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Why Can’t We Just Agree to Disagree?
Not Everything is Toxic: Rethinking Conflict and Difference at Work. Part Two of Three.
Workplaces are becoming less tolerant of ordinary disagreement and more likely to describe conflict in the language of harm. This three-part series explores how that shift happened, why it matters, and what leaders and organizations can do about it.
The first article in this series argued that we have started to describe ordinary workplace friction in the language of harm, calling difficult colleagues “toxic”, unwelcome decisions “harassment”, and honest disagreements “gaslighting”. This article is about the forces that have contributed to this trend.
In my view, it’s not that people have become more fragile or more difficult. That’s too simplistic. What has changed is the culture around us: increasing political division, the expansion of psychological language into everyday life, and rising expectations about what others should provide in our relationships. Those forces have converged, and the workplace is where many of us feel them most acutely.
When disagreement becomes a moral judgment
We are losing the ability to just agree to disagree. Believing that you are right is no longer enough. The other person must be made to see that they are wrong.
Part of what has changed is that opinions have become markers of identity and, increasingly, of morality. When an opinion is simply an opinion, we can accept when it doesn’t align with ours. But when it is seen as evidence of the kind of person someone is, disagreement becomes harder to resolve. The colleague who sees a problem differently is no longer just wrong about the problem. They have revealed an intolerable flaw in their character.
The pull of polarization
What happens in society does not stop at the workplace door. The rise in political division is one of the clearest examples. Political disagreement is hardly new, but the way we experience it appears to have changed. Increasingly, opposing views are not treated simply as different perspectives, but as evidence of a defect in the person who holds them.
The same mechanism operates in the workplace. A few simple disagreements can lead us to draw conclusions about a colleague’s character, values, and intentions. Those conclusions shape how we interpret future interactions, who we trust, and how willing we are to work together.
Polarization not only makes us combative. It can also make us wary. Caution around political debates has caused many people to play it safe by saying less and keeping their real views to themselves on many issues. These tendencies bleed into the workplace, where people stop saying what they think for fear of offending someone or starting an argument. As a result, disagreements that might challenge assumptions, improve decisions, or lead to a better approach don’t happen at all.
Being together less often
All of this has been compounded by the rise in remote work. In-person meetings are usually bracketed by small talk: catching up for a few minutes before the meeting starts, walking out together afterward, or asking a passing question about someone’s weekend. Those incidental moments are where we come to appreciate that a colleague is a whole person and not only a position on an issue. Online, the meeting tends to be about the work and nothing else. We arrive at the appointed minute, transact, and sign off, and the fullness of who we are disappears. What remains is a thinner version of one another, with less context and emotional goodwill to soften conflict when it comes.
Living online shapes us in a second way. People increasingly turn to AI for guidance on their relationships and disputes, and AI often responds in ways that are agreeable. A recent study in Science tested eleven leading chatbots and found they endorsed a user’s behaviour far more readily than another person would, affirming the user’s position roughly 50% more often than humans did. [1]
Ask whether a difficult colleague or relative is a narcissist, working only from your own description of them, and the answer that comes back will often confirm the suspicion you brought to it. Nothing in that exchange offers a different perspective or asks what you might have contributed. The tool that feels like impartial advice is closer to a mirror, and people are acting on its reflection. They distance themselves from a colleague or sever ties with a family member on the strength of a judgment assembled from a chatbot.
The problem is not confined to AI. It reflects a broader set of habits we have developed online; habits that encourage us to move away from people who challenge our views rather than stay engaged with them.
The reflex on social media to unfollow, mute, or block people whose views we find disagreeable, so normalized that we barely notice it, trains us to see distance as the answer to difference. Not surprisingly, cutting people off over disagreement often deepens the division it was meant to relieve. We cannot literally block a colleague, but we can freeze them out, route around them, and wait for them to leave. And that just makes it worse.
The cognitive biases that keep us there
Several cognitive biases exacerbate all of this. The first, “fundamental attribution error,” is our tendency to explain other people’s behaviour by their character, while justifying our own by our circumstances. When I am short with a colleague, it is because I am under pressure; when they are short with me, it is because they are difficult. Applied to conflict, this means we are quick to read a single unwelcome act as evidence of who someone is, rather than as a product of the situation they happen to be in.
The second, confirmation bias, strengthens that belief. Once we have decided what someone is like, we notice the things that fit assumption and overlook the things that do not. Every curt email confirms the verdict, while every kindness is discounted as an exception or as insincere. And then belief perseverance locks us in. Once we have developed a particular narrative about someone, we are resistant to abandoning it, even when new, contrary, information emerges.
Together, these biases become the soil in which labels take root.
Social contagion and the spread of narratives about others
Once someone has formed a judgment about a colleague, the judgment rarely stays private. It is often tested with someone else, sometimes as a concerned aside, sometimes as a request for validation. “Have you noticed how difficult she is?” or “I don’t feel safe raising things with him.”
