Hi,
This week’s email is about different goals we can have when talking with others.
One framework for this breaks down dialogues into the following common types:
Inquiry- When claims need proving, participants search for and check relevant evidence.
Discovery- When facts need explaining, participants explore and defend possible hypotheses.
Information-seeking- When information is needed, participants exchange knowledge with each other.
Persuasion- When there’s a conflict of opinions, participants try to clarify or resolve it.
Negotiation- When there’s a conflict of interests, participants work toward a compromise that they can agree on (though each usually tries to get the best outcome for themselves).
In real life, dialogues don’t always fall neatly into one—or any—of these types. Because of this, the main takeaway here isn’t that you should think about these particular types of dialogues. Instead, understand that each dialogue has some purpose (or purposes), and use that to guide your conversations, by asking yourself questions like “what should we aim to achieve with this dialogue, and what’s the best way to go about it?”
As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
Have a great week,
Itamar