September 23, 2024 • 33 mins
It feels like our world is deeply polarized. We seem to fundamentally disagree with so many people - and with those disputes comes anger and hatred. Can anything bridge these yawning divides?
It turns out that we aren’t as divided as all that. Our minds often fool us into thinking we disagree with people more than is actually true. Dr Laurie Santos and Dr Jamil Zaki look at ways we can tame this misconception and get on with people who think a little differently to us.
Jamil's book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is out now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's no secret that politics around the world has become
more divided and more toxic. Here in the US, our
political parties seem further apart on key issues than ever before.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Back in the.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Nineteen eighties, Democrats and Republicans reported liking people in their
own party and feeling relatively neutral about folks on the
other side. But today those feelings are much more polarized.
One survey from twenty twenty found that Democrats and Republicans
now dislike their rivals more than they like the people
who share their political views. This level of emotional polarization
(00:52):
is new in American politics, but it's not that surprising
given well, pretty much every screen you look at these days,
cable news, shows, social media sites, emailed attack ads, they
all show us a very extreme version of the other side.
Our opponents aren't just wrong about the policies, they're moral
and out to destroy our nation.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Of brainwashing that's going to the young people right now
is unbelieving.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Now they're inviting the government into their bedroom to tell
any woman what to do with her private parts.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I don't think that's right.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
We're being flooded in by illegal people coming in a
lot of people that vote for certain candidate of voting
against democracy. This level of division, distrust and anger, it
takes a huge toll on us. It's exhausting. I'm Jamil Zaki,
and in my lab at Stanford, we found that more
than eighty percent of Americans on both sides are fed
(01:43):
up with it and wish that the country was less divided.
But if you're convinced that the other side is made
up of terrible, hostile people, there's little hope for things
to get any better.
Speaker 6 (01:52):
They're so annoying, they're come with so money negative. That's
what a Republican come.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
You know, it's always put out there that Republicans are this,
Republicans are that we're racists.
Speaker 7 (02:00):
We don't listen to other people.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
A lot of my family are Republicans, but I'm not
friends with any Republicans.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
But are we right to imagine that everyone on the
other side is just plain awful? And if we're not,
can we fight this polarization and connect with our fellow
citizens across the aisle? Is there any hope that we
even could be less divided?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Our minds are constantly telling us what you to be happy?
What if our minds are wrong? What if our minds
are lying to us, leading us away from what will
really make us happy. The goodness is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me,
doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
And me doctor Jamille Zaki. Amanda, it's great to meet you.
I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Oh, thanks for saying that.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Yeah, I recommend your book for everybody.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Likewise, I've really been enjoying When I.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Was writing Hope for Cynics, I wanted to learn more
about how cynical thinking might worsen polarization. One of the
people who inspired me the most was Amanda Ripley.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I've been a journalist for twenty years and I spent
a lot of time covering conflict. That's part of the job,
and I thought I was pretty good at it. I
thought I understood it pretty well. I thought it was
comfortable with it. And then, you know, six or eight
years ago, I started to feel like things were happening
in the country politically that didn't make sense, and anything
(03:31):
I might do as a journalist was either going to
have no impact or make things worse.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
People have gotten more polarized in the past few decades,
but so is the media. When I was a kid,
not quite in the age of the dinosaurs, TV news
was like the ancient land mass of Pangaea, a single
continent of information on which we all lived. We might
not have shared our views, but at least we shared
a sense of what was going on. But then the
(03:58):
tectonic plates shifted, that single continent of news broke into
pieces that drifted apart. With media companies competing for our attention,
a new business mindel emerged. Instead of trying to get
the most viewers, news channels started cultivating audience loyalty by
feeding people what they wanted to hear twenty four hours
(04:19):
a day. Partisan cable news was born, pumping out divisive
rhetoric and encouraging us to fear and loathe our rivals.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
It's just painful because you can see the ways in
which the places I worked exploited and incited conflict without
anyone knowing it.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
So, according to Amanda, the news wasn't just reflecting polarization,
it was profiting from it. Research suggests this is spreading
cynicism through what's called mean world syndrome. The more people
tune into the news, the worse they think humanity is.
