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By the time I was 19 years old, I had quit college and was working a job thousands of miles from my family. With no money, my first Thanksgiving away from home promised to be a lonely one—until a local couple invited me to spend the holiday at their house with their extended family. They warned me, however, that this gathering would also include a ne’er-do-well cousin named Jeffrey. No one saw him the rest of the year, but he always came to Thanksgiving dinner and stirred up trouble with his controversial political opinions. Not having a dog in their fight—and, sentimentally, having a brother with the same name whom I missed a great deal—I accepted the invitation without reservation.

Sure enough, Jeffrey came ready to rumble. Provocative comments from the get-go led to disagreement and annoyance, and then to personal recrimination, shouting, and even angry tears by the end.

Your Thanksgiving probably won’t be that adversarial, but you might be feeling some apprehension if, as is so commonly the case, you have relatives and loved ones with whom you differ politically. A day set aside for us to count our blessings can easily be a tense ordeal, especially at a time of intense polarization in this country. Most likely, you would prefer to avoid a bitter argument. Besides the damage that can do to relationships, you might also have noticed that even if you’re well-informed and can squash someone with facts, you still don’t “win.” As the English poet Samuel Butler wrote in 1678, “He that complies against his will, / is of his own opinion still.”

Equally, you might come off a sharp exchange frustrated, feeling that you “lost.” An apt French expression—l’esprit de l’escalier, or “staircase wit”—captures the regret of realizing too late the smart, cutting thing you should have said at the time. But if you do find yourself wishing you had a better way of replying when you hear something you disagree with, you have another option: a response that doesn’t insult or harm, preserves your relations with a loved one, and has a prayer of having some effect on your interlocutor’s thinking. And social scientists might have just the key to what you’re looking for.

[Read: How Lincoln turned regional holidays into national celebrations]

To avoid an ugly confrontation, knowing how arguments start and then escalate is important. They generally follow a fairly simple formula. Each side makes a claim, followed by some statement of evidence. So, for example, someone at dinner might say, “Donald Trump was a great president [claim]. The economy was excellent under his leadership [evidence].” Your immediate response might be: “I disagree [claim]. We’ve had more economic growth under Joe Biden [evidence].” Although the claims on one side or both might be ill-founded and the evidence flimsy, this simple exchange seems harmless enough, and certainly shouldn’t spoil dinner. Yet it can still initiate a complex neurological response that is not only unproductive but actually destructive.

To begin with, as scientists showed in a series of experiments in 2021, when people disagree about politics, their brain reacts very differently from the way that it does when the people agree. People in agreement experience what is known as neural coupling, in which their brains mimic one another; this makes social harmony possible. But that occurs to a lesser extent when people disagree. The parts of the brain most active during a disagreement are those used not for social interaction but for high cognitive function. In other words, disagreements are perceived as a problem to solve, rather than as a pleasant conversation.

Next, your brain when disagreeing immediately begins to lose its ability to assess the strength of your opponent’s argument relative to your own. As scholars demonstrated in a 2020 article in Nature Neuroscience, when you hear an opinion that diverges from yours, your posterior medial prefrontal cortex, which is a part of your brain responsible for discriminating between strong and weak arguments, displays a reduced level of sensitivity. In other words, you’re smart when making your own argument, but instantly dumber when you hear your opponent’s.

If, at this point, the argument escalates, you are likely to experience emotional flooding, in which the amygdala hijacks your powers of reasoning with anger—about what an ignorant jackass your relative is. You may now assume that no area of agreement can exist between you, a belief that in experiments is associated with the escalation of conflicts. This is when “winning” an argument seems supremely important to you, much more so than harmony at your Thanksgiving dinner. You will now find yourself emotionally disconnected from your relative, and vice versa, each of you saying things that ruin the dinner and perhaps your relationship.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

In the scenario described at the beginning, I witnessed a case study of the neurobiological algorithm. Days after the row, however, when everyone was in a cooler hedonic state, the couple who’d invited me reflected on the altercation. “You know, I don’t even really care what Jeffrey thinks,” remarked one of them. “But for some reason, I always take the bait.” This candid admission holds the key to a better Thanksgiving, if you expect a Jeffrey at your table.

1. Do a cost-benefit analysis in advance.
My friends recognized that the actual benefits of disputing with Jeffrey were nil—Who cares what he thinks?—but that the costs of an argument had been steep. Unfortunately, they did that analysis after the fact, as a postmortem tinged with regret. You can arrive at this wisdom beforehand by walking through two scenarios. In the first, you can have a meltdown, say a bunch of bitter things to show your Jeffrey how wrong he is, and then regret having lost your cool. In the second, you can incur a minor cost by disregarding Jeffrey’s objectionable opinions, move the conversation toward more pleasant topics, and then realize a substantial benefit. Go into dinner with this choice of scenarios in mind, and you will enjoy much better odds of rejecting the bait.

2. Be a social scientist.
I have conducted many studies of human behavior over the years. Never once have I been tempted to fill out one of my own surveys or participate in any of my experiments, because that would ruin the data and I wouldn’t learn anything. My objective as a researcher is to watch, listen, and learn. This also happens to be a useful mindset as you walk into Thanksgiving dinner. Now that you have read a brief social-scientific analysis of how arguments operate, think of your gathering as an opportunity to observe this fascinating phenomenon. Don’t contaminate the data by joining in an argument yourself; watch, listen, and learn. Not only will this practice save you a lot of grief, but the research also shows that when you are looking for mutual resolution of a dispute with someone, you can reduce the physiological hyperarousal you’d otherwise experience in the confrontation. The attitude of observation that you adopt might just calm others down too.

