This new article will show you everything you need to know about how to be tolerant of people’s opinions.
Someone says something at dinner and your jaw tightens. You know the feeling. Your pulse picks up, a reply starts writing itself in your head, and by the time they finish their sentence you’ve stopped listening.
Being tolerant of people’s opinions doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It doesn’t mean pretending every view is equally well informed, either. It means you can hear a position you dislike, stay curious about the person holding it, and respond to what they actually said rather than to the worst version you imagined. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it gets easier with practice, and the research on how to build it is surprisingly practical.
Below are 13 ways to get better at it, each backed by a study, a documented event or a named source. If you want to sharpen the general craft first, our guide on how to have a good conversation with anyone is a good companion read.
1. Look for the goal you both share
Most arguments sit on top of a shared concern. Two parents fighting about screen time both want a healthy kid. Two coworkers arguing over a launch date both want the product to succeed. Find that layer and the other person stops looking like an opponent.
The classic evidence comes from a summer camp in Oklahoma. In 1954, psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif took 22 boys aged 11 and 12 to Robbers Cave State Park and split them into two groups, who named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers. A series of competitions turned them into bitter rivals, complete with cabin raids and a burned flag. Then the researchers tried to repair the damage. Simply putting the groups together for meals, a film and fireworks did little. What worked were problems neither group could solve alone: a blocked water supply, a stalled truck carrying food, and pooling money to rent the movie Treasure Island. By the end, the boys asked to ride home on the same bus.
The study has real limits. The conflict was manufactured, the boys were a narrow sample, and author Gina Perry’s 2018 book The Lost Boys raised serious questions about how the experiments were run. Still, the core idea has held up well in later work: shared goals soften hostility faster than forced togetherness.
Start small: in your next disagreement, say the shared goal out loud before you say anything else. “We both want this to go well” costs nothing and changes the temperature.
2. Step into their shoes, on purpose
Imagining someone else’s view sounds soft. It isn’t. Done deliberately, it is one of the few techniques with hard field evidence behind it.
In 2016, political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla published a randomized experiment in Science. Fifty-six canvassers knocked on doors in South Florida and talked with 501 voters about transgender rights. The conversation lasted about 10 minutes and encouraged voters to actively take the perspective of others. Broockman and Kalla’s 2016 canvassing experiment found that prejudice dropped and stayed lower for at least three months. The authors noted the shift was larger than the average decline in American homophobia between 1998 and 2012.
It’s one study on one topic in one region, so treat it as strong evidence for the method, not a promise. But it tells you something useful: perspective-taking works best when it’s specific and personal, not abstract. “I guess they have their reasons” does very little. “When did I feel the way they seem to feel now?” does more.
If empathy feels like a weak muscle for you, the strategies in our guide to improving your emotional intelligence build on exactly this. The next time an opinion irritates you, finish the sentence “Someone would believe this if they had experienced…” before you reply.
3. Ask how it would actually work
Here’s a strange finding. When people are asked to explain, step by step, how a policy they feel strongly about would work, they often soften their position.
Philip Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig Fox and Steven Sloman tested this in a paper published in Psychological Science in 2013. Participants rated how well they understood six policies, including a national flat tax and merit pay for teachers. Then they were asked to explain the mechanics of two of them. Their self-rated understanding dropped across all six, and their positions became less extreme. Those who started with strong views were also less likely to donate bonus money to a related cause afterward. The effect showed up among Democrats, Republicans and Independents.
The researchers called it an illusion of understanding. We often feel we know how something works until we try to spell it out. This is one paper, so hold it lightly. Still, the practical lesson is gentle and useful: questions that ask for mechanics lower the heat, while questions that ask for justification tend to raise it.
Picture this: your brother insists a new tax will “obviously” ruin small businesses. Instead of countering, you ask, “Walk me through it. Who pays it first, and what happens next?” He thinks. You think. The conversation slows down, and that’s the point.
Next time, do this: swap one “Why do you believe that?” for “How would that play out in practice?” Then apply the same question to your own view.
