Does making more than US$75,000 make you happier? Psychologist Matthew Killingsworth from Wharton Business School’s did research and his data showed that it did. Celebrated Nobel Prize winning professor, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman’s research said that it didn’t.
Kahneman proposed the two adversaries collaborate and discover the truth together. Killingsworth accepted. This weekend’s Globe & Mail article profiled their collaboration journey.
Adversarial Collaboration
In 2020, Dr. Cory Clark, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania co-founded the Adversarial Collaboration Project, to fund and organize more work between rivals. “After all, who better than scientists to find a procedural way to harness our biases and disagreements.”
Clark says that a successful collaboration leads to results that are more complex, and, she argues, closer to the truth. They rarely reveal that someone is all right, and another person is all wrong. “When you get everyone together, all that nuance bubbles to the surface.”
Over the last decade, adversarial collaborations have especially taken root in the psychological sciences.
How to conduct an effective adversarial collaboration
Scientists who have been involved in them offer specific advice:
- Consider the temperament of your adversary (in some situations, the mood is too malicious, the views too poisonous, to even begin).
- Choose a trusted third party (e.g., mediator/facilitator) to moderate the discussion and keep it respectful.
- Clearly delineate the issue(s), where the disagreement lies.
- Learn the position of your adversary well enough to be able to explain it in a way they agree with.
- Divide the outstanding issues into small steps.
- Stay flexible.
“It’s easy to play in your own sandbox. Working with rivals not only leads to better findings, but ideally a stronger guarantee that what you’re doing is going to matter”, says Gordon Pennycook, A Canadian psychologist based at Cornell. The power of collaboration with diverse perspectives!
Where to use adversarial collaboration
Dr. Clark believes that adversarial collaboration could be used to make progress on many unresolvable questions in psychological science – ones that, for example, address racial bias, social media’s effect on you people, whether grit and be taught, and how much personality changes over time. Clark says, “bad ideas will die faster, and good ideas will elevate with greater clarity.”
On vulnerability
From my lens, adversarial collaboration starts with an act of intellectual courage; to reach out to an adversary and initiate difficult conversation. Once agreed to, adversarial collaboration benefits from a trusted neutral third party, a mediator. The mediator can help with dialogue process, managing emotions, and organizing content.
Happiness
Oh yeah, and that Killingsworth/Kahneman conflict? Well, in March 2023, with the aid of their conflict mediator, they published the results of their adversarial collaboration under the title “Income and Emotional Well-being: A Conflict Resolved” in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It runed out the Killingsworth was mostly right: the larger one’s income, generally speaking, the higher the happiness.
That said, Kahneman, over the course of his career, “proved he’d been right about another possible route to happiness – having the ability to sort things out with people who hold an opposite belief”.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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