Misunderstanding interpersonal costs from expressing opposing views

The expression of diverse opinions is essential for high-quality decision making. Why then do people avoid expressing their views when they disagree with others? Our study (N = 2, 094) explored a potential interpersonal barrier to express opposition and revealed a misprediction that opposition expressers overestimated the interpersonal costs of stating an opposing view to recipients. This misprediction arises because opposition expressers pay more attention to the self-esteem threat (vs. information value) experienced by recipients than the recipients do. In Studies 1 and 2, the opposition expressers expressed opposing views after the recipients expressed their opinions. The opposition expressers then predicted the recipients’ reactions on recipients’ feelings, impressions, and relationship with them, and the recipients then evaluated their actual reactions. The results showed that opposition expressers overestimated recipients’ negative reactions. In Study 3, we ruled out the social-desirability explanation that recipients pretended to be open to diverse views by setting a third-person recipient condition, in which they received the expressers’ opposition together with another recipient. We found that the opposition expressers’ predictions were still more negative than the third-person recipients’ ratings, which reflected that the mispredictions we found persisted in the absence of social desirability. In Studies 4a and 4b, we found that such overestimations occurred only when an opposition was stated by examining a situation in which an agreement was stated as a comparison. In Study 5, we explored the mechanism of this misprediction by measuring the focus on self-esteem threat and the focus on information value, and whether the two foci mediated the misprediction that we found. The results showed that opposition expressers focused more on self-esteem threat and focused less on information value than recipients did, and that such difference in foci mediated the misprediction made by opposition expressers. Study 6 further examined our mechanism by designing a theoretically driven debiasing intervention and tested its effectiveness. We found that prompting opposition expressers to consider the information value that may be experienced by recipients can help them predict the consequences of raising opposing views more accurately. Together, our research shows that opposition expressers overestimate the negative interpersonal consequences of raising their view, which may hinder people from stating opposing views. We also find that this misprediction arises because opposition expressers pay more attention to self-esteem threat (vs. information value) that may be experienced by recipients than the recipients do. Besides, we developed a simple but effective approach to correct this misprediction. Theoretically, our research extends research on mispredictions in interpersonal communication. Practically, our research provides a feasible approach for promoting people to raise their opposing views.