How to listen to opinions you don’t want to hear

It has become popular to say that we want to have a diversity of opinion represented in workplaces. We want people to speak up when they disagree with an approach or have a unique viewpoint on how to address a complex problem.

While we say that in the abstract, there are many individual and group psychological factors that act against this ideal. We are often resistant to opinions that differ from our own and are more critical of evidence that contradicts our beliefs than we are of evidence consistent with it.