How to Disagree Well: Steelmanning, Charity and Changing Your Mind

Imagine two friends planning a weekend trip. One wants a packed itinerary; the other wants plenty of open time. Ten minutes later they are no longer talking about the trip. Each is defending themselves against a version of the other's view that the other doesn't actually hold.

Most disagreements in daily life are not about grand questions. They are about plans, budgets, recipes, books and how to get things done at work. Disagreeing well is a skill, and like most skills it improves with practice.

This guide looks at four habits that help: getting clear on what the disagreement is about, interpreting people charitably, restating their view in its strongest form (often called steelmanning), and being genuinely open to changing your mind. It draws on John Stuart Mill, Plato's dialogues and research on how well we understand our own beliefs. The everyday scenarios are hypothetical.

Get Clear on What You Actually Disagree About

Many arguments go wrong at the first step, because nobody pins down what the other person is claiming. A few questions help:

• What exactly do you mean by that word or phrase?
• Is this a disagreement about facts, about predictions, or about priorities?
• What would we both need to see to settle it?

In the trip example, the friends may agree on every fact. Both want to see the waterfall, and both know the drive is long. What differs is how much each values rest compared with seeing more. That is a difference in priorities, and it calls for compromise rather than proof.

It also helps to check how well you understand your own position. In a 2002 study published in Cognitive Science, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil asked people to rate how well they understood how everyday devices work, such as a zipper, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock and a sewing machine. When participants then had to write step-by-step explanations, answer diagnostic questions and compare their understanding with an expert description, nearly all of them lowered their estimates of what they knew. The researchers called this an "illusion of explanatory depth." A practical takeaway: before you argue for a view, try explaining how it works, step by step. Gaps tend to show up quickly.

Interpret Charitably

Logicians call it the principle of charity: when someone's words can be read in several ways, respond to the most reasonable reading rather than the weakest one. Our guide Seven Common Logical Fallacies and How to Spot Them explains how skipping this step leads straight to the straw man fallacy, where you defeat a position nobody holds.

In practice, charity sounds like this: "Let me make sure I've got it. You're saying that a full schedule means we won't waste the trip, not that we can never relax?" Then let the other person correct you. Charity also extends to motives. Unless you have real evidence otherwise, assume the other person wants a good outcome too.

Steelman the Other Side

Steelmanning means restating an opposing view in its strongest and most persuasive form before you respond to it. It is the opposite of building a straw man.

John Stuart Mill made the case for this habit in On Liberty, published in 1859. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that," he wrote. Mill argued that it is not enough to hear the other side summarized by people who disagree with it. You must hear the arguments "from persons who actually believe them" and know them "in their most plausible and persuasive form." Otherwise, he suggested, even a true opinion is held without real understanding of why it is true.

A simple steelmanning routine:

1. Restate their view until they say, "Yes, that's it," or even, "You put it better than I did."
2. Name the best reasons for it, including good reasons they didn't mention.
3. Say plainly what you agree with.
4. Only then explain where you differ and why.

Imagine, hypothetically, a colleague who wants to replace a weekly team meeting with written updates. A steelmanned version might be: "Written updates save everyone an hour, give people time to think before responding, and leave a record we can search later." Once you can say that fairly, your concern, perhaps that quick questions get lost without live discussion, will land as a real contribution instead of a reflex.

Steelmanning is not pretending to agree, and it is not inventing an argument the other person never made and then claiming victory over it. It is a sincere effort to engage with the best version of the view in front of you.

Treat Being Wrong as a Gain

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates describes the kind of conversation partner he hopes to be. In Benjamin Jowett's translation, he says he is "quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two." His reasoning is that being freed from a false belief does you more good than freeing someone else from one.

That reframing can lower the temperature of a disagreement. If the other person shows you a mistake in your reasoning, you have received something valuable, not lost a contest.

Change Your Mind Well

Psychologists study a related trait called intellectual humility. In a 2017 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Leary and colleagues defined it as the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Across four studies using a new questionnaire, they found it was associated with openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity and low dogmatism, and in one study, people higher in intellectual humility were more attuned to the strength of persuasive arguments than those lower in it. These findings come from self-report measures and lab tasks, so they describe tendencies rather than certainties, but they suggest that humility and good judgment can go together.

Some ways to practice:

• Decide in advance what evidence would change your mind, and say it out loud.
• Update by degrees. You can become less certain without flipping completely.
• Separate the belief from your identity. Being wrong about a schedule, a recipe or a forecast says nothing about your worth.
• Say it when it happens: "That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it, and it changes my view."

Know When to Pause

Not every disagreement needs a winner. When a difference comes down to values or taste, evidence may never settle it, and the goal shifts to mutual understanding and a fair compromise. If voices rise or someone is tired, hungry or hurt, a short break usually helps more than another argument. It is fine to end with, "I understand your view better now, and I still see it differently."

If disagreements in an important relationship feel constant or distressing, a counselor or mediator can help. If you are in crisis in the US, you can call or text 988.

Key takeaways

• Start by clarifying terms and whether you disagree about facts, predictions or priorities.
• Read others charitably and respond to the most reasonable version of what they said.
• Steelman: restate the other view so well that its holder agrees, then respond.
• Mill argued that knowing only your own side means knowing little even of that.
• Treat being shown wrong as a gain, and update your beliefs by degrees.

Sources

• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Project Gutenberg
• Plato, Gorgias, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg
• Rozenblit and Keil, The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth, Cognitive Science (2002)
• Leary and colleagues, Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2017), PubMed record