How Stories Change Minds

Jennifer Borda, professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire and the co-director of the Civil Discourse Lab, reflects on a family crisis that sparked a lasting insight into the nature of conflict. A painful confrontation with her father during her mother’s final days reveals how fear, grief, and loss of control often drive arguments more than the surface issue. The conversation explores the limits of language in moments of emotional intensity and the unseen forces shaping what people say. Drawing on her work in civil discourse, Borda highlights how storytelling can open space for understanding and shift deeply held positions. The episode connects personal experience to a broader framework for navigating conflict with greater awareness and empathy.

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Transcript

Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. After something happens, some of us convince ourselves that we saw it coming all along. This is the hindsight bias documented by the researcher, Baruch Fish Hoff, and it rewrites our memories to make us seem more prescient than we really were.

I knew that would happen, becomes our refrain, even when we were genuinely surprised. In disagreements. Hindsight bias can make us insufferable. know-it-Alls who claim we predicted problems, others should have foreseen. Hindsight bias can poison relationships after a breakup. Everyone claims they always knew it wouldn't work after a problem erupts, your partner insists they tried to tell you even if they really barely mentioned it.

Parents claim to know all along that their child would struggle in a particular class forgetting their initial enthusiasm for that very class. We retroactively become profits using [00:01:00] manufactured foresight to claim moral high ground and conflicts in workplace disputes. Hindsight bias can. Create blame games after a project fails.

Everyone remembers having doubts they never expressed or managers claim. They saw problems coming but didn't do much to prevent it. Team members insist they knew it wouldn't work, but somehow never documented these concerns. Hindsight bias can turn lots of failures into an opportunity for retroactive wisdom.

Political discourse really thrives on hindsight bias. Every crisis was obviously predictable well after it happened, and we can become Monday morning. Quarterbacks brilliant at predicting the past. Understanding hindsight bias can cultivate real humility. Document predictions before outcomes to see how often you're actually wrong and resist the temptation to claim you were no radames at predicting problems.

Instead of I told you so try. What can we learn from this? Hindsight bias can make us feel smart, but really prevent learning and wisdom [00:02:00] often admits surprise. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Jen Borda.

Jennifer Borda is Professor of Communication specializing in rhetoric, feminist studies, civil discourse, and democratic deliberation. And she's co-director with Renee Heath of the University of New Hampshire Civil Discourse Lab. Jen, tell us an argument story. 

Jennifer Borda: Hi Michael. Thank you so much. Yeah, so my story actually is gonna go back a little over a decade to a time in my family that was, very transformative and also sadly a tragic time for my family. Going back to May, 2014, my dad was unexpectedly diagnosed with initially they thought several forms of cancer, spent a year going through surgeries and things like that, and happily came out on the other side of all of that. In the meantime, I noticed on a visit that my mom seemed thin [00:03:00] worn down.

Seemed like that made sense given everything that had been going on. But she a year to the day from when my dad was diagnosed, was also diagnosed with metastatic cancer and went through a very lot of medical interventions and just deteriorated pretty rapidly. So we found ourselves in the summer, in July, that year of, having to bring in hospice. And she was in her final days, decided, wanted to stay at home. And so my brother, sister-in-law, me, my dad were taking turns staying up overnight with her in those final days. And I had the night off and had stayed at my brother's, was driving back and got a call from my sister-in-law saying that my mom had stated that she was closing the door to visitors. She didn't want more visitors into the house other than, people in the kind of immediate circle. And so when I pulled up my dad was standing in the driveway and. Verbally accosted me, really [00:04:00] laid into me, real, obviously tensions were running high pe were all very emotional at this point.

But he felt that I had made the decision of who could and could not visit that day or in the coming days. And just. It brought back memories of, staying out too late when you were a teenager or, and what happened was he stormed off back into the house and I was left, kinda shocked in our driveway, but the hospice nurse pulled up at that time and saw my face and said, are you okay?

And I told her what happened, and I was just really trying to process it because it just seemed. Just in that moment, it just, I didn't understand why. And she said, it's really not about you, it's about him. And he's got feeling a loss of control and he's looking for something he can control. And right now that's you.

And that just really stuck with me for a long time. That sense of, in moments of tension and high emotions and [00:05:00] controversy and when we're trying to make. Good decisions together or, trying to work together as a team collaborate. But we are finding those goals out of alignment or very mismatched what are some of the things that drive conflict that we don't always think of that might be working under the surface.

