polarization Archives - We Are Not Divided

Polarization occurs over the course of decades, across regions, races and generations, between parties and people. But there is one common thread: it always inflames emotions.

Luiza Santos, a third-year PhD psychology student at Stanford University, specializes in affective science — simply put, the study of emotion. In this final interview in our discussion series with researchers from Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, she dives into polarization as it manifests in our brains: the ways it makes us feel and act, and what we can do about it. We discuss how empathy works, its role in political discourse and resisting the temptation to hate the other side.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your work centers around empathy and how it plays out in politics and everyday life. Can you walk us through the psychology of it?

Empathy has a lot of multi-components, but one of them is empathic concern. So if I see that you’re suffering, I feel bad for you. The other one is perspective-taking, and this is a more cognitive side of empathy where you put on the shoes of someone in that experience and try to live through how that experience would feel.

Luiza Santos

Even though they’re related and there’s some overlap, they can have different consequences. I try to understand what motivates a person to empathize with outgroup members or what keeps people from empathizing, and understand how we can change people’s beliefs about empathy.

What do the terms ingroup and outgroup mean?

An ingroup member is a person who thinks like you and shares some sort of belief structure that you also share. An outgroup member is a person who does not. This ingroup-outgroup relationship becomes more salient in competitive environments. If you’re a liberal, your ingroup would be other liberals. If you’re a conservative, your ingroup would be other conservatives.

Things like threats can activate different sorts of groups. If we think about terrorism and terrorist attacks, that causes what pychologists call the “rally-round-the-flag effect” where basically distinctions between liberals and conservatives kind of disappear because they all cluster together around this American national identity instead of being divided on politics.

Not every disagreement is a fight or a threat, but they can feel that way, especially in politics. How do our brains distinguish between disagreement and threats?

Some of my research interests try to understand how attitudes become moralized. If someone comes to me and says they don’t like chocolate ice cream, I’m like, okay, that’s their own personal opinion. But if we think [in terms of] moral values and I think it’s wrong to kill people, and you come to me and you say it’s okay [to kill people], I would be like, this person is amoral. So there’s these different spectra of disagreements, from those where you could see potential compromise to those that you feel are really infringing on your central beliefs about right and wrong.

Empathy can seem like a natural emotion, so why does being challenged or proven wrong feel so unnatural and exhausting?

Sometimes we get so in depth into our group membership that we start seeing division where once there wasn’t any.

Empathy is this superhuman power that we have to try to understand the mind and beliefs of someone who could be radically different from us. The problem is that it doesn’t happen naturally. People have talked about empathy as this automatic mechanism, and we can totally see this where that’s true. Infants will cry when they hear another infant crying. Or we can care for completely fictional characters as we read a novel. There are all these ways empathy feels natural and automatic. But then when we look at ingroup and outgroup processes and see that’s not really how it happens.

If it’s not completely automatic and we have some control over it, then we can choose how we empathize in certain circumstances. It may feel very effortful, especially when you’re trying to empathize with someone who endorses beliefs that you find fundamentally wrong. One approach we’ve been taking — and that some recent research is trying to investigate — is the reasons why people try to avoid empathizing with outgroup members. Those reasons include things like, ‘I think their views are threatening to how I see the world.’ Or, ‘I think if I empathize with them, people in my group would see me less positively because I’ll be betraying my group.’

We try to investigate the motivations people may have that can lead them to either choose to empathize or avoid empathizing.

Could empathy have a downside? For instance, could it be used to simply paper over the problems that are causing a lot of the animus and polarization in our world?

My main rebuttal to that is sometimes we get so in depth into our group membership that we start seeing division where once there wasn’t any. If you feel that your identity is under threat by someone else’s belief, I see the point of believing it’s not your job to go out of your way to try to change a person’s view. But I do think at a greater society level, if we say that it’s not worth trying [to have a conversation], you consolidate these thoughts in a way that can be really harmful down the line. It pushes people to find niche groups that agree with them. The internet is a whole new world for that, and then you only find echo chambers.

So is having open and empathic conversations always worth the effort?

I just feel there’s no alternative. Being in a group has many benefits and gives us certainty, and when the world is kind of uncertain, it helps to guide our beliefs. But at the same time, it’s important to take a step back and understand that we’re all members of a broader group.

We’re all super tired. It’s hard to have family members that you grew up with and now you feel like you can’t talk to anymore. It’s emotionally exhausting to try. But I do believe that it makes a difference, even though sometimes it’s one conversation and one person. Having uncomfortable conversations where you try to be open-minded and then voice your concerns is one way to grow and understand different perspectives. It never ceases to be uncomfortable, but it’s still worth a try.

Wikipedia is one of the hubs of internet knowledge. The online encyclopedia receives more than 18 billion page views every month, which means that it exerts a huge influence on the way we think about our world and how we discuss every conceivable political and social issue.

Incredibly, Wikipedia is entirely curated by a team of volunteer users who come from many different backgrounds — and, unsurprisingly, the pages have become sites of ideological warfare, with different sides trying to control the terms of debate.

Is that conflict productive? Does the input of a politically diverse group of curators and editors result in more biased information — or less? How do we know which Wikipedia articles are comprehensive and balanced and which are not?

You might expect that people who already agree with each other are able to work cohesively to create more accurate pages. But according to a new study, that’s not true. It finds that Wikipedia’s political, social issues and science pages edited by a more politically diverse segment of editors ended up being higher quality.

The example of Wikipedia suggests that intellectual diversity can help teams produce higher-quality work, thanks to the different perspectives brought to bear on shared goals. When we lack intellectual diversity, it makes it much easier for us to develop blind spots or even discriminate against colleagues with different views. There are online projects — like Wikipedia or the news site AllSides — that are trying to develop healthy practices around intellectual diversity in a society where that’s increasingly rare. These projects are becoming laboratories where scientists can test the conditions that foster exchange across political differences.

Wikipedia has internal quality metrics like comprehensiveness and readability that editors use to rate articles and allocate resources. “We kind of piggybacked on their efforts and use this tool for our purposes,” says Misha Teplitskiy, one of the researchers who performed the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University.

After taking account of Wikipedia’s own measure of quality, Teplitskiy and his colleagues measured the ideological alignments of individual Wikipedia editors by the number of contributions they made to either conservative or liberal articles. In fact, they found that the structure of Wikipedia necessitated cross-ideological collaboration.

“If you want to edit whatever controversial topic, you really are forced to interact with whoever is already editing that topic,” says Teplitskiy. “You can’t just start your own Wikipedia page for the conservative take on climate change or something, right? There’s already a climate change page. You’re gonna have to play with the folks that are already in that sandbox. And that’s, of course, very different from Twitter, etc., where there’s no limit, there’s no forcing mechanism to get people into one room for a particular topic.”

“You can’t just start your own Wikipedia page for the conservative take on climate change. There’s already a climate change page. You’re gonna have to play with the folks that are already in that sandbox.”

But does this approach result in better pages? Yes. They found that more ideologically polarized teams of editors outperformed the homogenous ones, according to Wikipedia’s internal metrics. Their paper notes that the effect was greatest for political articles but also was seen in the other two issue areas. As polarization among editors rose, the odds of moving from lower- to higher-quality categories increased by a factor of almost 19 for political articles, and by about two for both social issues and science articles.

