Three Ways to Handle an Awkward Thanksgiving

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By the time I was 19 years old, I had quit college and was working a job thousands of miles from my family. With no money, my first Thanksgiving away from home promised to be a lonely one—until a local couple invited me to spend the holiday at their house with their extended family. They warned me, however, that this gathering would also include a ne’er-do-well cousin named Jeffrey. No one saw him the rest of the year, but he always came to Thanksgiving dinner and stirred up trouble with his controversial political opinions. Not having a dog in their fight—and, sentimentally, having a brother with the same name whom I missed a great deal—I accepted the invitation without reservation.

Sure enough, Jeffrey came ready to rumble. Provocative comments from the get-go led to disagreement and annoyance, and then to personal recrimination, shouting, and even angry tears by the end.

Your Thanksgiving probably won’t be that adversarial, but you might be feeling some apprehension if, as is so commonly the case, you have relatives and loved ones with whom you differ politically. A day set aside for us to count our blessings can easily be a tense ordeal, especially at a time of intense polarization in this country. Most likely, you would prefer to avoid a bitter argument. Besides the damage that can do to relationships, you might also have noticed that even if you’re well-informed and can squash someone with facts, you still don’t “win.” As the English poet Samuel Butler wrote in 1678, “He that complies against his will, / is of his own opinion still.”

Equally, you might come off a sharp exchange frustrated, feeling that you “lost.” An apt French expression—l’esprit de l’escalier, or “staircase wit”—captures the regret of realizing too late the smart, cutting thing you should have said at the time. But if you do find yourself wishing you had a better way of replying when you hear something you disagree with, you have another option: a response that doesn’t insult or harm, preserves your relations with a loved one, and has a prayer of having some effect on your interlocutor’s thinking. And social scientists might have just the key to what you’re looking for.

[Read: How Lincoln turned regional holidays into national celebrations]

To avoid an ugly confrontation, knowing how arguments start and then escalate is important. They generally follow a fairly simple formula. Each side makes a claim, followed by some statement of evidence. So, for example, someone at dinner might say, “Donald Trump was a great president [claim]. The economy was excellent under his leadership [evidence].” Your immediate response might be: “I disagree [claim]. We’ve had more economic growth under Joe Biden [evidence].” Although the claims on one side or both might be ill-founded and the evidence flimsy, this simple exchange seems harmless enough, and certainly shouldn’t spoil dinner. Yet it can still initiate a complex neurological response that is not only unproductive but actually destructive.

To begin with, as scientists showed in a series of experiments in 2021, when people disagree about politics, their brain reacts very differently from the way that it does when the people agree. People in agreement experience what is known as neural coupling, in which their brains mimic one another; this makes social harmony possible. But that occurs to a lesser extent when people disagree. The parts of the brain most active during a disagreement are those used not for social interaction but for high cognitive function. In other words, disagreements are perceived as a problem to solve, rather than as a pleasant conversation.

Next, your brain when disagreeing immediately begins to lose its ability to assess the strength of your opponent’s argument relative to your own. As scholars demonstrated in a 2020 article in Nature Neuroscience, when you hear an opinion that diverges from yours, your posterior medial prefrontal cortex, which is a part of your brain responsible for discriminating between strong and weak arguments, displays a reduced level of sensitivity. In other words, you’re smart when making your own argument, but instantly dumber when you hear your opponent’s.

If, at this point, the argument escalates, you are likely to experience emotional flooding, in which the amygdala hijacks your powers of reasoning with anger—about what an ignorant jackass your relative is. You may now assume that no area of agreement can exist between you, a belief that in experiments is associated with the escalation of conflicts. This is when “winning” an argument seems supremely important to you, much more so than harmony at your Thanksgiving dinner. You will now find yourself emotionally disconnected from your relative, and vice versa, each of you saying things that ruin the dinner and perhaps your relationship.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

In the scenario described at the beginning, I witnessed a case study of the neurobiological algorithm. Days after the row, however, when everyone was in a cooler hedonic state, the couple who’d invited me reflected on the altercation. “You know, I don’t even really care what Jeffrey thinks,” remarked one of them. “But for some reason, I always take the bait.” This candid admission holds the key to a better Thanksgiving, if you expect a Jeffrey at your table.

1. Do a cost-benefit analysis in advance.
My friends recognized that the actual benefits of disputing with Jeffrey were nil—Who cares what he thinks?—but that the costs of an argument had been steep. Unfortunately, they did that analysis after the fact, as a postmortem tinged with regret. You can arrive at this wisdom beforehand by walking through two scenarios. In the first, you can have a meltdown, say a bunch of bitter things to show your Jeffrey how wrong he is, and then regret having lost your cool. In the second, you can incur a minor cost by disregarding Jeffrey’s objectionable opinions, move the conversation toward more pleasant topics, and then realize a substantial benefit. Go into dinner with this choice of scenarios in mind, and you will enjoy much better odds of rejecting the bait.

2. Be a social scientist.
I have conducted many studies of human behavior over the years. Never once have I been tempted to fill out one of my own surveys or participate in any of my experiments, because that would ruin the data and I wouldn’t learn anything. My objective as a researcher is to watch, listen, and learn. This also happens to be a useful mindset as you walk into Thanksgiving dinner. Now that you have read a brief social-scientific analysis of how arguments operate, think of your gathering as an opportunity to observe this fascinating phenomenon. Don’t contaminate the data by joining in an argument yourself; watch, listen, and learn. Not only will this practice save you a lot of grief, but the research also shows that when you are looking for mutual resolution of a dispute with someone, you can reduce the physiological hyperarousal you’d otherwise experience in the confrontation. The attitude of observation that you adopt might just calm others down too.

3. Don’t forget to be thankful.
My Harvard colleague Jennifer Lerner studies the effects of induced emotions on behavior—finding, for example, that sadness encourages smoking. In a recent study, she and her co-authors showed that induced gratitude—in common parlance, counting one’s blessings—made people in the study less likely to engage in risky acts. This made me wonder whether inducing gratitude might also reduce such destructive behavior as starting a fight at the Thanksgiving table. As Lerner confirmed in an email, her research has found that gratitude does in fact change how we perceive the world, and that one effect can be to make us more patient; that could include making us more tolerant, she posited, when we gather with family.

[From the January/February 2004 issue: The angry American]

You may be thinking that I haven’t offered the most obvious advice of all: Just don’t invite Jeffrey. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether excluding him from Thanksgiving is the right course of action—and that will involve weighing the strength of family ties against excluding a relative for being difficult or having what you consider to be obnoxious views.

But if what’s guiding your decision making is long experience of conflict at past Thanksgivings, you may perhaps need to consider an uncomfortable question: Is it possible that you are the combative, argumentative person in the situation? If the honest answer is that perhaps, yes, you have contributed to previous family rows, you can make a resolution: Don’t be a Jeffrey.