politics 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.

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.

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 story was produced by Freakonomics Radio, a We Are Not Divided collaborator.

You probably hold certain beliefs that you think no one could ever change your mind about. Well, humor us, because in this episode of Freakonomics Radio, we’re pretty sure that we can change your mind about that.

The truth is, our minds are pretty changeable. Under the right conditions, even the concepts, ideologies and general truths that we hold to be sacrosanct are often prone to alteration. We showed you some examples of how this works in our story “Are You Liberal? Are You Sure?” And we’ll offer even more examples in the coming weeks.

For now, however, tune in to this episode of Freakonomics Radio: “How to Change Your Mind.” It kicks off with a conversation between host Stephen Dubner and Reasons to be Cheerful editors Christine McLaren and Will Doig.

This story was produced by CBC q, a We Are Not Divided collaborator

Simone Saunders and Tekikki Walker have never met each other in person. But the two artists found much in common with each other when they connected as part of a long-distance collaboration.

Their project is part of the Long Distance Art series, an initiative that connects different artists online, kind of like a matchmaking service for creators.

“Tekikki’s work was just mesmerizing to me: the Black content, the color palette, the vibrancy of her work,” Saunders, who is based in Calgary, tells q host Tom Power.

simone saunders — Simone Saunders is a Calgary-based artist who creates hand-tufted textiles. Courtesy of Simone Saunders

For Walker, who lives more than 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) away in Cleveland, the professional admiration was mutual.

“I love her work pretty much for the same reasons — a lot of the content and the vibrancy,” she says. “She just seemed like a really dope artist. And I was like, I’m so excited. I want to work with her.”

Saunders and Walker were put in touch with each other by Torontonian Nick Green, creator of the Social Distancing Series that spawned the Long Distance Art Series.

The series connects artists from a variety of media and artistic disciplines from around the world as a way to build bridges between artists and art-lovers as the Covid-19 pandemic makes in-person meetings difficult to impossible.

Saunders and Walker’s project, titled This Ain’t No Video Game, We Want Outta This Circus, explores the parallels between the Black experience, especially anti-Black racism, on both sides of the American-Canadian border.

Both artists submitted a series of images in their preferred medium — digital collages from Walker, and textile “rug tufting” from Saunders.

The project also includes personal essays from both that compare and contrast their experiences with systemic racism and the unique ways that racism has manifested during the pandemic.

Saunders says they drew inspiration from a Washington Post story in April that described two Black men who were followed by police through a Walmart for wearing protective face masks.

They were particularly struck by Kip Diggs, a 53-year-old Nashville marketing consultant who chose to wear cloth masks in bright, pastel colors like Carolina blue and lime green to appear less intimidating to passersby, including police.

“It says a lot for someone like Diggs, a marketing consultant, to think about the ramifications that stems from stereotyping and how one’s appearance or wardrobe could warrant danger in the face of another crisis,” Walker wrote in her essay.

The story highlighted the fact that some societal schisms have been widened by the pandemic, rather than uniting them.

“We started talking about the pandemic itself … especially in terms of marginalized communities and how they were not receiving the equitable care that was deserving of them,” says Saunders.

Canada doesn’t have any plans to collect nationwide race-based data on the pandemic. But some cities, including Toronto and Montreal, have found that reported Covid-19 cases were more frequently found in neighborhoods with diverse racial backgrounds and lower incomes.

“Unfortunately, [Covid-19] has had a greater impact on those in our community who face greater health inequities,” Toronto’s medical officer Eileen de Villa said in July.

Saunders and Walker began working together in the early days of the pandemic. But soon after, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the ensuing resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests — put these considerations into even sharper focus.

“Excuse my language — I’m frankly pissed about everything,” says Walker.

She said she uses contemporary and historical imagery in her digital collages to signal the importance of history and historical context in our current dialogues about systemic racism.

“I want to keep talking about those issues … layering with things that may have happened with Black folks in America and in past times,” she says.

In her essay, Saunders acknowledges that the Black experience in Canada isn’t exactly the same as her peers’ in the U.S., such as Walker.

She’s thankful for her relative economic privilege and access to health care during the pandemic, and put a spotlight on racism that Indigenous and other communities suffer.

Despite these differences, however, they found their causes had more in common with each other, and could strengthen each others’ voices by speaking as one through this project.

“I think that was the most poignant thing, was that two Black women were able to connect over this line in the sand … across borders and really talk about a Black history and what was meaningful to both of us,” says Saunders.