This isn’t the first study to find that heterogeneous groups can often come up with better solutions than homogenous groups. A recent study of professional video game teams found that the more culturally diverse groups won more prize money. Diverse crowds often out-guess individuals. In the influential 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki describes many studies and examples of groups solving problems better than individuals. For example, contestants on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? were more likely to win when they asked the audience to guess the weight of an ox, as opposed to phoning a single trusted friend.

As these thinkers argue, political and intellectual diversity can benefit a team by helping team members see flaws in their own ideas: If everybody agrees with you, it’s hard to see what you could possibly be missing. And lacking that diversity — just like lacking diversity in other dimensions — could create environments where discrimination occurs.

While Wikipedia might have embraced this kind of diversity, several studies have found that other institutions are moving in precisely the opposite direction.

In 2012, researchers studied political diversity in the field of social and personality psychology. They surveyed a broad range of social and personality psychologists on various issues to figure out where they stand politically and how they would interact with colleagues who share different politics.

They found that while respondents had varied positions on the issues, they overwhelmingly identified as left-leaning. This is important because much of our polarization is based on self-identification with labels, rather than what we actually believe.

Indeed, the researchers found that in this overwhelmingly liberal environment, there was a high willingness to discriminate against conservatives. More than one in three respondents said they would discriminate against conservatives when making hiring decisions; one in four said they would discriminate in reviewing their grant applications.

More recently, NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt has noted that the political identifications of those who work in academia have become much more one-sided than they were in the recent past. In his recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, he and co-author Greg Lukianoff argue that in the early 1990s liberal professors outnumbered conservatives two-to-one, but that this ratio has shifted closer to five-to-one in recent years, with certain departments being even more lopsided.

Perhaps as a result, the general public has come to view higher education in a more polarized way, with liberals consistently approving of these institutions more than conservatives do. This trend risks undermining those institutions, as both sides start to evaluate them by political leaning rather than merit.

As the study of social psychology suggests, this can increase the risk of acts of discrimination against conservatives on campus, but also against institutions that conservatives may implicitly perceive as liberal.

In addition, we know that calamities have occurred when teams excluded or marginalized dissenting voices who could have pointed out the errors of their processes and conclusions. Examples range from Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Brooksley Born trying to warn regulators about looming financial risk prior to the Great Recession to the intellectual consensus around the Iraq war, which was formed by a news media that mostly excluded anti-war voices.

“Filter bubbles in the mainstream media are one of the most dangerous aspects of the modern age because they reinforce the least risky positions.”

In 2017, Germany’s Goethe Institute commissioned the Jerusalem-based journalist Antony Loewenstein to discuss the problem of ideological silos. “Filter bubbles in the mainstream media are one of the most dangerous aspects of the modern age because they reinforce the least risky positions,” he says.

Promoting a healthier and competitive media is one way to promote intellectual diversity, but we also need to be mindful about doing so in our everyday lives, in our choice of media. Today, the website AllSides works to help people broaden their minds and consider the news and politics from points of view other than their own. Its founder, John Gable, was a long-time Republican Party staffer who later went to work on the internet browser Netscape.

“We all had this great thought that the internet would help us connect with each other,” he says of his Netscape days. But he was worried that the internet would also “train us to discriminate against each other in new ways.” In retrospect, his concern was justified: Two decades later, we can see that filter bubbles and tribal clustering are a real problem in online spaces.

“It trains us to think in categories,” says Gable. “If you and I disagree on the environment, let’s say, it’s not just that you are wrong, but you must be evil because you’re one of them.”

In response, Gable worked with Joan Blades, a co-founder of the liberal organization MoveOn.org, to start AllSides seven years ago.

AllSides offers its readers a menu of news items alongside coverage from the left, right and center. If, for instance, readers see a story about a congressional testimony, the website allows them to see the same event written up from multiple points of view.

It also features what’s called a “Red Blue dictionary,” where a reader can click on a topic to see different views on the same terminology. For instance, the page on abortion explains how pro-choice Americans view abortion as a common medical procedure, while pro-life Americans view it as taking a human life. The pages often include discussion questions to facilitate nuanced political thinking about the topic.

“The internet right now . . . tends to only have us see people who are just like us, and it always tends to show us information that we already agree with. When we always see people just like us, and when we always hear opinions we agree with, two things happen to any of us. First, we become much much more extreme in our points of view. And, secondly, we become much less tolerant of any person or idea that’s different than us. And that’s ripping up the fabric of our society.”

Fortunately, projects like Wikipedia and AllSides suggest an alternative. At Wikipedia, opponents can come together in a structured way to accomplish a shared goal: accurate, readable pages, evaluated according to agreed-upon criteria. For its part, AllSides primes readers to see the value of many points of view. Of course, we tend to find it more soothing when everyone agrees with us. The path these projects lay out is the more troubling, stressful one. Is it worth it? This research to date suggests that the answer is yes.

A version of this story originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine published by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

The message often heard in America is that liberals want to do something about climate change and conservatives do not. But what if it’s not that simple?

If you look at the polls, most Americans — on the left and the right — think that climate change is a serious problem we need to deal with. But the structure of the political system, the influence of money in politics and the warping effect of polarization have bifurcated the issue along party lines, making it nearly impossible to take necessary action. In our latest interview with researchers from Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, Samy Sekar explains how even an undeniable crisis can get caught in the web of money and politics, and how institutional change could break it free.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell us about yourself.

I just completed my PhD in environment and resources at Stanford University. Specifically, I was trying to understand what was causing the misrepresentation of Americans’ attitudes at the state and federal policy level when it comes to climate change.

Is there any debate to be had about climate change at all?

It is beyond a reasonable doubt that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and that we are causing it. Where there is room for debate about climate change is around policy: How should the government address it? How much should it spend trying to address it? Who should pay the cost of addressing it? A whole slew of policy issues can be debated, but the phenomenon itself can’t be debated.

There’s a commercial from 2008 featuring Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi sitting side by side on a couch, saying, “We don’t always see eye-to-eye, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.” These days, Newt Gingrich is a climate change skeptic, and the word “climate” doesn’t appear once in the Republican Party’s platform. What does this say about how politics can change politicians’ views (or, at least, their messages) about climate change?

More than 70 percent of Americans believe that climate change has happened. And most [of those people] have believed that climate change is human-caused. In a 2018 study by Stanford’s Jon Krosnick’s lab, the political psychology research group found that 78 percent of Americans support some sort of government action on climate change.

The fact that a huge number of members of Congress and our president don’t believe in climate change, or claim that climate change isn’t happening or that it’s a hoax, is not representative of the American public’s views.

There’s a name for this mismatch that occurs when an issue is polarizing within institutions, but is broadly agreed upon by the public: “democratic deficit.” Can you talk about this?

A paper by David Brockman and Chris Gavron found that both Republicans and Democrats at a state legislator level were actually less progressive in their policy views than their constituents. And there was a study in 2019 that showed something similar at a federal level when it came to congressional staffers predicting their constituents’ views. They were asked, “What percent of your constituents do you believe want the government to reduce CO2 emissions?” and similar questions about health care and other policies. That paper by Fernandez, Stokes and Miltenberger found congressional staffers were underestimating how progressive their constituents were.

