Expectations of Confrontations

What we get wrong and why it causes trouble for our relationships.

The response to last week’s newsletter, on how to talk with people we disagree with, was so lovely and deeply connecting. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all who commented or reached out to me personally.

Last week it was all about approaching people who might passionately oppose us. But confronting others is something that comes up a lot more often—mostly in less intense ways—in our everyday relationships. Sometimes it’s about approaching a friend about a comment that felt insensitive, a colleague about a snub you experienced, or a partner about their unwillingness to change the toilet paper roll.

Today we’ll dig into some brand-spanking new research about expectations around confrontations.

Let’s dig in.

Image by Manuel Alejandro Leon from Pixabay

This study, just published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, was conducted by two University of Chicago psychologists, including Nicholas Epley, whose book Mindwise summarizes a lot of fascinating research on social cognition (highly recommend!).

The broad strokes findings of this new study are that whether it was with strangers, in a simulated role play, with roommates, or with dating partners, people systematically have overly pessimistic expectations about confrontations. Those overly negative expectations make it more likely for people to avoid confrontations, which carries significant relationship costs.

Confrontations tend to have better outcomes than we anticipate.

This is a statistical finding meaning that it’s not absolute. Not every confrontation will be better than you anticipate, but on average they will be. Hard to believe, right?

If you’re like me, your first thought was to call up all the confrontations you’ve had that went exactly as badly as you feared they would (or worse!). But this is simply our negativity bias doing what negativity bias does: causing us to attend more to the bad stuff than the good stuff. As one perfectly titled review showed, a trove of research reveals that when it comes to our brains attention and recall, “bad is stronger than good.”

Our brains are better equipped to remember the events that went very badly rather than the ones that ended in more neutral or even quite positive ways. Once upon a time, that bias conferred a survival advantage. These days, not so much.

Our inaccurate confrontation expectations are not only overly pessimistic, they also interfere with our taking wise action in relationships.

The Costs of Conflict Avoidance

As a couples therapist, I often meet with partners who have spent years assuming that avoiding a confrontation is far better than approaching one. They are deeply attached to beliefs like, “We never have seen eye-to-eye about sex/parenting/money/affection, so why would we bother trying to talk about it?” So, they don’t.

This may be a shocking spoiler alert, but it turns out that partners not talking about what’s bothering them doesn’t help them to resolve problems. It only causes the problem to grow worse and the resentments around the problem to fester.

It’s striking to me how often couples assume their partner will hate hearing what’s most upsetting to them, that they expect anger, resentment, or disgust after a big share but it ends up going very differently. Partners often express surprise like, “that went better than I thought it would,” and, “I wish I had talked to you about this years ago,” or, “That bothered you, too?!”

Why You Should Have That Dreaded Confrontation

As regularly gets discussed in this newsletter, we often are miscalibrated in our relationship predictions. We think we know our partner better than we do (we don’t), we think someone we are arguing with is evil (they aren’t), and now this new miscalibrated relationship expectation: we are overly pessimistic about how confrontations will go.

This biased expectation can have big consequences. When we avoid discussing things because we assume it will go badly, we cut off options to work things out with the other person (this could be your partner, but also a friend, roommate, colleague, or family member). We don’t raise the thing that bugs us, so we can’t do anything about it, and it continues to irritate us and we develop all sorts of stories about how the other person wouldn’t care, wouldn’t respond well, and that we are forever doomed to be trapped in our unhappiness.

While a confrontation may, indeed, go badly, these study findings reveal that despite the discomfort, that the bark of anticipation is often worse than the bite of the confrontation, itself. Confrontations are often not as disastrous as we expected them to be.

Another interesting finding from this set of experiments is how unhooked from the relationship context our expectations are. We think about the confrontation without giving credit to how relationships are living, breathing entities through which we work to work things out. In other words, our anticipations overlook how conversations contain self-corrective features.

We are social creatures, after all. This means that whoever you’re in a relationship with is likely motivated, just like you are, to protect the relationship and work out whatever is plaguing the people in it. As the researchers in the study explained, “These overly negative expectations stem, at least in part, from biased attention to potentially negative outcomes of a constructive confrontation, and from failing to recognize the power of relationship-maintenance processes that are activated in direct conversations.”

How to Re-Think Your Confrontation Expectations

People naturally default to expecting the worst possible outcomes of a confrontation and therefore want to avoid having them. But, as one of the experiments showed, people prompted to consider more positive reactions from the person they are confronting become more likely to be willing to have that confrontation.

So, here are some confrontation re-calibration tips:

1. Recognize the tendency to expect the worst-case scenario for confrontations.

2. Actively consider what good could come from having the difficult conversation and the possibility that the response will be better than expected.

3. Try to remember the times where you were nervous that things would go horrifically. Then remember how the outcome, though possibly not ideal, was not as terrible as you feared. Consider, too, the ways that the process of working it through may have landed you in a better, stronger relational position.

Of course, not all confrontations are productive or even healthy. But overly negative expectations of how they will go can cause us to avoid the kinds of confrontations that can be and which are important to have in close relationships. These are the confrontations where we get to share what’s really going on and what we want to go differently.

Communicating openly is a cornerstone of healthy relationships. But if we routinely mispredict that open communication will go badly and therefore decide to avoid (or kick the proverbial can down the road), we miss out on opportunities to foster healthy, satisfying relationships.

So, have the hard conversations. Approach rather than avoid the topics that really matter in your most important relationships. Those confrontations are likely to go better than you fear.

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What do you think of these tips? Are you more likely to try approaching, rather than avoiding, a confrontation based on these findings?

Relationally yours,

Yael