Despite the remote nature of the work and the difficult, personal subject matter, Saunders and Walker consider their contribution to the Long Distance Art Series a success — and, hopefully, the prelude to more collaborations.

“I really do hope that Tekikki and I can stay connected and to keep that sisterhood, because we really are here for one another, even within these two different countries,” says Saunders.

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.”

This Q+A is published as part of an ongoing series interviews with members of Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab

A divided electorate, a gridlocked government and no end in sight. Where do we go from here? Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and psychology and the director of Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab (PASCL), has some ideas. He and his team of researchers have literally made a science of polarization, examining what it is, how it functions, why it occurs and what we can do about it. Over the course of We Are Not Divided, we’ll be talking with Willer and his colleagues about their research, taking a deep dive into the root causes and complex dynamics of division.

In the first of these conversations, Willer discusses how “moral reframing” can help us confront existential threats — and prove that we’re not as divided as we think we are.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why study polarization?

There are a lot of social problems that are going to require some sort of federal action if they’re going to be ameliorated: climate change, economic inequality, or an effective response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s impossible for us to pass significant legislation at the federal level with the levels of [political] elite polarization that we have.

The polarization of politicians also facilitates polarization in the mass public — people see their leaders being more different, working together less and expressing more antagonism towards one another. They solidify partisan identities and a sense of partisan rivalry, and they develop a sense of partisan animosity.

What are some ways to bridge those ideological chasms?

The theory that I’ve worked with the most is moral foundations theory — specifically, this persuasive technique that we call moral reframing. Moral reframing involves making an argument for a political position or candidate based in terms of moral values that you assume that they may have. We have a pretty good sense of what moral values — or moral foundations, as they call them — are endorsed more by Democrats and liberals versus conservatives and Republicans.

What are some of those moral foundations?

Liberals in the U.S. tend to endorse the moral values of care and protection from harm, as well as equality and justice, more than conservatives do, and thus are more likely to view politics through the moral lens of: we need to protect people from harm and protect vulnerable groups.

Conservatives think about those things as well, but they also think about some uniquely conservative moral values that liberals really don’t account for. Conservatives value group loyalty and patriotism. They also value respect for authority — legitimate authorities — and they have respect for tradition as well. They also value purity, moral sanctity and religious sanctity more than liberals do.

Once you have this sort of moral map, you have a roadmap or a guide to how to formulate potentially persuasive political arguments to either a liberal or conservative for a view they might not otherwise hold.

Can you give us an example? For instance, how could moral reframing be applied to an issue like climate change?

If you were trying to persuade a conservative to be more concerned about climate change, a less persuasive argument, we find in our research, would be an environmental message in terms of protection from harm. That doesn’t tend to move the needle, at least in our research.

What might be more successful would be to make an argument in terms of patriotism, about the need to protect the country, the need to help the country maintain a position of international leadership relative to other countries.

You could conceivably make an argument in terms of national traditions around conservation and respecting the land in our country. You also can make an argument in terms of purity, the need to not desecrate and pollute our pure and sacred habitats. Those kinds of arguments would be more likely to resonate with conservatives because they fit with their moral values.

Are existential issues like climate change truly polarizing, or does it just feel that way?

By some measures, even a majority of Republicans believe in climate change and express a basic level of concern about it. And certainly a super-majority of Americans do. So you could make a case when it comes to the climate change problem, public opinion isn’t the leading issue. It’s that some very wealthy interests that don’t want to see climate change legislation happen have been able to have an outsized influence on the political process that nullifies that super-majority influence.

With moral framing you can go up to someone and say, “You can still be who you are and agree with me on this.”

Those structural mechanics are tremendously important, and ideally we would have basic structural reform around the role of money in politics, because absent that it’s hard to know how we would really combat [climate change]. But public opinion matters too, most of all because it gets people elected.

Right, and to overcome those structures that override public opinion, we will need broad, diverse coalitions. So depolarizing climate change doesn’t mean moderating on climate change mitigation, it just means creating policies that link different morals and values. How do we do that?

We’ve done research into seeing if we could construct arguments for same-sex marriage that were more persuasive to conservatives. So we constructed an equality-based argument that was along the lines of the dominant rationale for same-sex marriage, which basically said, “Gay people deserve the same rights as all other people, and that’s why you should support same-sex marriage.”

We tested that message against a very different argument that made the case in terms of patriotism and group loyalty, saying, “Gay Americans are proud, patriotic Americans who contribute to society, they contribute to the economy, they buy homes, they build families, and they deserve the same rights.” And it’s not that different from an equality message, but it’s clearly signaling that if you value group loyalty and patriotism, you should support same-sex marriage.