There are a few different reasons why this democratic deficit could exist. One reason could be that people have policy preferences, but those policy preferences don’t necessarily map on to how people vote for their representatives.

Alternatively, you could vote for a politician that theoretically supports [your policy preference], but then you and all of your fellow constituents don’t voice your opinion loud enough for them to hear what you want.

What causes this disconnect?

What you find is that the congressional staffers who most poorly predicted what their constituents wanted were the ones who are getting the most visits from lobbyists. That means they’re getting signals about what companies in their districts want that may be louder than the signals they’re getting from their constituents.

“While there is some polarization on the climate change issue among the American populace, there is extreme polarization on the climate change issue among American legislators or politicians.”

Where does the climate fall on the priority lists of voters?

There was a survey done by the political psychology research group at Stanford and [the nonprofit] Resources for the Future. It was the 20th or 25th year in a row that they ran the same climate change survey. They found that the percentage of Americans who say climate change is extremely important to them personally is higher than ever.

There aren’t a lot of options if you want to vote for a Republican who is passionate about climate change. While there is some polarization on the climate change issue among the American populace, there is extreme polarization on the climate change issue among American legislators or politicians.

So if you’re a Republican who is very passionate about climate change, you can either have your general worldview represented in the context of electing a Republican, or you have to have your climate preference represented in the context of electing a Democrat [who supports] climate change.

The small number of options there were for Republican climate voters, they are losing because of political polarization.

How strongly does polarization drive the actions of both voters and politicians?

One problem with political polarization is the competition ends up being not between the two parties, but within each party. There are people who are perhaps willing to sit out the election because they don’t believe that Joe Biden is going to take climate change seriously enough. It’s not because the other candidate is going to take climate change more seriously, it’s simply because in the primary, their candidate who was more serious on climate change lost.

But because affective polarization is so strong, the majority of Democrats, even if they think Joe Biden doesn’t represent them or their views, will vote for him because they hate the other person and other party. There is a competition of ideas within the Democratic party and then whoever wins that competition gets the support of the vast majority of Democrats.

Any given issue gets swept under the rug when people are holding their nose and voting for the less bad of two candidates. It’s very obvious at the presidential level. I’m less certain it’s happening at the congressional level because you see progressive candidates beating out centrist Democrats because of their progressive stances on many issues. The Green New Deal has been front and center almost every time.

So what would it take to create a major policy shift?

About five or six years ago there appeared to be some hope among economists and natural scientists that a bipartisan climate policy was possible. Now, because parts of the Republican Party with particularly extreme views on climate change have won out, and because progressives and Democrats have started to expect more urgency from their leaders in addressing the crisis, a bipartisan solution seems further away than ever.

If you were to ask Republican voters, “Do you believe climate change is happening? Do you believe that it’s human-caused? Or at least partly human-caused?” you will still get about 50 percent to 60 percent of Republicans saying yes to those questions. It could be that the remaining 40 percent are the loudest 40 percent, but I think there’s another component, which is lobbyists and all of these other things that elevate the voices of a small percentage of the Republican party or Republican voters.

If you had a magic wand, what institutional changes would you make to increase the likelihood of passing climate policy?

My research has shown that Republican state policymakers are willing to update their policy preference to be more in line with their constituents’ climate mitigation policy preference. So my view on how this could change is to start at the state level — pass strong, stringent climate policy at the state level, as we’ve seen in New York.

One key component to make serious climate policy more likely at the federal level is reducing the extent to which lobbyists can knock on any member of Congress’s door and influence their beliefs and attitudes.

Essentially, [overturning] Citizens United, money in politics, lobbyists in politics — the extent to which we can reduce that, I think that is the biggest barrier to implementing or passing climate policy.

“What you find is that the congressional staffers who most poorly predicted what their constituents wanted were the ones who are getting the most visits from lobbyists.”

Another thing we’re seeing at an extreme level in this election is making it harder to vote. We’ve seen it over and over again that the American people really want this climate policy. [It would help] if we made it easier for them to vote [instead of] making it harder to actually cast a ballot without a voter ID or without waiting in line for 10 hours without getting sick.

Giving people Election Day off and having more people vote the way Australia does [Australia has compulsory voting] would be excellent mechanisms. Getting the people’s voices heard more clearly is a key factor.

Ultimately, my argument is that the people’s will isn’t being represented because the political elite are more polarized than the people themselves are on specific issues. If you made it easier for a third-party candidate to get into the mix, that would make it easier for a Republican to choose someone that actually aligns with their views on some issues, but who is also not a Democrat.

In a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, novelist Mohsin Hamid remarked, “Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.”

By hearing more of these echoes, it stands to reason that we can build our empathy. But how does it work? That’s where the SPARQ lab comes in. Using insights from behavioral science, Stanford University’s SPARQ lab (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions) is dedicated to finding new ways to break down barriers and build a more empathetic world. Its researchers produce and present academic research through toolkits, designed to teach us not just how to increase our empathy, but deploy it for the greater good.

Ellen Reinhart is a PhD candidate in social psychology at Stanford studying the intersection of psychology, culture and inequality. She is a graduate affiliate at SPARQ, having previously served as lab manager. Here, she discusses the psychology of empathy, its limits, and practical interventions for building more of it.

Ellen Reinhart

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your areas of research?

I study how psychological tendencies and cultural default assumptions perpetuate social inequalities, and I focus on social class and race. I’m also very passionate about research that addresses social problems out in the real world, beyond academia.

How does SPARQ address real-world questions?

Overall we think of ourselves as a “do tank” rather than a think tank. It’s creating science and psychological insights… in partnership with change makers, which people in criminal justice and economic mobility and education spaces and health-related spaces [can use] in an applied setting.

But another version is also taking what psychology has already found and packaging that in a way that non-academics can use in everyday life circumstances. That’s where the SPARQ Solutions Catalog comes from — it’s over 50 entries taking a psychological intervention written about in an academic paper… and packaging it in a way that anyone who comes to the website could learn about what the insight is and how they can apply that in their real life.

What institutions have used these solutions and toolkits?

One of the big branches of SPARQ is with criminal justice. Under the criminal justice branch, we’ve partnered with agencies and communities to make data-driven change. For example, one paper found that officers in a department used less respectful language with community members of color. The methods of how they found that was incredible, it was across audio from many weeks and many different recordings of body-worn cameras.

“One of the powers of this study is that it demonstrates in a real-world setting that when instructed, participants could follow the reappraising of emotions.”

SPARQ is using that finding and saying, “Okay, we know it’s less respectful language and that impacts how community members see the police department. How can we help this department create an intervention that teaches officers how to use the same type of language regardless of the person they are interacting with?”

What exactly is an intervention, and how can it lead to change?

An intervention is some kind of systematic change, targeting a very particular outcome. An individual-level intervention would be, for example, a teacher in a classroom having their students read about Harry Potter because that increases empathy for marginalized groups. But there can also be interventions at institutional levels, like a police department rolling out policies and protocols about language in these stops.

One study SPARQ features addresses political and social intolerance through “reappraising emotions.” What does that mean?

