 1996). Add one step and even a question about it can sound like bias.

That's the same mistake as in my Hanlon's Razor article, The Refs Are Out to Get Us… we assume malice when there's a much simpler explanation. Here the simple explanation is that I was curious. If a question feels like an attack, they defend, and the pivot is the defense ("I need to protect my point").

Smart, honest, nice people do it too

The easy explanation is that the other person is dishonest, or not very bright. That's sure what it feels like in the moment!

I don't think it's either one. If people dodged because they weren't smart enough to follow the point, the smartest people would dodge the least. Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested something close to that. They gave people the same math problem with two different covers – one about a skin cream, one about gun control. On the skin cream, people who were better at math got it right more often. On gun control, people who were better at math did well when the right answer fit their politics and much worse when it didn't, and that gap was BIGGEST among the people best at math (Kahan et al., 2017). Being better at math didn't protect them… it may even have helped them get to the answer they wanted!

They usually aren't lying either. Kahan's team calls it identity-protective cognition – people resist information that threatens the standing of a group they belong to (Kahan et al., 2007).

There's some brain-imaging evidence for it. Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris challenged the beliefs of 40 people who described themselves as strongly liberal while they were in a brain scanner (fMRI). Political beliefs moved less than non-political ones, and resisting the challenge was associated with activity in areas tied to identity and emotion, including the amygdala and insula (Kaplan et al., 2016). That fits what Ziva Kunda called motivated reasoning – we get to the conclusion we want, as long as we can build a reasonable-sounding case for it (Kunda, 1990).

I talk about this a lot (Spock couldn't really exist). I WANT something, so I come up with the "logical" reasons to justify it… and so does everybody else. In the predictive model from my series, a new fact that doesn't fit what we already predicted often gets ignored instead of changing our estimate (What you predict is what you defend).

What the pivot does to your point

Three things happen, and they're why it bothers me.

A) They didn't really hear it

Communication researchers sort replies into ones that confirm the person and ones that disconfirm them. One of the disconfirming ones is the tangential response – the speaker briefly acknowledges what you said, then immediately changes direction (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative, n.d.), building on Evelyn Sieburg's work on confirmation and disconfirmation (Cissna & Sieburg, 1981). That's the pivot.

Sociologist Charles Derber described the same turn in everyday talk. A support response keeps the conversation on what you said, and a shift response turns it back to them. You say you're shopping for a car… the support response asks what you're looking at, and the shift response starts telling you about THEIR car. The shift often starts with a quick "Really?" or "That's interesting" so it doesn't look like a turn at all (Derber, 2000).

In therapy, validation starts with two things – paying attention and accurately reflecting back what the person said (Linehan, 1997). The pivot skips both. That's why a "yes" can leave you feeling like you got ZERO validation.

B) Acknowledging it would give the other side credit

If they really took in your point, they'd have to admit the other side has one too. Part of this is close to what we call splitting in therapy – all-or-nothing thinking. A group is all good or all bad, and admitting a real flaw feels like switching sides.

A quick aside on splitting… the word usually comes up with borderline personality disorder, where a person can swing from "you're the best person I know" to "you're the worst" in a single conversation. Otto Kernberg made splitting a central idea in how therapists understand borderline personality – a person keeps the good and the bad in separate boxes so they never have to hold both at the same time (Kernberg, 1975).

You don't need a diagnosis to do a milder version. The CBT version is what David Burns called all-or-nothing thinking, first on his list of common thinking errors (Burns, 1980). Under stress, almost all of us slide toward it… my team is right, your team is wrong, and "if you're not with us, you're against us."

Eric Berne described a version of it decades ago as the "Why Don't You – Yes But" game. Every idea gets a "yes, but," and the game isn't about solving anything (Berne, 1964). Leon Festinger called the discomfort of holding two conflicting thoughts cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). The pivot makes that discomfort stop FAST.

C) The return to their agenda erases a point that may be legitimate

Your point never gets an answer, and a minute later nobody's talking about it anymore (and unfortunately the person doing it usually can't see it either).