We found that conservatives were significantly more persuaded by the argument made in terms of patriotism and group loyalty.

What about the flip side — something traditionally conservative appealing to liberals?

One study we did made an argument for why there should be higher levels of military spending, which is a traditionally conservative position that liberals typically oppose.

We contrasted two different rationales. One was about the U.S. being a major superpower and the importance of sustaining that position in the global theater. We contrasted that with a rationale as to why the military is a force for equality and opportunity in America.

[The argument] made the case that the military is one of the few institutions in America where the poor and minorities can compete on a level playing field and can advance proportional to their talents and efforts in a way that they would otherwise struggle to because of barriers in the wider society. It was one of the first integrated government institutions, and today it plays a key role in helping the poor and minorities gain the resources needed to access higher education.

We found that, when presented with that argument, liberals were significantly more supportive of higher levels of military spending.

To play the skeptic: If I was someone who was against more military spending, hearing that would be a little scary. I might think I’m being manipulated into believing in something that I rationally think is a net negative.

While I’ve defended moral reframing as something that can be a sincere form of coalition-building in a pluralistic society — and I think it can help us bridge divides and make political progress despite our differences — I also believe that it can be a deeply cynical and strategic tool of manipulation. Just think about the purity-based arguments for the Third Reich or equality-based arguments for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Moral reframing is not new, and it’s been used for good ends and bad ends.

Why should good ideas require moral reframing? If they’re truly good, shouldn’t they succeed on their merits?

You could make a case that America is the most diverse country ideologically and demographically in the world. We’re going to have to be comfortable with agreeing to do things for different reasons because we have a lot of differences. If we’re going to hold out and say we need everybody in this coalition to not just get on board for this issue, but get on board for the same reasons as me, you’re going to be waiting a long time. It’s just not realistic.

But people also don’t often see that they’ve been framed up to support positions that they support. Everybody is perceiving their issue positions through a subjective filter that they’ve constructed or has been constructed for them.

One of the things I think is attractive about moral framing is that you can go up to someone and say, “You can still be who you are and agree with me on this.” And I don’t have to try to move the fiber of your being. Maybe they do get exposed to those [different] values over time, and they just got to it from where they already were.

The experiment’s participants were politically minded, sure of their ideologies. Which is why, upon learning that they had just expressed support for an issue they actually oppose, many of them tried to insist they must have misread the question. More than a few were flat-out confused. And, perhaps surprisingly, a handful were relieved to find that they were more ideologically flexible than they realized.

“They told us, ‘Thank God I’m not a left-winger,’” says Philip Parnamets, a psychologist who helped design the crafty experiment that would trick its subjects into defending a political view they disagreed with. “They were like, I didn’t know I could think this way.” Which made Parnamets realize something: “You could see this as a tool for self-discovery. It seemed to open up the possibility of change.”

“The idea that one arrives at their political beliefs through careful and considered reasoning only is fictional.”

The premise of Parnamets’ experiment — that a simple psychological game could meaningfully alter a person’s political positions — is something most people probably assume couldn’t work on them. Most of us see our ideological viewpoints as the result of thoughtful, objective consideration. “We live in a world where people think political attitudes are sacred things,” says Parnamets, “that they shouldn’t be changeable at all.”

But a growing body of research suggests that’s not true, and that our politics may be far more flexible than we think. “The idea that one arrives at their political beliefs through careful and considered reasoning only is fictional,” says David Melnikoff, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University who studies attitude change. ”Whether it’s about a country, party, policy or politicians, attitudes can be radically changed on the basis of your current stimuli.”

Parnamets’ experiment did just that. He and his colleagues gave their subjects an iPad that contained a series of polar opposite ideological statements. The subjects used their fingers to draw X’s on the spectrum between the two statements to indicate their level of support or opposition to each.

What they didn’t know was that the iPads were programmed to secretly move some of their hand-drawn X’s to different parts of the spectrum. Suddenly, an X drawn next to the statement “I support raising gas taxes” was now closer to “I oppose raising gas taxes.” The researchers then showed the subjects their iPads to see how they would react. Some of them cried foul. But more than half accepted the altered opinions as their own.

Even more remarkably, when asked to explain their thinking behind these opinions, many of the subjects took pains to describe in detail why they had supported a political stance that they hadn’t actually chosen. It was these participants whose political opinions shifted the most dramatically — in fact, their “new” opinions held fast even a week later when the researchers checked in on them again.