This study was run by psychologist Eran Halperin. He and his colleagues wanted to see if this common technique for managing emotions, which is called reappraising emotions, could be used to influence political intolerance. To reappraise your emotions is to be somewhat detached from them, to take an outside perspective and try to be more objective and analytical.

How did the study work?

They had Israeli college students read an article about the Arab minority population, and it was taking place at a time when tensions were very high. This was a very inflaming piece to read. It was designed to elicit very strong negative emotions. Some students were told to read the passage in this cognitive appraisal way. They were told to take the outside perspective, be objective, be analytical, try to be like a scientist and don’t think about it personally.

What they found is among those who were right wing in their political orientation, the experiment reduced the level of political intolerance towards Palestinian citizens of Israel. Part of the reason why they think this works is because it reduced the negative emotion that participants felt while they were reading the passage. The thought is, it allowed participants to have a more balanced perspective as they were taking in this new information, and that reduced their intolerance for others.

What are the broader implications of this?

One of the powers of this study is that it demonstrates in a real-world setting — this was a very tense political situation taking place on the ground — that when instructed, participants could follow the reappraising of emotions, they could follow those directions. Reading these short instructions before reading the passage changed how participants read the passage, reduced their negative emotions and then changed their intolerance. I think it’s a positive sign that it’s possible.

SPARQ also featured research on how native-born citizens and immigrants can reconcile and navigate their differences. How did that work?

With this study, psychologist Jonas Kunst and colleagues divided European-American adults into three groups. One of the groups, they focused on facilitating this common identity between European-Americans and immigrants who had [more recently] come to the country. For example, one of the quotes from this passage read, “Because we are all immigrants or descend directly from the immigrants who came to this country and built it, the United States of America and all its citizens are true and proud products of immigration.”

A different group read a passage that emphasized differences between those who are native born versus those who are immigrants. A third group was a control condition and didn’t read anything about immigrants in the U.S.

They gave participants a small amount of money and they were able to decide how much they wanted to keep for themselves and then how much to donate to the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports immigrants. The researchers found that participants who had read about immigrants with this common identity were more likely to give more money to the ACLU than the participants in the other two conditions. There was something about emphasizing the shared group that allowed participants to show support for immigrant communities by supporting the ACLU at a personal cost to them.

What do these stories tell us about bridging divides?

At a larger individual narrative, this common identity intervention with immigrants is showing how they are we. It’s drawing on this bigger story of what America is and saying we’re all immigrants and that’s something to celebrate and share, and because we’re all one in this group, then I’m going to treat you like you’re a part of my group, my family, my team. That impacts how people think about distributing resources and other kinds of downstream consequences.

SPARQ has something called toolkits, which are about applying sanitized laboratory results to trickier, more complex real-world situations. Tell me about that.

The Solutions Catalog is step one of how we take social science, package it in a way that is not academic jargon, and give it to the public. The toolkit instructions show how to implement the intervention in an almost cookbook recipe way. Step one is to take your baseline, see where point A is. Step two is the change we’re going to ask you to take: read about this article, try to take a detached perspective, whatever the intervention that has already been tested academically. Step three is take that measure again to see if you’ve changed. You get your score so you see if there’s been any change over time.

Step four that SPARQ is helping to promote is to share your story on the website, to work with others, to see what part of this is really working. It can be this iterative process because it’s not just getting science into the real world, but how do we get more of the real world back into science? That makes society better and makes research and theories better. We hope it can be this more symbiotic relationship.

Like a lot of folks, I occasionally hear people espouse values and beliefs different and often counter to my own. When I was young, I didn’t understand this. Many of these beliefs and positions seemed irrational to me. How could people believe such crazy things? But as I read, traveled and met more people, I learned that values and convictions that might seem strange to me often serve a purpose for others.

I have come to sense that I, too, might harbor some odd beliefs – and, like others, I come up with convoluted rationalizations for them.

Sometimes that purpose is simply the sharing of these values and beliefs with others who feel the same way. Shared beliefs can foster a sense of community, or provide meaning in people’s lives. It seems that we as humans have evolved to need something that provides unity and cohesion. Sometimes that might be liking the same songs or movies. Or, if that means believing in statues that cry or space aliens, well, okay, maybe no harm done.

I have come to sense that I, too, might harbor some odd beliefs — and, like others, I come up with convoluted rationalizations for them. I have a set of values that, to me, should be seen as self evident and should therefore be adopted by everyone. But if we’re going to find common ground and live together, we need to at least attempt to understand the mindsets of the people who think differently from us.

Some years ago the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposed in his book The Righteous Mind that there are six basic moral values, and how important each value is to us as individuals determines our behavior. I am not interested in debating how innate or universal these values are, or if there are more or less than six, but I do find them a useful tool for understanding those with views different from my own. These tools help prevent me from feeling superior. They allow me to imagine what someone else might be thinking and why they believe what they believe — because we actually share many of the same values.

Here are the values (and their opposites):

1. Care/Harm. We are all one family and should have compassion for everyone else, as much as we can. Suffering should be eliminated if it can be.

2. Fairness/Cheating. A society should strive to be fair. Justice should be equal for all. Cooperation is better than cruelty. The flip side is that cheaters and free riders should be scorned or punished.

3. Loyalty/Betrayal. Loyalty to one’s family, community, team, business and nation is essential. It is the force that holds things together.

4. Authority/Subversion. One must abide by the law, whether one agrees with it or not. Our collective agreement to obey social and legal institutions is what makes us function as a society.

5. Sanctity/Degradation. Purity, temperance, restraint and moderation stabilize our world. Certain behaviors are immoral and must be shunned.

6. Liberty/Oppression. People should be allowed to be free in their speech, thoughts and behaviors as long as they aren’t hurting others.

I find that, to some extent, I can see the worth in every one of these six values. None of them seems completely wrong. That said, clearly I have my personal leanings. I value some more than others. That’s exactly the point. The idea is that folks tend to prioritize some of these values, and which ones we prioritize determines our politics, how we behave and how we think of others. I do this, you do this, we all do this.

The values we prioritize, says Haidt, determine where along the political spectrum we fall. Whereas liberals tend to emphasize care and fairness, conservatives are somewhat more apt to value loyalty, purity and authority (though, as Haidt points out, neither group discounts care and fairness all that much — it’s on loyalty, purity and authority where liberals and conservatives really diverge.)

So, for example, as someone who places a high value on care and fairness, I might support laws that say everyone, no matter their personal beliefs, must treat LGBT people as equal citizens. But folks who rank sanctity higher than care or fairness in their value hierarchy may feel that homosexuality is “unnatural,” and that its “degradation” of sanctity therefore overrides the need for equality.

As we’ve seen recently, some folks believe face mask rules intrude on their personal freedom. They feel that their individual rights (liberty) take precedence over those of the larger community, whereas I place more value on cooperation and the health of the collective (care). I don’t think either freedom or liberty are wrong, but in certain situations, I might feel that those values need to be curtailed for the good of everyone.

I might feel that in order to challenge unjust laws one sometimes has to break them (fairness). Others will disagree and say “the law is the law” (authority). Many Americans believe that free speech is an absolute right (liberty) and if others are hurt, offended, or feel discriminated against by what I say, well, that’s the price of freedom. In general, I personally share that value, but I don’t see it as absolute — there are times when maybe it should be regulated if it is intended to do harm or incite violence (care, fairness). The point is, I can see some worth in all of these values.