4. Name the feeling before it names you
That surge you feel when someone says something you find wrong is physical. Your threat system is reacting before your reasoning has caught up. The mechanism is fairly well understood, and it suggests a simple fix.
When a statement registers as a threat, the amygdala, a brain region involved in detecting danger, ramps up. That makes a fast, defensive reply more likely and careful thought less likely. Putting the emotion into words seems to interrupt that loop. In a 2007 study in Psychological Science, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA scanned 30 people as they looked at photos of emotional faces. When participants picked a word for the emotion, such as “angry,” amygdala activity fell, and a region in the right prefrontal cortex linked to regulating emotion became more active. Choosing a name like “Harry” for the face had no such effect.
So the chain runs like this: label the feeling, recruit the brain’s braking system, and quiet the alarm enough to think. A caveat matters here. The study used faces in a scanner, not heated arguments, so the leap to real conversations is reasonable but not proven. If your body tends to run hot in tense moments, these quick resets to calm your nervous system pair well with labeling.
A quick experiment: during your next tense exchange, say silently, “I’m feeling defensive right now.” Notice whether the next thing you say comes out differently.
5. Listen as if you’ll have to repeat it back
Many of us listen with one ear while the other half of the brain drafts a rebuttal. People notice. And it turns out that the quality of your listening can change how the other person thinks, without a word of persuasion.
Guy Itzchakov, Avraham Kluger and Dotan Castro ran four experiments on this, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2017. Speakers shared their attitudes on several topics, and the researchers varied how well they were listened to. Speakers who got high-quality listening, attentive and non-judgmental, felt less social anxiety. With that pressure off, they became more aware of the contradictions in their own views, and their attitudes grew less extreme. They also seemed more comfortable living with those inconsistencies.
That’s a striking result when you flip it around. If you want someone to hold their opinion less rigidly, the most effective move may be to stop pushing and pay full attention. Good listening is also the backbone of being genuinely warm with people, which we cover in our guide on how to be friendly and kind.
When the other person finishes, summarize what you heard in one sentence and ask whether you got it right, before you add a single point of your own.
6. Make their case better than they did
Philosopher Daniel Dennett popularized a set of guidelines for criticizing someone’s view, which he credited to the game theorist and social psychologist Anatol Rapoport. In his 2013 book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Dennett laid them out in four steps.
First, restate the other person’s position so clearly and fairly that they wish they’d put it that way. Second, list where you agree. Third, mention anything you learned from them. Only then, fourth, offer your criticism. Dennett’s argument was practical rather than moral: once someone sees that you understand their view as well as they do, they become a far more receptive audience for whatever objection you raise.
This is sometimes called steelmanning, the opposite of attacking a straw man. It’s hard. It forces you to find the strongest version of an idea you dislike, which usually means discovering that smart, decent people hold it for reasons that make some sense.
Say you’re debating remote work with a manager who wants everyone back in the office. A steelman might sound like: “So your worry is that new hires learn by overhearing, and that’s almost impossible on video. That’s a real cost.” Now you’ve earned the right to disagree.
Your move: before your next disagreement, write down the best two-sentence version of the other side’s argument. If you can’t, you’re not ready to argue against it.
7. Go after the idea and leave the person alone
“That plan has a gap” and “You clearly don’t think things through” might be aimed at the same problem. Only one of them keeps the conversation alive.
Few relationships show this better than the one between Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. He was the court’s most outspoken conservative. She led its liberal wing. They first worked together on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., and stayed close friends for decades, bonded in part by a shared love of opera. Their disagreements were sharp and on the record. Scalia once handed Ginsburg an early copy of his dissent before she had finished her majority opinion; she called it a “very spicy dissent,” according to NPR, and used it to make her own opinion stronger. Composer Derrick Wang later turned their sparring into a comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg. When Scalia died in February 2016, Ginsburg’s statement said the two had disagreed now and then but were “best buddies,” as NBC News reported.
They argued about the most divisive legal questions in the country and never treated each other as enemies. Their fights were about reasoning, not character. If you deal with people who get personal fast, our guide on how to deal with angry people can help you stay on the issue when they won’t.