3. Don’t forget to be thankful.
My Harvard colleague Jennifer Lerner studies the effects of induced emotions on behavior—finding, for example, that sadness encourages smoking. In a recent study, she and her co-authors showed that induced gratitude—in common parlance, counting one’s blessings—made people in the study less likely to engage in risky acts. This made me wonder whether inducing gratitude might also reduce such destructive behavior as starting a fight at the Thanksgiving table. As Lerner confirmed in an email, her research has found that gratitude does in fact change how we perceive the world, and that one effect can be to make us more patient; that could include making us more tolerant, she posited, when we gather with family.

[From the January/February 2004 issue: The angry American]

You may be thinking that I haven’t offered the most obvious advice of all: Just don’t invite Jeffrey. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether excluding him from Thanksgiving is the right course of action—and that will involve weighing the strength of family ties against excluding a relative for being difficult or having what you consider to be obnoxious views.

But if what’s guiding your decision making is long experience of conflict at past Thanksgivings, you may perhaps need to consider an uncomfortable question: Is it possible that you are the combative, argumentative person in the situation? If the honest answer is that perhaps, yes, you have contributed to previous family rows, you can make a resolution: Don’t be a Jeffrey.

On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, agreed to a cease-fire. The arrangement is a win for outgoing President Joe Biden, who has followed a hapless policy course through a calamitous year for the Middle East.

Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s goal in the Middle East has been to contain the conflict. That policy didn’t exactly succeed: The fighting spread to Lebanon and even led to exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran. In the meantime, Washington gave Israel virtual carte blanche in Gaza, particularly in the first few months of the war; in doing so, it implicated itself in a war that has exacted a heavy toll not just on Hamas but on the people of Gaza. Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and displaced nearly the entire population of 2.2 million, many of them multiple times. An estimated 66 percent of structures that once stood in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed. And at every step, Israel dictated the scope and nature of the conflict, not just to its adversaries but also to Washington, escalating to the brink of all-out war with Iran.

Now Washington has helped broker a cease-fire, not in Gaza, but in Lebanon and northern Israel. If it holds, Biden may leave office able to say that he averted a regional war that could have drawn in the United States and others.

[Read: ‘The Iranian period is finished’]

The agreement likely will hold, because it serves the interests of all the parties directly involved. Hezbollah desperately needs the hiatus to regroup. Israel has assassinated most of its political leaders and battlefield commanders, including Hassan Nasrallah, and demolished much of its arsenal of rockets and missiles. The organization’s command-and-control capabilities are shattered, and many of its best fighters have been killed or badly wounded. Iran could use the pause to reconsider its national-security strategy: Hezbollah was the centerpiece of Iran’s forward defense, yet it turned out to be unable to deter or successfully combat Israel. The Lebanese militia either could not or would not fire large numbers of missiles on Israeli cities, such as Haifa, or strategic targets, such as the Dimona nuclear reactor.

Israel likely welcomes the cease-fire because it, too, is near exhaustion. Its munitions are depleted and its military overstretched, even as the insurgency in Gaza appears to be intensifying, however gradually. Israel has achieved virtually all of its most ambitious goals in Lebanon and stands to gain very little by continuing the conflict. It may even have risked reinvigorating Hezbollah had it overstayed, in the same way that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 led to the establishment of  the organization in the first place.

The negotiators, led by the Biden administration but also including France and others, were able to succeed because both sides had a clear interest in drawing down the conflict. The war in Gaza stands in stark relief. There, the two parties—the Israeli government and the remnants of Hamas’s leadership—both calculate that continuing to fight will further their political interests.

[Read: Israel and Hamas are kidding themselves]

By contrast, the Israeli military and public were eager to end the war with Hezbollah, especially on advantageous terms. Hezbollah has been so devastated that it was willing to agree to conditions it might once have deemed humiliating. The militia will withdraw its personnel and heavy equipment from southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, about 15 miles north of the border with Israel, as it was originally required to do by the United Nations resolution that ended the fighting in 2006. The Lebanese military and UN peacekeepers will fill the void, maintain order, and ensure that Hezbollah doesn’t return. Israel has agreed to a phased withdrawal from Lebanon, but the agreement stipulates that Israel and Lebanon can still exercise their “inherent right of self-defense,” which Israeli officials have signaled they see as a license to strike Hezbollah if they believe it is violating the terms of the cease-fire. That Hezbollah and Iran agreed to this imbalanced arrangement shows the extent of Israel’s military advantage and the decisiveness of its victory in this round of battle.

The Biden administration will be handing Donald Trump a Middle East that is still smoldering but no longer on the verge of explosion. Trump’s minions are already trying to suggest—preposterously—that his reelection is the main reason for the cease-fire. Biden’s Gaza-war policy has been indefensible as well as inept, in that it failed to prevent the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. But the president will leave office able to count as a success a deal that forestalls any realistic prospect of a large-scale, multifront, regional war in the Middle East.