This raises an important point. The fact that all of our disparate beliefs spring from the same six values doesn’t mean all beliefs have the same merit, or even any merit at all. Prioritizing some values — like sanctity of race or homeland, in the example to follow — can justify inhuman behavior.

Adam Gopnik, writing about the Nazi “angel of death” Josef Mengle in The New Yorker, noted: “There is nothing surprising in educated people doing evil, but it is still amazing to see how fully they construct a rationale to let them do it, piling plausible reason on self-justification, until, like Mengele, they are able to look themselves in the mirror every morning with bright-eyed self-congratulation.” The point is, we shouldn’t excuse behaviors that harm others — we should simply try to understand why those behaviors happen and the mechanisms that are used to justify them. To paraphrase the writer Hannah Arendt when she was accused of justifying what the Nazis did: To understand is not to excuse.

What does all this tell us? It tells us that, though I may disagree with folks on certain issues, those disagreements are nonetheless rooted in values that they — and I, to some degree — share. Our beliefs and our politics may be very different, and yet, by recognizing the values behind them, I can, to some extent and in some instances, empathize and understand why someone might feel differently about an issue than I do. It helps me to not judge them as ignorant or evil, and gives us a foothold, a place to start a conversation.

One of polarization’s more nefarious effects is how it prevents people from connecting on an individual level. Learning to push across these barriers and reach out to people you disagree with may be a dying art, but it’s also one of the most valuable methods we have for fighting alienation. In this video, psychotherapist Allison Briscoe-Smith how to do it.

This is the second video in “Bridging Divides,” a five-part series hosted by Scott Shigeoka, in which we meet people whose personal experiences show us how real-life divisions can be overcome. See the transcript of this interview here.

Watch the first video: Is This the Unlikeliest Friendship in America?

THIS Q+A IS PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES INTERVIEWS WITH MEMBERS OF STANFORD’S POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE LAB

Those of us old enough to remember the dawn of social media might recall a lot of happy talk about it representing a new way to connect with the world. So much for that. Platforms that promised connection have instead often exacerbated division through interfaces and algorithmic designs that reward provocation and bomb throwing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Just a few weeks ago, we featured a story on a Taiwanese social media platform that elevates consensus and brings people closer together. Other new platforms are attempting to do something similar.

One is called Gell. It’s an online forum designed to encourage users to fully contemplate an issue before hurling their opinion out into the world. Created by a group of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and technologists looking to encourage informed discourse, in its own words, it “bring[s] together a diverse group of thought leaders and engaged citizens to encourage, facilitate, and moderate healthy discussions and debates on the most important issues.”

In this interview, James Chu and Nick Stagnaro, two researchers at Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, discuss social media’s promises and failures, and what their research says about the potential for Gell to successfully course correct.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Considering the political moment in which we find ourselves, how has technology affected how people organize themselves into teams?

James Chu: There was a time when we thought the rise of the internet and mass media would be extremely salubrious to helping the country become better at being a democracy, or at least becoming a more thoughtful republic. People had opinions that were more deeply informed because they had more access to information. Even if they were debating strictly moral claims that weren’t necessarily informed by data, at least they were able to be thoughtful and potentially even more empathetic. And people who were originally on the outskirts could get a fair shot of having their voices heard. The verdict is not completely out yet on whether mass media has been good or bad.

James Chu

But clearly social media has a polarization problem — it fosters these environments where hyper-partisan people seem to thrive. Is technology creating the behavior or just unlocking something that’s already there?

Nick Stagnaro: There’s a confluence of factors in the context of social media, where you have aspects of anonymity and a lot of performative features — you’re having a conversation in front of a huge audience of people — which constrains nuance and the ability to have conversations.

But I don’t think any of this stuff is unique to social media. It’s the reason reality television does very well. It’s really sticky, it reproduces at high rates, and it becomes highly permeating. That’s why more complicated, nuanced shows or online social platforms or conversations just don’t do as well. I feel like the question isn’t really quite right. It’s sort of like, what are the right ways of maybe regulating and controlling, and how do we establish good norms?

So let’s talk about how to do that — tell us about Gell and how it functions differently from other online forums?

NS: Gell is trying to present information on contentious arguments or topics by inviting people from different sides of the aisle who have cultural or social authority to comment on some sort of topic. They write content, and other people come in and read these different points, and then add their own commentary or respond specifically to an argument. This leads people to have conversations and consume different arguments, which oftentimes results in a more balanced but informed position.

“I do think there’s a lot of people out there who’ve seen this problem and are rising up to try to solve it. That’s cause for optimism.”

Can you give us an example?

NS: Say I have a position about affirmative action that isn’t well-informed. There are websites I can visit that will adhere to one side. But Gell might encourage me to sample more broadly and to build a better understanding of arguments for and against it, [to hear from] people who hold those two positions, and to expand my understanding. You can imagine, even in the context where I don’t change my position, I’m now better-informed and also potentially more willing to move in the direction of accuracy as I navigate forward in life.

JC: If you look at our politics today, it seems at first glance there isn’t much to be happy about. We thought social media was going to be this harbinger of better debates and more enlightened political discussion, and so far the evidence suggests that it’s not. But I do think there’s a lot of people out there who’ve seen this problem and are rising up to try to solve it. That’s cause for optimism. The way Gell displays information and helps you to understand both sides could very well lead to much more enlightened and thoughtful debate.

So your research is looking at people’s behavior after they’ve visited Gell. What have you found?

JC: Because of the way our experiments are designed, we give people different articles to read or different sources to look at, and you can actually measure whether people look at more types of information after they were exposed to Gell, versus people in the control group that didn’t get exposed to Gell. Gell actually causes people to be much more diverse in their media consumption. They have a much more omnivorous diet and they’re not just consuming information from one source.

Nick Stagnaro

It’s not clear that we can claim numerous media diets lead people to have more thoughtful opinions about politics or to be more polite or civil, but we do think the basic principle of looking across more sources of information is a good and important outcome.

So this isn’t really about changing people’s opinions — it’s more about giving them access to a wider range of them.

JC: What we want to see is that [the site] leaves people willing to sample from more spaces. We’re not asking for conservatives to become liberals or liberals to become conservatives. That’s silly. What we’re trying to minimize is the affective polarization, so that people stop hating each other, have more constructive conversations, and sort of understand why the other side disagrees with them so that the debates are higher quality rather than just, “They’re dumb, they’re evil, they’re stupid,” which of course doesn’t do anybody any good in the long run.

Since inflammatory discourse is profitable for social media companies, what could encourage them to adopt practices more like this? And what if they don’t?

JC: The fear is that we throw the baby out with the bathwater after we see a couple of negative effects and assume that the whole thing is corrupted to the core. Clearly, social media has had enormous benefits that also deserve to be quantified and brought to the forefront. One really important thing to remember in both our work and hopefully for the work of our colleagues is that you can’t just scapegoat social media companies as being bad. They have a lot of positive effects and it’s important that you don’t create interventions that do more harm than good.