And that makes sense because, in addition to becoming more divisive,
the news has also grown more negative. Since the beginning
(05:02):
of this century, the presence of angry words and headlines
has increased by one hundred percent and the presence of
fear by one hundred and fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Unsurprisingly, none of this makes us happy. Once survey asked
people to complete the following sentence, the news makes me
feel blank the top answers, hopeless, agitated, and despair. What
would your answers be? Amanda was devastated that her industry
was making people miserable. She hated the idea that she
might be contributing to the conflict brewing all around us.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
There are stories I've written or headlines I've approved that
definitely piled on that exploited the conflict in order to
get attention or status or profit.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Amanda wanted to better understand how good journalists wound up
fanning the flames of polarization and what they could do
to break free.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
So I started following people who have been through really
dysfunctional conflict and now are in healthier conflict.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Amanda interviewed rival gang leaders in Chicago. She traveled to
Columbia to learn about that country's civil war. She shadowed
radical environmentalists and even did a deep dive into small
time politics. What she discovered turned into a book, High Conflict,
Why we get trapped, and How we get out.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Conflict is not a problem, right, and we know this
from all of the research into human behavior. The conflict
onto itself can be really important and helpful. The problem
is high conflict or intractable conflict, which becomes kind of
like conflict for conflict's sake.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
So if conflict can be just fine, when does it
turn into a problem. According to Amanda, the first step
is when we draw up rigid battle.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Lines, we literally lose our peripheral vision. We start to
cleanly divide the world into us and them and miss
all the people that don't really fit.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Once we define ourselves as members of a group, we
begin stereotyping the other group as the enemy. Caught in
a zero sum competition, we win only if they lose.
This is when emotional polarization takes over. We begin to
dislike the other side and take pleasure in their suffering,
known as schadenfreude. But it even opens the door to
(07:13):
us finding a justification to hurt them ourselves.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
We know that when people feel like they are better
than another person or another group, when they feel maybe
humiliated by that other person or other group, all of
that makes violent conflict much more likely.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
So this cycle of fear creates hatred and even violence.
It's exhausting and most of us wish it would stop.
Remember that statistic saying eighty percent of us want less division.
But it does help at least one group of people.
Amanda calls them conflict entrepreneurs, So.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
People who exploit or inflame conflict for their own ends.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
We've always had conflict entrepreneurs who earned a living saying
outrageous things in newspapers or on TV. But these days
anyone can engineer conflict and profit from it, reaching millions
of people from the comfort of their own home.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
You know, you can go viral online, as we all know,
with like really cool, inspiring, hopeful, surprising content. You can
absolutely do that, but it's a lot easier to go
viral with like really uninspired and kind of mediocre content
if you can provoke outrage. So we've kind of set
things up to create a golden age for conflict entrepreneurs,
(08:29):
and it's very easy to be one. You can raise
money by being a conflict entrepreneur. You can get attention,
you can get a sense of belonging, you get followers.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You get likes.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
You know, Amanda, it's easy to think about the conflict
entrepreneur as somebody cynical who's trying to make money from
or gain notoriety from their the ideological bomb throwing. But
you're actually saying, sometimes conflict entrepreneurs are looking for what
the rest of us are looking for, community and belonging.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, that's a great way of putting into meal. I mean,
I think certainly profit is maybe the least seductive reward
for conflict entrepreneurs. It's definitely in there.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
But what is money?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Right? Money is often, especially for someone who's been doing
this their whole life, it's a proxy for being loved,
for being respected, for being powerful. Right, So it's a
way for people to feel like they matter.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Mattering it's a core psychological need we all share. We
go back again and again to whatever makes us feel
that way, and conflict, even when it's scary, can make
us feel a sense of purpose, belonging and mattering because
of this it can suck people in, turning any of
us into many conflict entrepreneurs. And once it gets going,
(09:45):
it's also hard to get out of. Once we're in
a state of high conflict, we experience a whole host
of psychological changes. Our thinking becomes oversimplified. If you think
you're smart, your enemy must be dumb. If you're good,
they're bad. If you want one thing, they must want
the exact opposite. But lots of these assumptions are just
(10:06):
plain wrong.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The democratic way it drives me absolute.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I can't tell you how many terrorists are actually coming
into our country right now.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
I think their Republicans is very hard paper.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
Democrats are real stupid, and they don't know much, and they.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Better than everyone.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
At least in the US. Political groups are wrong about
each other in almost every way we can measure. We
don't know what people on the other side are like,
even at a basic level. For example, Democrats tend to
think that Republicans are super rich. When asked how many
Republicans have a salary of over two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars a year, Democrats, on average guess around forty
(10:46):
four percent.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I think the real number Epison like twelve percent.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
I don't want to correct, Amanda, but the actual statistic
is two percent.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
See even I just did it.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
I just did the same mistake.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
The right gets the left wrong too. When Republicans are
asked how many Democrats identify as LGBTQ, they assumed it
was around thirty eight percent, the actual proportion six percent.
