Difficult conversations as Self-Control Conflicts

<p>Why do people avoid having important but difficult conversations? The dominant explanation is that people are overly pessimistic about the outcomes of conversations— overestimating costs and underestimating benefits. However, anecdotal evidence suggests people still fail to initiate conversations they expect to be more beneficial than costly. We address this puzzle by testing a self-control account of difficult conversations. Like other classic self-control conflicts (e.g., going to the gym, eating healthily), we argue that engaging in difficult conversations requires people to overcome proximal, concrete costs (e.g., feeling uncomfortable, hurting someone’s feelings in the moment) in pursuit of distal, abstract benefits (e.g., helping someone grow). Across four pilot studies and six experiments (N = 2,442), we provide three key pieces of support for our account. First, people perceive difficult conversations as having intertemporal trade-offs, such that the costs precede the benefits. Second, people’s decisions to initiate difficult conversations are sensitive to time, such that people are more willing to have difficult conversations in the future than the present (i.e., they delay). Importantly, this effect is specific to conversations that are expected to have both costs and benefits, suggesting that people do not generally delay all conversations. This delay is mediated by differential weighing of the costs and benefits in addition to lower anticipated costs in the future (vs. the present). Third, people are more willing to take up costly commitment devices to motivate themselves to initiate difficult conversations than to take up equivalently costly gambles. This suggests that people are aware of these dynamics. Overall, we provide a new theoretical lens for understanding difficult conversations and point to new interventions to prompt them.</p>