THIS Q+A IS PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES INTERVIEWS WITH MEMBERS OF STANFORD’S POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE LAB

Polarization isn’t a single, monolithic phenomenon. There are two types: the kind we express in wonky disagreements over laws and policies, and the kind we feel — that visceral red-vs.-blue passion that fuels partisan acrimony and take-no-prisoners elections.

In this interview — the latest in our series of conversations with researchers on the science and dynamics of polarization — Jan Gerrit Voelkel, a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University and an affiliate of the Polarization and Social Change Lab (PASCL), breaks down these two types of polarization and explains the mercurial forces that drive political division.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jan Gerrit Voelkel

Can you walk me through the two major types of polarization?

The two major dimensions of polarization discussed in the literature are attitudinal polarization on the one side and affective polarization on the other. Attitudinal polarization is about policy views. The study of affective polarization is relatively young — it is oftentimes seen as the tendency for partisans to like their own fellow partisans and to dislike their opposing parties.

What does affective polarization — the partisan kind — tell us about how we see each other?

One American national election survey that has been going on for a long time has asked respondents how they feel towards the parties and the candidates of the parties. You can see that people have always preferred their own party over the other party. But now this gap has very much widened, and it is not so much driven by the fact that people now like their own party more — that has been relatively constant over the last two decades. But it’s more that people really started to like the opposing party much less.

How do we know this? Is there a way to measure our feelings about the “other side?”

One traditional measure is to ask: How much do you like or dislike Republicans and Democrats? However, important research has shown that it very much depends on how you ask these questions, because people may answer this about elites or about the mass public. My view might be different for Republican elites versus the Republican voter base. They find that you need to be careful to not mistake a dislike of politics in general, for a dislike for voters for the opposite party.

What can affective polarization potentially lead to?

The next level would be partisan spite, a real contempt for the other side and the willingness to compromise other principles just to keep the other side away from governing. [We may do this] to an extent where we sacrifice democratic principles and ignore the rules that we have all agreed on because we think we are really on the right side.

Crushed by negative news?

Sounds perilous. Does affective polarization ever have the potential to result in a positive outcome?

You can see affective polarization relate to more political activity, caring more about politics, seeking out more information, being willing to protest and stand up for what you believe in. And I totally think that there can be positive externalities of that.

This is why it’s so important to study the links between negative partisan effects, then partisan spite or contempt at the next level, and then the things that we think are problematic for society. One thing I’m very concerned about is if we receive the same set of facts and we interpret these two facts very differently, then it becomes really difficult to find agreement on anything.

A functioning government that is incentivized by the voters to work together and to implement what the majority of the country clearly wants is really important. This can be undermined by polarization, because polarization can lead to more incentives for politicians to not compromise, to play to their base and hope that the other side is so disliked that even the more moderate voters who lean towards their own party will still support them.

Why do you think affective polarization has happened at a mass scale, while attitudinal polarization, which is more about policy and facts, has been less extreme?

This is exactly the right question to ask. My main answer is, “We don’t know.” One thing is that people have evolved into different, new circles, and are getting different views from different sources. That wasn’t so much the case for a long time when there were a few national television programs from which people would get the news. Now there’s a lot more choices and people can select into these bubbles and receive the news, and that may more strongly drive their views for the parties.

So do Americans actually agree on a lot of policy? Or is it more like they don’t necessarily have strong views on policy in the first place?

The concept of attitudinal positions has a lot of sub-dimensions. There is partisan sorting, and research strongly suggests that it has increased in the sense that people’s policy views are just more aligned nowadays with each other than before. For instance, my attitudes on climate change might be more aligned with my attitudes on gun laws and everything follows pretty much along the same party line.

Polarization can lead to more incentives for politicians to not compromise, to play to their base and hope that the other side is so disliked that even the more moderate voters will still support them.

Recent research suggests that people do care a lot about policy positions. If someone is from my own party but disagrees with me on abortion or on immigration policies, then I do like them less. If you ask Americans “Why do you dislike the other side?” polls show that they will answer “Well, because they have different attitudes, because they are wrong.”

There is a lot we still don’t know about the relationship between attitudinal and affective polarization. How are you and your colleagues working to build the knowledge base?

Our team at the Polarization and Social Change Lab is working hard on what we call the “depolarization challenge.” The evidence that is out there suggests that we need a lot of additional information. And with the political moment that we were in, we feel like we need that information quickly to determine to what extent is polarization — and, in particular, partisan animosity or affective polarization — an issue with important downstream consequences and how it can be changed.

As soon as we launch the challenge, everyone out there who is interested will have a chance to submit interventions [strategies]. Then a certain number of our board of experts will choose what they think are the most promising interventions to be tested in a large-scale experiment. We will hopefully have more answers. I hope that by doing this challenge during this coordinated large-scale project, we will make fast progress on identifying more of the answers that we need to determine to what extent polarization matters, and how we can change the trend that we’re in right now.

THIS Q+A IS PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES INTERVIEWS WITH MEMBERS OF STANFORD’S POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE LAB

Politics can be a brutish place, full of low-blows and Twitter attacks. But nearly lost in all this mudslinging is a critical question: Are these tactics effective?

Jeremy Frimer doesn’t think so. In fact, Frimer thinks the incivility that politicians increasingly flaunt along hyper-partisan lines is actually costing them — and, by proxy, all of us.

In the latest in our series of conversations with researchers from Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, Frimer reveals the counterintuitive findings of his studies on civility in politics: namely, that the public is turned off by negative campaigning, which ultimately ends up hurting the image of the attacking politician more than the one being attacked. He spoke to us about the methods used to evaluate responses to incivility, the ramifications of their surprising conclusions, the pitfalls of politics built only on tone — and where to go from here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your central area of research?

I study American politics, political polarization, and how people feel about each other on the other side and within the same side. The central finding in my research is things are not as bad as they seem.

You have a paper called “The Montagu Principle: Incivility decreases politicians’ public approval even with their political base.” What is the Montagu Principle?

Mary Wortley Montagu was an 18th century author, and she once said “civility costs nothing and buys everything.” For someone to come along and make such a strong claim like that, I think it’s provocative and it’s counter to a lot of our intuitions. Yet the evidence seems to support it.

How does this square with the fact that incivility seems to be really popular, and really effective?

So the manifestation of this, if you can envision it, is a Trump rally. So you can just picture Donald Trump standing up at a rally and ripping and tearing into whoever his perceived political opponent is, and the crowd going absolutely wild when he says something particularly provocative and inflammatory and uncivil about the other side. And so commentators, a number of commentators, pundits and journalists have even Nancy Pelosi has used the term “throwing red meat to the base” to capture that phenomenon.

The robust finding is that if one politician attacks the other, the attacker takes a bigger hit to their reputation than the person who’s attacked.

[This idea] leads to a testable hypothesis: when a politician attacks the other side with incivility, will that boost that politician’s approval with their most diehard supporters? That was an idea floating around in the media and popular culture that as far as we knew had not ever been tested. The point of our paper was to test that and see, is that the case? Do people generally receive incivility from their cherished leader positively?

How did your study work and what did you find?

