Transcriber: Megan Claeys Reviewer: Annet Johnson
Today, I am going to talk to you about the increasing divide
between everyday people’s political beliefs,
what’s known as political polarization.
I’m going to cover it in three ways:
one, how my lifelong interest in the topic developed;
two, why we have it or at least one key reason;
and three, what you can but probably are not doing to help resolve the situation.
So, let me start with where my interest started for me:
in elementary school.
Now, some people say that if you really want to predict a presidential election,
you should poll in elementary school.
The idea goes, kids will help you tally voters you might otherwise miss,
and since they’ll just repeat their parents’ preferences,
you’ll get a more accurate prediction.
In fact, one elementary school, not my own, has been conducting
this very poll for over four decades.
And it’s got the president right 48 years in a row
though even they biffed on 2016.
Now, when I was a first grader, my own elementary school in Portland, Oregon,
was conducting a very similar presidential poll.
And me, I was a blazing five-year-old crusader
for the Republican nominee, Bob Dole, over the Democrat, Bill Clinton.
I even distinctly remember going up to a kid and saying,
“You can’t trust that Clinton.
He’ll show you a grape and call it a cherry.
It’s pure logic, people.”
But, as compelling as I thought I was,
if you don’t know anything about Portland’s political scene,
I can indicate it with one photo.
There were only two votes for the Republican nominee
in my classroom that year and I might be misremembering one of them.
Growing up in Portland, my friends were liberal,
or rather my friend’s parents were liberal, my teachers were liberal,
the squirrels were definitely liberal.
But at home, my primary political role model, my father,
was an unabashed conservative.
It was a straining political identity for me to hold growing up,
but especially after my father spoke to my high school principal
and, the next day,
my history teacher was no longer telling George Bush jokes in class.
But because of this political environment,
my dad and I were constantly having debates:
voter ID laws, immigration, capital punishment.
And throughout it all, he never once forced me to believe what he did.
And later, when I went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Social Psychology,
it was in part because those debates
made me so interested in the science of persuasion,
largely because I kept losing debates to him.
Now, when I got to graduate school
and started to study the psychology of opinion change,
as it turned out, there were a lot of other people doing it too,
and for good reason.
Although the United States has had its fair share of political disagreements,
the current divide is truly alarming to people on both sides of the aisle.
And yet, there is hope.
The idea is not a particularly new one or a flashy one,
nor will it FedEx us national peace by 9 p.m. tonight,
but there is a promising study.
In 2015, two young researchers hired a team of people
to go door to door in a California county
to try to reduce negativity toward an upcoming transgender bill.
Such issues, today, elicit quite polarized responses.
And yet, even three months after these visits occurred,
the researchers continued to observe a sizable reduction
in negativity toward the bill.
In other words, they were able to depolarize a very polarized issue,
and they did it simply by having a conversation.
Increasing amounts of research show
that one of the simplest and most straightforward paths
to curbing political polarization among everyday people
is simply to have conversations with people of different views.
Of course, not every view deserves a debate;
giving a platform to truly harmful or totally untrue beliefs
simply legitimizes them for susceptible minds.
However, we can’t treat all topics like this.
We must figure out how to differentiate our dislike from what is unacceptable
and have real, but often difficult dialogues.
For when we do, we often come to find the ways
in which we have misrepresented the other side’s opinion.
For me, I was getting weekly conversations of this with my dad, who,
as I was progressing through graduate school,
was now becoming a little frustrated he couldn’t win every debate so easily.
But okay, even if you believe the research that these kinds of conversations
can reduce the polarization between everyday people,
you probably had two reactions.
One, if the solution is so easy, why do we still have political polarization, huh?
Fair point.
And two, I’ve talked to the other side.
You’re telling me that conversation is supposed to depolarize things?
Also a fair point.
Let me start with the first, it’s easier.
The reason we still have political polarization is ...
drumroll,
people don’t talk to people they disagree with.
That’s right.
In fact, two separate studies showed
that Thanksgiving dinners are anywhere from 20 to 50 minutes shorter
when the guest list includes people with mixed versus the same political beliefs.
But speaking to people we disagree with
is kind of like exercising and eating healthy.
We have clear solutions to our collective well-being,
yet we’re all just kind of like, “Nah, not for me.”
And that’s what my research has really tried to understand.
Why are people so reluctant toward having these important conversations?
Now, before continuing, let me acknowledge that for many people,
they avoid these conversations for very good reason.
Maybe they feel unsafe having them or this “debate” is about their lived experience,
so constantly having to defend it is simply exhausting, if not insulting.
But, at the same time, there are a lot of other people
who do possess the capacity for these conversations.
And my research has really tried to understand
why these people are so reluctant toward having them.
A question that was particularly meaningful to me at the time,
because I needed a dissertation.
It was the summer before my final year in graduate school,
and although I knew what I wanted to study,
I didn’t have any good hypotheses.
Well, until a family barbecue.
Now although my dad’s conservative he chooses to eat a vegetarian diet,
so there was already a little political debate about what should go on the grill.
But I was in my own political debate with a conservative leaning family friend
on the topic of white privilege,
where I was taking the apparently controversial stance that it exists.
Now, as I was trying to defend this position,
this family friend just kept talking right past me or even right over me.
When finally I decided I needed to fake a bathroom break to get out of this,
my dad suddenly jumped into the conversation.
He turned to the family friend and he said,
it’s not his real name.
“Kyle, will you shut up and let Jake speak?
You may not agree with what he has to say,
but I promise you’ll be better off after you hear it.”
