Question: from your research how do people interact when talking about subjects the disagree on.

Jack Joyce answered on 9 Nov 2019:

It depends on what they’re doing — so in a courtroom people talk in a certain way which is usually very polite. In the public disputes I research, they ‘break’ the rules of talk — when we talk we all follow the ‘invisible’ rule of turn-taking that we all talk one at a time. In disputes people talk over one another constantly BUT breaking that turn-taking rule is done in the same ways so it’s not that they’re breaking the rule but are creating their own rules for how people talk to each other!

So one way that people talk about subjects they disagree on is by changing the ways that they talk, and that ‘change’ is done in the same way by different people, about different topics, and in different places!