Study shows why speaking beats writing for contentious conversation

Before you fire off that carefully worded email to a colleague you disagree with, consider this: Your written precision may be sabotaging your chance of greater understanding.

New research coauthored by UC Berkeley Haas social psychologist Juliana Schroeder shows that when the stakes are high, your voice—rather than your words alone—makes all the difference.

In a paper published online today in the journal Nature Communications, Schroeder and colleagues Burint Bevis and Michael Yeomans of Imperial College Business School in London show compelling evidence for a simple way to bridge society’s growing divides—spoken conversation. In a series of studies, they demonstrate that disagreement is made much less disagreeable when conducted through speaking rather than writing.

The finding arrives at a pivotal moment: The U.S. is experiencing levels of partisan divide not seen in generations. “There’s some data that suggests political disagreement in the U.S. is at levels close to where they were at the time of the Civil War,” says Schroeder, the Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values Professor at the Haas School of Business. “And the lines of divide also seem to be increasing globally.”

And while the solution of talking it out might sound obvious, it runs counter to most people’s instincts. In a survey, Schroeder and her colleagues found that 77% of respondents not only felt it was easier to communicate disagreement through writing but also predicted it would lead to less conflict as well. “With the advent of social media platforms and digital communications, text feels pretty convenient,” Schroeder says. The studies, however, directly contradict that intuition. “What this work suggests is that when it comes to having a more intimate social conversation where you actually reach better understanding, speaking is more effective.”

Why the medium matters

Schroeder has been investigating disagreement for more than a decade, conducting more than a dozen studies in the lab to examine the circumstances under which people can best overcome their differences. While her previous work examined how people form impressions from voice versus text, this new research is the first to systematically test whether the communication medium itself affects the quality of contentious conversations, and to pinpoint the specific linguistic mechanisms that make speech more effective.

Disagreement, Schroeder stresses, is not always a bad thing; studies have shown that having diverse perspectives in a room can lead to better decision-making. At the same time, disagreement often leads to conflict, causing people to think less of another’s mental capacity, or even see them as less human. “We were thinking, how do you solve that? How do you make conversations more productive?” asks Schroeder. She and her fellow researchers suspected that when it comes to disagreement, how people communicate can be as important as what they communicate.

In one experiment, they brought participants into a lab, pairing people with differing views on controversial topics including legalization of drugs, reparations for slavery, and genetically modified foods. After meeting face-to-face, the pairs then discussed issues on separate computers over Skype, some using video chat, while others spoke over audio or wrote in a text-based chat. After a 10-minute conversation, they were then asked how much they changed their attitude; how much they felt they understood and were understood by the other; and how much conflict they felt.

The brief exchanged didn’t change anyone’s minds on the issues. But they revealed differences in how the medium shaped the interaction. Both video and audio promoted more understanding and less conflict than a text-based chat—increasing understanding by nearly half a point on a 7-point scale and decreasing conflict by a quarter point, effects seen as small-to-moderate but meaningful.

Drilling down into these results in other studies, the researchers found that those benefits came both how people spoke and from how people listened. In a computer analysis of words people chose, they found that while they tended to be more formal and polite when writing, they tended to use phrasing that more often acknowledged other’s points and referred to their own point of view in a more subjective way when speaking, choices that can lead to greater receptiveness.

Listeners were also more receptive just from hearing another person’s voice. To test this, the researchers had actors read written arguments aloud, and transcribed spoken arguments into text. Third-party evaluators consistently rated the spoken versions as promoting more understanding and less conflict—proving the medium really is the message in bridging conflict. “Even if they use the exact same words, it comes across differently when you heard it in the person’s voice rather than when you read it,” says Schroeder. “People tend to humanize the communicator more, and think they have greater mental capacity.”

When extra effort pays off

The findings don’t mean every email should become a phone call, Schroeder hastens to say. For straightforward topics, an email or Slack message works fine and might even provide greater clarity. But when disagreement looms, it pays to pick up the phone, jump on Zoom, or knock on a colleague’s door. “Speaking is better for conversations with more disagreement, because people tend to engage with more receptive language,” Schroeder says. “Sometimes there’s a tendency to avoid social experiences that can be off-putting. But this is one case in which putting in a little bit of effort can really improve the outcome.”

Read the full paper:

Spoken disagreement is more constructive than written disagreement
By Burint Bevis, Juliana Schroeder, and Michael Yeomans
Nature Communications, in press (published online April 27, 2026)