We don't know who the other side is or what
they think. This is called false polarization. Of course, we
are polarized, but these divisions are larger in our minds
(11:21):
than in reality. Both Democrats and Republicans report that the
average person they disagree with is much more extreme than
they really are, and it gets worse. We also think
our average rival is about twice as hateful as they
really are.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
We kind of caricature each other, or rather, I should say,
conflict entrepreneurs caricature each other, and then we believe these things,
especially when we're really segregated like we are right now.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
The good news is there is way more common ground
in our political landscape than we realize. Most of us
agree on at least some issues, and almost all of
us share certain values. Most Americans want peace and democracy.
The bad news is that conflict. Entrepreneurs convince us that
people on the other side are awful, so we avoid
talking with them, even when the those conversations might help
(12:10):
us become less wrong. What's worse, we end up thinking
that we need to escalate conflict even though almost no
one wants to. This feeds even more division. An exhausted
majority wishes things could be different, but feels incorrectly that
they're alone.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I think people are getting really tired of it, but
they also feel totally trapped. We know this doesn't feel right.
I think we all know that something is wrong in
our culture, in our politics, and that we need to
do better. I think there's huge unmet demand for a
different way to do politics, a different way to do journalism,
(12:46):
different way to fight.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Is there hope that we can find a way out
of high conflict. Well, after the break, we'll meet someone
who's had to diffuse lots of polarizing situations and open
a type of dialogue not where we agree, but where
we can still see each other's humanity and common goals.
Even with our families.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Half my families Republicans. It always makes for a great thanksgeving.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
It out more on that when the happiness lab returns
in a moment.
Speaker 7 (13:24):
A lot of people surprise us, both good and bad.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Britt Baron tries not to see the world in black
and white. Instead, she's a self proclaimed master of nuance.
Speaker 6 (13:34):
You know traditional cartoon Disney. They're just a good guy,
there's a bad guy. You want the good guy to win.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That is it. That is the entire story. And so
we have this.
Speaker 6 (13:44):
Idea in our mind that things are that clean and
that things can be that clean.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But BRIT's own identities never fit cleanly into simple categories.
Speaker 7 (13:53):
I grew up in the Evangelical church.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
My parents were both very committed, and so that identity
I actually shaped a lot of decisions I made, schools,
I went to things I was a part of.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
But growing up as a black woman in these predominantly
white religious spaces was I to achieve a sense of belonging.
Britt wound up embracing some strong fundamentalist beliefs, like the
idea that homosexuality is a sin and that girls need
to save themselves for marriage.
Speaker 6 (14:20):
I think when I was like twelve or something, I
was in this youth group and the youth pastor passed
around a glass of water and everyone spit in the water,
and in the end he said, would anyone want to
drink this?
Speaker 7 (14:31):
This is what happens every time you sleep with someone.
This is what's happening.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
I mean even now saying that, I'm like, you know,
throwing up in my mouth. But yeah, I carried all
these stories and then I passed these stories on.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Britt was a dynamic speaker. She quickly rose through the
leadership breaks of her mostly white congregation, and I.
Speaker 6 (14:49):
Found myself at a very young age of twenty six
being a pastor at a megachurch.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Things were going smoothly until Britt and the church's creative director, Sammy,
fell in love.
Speaker 6 (14:59):
And so that is where I feel like I had
a decision to make.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Sammy is not the sort of person that Britt expected
to fall for. Sammy is a woman, and Britt had
spent her career preaching that same sex relationships were evil.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
I struggled a lot with feeling like this seems like
a good thing, but what if it's bad?