Test it this week: catch yourself whenever a sentence starts with “You always” or “People like you.” Rewrite it so it starts with the idea instead.
8. Remember that your worth isn’t on the table
When an opinion feels like part of who you are, criticism of the opinion lands as an attack on you. That’s why some arguments feel strangely personal even when the topic is tax policy.
The mechanism goes roughly like this. Beliefs tied to identity become something to protect. A challenge to them registers as a threat to your sense of being a good, smart person. Under threat, people defend rather than think. So one route to openness is reducing the threat by reminding yourself of what you value, in an area that has nothing to do with the argument.
Geoffrey Cohen, Joshua Aronson and Claude Steele tested exactly this, publishing their results in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2000. In one experiment, 80 Stanford students with strong views on capital punishment read a scientific report that challenged their position. Some had first received an ego boost, positive feedback on an unrelated skill. Among them, 61.9% showed a substantial attitude shift, compared with 39.5% of those who hadn’t. A related experiment found that people who wrote about a personally important value judged the opposing report more fairly. Feeling secure made the evidence easier to hear.
None of this means you should accept manipulation in the name of open-mindedness. Tolerating a different opinion is very different from tolerating someone who rewrites reality to control you. If that’s what you’re facing, read our guide on how to respond to gaslighting.
Here’s a simple way in: before a conversation you expect to be tense, spend two minutes writing about something you value and why. Kindness, your craft, your family. Then go in.
9. Spend real time with people unlike you
It’s easy to be dismissive of a group you only meet through headlines. It’s much harder when one of them is your teammate, your neighbor or the guy who helped you move a sofa.
Psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp pulled together the evidence in a meta-analysis of 515 studies on intergroup contact, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006. Across 713 independent samples, and roughly a quarter of a million participants by the authors’ own later count, contact between groups typically reduced prejudice. The average correlation was about .21, modest but remarkably consistent. The more rigorous experimental studies showed a stronger average effect, around .33. The benefits also tended to spread from the individuals people met to the whole group.
Two notes keep this honest. Much of the underlying research is correlational, so some of the link may run the other way, with tolerant people seeking out contact. And conditions matter. Contact works best when people meet as equals, cooperate toward something and have support from those around them, which echoes what happened at Robbers Cave. Our guides to improving social skills and getting good at small talk can make those first conversations easier.
Give it a go: join one group this month, a sports league, a volunteer shift or a class, where people won’t all share your background or politics. Go back more than once.
10. Check your picture of “the other side”
You may be disagreeing with people who don’t exist. Many of us carry a mental image of our opponents that’s far more extreme than the real thing.
The research organization More in Common studied this in its 2019 report The Perception Gap, based on a YouGov survey of 2,100 Americans. Democrats and Republicans both imagined that almost twice as many people on the other side held extreme views as actually did. People who said they followed the news most of the time were nearly three times as distorted in their perceptions as those who followed it only now and then. Among Democrats, more education was linked to a bigger gap, not a smaller one. The authors are clear that these are associations, so the survey can’t show that news consumption causes the distortion.
The lesson travels beyond American politics. The loudest voices from any group are the ones that reach you, and they’re rarely typical. If you like checking claims properly, the habits in our piece on developing research skills work just as well on your assumptions about people.
The next time you think “they all believe X,” find out what a real person from that group thinks by asking one, or by looking up actual survey data instead of a viral clip.
11. Be careful how you meet opposing views online
Here’s a twist that complicates the advice to “expose yourself to other perspectives.” How you’re exposed matters a great deal, and some kinds of exposure backfire.
In a 2018 study published in PNAS, sociologist Christopher Bail and colleagues at Duke University offered payment to Twitter users who logged on at least three times a week to follow a bot for one month. The bot retweeted messages from elected officials, commentators and organizations on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Republicans who followed a liberal bot became more conservative, not less: between 0.12 and 0.60 points on a seven-point scale, depending on how closely they engaged. Democrats who followed a conservative bot shifted slightly more liberal, though that change wasn’t statistically significant.
