on Fiction University:

Everyone has their hot buttons topics–the ones that get their blood boiling, or makes their skin crawl, or triggers an inappropriate response to the situation. While this isn’t much fun to encounter in real life, it’s a great way to create conflict and tension in a novel. Pushing someone’s hot button (either accidentally or on purpose) can cause a character to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t.

Take at look at your current project and list the important characters: your protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters and anyone who might be in a position to affect how a scene plays out. Think about those characters and their background, their hopes and fears, their education, their opinions, and ask them: