It Is Useful To Talk To People You Do Not Agree With It is us | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Official Telegram Channel

It Is Useful To Talk To People You Do Not Agree With

It is useful to talk to people you do not agree with for a variety of reasons. One is that a lot of what determines your political orientation is biological temperament, far more than what people realize.

For example, left-leaning people — liberals — are high in a trait called “openness,” which is one of the big-five personality traits, and it is associated with interest in abstraction and interest in aesthetics. It is the best predictor of liberal political leaning. They are low in trait conscientiousness, which is dutifulness and orderliness in particular. The conservatives are the opposite. They are high in conscientiousness, they are dutiful and orderly, and they are low in openness. That makes them really good managers and administrators and often businessmen but not very good entrepreneurs — because entrepreneurs are almost all drawn from the liberal types. These are really fundamentally, biologically predicated differences. You might think about them as different sets of opportunities and limitations and certainly different ways of screening the world. Each of those different temperamental types needs the other type.

One thing to remember is, people actually do see the world differently. It is not merely that they are possessed of ill-informed opinions. So you have to, first of all, stretch out your hand and say, “I get that you see the world differently than me, and I also understand that there is a place for you and a place for me, even though that is not the same place.”