The likely reason is simple. A feed of the other side’s most combative posts, delivered with no relationship and no conversation, feels like an attack. People dig in. The study has limits, since it covered one platform in one country with paid participants, but it fits everything else in this list: contact helps, while a stream of hostility from strangers usually doesn’t. If your scrolling habits leave you angrier than when you started, our guide on how to stop doomscrolling is worth your time.
One change to make: unfollow two accounts that mainly post outrage about “the other side,” and replace them with one thoughtful writer you often disagree with.
12. Don’t argue on an empty tank
Think of your patience like the brakes on a car. On a good day, they respond well and you stop smoothly. When they’re worn, the same pressure on the pedal gets you a slower, jerkier stop. The analogy has limits, since brakes don’t recover overnight and you largely do. But it captures something real about tired, stressed brains.
A 2007 study in Current Biology, by Yoo and colleagues, with Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley as senior author, kept 26 healthy young adults awake for about 35 hours and then showed them disturbing images. Compared with rested participants, their amygdala was more than 60% more reactive. The usual connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which helps keep emotional reactions in check, was also weakened. It’s a small sample and an extreme level of sleep loss, but the direction is clear: less rest, a hotter trigger.
Plenty of what looks like intolerance is really exhaustion. You snap at an opinion at 11 p.m. that you’d have shrugged off at 10 a.m. If nights are rough, these tips on how to get to sleep faster are a quiet investment in your patience.
A small fix: make a personal rule not to start a serious disagreement when you’re exhausted, hungry or running late. “Can we pick this up tomorrow?” is a complete sentence.
13. Play the long game
Tolerance rarely changes anyone in a single conversation. Sometimes it takes years.
Daryl Davis, a Black blues musician, has spent roughly three decades befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, as he described in a 2017 NPR interview. It started when a white man at a bar, the Silver Dollar Lounge, struck up a conversation with Davis about music and later revealed he was a Klansman. Davis began studying the Klan’s history and beliefs so he could talk about them knowledgeably. He asked questions, listened and kept showing up. About five months after their first meeting, that first man gave up his robe. Davis says around 200 Klan members have done the same after getting to know him, though that’s his own count and hasn’t been independently verified. He insists he didn’t change them himself: “They saw the light and converted themselves.”
Nobody owes anyone this kind of patience, least of all a person being targeted by hate. Davis chose it. But his story shows how slow and relational real change tends to be. People rarely update their views because they lost an argument. They do it because someone they’ve come to respect kept treating them like a person. Building that kind of patience is a habit, and the ideas in our list of good habits to have can help you stick with it.
So think in seasons rather than single conversations. Keep the relationship going even when nobody’s mind has moved yet.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll interrupt, roll your eyes, say something sharp and replay it on the drive home. That’s normal, and how you handle it decides whether you get better.
The instinct is to be hard on yourself. Research suggests that’s the wrong move. In four experiments published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley asked people to recall a weakness, a moral lapse or a failure. Those who were guided to treat themselves with understanding were more motivated to improve, more likely to want to make amends for a past wrong and more optimistic that their weakness could change. Self-compassion didn’t make them complacent. It made them more willing to face the mistake.
So when you lose your temper in a disagreement, work through these four steps:
- Notice it without a verdict. “I got defensive there” is enough. “I’m a terrible person” helps no one.
- Repair quickly. A short message works: “I was sharper than I meant to be yesterday. I’d like to hear the rest of your point.”
- Find the trigger. Were you tired? Did the topic touch something personal? Was it a pattern you recognize?
- Pick one item from this list to practice next time, rather than all thirteen.
If slips turn into a spiral of self-criticism, our guide on how to stop hating yourself offers ways to break it.
Conclusion
Being tolerant of people’s opinions is mostly a collection of small, learnable moves. Find the shared goal. Ask how things would work. Listen well enough to repeat it back. Make their case before you make yours. Look after your sleep, your feed and your sense of self, so a different opinion doesn’t feel like a threat.
You don’t have to agree with anyone to do any of this. You just have to stay curious a little longer than feels natural. Pick one item, try it in your next disagreement, and see what changes. For more practical guides on growing your patience, confidence and relationships, browse our self-improvement section.