Michael Lee: How did you react besides the face that you were making and the emotions you were feeling when the hospice person showed up? How did you react to your dad then in that moment and then in the days and weeks that followed? 

Jennifer Borda: Yeah. I think I, as is my kind of personality, I just got right back into business.

And just, kept some distance there. There were lots of, phone calls to make and triaging medications and doctors, and I had a, 6-year-old at the time who was there navigating this. With me and actually about to depart back to New Hampshire with my husband that day.

I just shifted my focus at first, but it was gnawing at me and also. It was really hard for me to [00:06:00] try to stay in the moment with that conflict, to really think about how I would address it at that time because there were so many, so much other noise right in the background that was happening at that moment.

And so what actually happened, which is why I think this. This disagreement has stayed with me for over a decade is later that evening, once things quieted down, my dad apologized. And that was not his modus operandi, right? The fact that he recognized that and recognized the impact that it could have on our relationship moving forward.

And because I think we were in such a, precarious moment where we really needed to be aligned. My dad, my brother and I, a moment where we knew there, there are big changes to come in our family dynamic. And that every kind of step, every decision we're making together, the way we're going about, dealing with this issue could [00:07:00] have long-term ramifications for our relationship.

Michael Lee: A few things come up for me as you were narrating the story. The first one is, a dear friend of mine just the other day told me a favorite quotation of his from Neil Gaman, the writer. And I'll butcher it, but it's something along the lines of events or cowards and they jump out in packs. And it sounds like that was certainly the case in Yes.

In your life in 2014 as it were. Second, I have some experience with the cancer diagnosis near my family and hospice care. When I was dealing with that situation, I often thought about the world of families as it's viewed through the lens and the eyes of hospice workers who see these kinds of familial triumphs around tragedies, but also the discord that tragedy.

Can really bring up, and what really struck me too was the way that you've applied this into your own work as a co-director of the Civil Discourse Lab and your own work as a communication professor in thinking about the heightened set of circumstances, the kind of [00:08:00] material realities that we're responding to as we engage in the business of our relationship.

The phone calls that need to be made, the appointments that need to be scheduled, and the apologies that need to be given. 

Jennifer Borda: Yeah, and I would say, a I I. Gained such an appreciation for those who work in the hospice industry and really thinking about that person who's stepping into this situation of a lot of high anxiety and stress and emotions and conflict right of someone else's.

So they really need to be, therapists and mediators as well as, health professionals and experts in death and dying, which for me, this was my first kind of up close experience with that. But that. When my dad opened that conversation again later by apologizing that was really a very enlightening moment for me as someone who had already been studying, communication and thinking about, how do we use communication to co-construct our shared realities. How do we, use communication to coordinate [00:09:00] our activity with others? I hadn't at the time done a whole lot of investigation into conflict, but that became something that with the Civil Discourse Lab I've now, done a deeper dive into and really thinking about the relationship between dialogue and conflict.

And later that evening. My dad started telling stories about he and my mom, how they got, when they got together, the early days, before me and my brother came along. Just a kind of real walk down memory lane. And I think that was his way of, bringing me into his present way of feeling and thinking to allow me to step into his perspective on what was happening, because obviously it's very different to lose a partner, a lifelong partner, than to lose a parent, right?

They're both tragic losses, but they hit different, right? 

Michael Lee: Yeah. What really came up for me too, when you were talking about, and perhaps this is just my background and folks that I'm used to talking to, is when somebody gives a rare apology or when somebody's just not very quick to [00:10:00] apologize, that's not their modus operandi you say.

Oftentimes it reminds me of the fragility of our egos and how we use communication to manage and inflate and deflate ego, and sometimes apologizing makes those with whatever condition their ego is in, feel pretty bad. And it's also the way that we assign causality to the world and to that extent to assign blame in the world as well.

Jennifer Borda: And what that hospice nurse said to me in the driveway, I think was really important too, about that sense of a loss of control. 

Because, I think my immediate reaction was to fall on past history of a relationship and any conflict I would've had with my dad, over the time.

That I lived at home. At this point I was, I already had a child of my own. I was a parent, I was a wife as well as a daughter and a sister in this situation, but it made me pause. To put myself more than even putting myself in his shoes, right? But thinking about what is [00:11:00] really the undercurrent to this argument we're having?

Is it so much about who gets to visit and who doesn't get to visit, and who gets to make those decisions? Even though I firmly felt my mom. Got to make the last decision, the final decision on that. 