Speaker 7 (15:17):
What if this is a trick? What if you know,
the devil tricking you know?
Speaker 6 (15:20):
I mean, I was like so deeply in this religion
called you know, what if you want to call it.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
I was so deep in it.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Eventually, Britt and Sammy decided to declare their love openly
and came out to their church community.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
I thought we would lose our jobs, which we both did.
Speaker 6 (15:33):
I thought that we would get weird messages on the internet,
and we did.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Britta and Sammy lost much of the community they'd built
over decades. Many of BRIT's friends were so steeped in
binary thinking they simply couldn't accept that their former friends
had become a loving couple.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
We got engaged not too long after coming out, and
there were three people, some of our closest friends in life,
who we asked to be in our wedding, who eventually
said this sort of stands against what they believe in.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
They're not able to participate.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
In with this.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The experience was devastating, but it got Brit thinking could
people who DRIs agreed so deeply on key issues ever
find a way to connect. She dedicated the next stages
of her career to helping people start meaningful dialogue to
see beyond their usual black and white views. I first
learned about BRIT's work through her book Do You Still
Talk to Grandma? When the problematic people in our lives
(16:25):
are the ones we love.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
I was at dinner with a group of friends and
one of our friends was saying, oh, yeah, my grandma
voted for Trump, And someone else was like, do you
still talk to her? And she was like my nana,
And I was like, oh my gosh, are we cancling Grandma's?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Like?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Are we saying?
Speaker 6 (16:42):
It's too hard for me to sit in any gray?
So I am just going to talk to people with
whom I'm on the same page.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Britt argues that we'd all be happier if we found
ways to disagree more agreeably.
Speaker 6 (16:55):
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot
of us are actually looking for a way to disagree
and still be in relationships with each other.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
But to do that, we need to recognize that we
actually agree with the vast majority of people more than
our lying minds think. False polarization is just that false.
Take the US for example. Did you know that seventy
two percent of Americans think that climate change is happening
and agree we should take action, Or that more than
eighty percent of Americans believe that racism is a problem
(17:27):
we need to address. Over eighty percent of our fellow
citizens agree we should be fighting for a free press,
for freedom of speech, and for reasonable gun control measures
like background checks. Ninety percent of Americans support everyone's right
to a fair vote. Those stats make it clear we
actually see eye to eye on way more of the
(17:48):
fundamentals than we think.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
If we can agree on the what, then we don't
necessarily have to agree.
Speaker 7 (17:53):
On the how.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
The problem is that we don't realize how aligned we
really are. But what would happen if we did realize
if we corrected our mistaken intuitions and developed a more
accurate view of what people on the other side actually believe.
That's what Stanford's sociologist Rob Willer and his colleagues tested.
They brought Democrats and Republicans into the lab and asked them,
(18:17):
how much do you feel it's justified for your party
to use violence to advance political goals. He then had
the same people predict what the other side would answered.
Willer found that each side overestimated the other's approval of
violence by nearly three hundred percent three hundred percent. But
Willer and his colleagues didn't stop there. They showed a
(18:38):
different group of people how big the usual overestimate was.
They explained just how off the average person was in
their predictions about the other side and what happened while
those new participants corrected their beliefs about the other side's
violent tendencies, and maybe more importantly, their own support for
political violence went down. Simply correcting our inaccurate perceptions of
(19:02):
our rivals can help us dial back our willingness to
strike preemptively. It can make us seek more peace.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Brit thinks that results like these prove that we need
to embrace a bit more nuance and drop the binary
judgments we make about say a grandma who's kind and
loving but also votes for someone.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
We hate, So is she good or is she bad?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
Right, very few of us are willing to sit with
the fact of Grandma's both, and so are we.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And that gets to the heart of BRIT's strategy for
disagreeing better. We need to bring some humility to our
own views too.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
I think a lot of us have convinced ourselves that
we can fully exist on the quote unquote right side
of the line. So if someone can be all bad,
then we can be all good, and we can exist
in only right answers, and we can know the formula
and we can have it right, and we know the
right people to follow, we know the right things to repost,
we know the right books to read, and oh my gosh,
(19:56):
I just wipe this one off my brow because I
don't have to worry about ever being bad.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Brit worries that we don't just think we're right right now.