We focused on President Trump, although it’s important to note that these effects are not limited to President Trump. We gathered together President Trump’s daily approval ratings from publicly available polling data over the first year of his presidency. We also gathered information about the number of insults he issued on Twitter, which is sort of a level of incivility. The New York Times documents every single insult he’s ever issued on Twitter. If the insults were well received, then we should expect that more insults equals greater approval. But we find the opposite. The more insults, the lower his approval. We broke it down by the political identity of respondents and found the same effect. We’re still finding negative associations between approval and insults. More insults, lower approval — even among conservatives.

You did another longitudinal study analyzing over 200 million words from the Congressional Record. How did you do that?

We looked at all of the words spoken on the floor of the U.S. Congress since the mid ’90s. There are ways to code incivility in text using computers. We use a basic software called Linguistic Inquiry and word count, which starts with a preset dictionary. It looks at a text and asks how many words in that text match any of those words in the dictionary. Then you divide by the total number of words to get a density of that topic.

Crushed by negative news?

One way you can tell someone’s being civil is that they’re using honorifics, which would be calling someone by their title like “President,” “Mister,” “Mayor” or “Congresswoman.” To ramp up your civility, one would generally want to use tentative language like “I suggest” or “it might happen,” as opposed to language like “it definitely is.”

We also looked at first-person and second-person. Civility theory suggests that one should use impersonal language like “we” and even passive voice to communicate, as opposed to the more direct and clear “I” and “you.” So “I want this” as opposed to, “you know, this might be helpful.” It’s subtle, but it actually does work. We analyzed the civility of what members of Congress had to say and found that they were again correlated and longitudinally predictive of lower approval: more civility, higher approval.

How do you control for outside variables that might also have an effect on approval ratings?

We try to measure other factors that we think might explain the correlation between two variables — in this case, incivility and approval. We use a statistical program to essentially hold those constant hypothetically to ask: What if this weren’t changing, would we still see a relationship between incivility? We did control for political polarization of Congress, so the degree to which the two sides were really far away from each other on policy, which could obviously cause incivility to go up, and also approval to go down because people want Congress to work together. Indicators of economic strength, violence and military might are possible factors that could potentially partly explain why we might observe a correlation between civility and approval. Yet even holding those fixed, we still see that incivility and approval go together, which implies that there might be a direct relationship between approval and incivility.

In addition to studying the president’s tweets and words in the Congressional Record, you conducted some experimental tests, as well. Can you tell us about those?

An experiment requires that we manipulate a variable that we care about. In this case, we think that incivility causes approval to go up or down. Therefore, we randomly assigned people to experience either something civil or uncivil. Then we ask them about how they feel about it.

Study Three was called “President Trump attacks” using a website called Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people basically sign up to do studies and get paid a bit of money to do each one. They’re reasonably representative of the American population and include people on the left, the center and the right. They’re a pretty decent representation amongst different racial and ethnic groups and the genders and education.

We showed half of [the participants] three or four of President Trump’s most egregious, uncivil tweets and then we asked people, “How do you feel about President Trump?” We also asked them their political identity, ranging from a diehard Trump opponent to a regular Trump opponent to being on the fence about President Trump, being a supporter, or even a diehard supporter.

And what were the results?

Jeremy Frimer

What we found is that for every group, except for diehard Trump supporters, approval was higher after reading the civil tweets. Uncivil tweets caused approval to decrease among die-hard Trump opponents, Trump opponents, people who are on the fence, and even people who generally support him — but diehard supporters didn’t move. There was no change.

But if the “red meat” hypothesis is right, then we should see an uptick in approval among die-hard fans. We did not see that. It’s always tricky to interpret a null finding because it could be explained by not a big enough sample. But in spite of an honest and well-designed effort to try to find evidence of red meat, of “I love Trump even more because he attacked the other side,” we didn’t find it when we thought we would.

If there’s evidence that being civil is popular, even in a hyper-partisan environment, then why aren’t people and politicians cultivating this behavior?

There are some strong beliefs in the public, and especially among political operatives, about how attacking and incivility actually work. Political operatives say attack ads work. That’s why we go low, why we punch the other side, because it works. It drives people away from the other side and they’re not interested in going to vote. They don’t like them anymore or they’re just not sure about them anymore. But the literature suggests the opposite. The robust finding is that if one politician attacks the other, the attacker takes a bigger hit to their reputation than the person who’s attacked.

And what are the pitfalls to civility?

Other researchers have found that incivility can be a really strong signal to other people about who you are, who you’re loyal to and who’s your tribe. And if you want to be accepted within a particular group, attacking the other side might signal your fidelity and your loyalty to a particular tribe and gain you entry in a way.

Research from William Brady has shown that language expressing outrage — which I think is related to uncivil language — gets a lot more retweets on Twitter. So incivility might get people’s attention and draw attention to something that one sees as problematic.

And what are the consequences of incivility?

There’s a robust literature showing that when politicians are uncivil, it turns people off the system and makes people distrust politicians and have less faith in the government. It doesn’t seem to mobilize the electorate one way or the other, doesn’t change voter turnout, but it does seem to get people’s attention.

Incivility takes up all the oxygen in the room. It causes people to ruminate and be distracted and then not be good at whatever else they’re trying to.

Another negative effect of incivility is that it takes up all the oxygen in the room, so it causes people to ruminate and be distracted and then not be good at whatever else they’re trying to. My favorite study on this is that pediatricians were exposed to incivility from their colleagues and it caused them to do a less good job at taking care of infants. This is clearly not retaliation. They’re not taking out their frustration on infants. But incivility caused them to ruminate and be distracted.

From your perspective, what’s the big takeaway from all this research?

I think it would be a mistake to suggest that it’s always worth offending the other side. Americans are not nearly as divided as they seem. There’s really great polling results out there showing that even on policy issues, we think of the other side as being way on one extreme and we’re way on this extreme. And that’s not the case. There’s almost overlap on things like borders and gun control, and people are actually not that far apart on policy. It’s the feeling between the two sides that has grown more and more negative. And feelings can be managed. As Mister Rogers said, anything that’s mentionable is manageable.

This story was produced by The Guardian, a We Are Not Divided collaborator.

When Glenn Stanton and Sheila Kloefkorn first ended up in the same room together, they knew they were not going to see eye to eye.

Stanton, the director of Global Family Formation Studies at the evangelical Christian values organization Focus on the Family, had spent years vociferously fighting gay marriage.

Kloefkorn, on the other hand, had married her wife in 2014, on the day gay marriage became legal in Arizona. Having fought for equal marriage for decades, finally being able to wed meant letting go of feeling like a second-class citizen.

But today, Stanton and Kloefkorn are friends. They met through Braver Angels, an organization that encourages people to befriend and understand people who have differing political opinions. Today, they laugh when people are surprised at their friendship.

“I don’t believe that Glenn is out to get me in the way I probably would have in the beginning of my activism. I just really believe he feels strongly about the things he cares about, and that’s a great thing,” says Kloefkorn.

For Stanton, those things include being passionately anti-abortion (he believes that life begins at conception); a firm belief in what he calls the “traditional” family structure (he calls fatherless families a “human tragedy”); and he is so against gay marriage, he says he wouldn’t have gone to Kloefkorn’s wedding if they had met before she was married. Kloefkorn, for her part, rejoiced when the rainbow flag was projected onto the White House for Pride. She believes that functioning families come in all different shapes and sizes, and is pro-choice.