Michael Lee: Right. 

Jennifer Borda: But what else is at play here? And so that's something I've taken to my work and teaching students in the Civil Discourse Lab or other, groups I've talked to about conflict is that, conflict often is.

Not just about the argument, right? It's not just about a disagreement or misaligned goals or objectives, but it often is a sense of lost control over one's life. Or over one's work or not being recognized. So a conflict of identity. It could be not having a sense of belonging. It could be, feeling insecure, insecurity around, economic insecurity, right? There are all these kind of underlying interests that drive what come out as positions in terms of disagreements, right? But it's the underlying why that we don't [00:12:00] also off, we don't often surface. 

Michael Lee: Yeah, and I'll talk about a specific case in my own life that came up as you were talking another quotation, but as we talk about this, that the question for me is to what extent as we're doing civil discourse work or dialogue coaching or conflict management, or whatever you wanna call it.

There, there is a kind of meta debate about the extent to which you should wait another person's words tremendously. In other words, how much of this conflict is about the literal words that you just said, the literal accusation that you just made, or is there as one writer, talks about an understory and So when my 10 years ago when my son was dying of cancer, I was reading some of the poetry of David White.

And there was a line that stuck out just so tremendously. It is tattooed on my brain, and he talked about the horror of inexplicably, but the inexplicably of horror, meaning how terrible a challenging it is for a human [00:13:00] being to really have. One tool to express ourselves, our language in a way, and not to be able to find the language to, to describe something so awful.

But then there are things that have happened to us that are so awful that in a real sense, they are unspeakable. I. It's virtually impossible for us to give real meaning to them or the seismic consequence of the event in our life and the insufficiency of the tools that I have to describe that consequence is in stark relief.

And so it came back to this question of, to what extent are the words that I'm saying, really communicating the meaning that I'm feeling. Which is that I'm saying these words and I might not even be conscious, but I've attached to Jen, you're controlling the damn schedule. But really what I'm trying to say is something awful is happening and I don't know what to do about it.

Jennifer Borda: Exactly. Yes. I'm so sorry to hear that about your son and your family and your story. About cancer and loss. And yeah, I think the power of language is something that [00:14:00] we, my, my colleague, co-director, Renee Heath and I discuss a lot when, thinking about, whether we're designing programs for the civil discourse lab or creating curricula or giving workshops.

And. Language is a part of dialogue. So we both, work from a. In her case she was introduced to dialogue and through social constructionism. And I, from a rhetorical background something called symbolic action, right? So how are we co-creating our realities together through language?

And I think that's always really at the forefront. And so we need to. Think about how does communication and the way can we communicate with one another? Co-create our relationships with one another, co-create our knowledge that we have, about a situation co-create. Our identities or how we're communicating our identity to each other those are really important components that you have to keep an eye on, when you're trying to particularly navigate conflict or try to deescalate conflict. And so [00:15:00] I think, the impulse in that case for me was because I was always, I'm not a middle child. I'm the older of two siblings, but the one to keep The harmony.

Keep the peace, yeah. Yeah. That was always my conflict negotiation strategy. Which works well because it works to try to maintain or preserve relationships. But it doesn't always help to get to the heart of the conflict, which means that conflict could rear its ugly head later down the line.

Right? 

Michael Lee: Oh, 

Jennifer Borda: Some people, take the nearest exit. And I did create that space early on and turn to the tasks of the day which could be seen as a, kind of conflict avoidance strategy in that moment. But what works best. And conflict really can be very productive if you have inter interdependence with someone else.

And you need to be working on the same team. So conflict in collaboration, conflict in decision making. Conflict, that brings us from kind of individual positions to shared interest, I think [00:16:00] is all very. Productive. And so in this case, we really had to be a solid team to get through these grueling, days ahead being there, being present for my mom dying.

And that meant I had to be present to this changing relationship between my dad and I. I couldn't fall back on the history of how I felt if, he confronted me when I was. 12 years old. But to be present in, the relationship that we were actually building together and the new reality we were building together in a very changed family dynamic.

Michael Lee: Did I hear you say accurately that you grew up adopting a peacekeeping role in your family? 

Jennifer Borda: Correct. 

Michael Lee: It is fascinating that you became a dialogue researcher and practitioner. 

Jennifer Borda: Yeah, I think we, we bring some autobio autobiographical stuff to our work often. Right? 