We assume we've always been right and that we always
will be right. It's a bias calls progressive amnesia.
Speaker 6 (20:10):
Progressive amnesia is our ability to conveniently forget a time
before we knew what we know now. We have all
seen a movie that we like love from our childhood.
We rewatch it only to find and we've all said
this phrase before that movie doesn't hold up. And owning
that and experiencing that should give us a different perspective.
Speaker 7 (20:32):
It should change our lens.
Speaker 6 (20:34):
To sort of soften some of that black and white
line we've drawn so firmly.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Noticing just how much our own views have changed can
help us remember that other people have the capacity for
change too. It's a reminder that Britt turns to whenever
she encounters someone she disagrees with.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
I have outgrown so many beliefs I used to firmly
hold right. I believe these fundamentally Christian things. I had
thoughts about women and purity culture. I used to believe
that being gay was a sin, like I bought into that.
Now I can't look at the people who are there
as just like antiquated, prehistoric idiots who don't stand a
(21:11):
chance and they're just dumb and they're bad, when in
reality they're just me.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Fifteen years ago.
Speaker 6 (21:15):
I think there's just a lot of empathy I feel
for people who have only ever been told one story
and now are retelling that story because what else.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Would they know?
Speaker 6 (21:24):
And that doesn't change the work that we have to
do in terms of justice and fighting for equity, but
it should change our approach to the work as we
understand those people in a different way.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
But we don't just need to change the way we
think about people on the other side of political debates.
We also need to change how we act. We actually
need to talk to the people we disagree.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
With, and so talking to people is so wildly important
because that is how we see them as people.
Speaker 7 (21:49):
Again, I think there are a lot of ways in.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
Which human interaction can actually turn the needle quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Because I've experienced that.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
But how do we get those tricky conversations going. We'll
find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break.
Hey Lisa, how's it going?
Speaker 6 (22:13):
Hello?
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Doing well?
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Thank you for having.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Me, No, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 7 (22:17):
I love, love love.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
This is Louisa Santims no relation to Laurie. In fact,
she hails from a different continent than our fearless host.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
I was born in Brazil, and Brazil has an interesting
history because we had a military dictatorship. So my parents
lived through that and I kind of saw their shifting
and their political beliefs.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
Louise's homeland has seen decades of political upheaval and division,
and sadly, those disagreements have driven a painful wedge directly
between members of her closest family.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
My mom and one of my cousins stopped talking until
this day, don't really communicate, and it's been, you know,
ten years, and so that was really shocking for me
to see how something that at times in people's lives
feels abstract can really corrode these very real relationships.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Left Brazil to study psychology in the US, eventually working
with me at Stanford, and quickly realized that the rise
of populist politicians was causing worrying levels of polarization in
both countries.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So I was in college when thewenty sixteen election happened,
and I kind of saw the fabric of both countries
unraveling because of these dynamics, and I became really interested
in if there's anything we could use to help mitigate
some of these effects.
Speaker 5 (23:37):
Louisa became interested in false polarization, the idea that people
simply don't disagree as much as they think. She began
to wonder what was causing us to be so wrong
about the views of others. Louisa gravitated towards an answer.
Study after study showed that, like in her own family,
people don't know what the other side really thinks because
(23:58):
they're unwilling to even talk to them.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
People might see value in it, but they are just
very concerned about how these conversations are going to go
and tend to imagine kind of the worst a breeding
ground for these misperceptions.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And that breeding ground has grown pretty extreme. One recent
experiment found that people will refuse money if it requires
listening to a political opponent. In another study, subjects predicted
that talking to a political opponent would feel about as
bad as getting a tooth pulled, and family members who
spent their Thanksgiving dinners in a town where people voted
differently than they did wound up leaving that holiday meal
(24:33):
fifty minutes earlier than those who wait in communities that
voted more similarly.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
Hold up, LORI wait a minute, you're saying that these
people leave before dessert. They're giving up pie. I mean
pumpkin pie, apple pie. That's an incredible desire to avoid
a conversation if you're willing to give that up.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
So our idea was, can we get everyday people who
disagree on topics that are important for the country to
just sit and have a conversation for twenty minutes and
what are the consequences of that?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
The idea turned into Luisa's PhD dissertation.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
We basically out and asked a bunch of Republicans and
Democrats about their beliefs on three hot button topics. It
was immigration, gun control, and climate change. And we explained
to them that we were trying to have the study
where people would meet over zoom and talk about disagreements
(25:28):
with a person who supported the other party, And then
we asked them to forecast how these conversations were going
to go, So we asked them how pleasant do you
think the conversation will be?