Reaching out to the other side may sound like self-inflicted pain, but Kloefkorn took those steps for a very personal reason: she is the only liberal in her staunchly conservative, evangelical family.

Glenn Stanton, director of Global Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family, is anti-abortion and against same-sex marriage. Credit: David Williams / The Guardian

Growing up, her mother was the only person she could relate to politically, so when she died in 2015, Kloefkorn found herself increasingly isolated. And Trump’s election only exacerbated this feeling.

“My dad’s wife texted me the day after Trump won and said, ‘We are so happy that Trump won. We are sorry that your life’s work is over,’” Kloefkorn explains. “I kept on thinking, I’ve got to figure out how to handle this. I very much do not want my dad to die and for us to be on a bad foot.”

Stanton’s motivations are less fraught: he sees pairing up with someone different from him as an opportunity. He likes the idea of making new friends, and wants to learn how to become a better citizen. “Gaining all the friends that we can, and learning all of the different stories that I know nothing about: that’s worth the effort,” he says.

The work can sometimes be tough, revealing, anxiety-inducing. It requires workshops, disabling one’s own ego, and sometimes even being subjected to offensive ideas.

And yet thousands of people across the U.S. are returning every week to do the work and broaden their friendship circles and their minds, in hopes that the country will be healed by learning to get along.

“Where did we get the idea that we can’t be friends with people we don’t agree with?” asks Stanton when I talk to him on the phone, in his chipper, almost singsong voice. “I work in a very partisan world, and I am an advocate for things I believe deeply. But I really am troubled by the divisive nature of our culture and the way we tag each other so dismissively.”

That might sound simple enough, but the polarization currently gripping America is about more than just disagreement.

Most Americans today choose to spend their time with people who vote the same way as they do. People increasingly look badly upon — even loathe — people with differing views: a 2016 Pew poll found that 47 percent of Republicans judged Democrats to be more immoral than other Americans; 35 percent of Democrats said the same about Republicans. And this year, a Gallup poll recorded the most divided results it had ever seen on Republican (89 percent) versus Democratic (7 percent) approval of the president: an 82-point gap.

Crushed by negative news?

And while it might feel like politicians have always hurled mud at each other, our political culture is becoming increasingly antagonistic. During the 1960 presidential campaign, only 10 percent of political advertisements were negative; by Obama’s second election in 2012, only about 14 percent of campaign ads were positive.

This increasing polarization has devastating effects on our capacity to show compassion, and on our emotional and political health.

Sheila Kloefkorn spent years advocating for legal same-sex marriage. Credit: Cassidy Araiza / The Guardian

“When people become over-identified with a very negative or judgmental stance, it has a way of limiting their ability to perceive larger possibilities in their world,” says Kirk Schneider, a psychotherapist who has been researching polarization and its effects on the human psyche for decades. “Being continually consumed with seeing the other as evil [prevents a person from] experiencing a wider range of relationships in their life, of having new discoveries, and also perhaps feeling a sense of wonder about the world.”

Polarization is also dangerous for democracy. Schneider, who is a Braver Angels moderator, points out that when societies become heavily divided, they tend to reach an impasse. Political objectives seem less achievable. People who have a less mixed range of views tend to move away from a give-and-take approach to politics, and start to endorse the idea that the other side — not their own — is the one that should be doing the giving.

“People have to sit with some discomfort if we’re going to have sustainable peaceful coexistence with one another,” says Schneider.

Wesley Dennis is so terrified of racism in Trump’s America he has already started planning his exit route should Trump win another election. But he doesn’t want to be this scared. He wants to hear why he shouldn’t be afraid of Trump voters — he wants some reason to feel, if not optimistic, at least not horrified.

Dennis has been engaged with Make America Dinner Again (MADA) since the 2016 election, an organization that started out by asking people to have polite disagreements over dinner in people’s homes, and has moved online since the pandemic.

“I don’t believe that Glenn is out to get me in the way I probably would have in the beginning of my activism.”

Sometimes the posts that he submits to MADA’s Facebook forum take two, three, maybe even four attempts to write. He will carve out six paragraphs explaining why he believes it’s not anti-American to take down statues honoring Confederate generals, and then he will screen his own writing. He wants to be as approachable, rational and careful as possible to help Trump voters understand his side.

Sometimes the responses he receives are infuriating. People call him over-emotional about racism, or unable to be rational. They suggest that Black people are inherently criminal. Sometimes they don’t even gratify him with a response.

“Some days I spend hours writing comments to people who have said things that are offensively misguided, only for them to say, ‘I don’t like your tone,’” he says.

Dennis points out that while he knows it is not his job to educate anyone, if he doesn’t speak up the “other side” might never hear from a Black American. “Take this idea that Black people are somehow inherently suspect; or that police brutality stories are just an example of ‘one bad cop,’” he says. “People [on these forums] will say, ‘Well, the solution is more education, or for Black fathers to stop being so derelict.’ And I say, look, I grew up with both parents and I have a Yale degree, and I still experience this sort of profiling and harassment.”

There have been small points of relief throughout his work. He is now less likely to lump all conservatives together, which he believes is good for democracy. Sometimes he will see a post about guns that makes him certain someone is an archetypal, evil orthodox Trumpian — and the next minute, he’ll see the same person attending a person of color-led Zoom talk about race that makes him reconsider his assumptions.

And while he can’t be sure he has helped the more conservative members to see his side of things, he has certainly made ground with some. One of his MADA partners, Patrick Yu — who voted Republican until Trump’s election — said he struggled to understand systemic racism in the very abstract ways he felt it was written about in news articles and academic studies. But meeting Dennis helped to broaden his worldview.

For Dennis, there is another benefit: he feels less powerless. At least if he chooses to engage with those he disagrees with, he might broaden their perspective, and that is something he can hold on to.

Depolarizing is not easy. Some people years into the process say they still have paranoid fantasies: they fear the sum of their values could be compromised by talking to their political opponents; that the other side will take over and destroy society; and that those they care for could be harmed as a result.

Sometimes those fears materialize. After Kloefkorn joined Braver Angels, her own friends berated her, accusing her of compromising her values by being friends with a man who had opposed same-sex marriage.

That is why the Braver Angels model focuses on techniques taken from marriage counseling to help repair wounds. People listen to their partners talk about the stereotypes they have been subjected to, and how it makes them feel. Ultimately, they are filling out their political opponents’ humanity, putting the parts of them back together in a way that makes them less of a caricature.

“It helps to expose myself to other beliefs and I have an understanding of where people are coming from, even though I don’t agree. It helps me because then I don’t have to feel so bad all the time, especially at family dinners,” says Kloefkorn.

What’s more, she isn’t carrying around the weight of assuming that others are against her anymore. “It is just negative for me if I have that as a belief because I am just going to look for confirmation and then I am going to feel unsafe.”

Now, at Thanksgiving, Kloefkorn tries not to persuade, not to rationalize or reason with, but to disarm herself and take in what her father’s fears are. “On a bad day, I just try not to talk about it,” she says. “But when it is good we just focus on the things that we love about each other.”