“We see a larger attitude change when participants are asked to give a narrative explanation of their choice because they’re then more invested in that view,” says Parnamets. Psychologists call this “choice blindness” — when people have to rationalize a choice they didn’t actually make, their preference can naturally shift toward that choice.

Melnikoff has conducted similar experiments into attitude change, in which participants are primed through exercises to generate positive feelings toward things they don’t actually like. In one such experiment, Melnikoff’s subjects exhibited lower feelings of disgust toward, of all monsters, Adolf Hitler after being told they would have to defend him in court. “All it takes to change someone’s affective response to something is to induce them to have a positively or negatively valenced action toward that person or thing,” says Melnikoff. Even if, intellectually speaking, the subject knows this person or thing is bad, they can still “feel good” about it, like a dieter salivating at the sight of an ice cream sundae they know they shouldn’t eat.

Crushed by negative news?

Part of the reason our choices and beliefs can be so easily changed is that our brains have evolved to help us navigate life by avoiding friction and complications. “The brain’s job is to predict, to guide you through an environment without making too many errors, and to help you adapt to that environment,” says Jordan Theriault, a researcher who studies the neural and biological bases of behavior and judgment. “The behaviors people take on and the beliefs they hold are about managing stress and arousal and discomfort.”

Our brains are built to anticipate and avoid friction, which may help explain where our ideologies come from. Illustration courtesy of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Looked at from that perspective, it makes sense that our beliefs should adapt to fit our environments, coalescing into ideologies that make the world feel easier to navigate and understand. You can see this most clearly in partisan politics, wherein an ideology’s potential to bind you together with “your group” may be more important than the ideology itself.

“Part of partisanship is about being part of partisan conflict,” says Theriault. “You have your people and you have the other people you consider yourself against, and that’s an environment where it makes sense to have these beliefs. But if you’re removed from that conflict position, your partisan beliefs may not serve as much of a purpose anymore.”

Removing ourselves from that conflict position is easier said than done in a world where it feels like every politician, pundit and loudmouth on Twitter wants us to do the opposite. But in those rare instances where we can manage to put conflict aside, it’s possible to free ourselves from our rigid political mindsets and see the other’s point of view.

One technique that has gained interest in political advocacy is “deep canvassing.” Traditional political canvassing involves identifying your supporters and making sure they get out and vote — basically, it seeks to leverage partisan feelings to the party’s advantage. Deep canvassing, on the other hand, does the opposite: Canvassers go door to door, but instead of pumping up the passions of their supporters, they listen closely to those who hold opposing views. “What we’ve learned by having real, in-depth conversations with people is that a broad swath of voters are actually open to changing their mind,” Dave Fleischer, one of the technique’s best-known practitioners, told the New York Times Magazine in 2016.

Deep canvassing can leverage the same tribalist power of partisan politics, but turn that power toward finding common ground rather than fighting to the death, according to Theriault. “Just by showing up on someone’s doorstep to talk to them about what they believe, you’re essentially building a new relationship” — a tribe of two — “even though it’s a very short one at the door,” he says. And in an age when so many political affiliations are cultivated online, the face-to-face offering of an olive branch becomes all the more powerful. “It’s difficult to be genuinely listened to on social media,” says Theriault, “so I think being genuinely listened to is a way of building a connection to people — and even working out what you believe, too.”

In essence, deep canvassing functions not unlike Parnamets’ experiment with the iPads. Both encourage their participants to slow down, rethink their initial position, and then, engage in a meaningful narrative about the opposing point of view.

Such narratives have powerful effects on our brains — we are more easily swayed by them than we realize. In his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes that simply naming a game the “Wall Street Game” is likely to make players compete more ruthlessly than if they are told the game is called the “Community Game.” Telling doctors a drug has a “95 percent survival rate” makes them more likely to prescribe it than if they’re told it has a “five percent death rate.” Subtle cues can alter even our most cherished beliefs. In one experiment conducted in the U.S., survey respondents were more likely to support egalitarian principles if there was an American flag hanging nearby.

“I think we have an untapped reservoir for flexibility in our attitudes and beliefs,” says Parnamets, “but it’s difficult to access because there are many reasons for holding tightly to beliefs — sense of security, sense of belonging, self esteem — and those might actually close you off to other views, even if you’re the type of person who could actually hold a different belief than the one you’re holding.”

“But if you can have a discussion with yourself, which our method allows you to do,” adds Parnamets, “we see a real possibility of change.”