Speaker 7 (25:37):
How productive?
Speaker 4 (25:37):
How much do you think you're going to like the
person on the other side, And a week later we
actually paired people to have conversations.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Louisa's methods seems straightforward enough, but her PhD advisor was
a little worried, more than a little.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
One of our core missions in research, as you know, Laurie,
is not just to find out about people, but to
keep them safe. Louisa and I were terrified that people
would threaten each other, or dox each other, you name it.
We wanted to do everything we could to avoid harm,
so Luisa.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
And Jamille put protections in place to make make sure
that the conversations went smoothly. They added a moderator who
had explicit instructions about what to do if the conversation
went south. The moderator began the conversation by reminding the
participants about the political questions they'd answered before, and explained
that they'd now be having a conversation with someone who
disagreed with their views. The moderator that introduced the first
(26:29):
of two hot fun topics, say gun control, and invited
the strangers to exchange their views.
Speaker 4 (26:35):
And then a moderator would mute themselves and turn their
camera off, and then people will basically have this ten
minute conversation with the stranger that person they just met
on this issue.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Well, I think we need guns because there are a
lot of crazies out there.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
I think the real problem is that there are just
too many crazy people with guns.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
When I first heard about Luisa's study, my initial reaction was, man,
I hope she plaid those poor moderators a lot of money,
because I assumed most conversations would turn into twenty minute
screaming matches. And I wasn't the only one with this prediction.
Luisa recruited a different group of people and asked them
to forecast how many conversations would require moderator intervention.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
And people thought that twenty five percent of conversations would
have to be stopped, when in fact none did.
Speaker 7 (27:25):
I was shocked.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
I did not think that they were gonna love it,
but people.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Did love it. They shared their views civilly and listened
to stories from a complete stranger on the other side
with genuine curiosity.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
My Mom's not guns.
Speaker 5 (27:38):
I mean, she's in her eighties, SAEs it make her
feel safer. I guess I can understand that my sister's
the same way.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
But the most shocking finding came when Luisa asked people
how much they enjoyed the conversation on a scale from
one not at all to one hundred extremely enjoyable.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
The most common response was one hundred out of one hundred.
People thought it was extremely pleasant, that these conversations were
extremely productive, that they found a lot of common ground
with their partner, and that they liked their conversation partner
a lot. And a very common comment at the end
of the survey was that people were shocked by how
(28:18):
well it went and how much they liked the person
they talked to. They even wrote things like I would
love to have this person over for cocktails in dinner,
and you know, they really seemed to connect with one another,
even though they were talking about these frot topics of
political disagreement. And I think it speaks a little bit
to the hunger that people have to find these types
(28:40):
of connections, you know, to kind of feel that there
is common ground out there when everything around.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Us seemed to indicate otherwise.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But why did these conversations go so shockingly well? Luisa
think's part of the success involved the way strangers talked
about their views. Rather than give some lecture aimed at
convincing the other side, most participants just talked about their
lived experience. They told stories about how and why they
came to believe what they did.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
For example, in one of our conversations, this person who
the Republican gun supporter, shared that he's gay, he lives
in an area where he feels very unsafe, and he
has received death threats in the past, and that was
the time where he bought his first gun. So he
kind of shares the story about how he was actually
opposed to guns before and then this setting of being
(29:28):
frightened made him purchase a gun, and nowadays he feels
safer because of that purchase. I feel like stories like
that really shatter kind of preconceived ideas of who that
person on the other side is, and it kind of
opens us up to understanding how a person can disagree
with us, and it might not fully change or believes,
but at least gives insight into the humanity of that
(29:48):
person who believes that.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Luis's conversations involved a rhetorical tactic that we've talked about
before on the Happiness Lab, asking deep questions. Research shows
that people feel more hurt when their conversation partners ask
deep questions and listen to their replies. Hearing a partner's
question can also help us think more carefully about our
own views on a.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
Topic, like sometimes when people ask enough questions, even the
person who was very confident in their beliefs starting out
become a little less confident as it goes on.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Asking questions also helps your conversation partner know that you
really care about their experiences and perspective.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
So I think that sometimes people come to conversations thinking
that the sole goal on the other side is to
persuade you, but actually people are more interested in learning
than we give them credit for.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Louis's study shows that hard political conversations are much more
effective and enjoyable than we think. Her findings about the
power of a quick one on one political dialogue have
made her much more hopeful that we can fight our
polarization and fix the toxic conflict that so many of
us despise.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Most people do not want the world that we currently
live in, and they kind of would like more connection.