You've heard it from both sides of politics. Ask a Democrat whether anything the last Republican administration did worked, and you may hear "Sure, maybe one or two things… but look at what else they did." Ask a Republican the same question about the last Democratic administration, and you may hear the same sentence with the nouns swapped. Neither one answered the question… and a lot of the people watching don't even notice.

Sports press conferences are full of it too. A coach gets asked why the team gave up twenty points in the fourth quarter and says "I'm proud of the way our guys competed." A player gets asked about a missed free throw and says "Yeah, you've got to make those… but we'll be ready for the next one."

It works on everyone listening. Todd Rogers and Michael Norton had people watch a speaker answer a question. When the speaker answered a similar question instead of the one asked, many listeners didn't notice the dodge, and they liked that speaker better than one who answered the real question badly (Rogers & Norton, 2011). When the original question stayed on the screen, a lot more people caught the dodge.

What to do about it

On to Practical Matters…

Our goal is not to win. When we push to win, the threat usually goes up, and they pivot faster. The goal is to understand them (and maybe help them see all of the issues for a minute).

Step 1: Say why you're asking before you ask

Since the pivot usually comes from reading your question as an attack, take the attack off the table first.

"I'm not trying to argue – I'm curious. What are people complaining about?"

Step 2: Hold the concession

When you hear "Yes, of course, but…" or "that doesn't happen very often," don't follow the turn yet. Go back to what they just granted.

"Hang on, you said yes. What does that change for you?"

That's the Rogers and Norton finding in conversation form – put the question back on the screen. You'll find out pretty quickly whether the yes was real (and sometimes they find out too).

Step 3: Loop it back

Mediator Gary Friedman calls it looping for understanding – say back what you heard, ask if you got it right, and keep going until they say yes. Amanda Ripley writes about it in High Conflict (Ripley, 2021). It's also a core skill in motivational interviewing – reflect more than you ask, so the person feels heard (Miller & Rollnick, 2023).

"It sounds like the people doing this job matter a lot to you – you feel safer because of them. Did I get that right?"

Step 4: Lower the threat

Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman reviewed the research on self-affirmation. When people get to affirm a value that matters to them, they're less defensive about information that threatens them (Cohen & Sherman, 2014).

"I can tell you care about people being safe. I do too." Now the hard question is less likely to feel like an attack on who they are.

Step 5: Talk like you're open to it

Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson and their colleagues measured what they call conversational receptiveness – language that shows you're willing to really consider the other view. People who used it were rated as better teammates and advisers, and Wikipedia editors who wrote that way got fewer personal attacks (Yeomans et al., 2020). In their research, that looked like: acknowledge their view, point out where you agree, hedge your own claims ("I may be wrong, but…") and use positive words instead of no and won't.

Step 6: Ask for the story, not the position

Joshua Kalla and David Broockman ran three field experiments with door-to-door canvassers talking about immigrants and transgender people. Conversations built on a non-judgmental exchange of personal stories reduced exclusionary attitudes, and the change lasted months, and the versions that offered arguments without that exchange didn't show the same effect (Kalla & Broockman, 2020).

"Have you ever known someone on the other side of this?" will get you a lot further than "But what about…?"

Step 7: Say both truths out loud

"Both things are true, then? They keep people safe, and some people have real complaints?"

You're asking them to hold two things at once… and many people can (especially after Steps 1 through 4).

Step 8: Catch your own pivot

We all do this, so try it on yourself. Pick the subject you care most about – for me it's how people work with kids with autism. Now imagine someone who does it differently asks me "Is there anything they get right?"

Do I answer that question? Or do I say "Yes, of course, but…" and go right back to my own point? If it's the second one, that's the pivot (I catch myself doing it too). The fix is the same one I'd ask of them… answer the question first, then make my point.

"I don't want to give them that one." "Yes, of course, but…"

Step 9: Know when to stop

If they keep pivoting, they are usually telling you the threat is too high today. Stop. "I appreciate you talking with me about it" keeps the door open for another conversation.

The pivot, one table

Your goal for the next week is ONE held concession. The next time someone pivots on you, say why you're asking, then ask "What does that change for you?"… and listen to the whole answer. If you try it, I'd love to hear how it went… you can always reach out.