And like that my dad just gave me my dissertation idea.
In research that I and a colleague would later publish,
we recruited a sample of participants from all over the United States,
young and old, Democrat and Republican, and gave them a list of reasons
for why they might avoid conversations with people they disagree with;
maybe they think they’re too hard to change or too extreme
or too prone to emotional agitation.
Although people do care about these things,
do you know the number one reason
people avoid speaking to those they disagree with?
Their expectation of feeling unheard.
In follow-up studies, my colleague and I found the same effect over and over again,
even if the other person was extreme or impossible to change,
as long as you thought they would genuinely listen to you,
you were willing to speak to them.
And as it turns out,
we actually underestimate just how likely this is to occur.
Of course, there will always be people on both sides of an issue
who will ignore anything they disagree with.
But on average, people self-report being open to hearing contrary views.
We just have to actually initiate the conversation.
So whether it’s a friend, a family member, or a family friend,
consider going out and speaking to them
on a topic that maybe the two of you disagree on.
Of course, once you do, you’ll have the greater challenge ahead of you;
how to actually have a productive conversation.
Not every debate with my dad has gone so well.
Once, he, my brother, and I were taking a road trip through Ireland.
While I was in the back recovering from an illness I got from ...
giving a passionate kiss to a popular rock, the Blarney Stone.
Well, somehow we got onto the topic of military spending
and for some reason, I felt the need to prove him wrong.
When he cited a statistic I didn’t like, I told him I didn’t believe it.
Then he told me, “Well, I don’t believe any of the statistics you shared.”
Naturally, I told him,
to which he, naturally, responded, “No, you’re just an unknowing, naive boy.”
The car fell silent, our necklines hot.
Meanwhile, my brother, who’s actually in the military
and might know something about military spending,
was never once consulted for his opinion on the matter.
So, let me give you a point-by-point breakdown of my every blunder.
First, don’t kiss a rock lots of other people also kiss,
even pre-COVID, that was pretty stupid.
But the bigger point is,
don’t have these conversations when people are in a bad mood.
Debates like these are best done when people are happy
and don’t feel like the conversation is sprung upon them.
Second, make sure you’re going into these conversations with the right motive.
With my dad, I wanted to prove him wrong and rhetorically kick his butt,
but these mindsets almost always backfire.
Instead, I should have explicitly established
a learning or truth seeking motive.
In fact, one of the easiest ways to do this is to simply ask
the other person about their opinion.
Asking them to explain why they believe what they do
communicates that you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say,
which, in fact, makes the other person more likely to be interested in hearing
what you have to say.
Third, I shouldn’t have just dismissed this statistic.
A better approach would have been to have said that what he shared
was different than what I had read,
and, if this statistic was important to our conversation,
maybe we’ll compare sources.
But, more broadly, I should have been willing to acknowledge
the aspects of his opinion that I thought had merit.
Acknowledging pros and cons on a topic helps to foster a sense of openness,
which makes the other person more receptive to your counterpoints too.
Finally, and one of the most powerful tactics you can use
in these kinds of conversations is called “Analogic Perspective-Taking.”
Perspective-taking is simply imagining yourself
from another person’s point of view.
However, if you’ve lived a very different experience,
perspective-taking can be very hard,
and that’s where Analogic Perspective-Taking comes in.
The idea is to get the other person to recall a personal experience
that generates the same thoughts and emotions
to the context you’re trying to describe,
even if it occurs in a totally different situation.
For example, in that transgender bill study I told you about earlier,
the researchers asked participants to recall from their lives a time
where they had been judged negatively simply for being different.
They then encouraged the voters to see how this personal experience
offered a window into the daily experience of transgender people’s daily lives.
Of course, in the conversation with my dad, I didn’t do anything
that I’m advising you now.
But even if I had,
even if I had practiced perfectly what I’m prescribing to you right now,
there’s a very good chance I would have had zero effect on his opinion.
And I want to emphasize, that’s okay.
Depolarizing society is not simply about changing minds,
but about showing people that there are reasonable and open-minded people
on this side of the issue too.
If we don’t, people will just keep going around thinking
the other side is full of extremist, closed-minded thinkers,
at which point civil discourse no longer seems like
a feasible solution to our differences.
And if we give up on dialogue, I really begin to worry
what the alternative solution to our differences becomes.
Over time, the conversations with my dad, at least politically,
have become less frequent:
the distance, the time zones, new series on Netflix.
But their cumulative effect on me has been profound.
Yes, I’m sure they have ultimately shifted my political beliefs,
just as I’m sure, even minimally, they’ve shifted his.
But more importantly,
communicating with at least one person on the other side of the aisle
has helped to remind me that these debates and conversations
are not simply about who’s right and who’s wrong,
but one of the best practices and policies
for developing a society that brings about the most good.
Still, even if you can understand the other side's opinion,
no one likes to lose an election.
And when the results of my own first grade presidential poll were revealed to me,
I remember going back to my dad and just punched-fist frustration.
“Did I say it wrong?
Was it a cherry to a grape or a grape to a cherry?
I tried both, neither worked.”
And to this day, I still remember his response.
“Well, son, did you take the time to ask them for their opinion on the matter?
And really listen?”
Thank you all for listening to me today.
I know I said a lot of advice and research,
so scanning this QR code takes you to a one-page summary
of all the key points to have a productive conversation
with someone you might disagree with.
Because I truly encourage you to go out and have a conversation
with someone who sees the world a little differently.
Thank you.
(Applause)