Speaker 5 (30:55):
Louise's research is so encouraging and compelling, but has it
fixed the rift between her mother and her cousin.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
I try in private conversations with each of them, and
both of them asked me about each other, you know,
So there's a lot of care there and love, And
I think that like both of them seem when I
talk to them in private, very open to the idea
of it. But no one wants to do the first step.
So I hope I can come back to this podcast
in a few years and say that that conflict has ended.
Speaker 5 (31:25):
This points to a new frontier for Louisa's work. Getting
strangers to be polite to each other is one thing,
but the emotions of a family dynamic are on another
level of challenge, one we hope to explore in the future.
Of course, there are real disagreements in our country and
around the world. There are real violent extremists and bad
(31:45):
faith actors out there, and real threats to our values
and even democracy itself. But our problems only get worse
when we cynically decide that absolutely everyone we disagree with
is awful. The way we see each other now shapes
the future we can imagine together. When we write off
the other side, we give up on things getting any better.
(32:07):
The common ground we could explore it together remains an
undiscovered country. But we don't have to give into this.
The data about what people really want is more accurate
than our assumptions and more hopeful too. By opening our
minds and paying closer attention, we can rediscover the things
most of us want and maybe even start to mend division.
(32:31):
And that new approach probably won't hurt our happiness either.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
In our next episode, in this special season on Finding Hope,
we'll build on what you've heard so far and talk
to people who put their cynicism aside to work with
others to fix the problems our society is facing, and
in doing so made their communities and themselves a lot happier.
Speaker 7 (32:49):
There was no guarantee we were going to be successful.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
If anything, everybody told us all the reasons.
Speaker 7 (32:53):
We would fail, and yet we.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Were willing to try anyways.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
All that next time on the Happiness Lab would be
doctor Laurie Santos and me, doctor jimille Zaki.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
Yes,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's no secret that politics around the world has become
more divided and more toxic. Here in the US, our
political parties seem further apart on key issues than ever before.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Back in the.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Nineteen eighties, Democrats and Republicans reported liking people in their
own party and feeling relatively neutral about folks on the
other side. But today those feelings are much more polarized.
One survey from twenty twenty found that Democrats and Republicans
now dislike their rivals more than they like the people
who share their political views. This level of emotional polarization
(00:52):
is new in American politics, but it's not that surprising
given well, pretty much every screen you look at these days,
cable news, shows, social media sites, emailed attack ads, they
all show us a very extreme version of the other side.
Our opponents aren't just wrong about the policies, they're moral
and out to destroy our nation.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Of brainwashing that's going to the young people right now
is unbelieving.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Now they're inviting the government into their bedroom to tell
any woman what to do with her private parts.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I don't think that's right.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
We're being flooded in by illegal people coming in a
lot of people that vote for certain candidate of voting
against democracy. This level of division, distrust and anger, it
takes a huge toll on us. It's exhausting. I'm Jamil Zaki,
and in my lab at Stanford, we found that more
than eighty percent of Americans on both sides are fed
(01:43):
up with it and wish that the country was less divided.
But if you're convinced that the other side is made
up of terrible, hostile people, there's little hope for things
to get any better.
Speaker 6 (01:52):
They're so annoying, they're come with so money negative. That's
what a Republican come.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
You know, it's always put out there that Republicans are this,
Republicans are that we're racists.