Sometimes the concern is a legitimate need for support. But other times what is being shared is not evidence so much as an interpretation. Once repeated, the interpretation gathers weight: what began as one person’s discomfort quickly becomes a group narrative, even when no one has questioned whether that narrative is accurate. (There is a different kind of social contagion in family systems. When one family member goes “no contact” it gives tacit permission to others to do the same, making estrangement more likely to spread.)
Group narratives are powerful because they create belonging. Once a few people share the same interpretation, agreeing with it can start to feel like loyalty, while questioning it can feel like betrayal. Teams then begin to divide into those who “get it” and those who do not. Over time, this can harden into factions, exclusion, and, in the most serious cases, workplace mobbing, which is a form of group bullying.
How the language of therapy became everyday language
Another driver, explored at length in the first article, is the migration of psychological language out of the therapy session and into ordinary life. Give a generation a rich language of harm, therapy, and diagnosis, and it will, quite sincerely, come to interpret ordinary distress in those terms. [2] The same fluency that lets us name real harm also tempts us to reach for clinical language when what we are actually feeling is discomfort, disappointment, or dislike.
A challenge across generations
It is tempting to attribute this development to a particular generation, whether Gen Z or the millennials, who are often accused of being less resilient. But the erosion of tolerance for difference is not confined to any one cohort. The manager who cannot tolerate a subordinate who challenges them, the long-serving employee who freezes out a colleague over a political remark, the senior leader who treats disagreement as disloyalty; none of these belongs to the youngest generation. What younger cohorts may have done is lead a shift that the rest then followed. The vocabulary and the reflexes spread outward, and now they belong to everyone. It is more honest, and more useful, to treat this as a change in our shared culture.
What we now ask of one another
Our expectations have also expanded. We ask our institutions, including our employers, to meet emotional needs that were once the domain of family, faith, or community. We want work to provide not just a living but meaning, belonging, purpose, and a sense of being seen. These are not unreasonable things to want. But once they harden into expectations, the inevitable shortfall is often registered in the language of harm.
We also expect a lot from each other. We want colleagues to be consistently pleasant, patient, and available and we read any lapse as a personal affront rather than as a sign that someone is simply having a hard day. We all speak more sharply than we mean to at times, usually because of something that has nothing to do with the person in front of us. A workplace that leaves no room for that ordinary human unevenness is one in which everyone is perpetually on trial.
The same standard is visible well beyond work. In the first large national study of its kind, sociologist Karl Pillemer found that more than a quarter of adults were estranged from a family member. While there are genuine cases of abuse and betrayal, there are also many ruptures driven by differing values and unmet, sometimes unrealistic, expectations. [3] We appear to be applying a higher and more therapeutic standard to our closest relationships and finding them wanting. The same instinct that ends a friendship or fractures a family over a perceived deficit, rather than an actual betrayal, is the one that recasts an ordinary difficult colleague as someone to be escaped.
Social media not only trains us to distance ourselves from views we dislike. It also trains us to expect affirmation. Social media runs on validation – the likes, the follows, the affirming replies – and it causes us to crave a steady stream of approval from the people around us. When a friend, a manager, or a workplace does not supply it, the shortfall can feel like a slight. As a result, , we have grown accustomed to relationships that affirm us, and less practised at ones that require room for difference.
Distance has become the default solution. When walking away is easy, the harder work of staying and sorting things out starts to look optional.
There is also a shift how we assign responsibility. When a relationship sours, the narrative has become one in which the fault lies entirely with the other person – their toxicity, their failings – rather than in the space between two people who both usually played some part. The first version asks nothing of us, which is part of its appeal, but it also closes off the honest self-examination that resolution and personal growth depend on.
The thread that connects them
These forces do not operate in isolation. Moral certainty makes us less willing to concede a point; polarization tells us the other side is not merely wrong but bad; our cognitive biases harden dispute into a verdict; therapy language gives discomfort a diagnostic name; and inflated expectations ensure we are more often disappointed. Each feeds the others. Together they produce a workplace, and a wider world, in which the effort of getting along with people we have not chosen to be with, and do not always like, has come to feel unreasonably hard.
The encouraging part, and the subject of the final article in this series, is that none of this is fixed. Much of our division rests on misperception, which can be corrected. Much of our difficulty is a skill deficit, and skills can be taught. And much of what we have lost, the ability to disagree with someone and keep working alongside them, was never a natural ability in the first place. It was a discipline, and disciplines can be taught.
If much of what we are facing is a problem of habits, expectations, and skills, then it follows that something can also be done about it. The last article turns to how to do this.
[1] Myra Cheng et al., “AI Overly Affirms Users Asking for Personal Advice,” Stanford Report (26 March 2026).
[2] Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016). See also part one of this series.
[3]Karl Pillemer, Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them (New York: Avery, 2020), reporting the first national survey on estrangement (27% of adults, ~67 million). On the cultural drivers, including avoidance, social contagion, and the language of diagnosis, see Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict (New York: Harmony, 2021).
Lauren Bernardi is a lawyer, workplace investigator and HR advisor. She is the founder of Bernardi Human Resource Law LLP and The Bernardi Centre, which help organizations navigate workplace issues and create psychologically safe, respectful, and inclusive workplaces.