Michael Lee: Yeah. Sometimes a challenge for folks whose natural inclination is peacekeeping when it comes to, to dialogue, as you said, is trying to find a surface [00:17:00] level piece to quickly where the underlying issue doesn't really get resolved.

How do you encourage folks to do that when you do, when you teach and when you do workshops and the like? 

Jennifer Borda: Yeah, I think that, the dialogue strategies that we tend to talk about are things like, creating openness or Renee and I have actually written on what we've called discursive opening.

So how do we open up conversation, right? So if we think of the goal is. To keep the conversation going. But what are some of the strategies we can use to do that through dialogue? I think that, storytelling is a really big part of that. Storytelling can allow people to bring people into their stories and their perspectives, but also is a way to create the kind of openness.

Vulnerability connecting connection with others. I think that really can become a great basis for doing some of those other things, like making a decision together, right? Or deliberating between various [00:18:00] options. But it's the dialogue piece of it that allows us to build those relationships, right?

And what I've been thinking about a lot too is how do we. Build relationships to then sustain dialogue and keep that conversation going so that we can work on some of those problems. I think our culture has spent a lot of time teaching people how to be really good at shutting other people down, closing down conversation, whether it's call out culture or cancel culture or the kind of outrage machine that has become social media.

So I think. Taking that other tact of how do we open conversation, how do we create those openings for others to build those connections so that we can move forward and do the hard things that are necessary of people. In a democracy, 

Michael Lee: there's so much work around the conceptual apparatus, the concepts relevant to dialogue, let's say letting go of winning and letting go of [00:19:00] persuasion and focusing on stories rather than facts, and focusing on identities rather than ideas.

There's another thing which you said, the culture and algorithms of anger and whatever else in the nineties just full stop, have made many of us pretty good at shutting other people down. And that's a skillset. And so then we need a corresponding skillset that answers or cancels out that skillset.

So how do you take, what's your best advice? For those of us who work in any walk of life, whether you're trying to do more effective team building at your office, whether you're trying to learn neighbor's last names, or whether you work at a college or university or wherever else, your best advice for taking the high level concepts about letting go of winning and compassionate curiosity and making them into more like actionable skill sets.

Jennifer Borda: Yeah. I think that a lot of this in the abstract, it's oh, okay. Stories aren't gonna change the world, right? Or make a big impact. But when I talk to students in the Civil Discourse lab, or we do [00:20:00] we, we talk about saying values, right? Values in conflict, or values in tension, right?

When we're trying to make decisions across differences or about, thorny problems that affect, collective groups of people. We were talking about that in class one day and I threw out, as an example social security in the United States.

Should that be something that the government kind of controls as a benefit for us, or should that be. Individual responsibility, right? So we no longer have social security as a kind of, safety net. And so we, I had them kind of work through different values, personal responsibility, fairness, equality, all of these things, and talk about what their, think about what their priorities were and, maybe a little bit. To my surprise, most people, most of the students, these are all college students, thought that the government should get out of the business of, social security. And we had a, fulsome conversation about this. And then I noticed two students hesitant to jump into the [00:21:00] conversation.

So I did make a little opening for them as a teacher, how you do. And the one shared that if it was not for social security, she would not be in college because her father had a. Medical condition arise. In his fifties long before he would've planned to retire, but he had to retire early and without social security, she wouldn't have been able to, make it to college.

That created an opening for another student to share that her father had just passed away just the semester before, which I knew 'cause I'd had her as a student. That without social security, because her mom was also facing health challenges, they wouldn't have been able to keep her childhood home.

And it just took those two stories and literally as long as it took to tell that. And the students really started to think about this issue from a completely different. Framework and started to question whether the values that they had attached to their opinions or their positions, their [00:22:00] argument about social Security really started to loosen up. And they started to think about, they started to ask more questions. They became more curious. About this issue. They asked questions of the two students who were vulnerable and open and generous enough to share their stories with them.

And so I really feel like that's a great example of, what some scholars have called a dialogic moment, right? A moment of dialogue that really not just shifts perspectives, but allows for, the experience of learning and understanding. Between one another through discourse and listening, and that's, I think, a great goal or objective to have when we're trying to do hard things together.

Michael Lee: It's a powerful story about the power of stories, and this has been a really affecting conversation. Jen Borda, thank you so much for being on when we disagree. 

Jennifer Borda: You're welcome. Thank you. 

Michael Lee: When we Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host [00:23:00] Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw.

Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.