Speaker 7 (02:00):
We don't listen to other people.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
A lot of my family are Republicans, but I'm not
friends with any Republicans.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
But are we right to imagine that everyone on the
other side is just plain awful? And if we're not,
can we fight this polarization and connect with our fellow
citizens across the aisle? Is there any hope that we
even could be less divided?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Our minds are constantly telling us what you to be happy?
What if our minds are wrong? What if our minds
are lying to us, leading us away from what will
really make us happy. The goodness is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me,
doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
And me doctor Jamille Zaki. Amanda, it's great to meet you.
I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Oh, thanks for saying that.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Yeah, I recommend your book for everybody.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Likewise, I've really been enjoying When I.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Was writing Hope for Cynics, I wanted to learn more
about how cynical thinking might worsen polarization. One of the
people who inspired me the most was Amanda Ripley.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I've been a journalist for twenty years and I spent
a lot of time covering conflict. That's part of the job,
and I thought I was pretty good at it. I
thought I understood it pretty well. I thought it was
comfortable with it. And then, you know, six or eight
years ago, I started to feel like things were happening
in the country politically that didn't make sense, and anything
(03:31):
I might do as a journalist was either going to
have no impact or make things worse.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
People have gotten more polarized in the past few decades,
but so is the media. When I was a kid,
not quite in the age of the dinosaurs, TV news
was like the ancient land mass of Pangaea, a single
continent of information on which we all lived. We might
not have shared our views, but at least we shared
a sense of what was going on. But then the
(03:58):
tectonic plates shifted, that single continent of news broke into
pieces that drifted apart. With media companies competing for our attention,
a new business mindel emerged. Instead of trying to get
the most viewers, news channels started cultivating audience loyalty by
feeding people what they wanted to hear twenty four hours
(04:19):
a day. Partisan cable news was born, pumping out divisive
rhetoric and encouraging us to fear and loathe our rivals.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
It's just painful because you can see the ways in
which the places I worked exploited and incited conflict without
anyone knowing it.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
So, according to Amanda, the news wasn't just reflecting polarization,
it was profiting from it. Research suggests this is spreading
cynicism through what's called mean world syndrome. The more people
tune into the news, the worse they think humanity is.
And that makes sense because, in addition to becoming more divisive,
the news has also grown more negative. Since the beginning
(05:02):
of this century, the presence of angry words and headlines
has increased by one hundred percent and the presence of
fear by one hundred and fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Unsurprisingly, none of this makes us happy. Once survey asked
people to complete the following sentence, the news makes me
feel blank the top answers, hopeless, agitated, and despair. What
would your answers be? Amanda was devastated that her industry
was making people miserable. She hated the idea that she
might be contributing to the conflict brewing all around us.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
There are stories I've written or headlines I've approved that
definitely piled on that exploited the conflict in order to
get attention or status or profit.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Amanda wanted to better understand how good journalists wound up
fanning the flames of polarization and what they could do
to break free.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
So I started following people who have been through really
dysfunctional conflict and now are in healthier conflict.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Amanda interviewed rival gang leaders in Chicago. She traveled to
Columbia to learn about that country's civil war. She shadowed
radical environmentalists and even did a deep dive into small
time politics. What she discovered turned into a book, High Conflict,
Why we get trapped, and How we get out.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Conflict is not a problem, right, and we know this
from all of the research into human behavior. The conflict
onto itself can be really important and helpful. The problem
is high conflict or intractable conflict, which becomes kind of
like conflict for conflict's sake.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
So if conflict can be just fine, when does it
turn into a problem. According to Amanda, the first step
is when we draw up rigid battle.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Lines, we literally lose our peripheral vision. We start to
cleanly divide the world into us and them and miss
all the people that don't really fit.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Once we define ourselves as members of a group, we
begin stereotyping the other group as the enemy. Caught in
a zero sum competition, we win only if they lose.
This is when emotional polarization takes over. We begin to
dislike the other side and take pleasure in their suffering,
known as schadenfreude. But it even opens the door to
(07:13):
us finding a justification to hurt them ourselves.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
We know that when people feel like they are better
than another person or another group, when they feel maybe
humiliated by that other person or other group, all of
that makes violent conflict much more likely.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
So this cycle of fear creates hatred and even violence.
It's exhausting and most of us wish it would stop.
Remember that statistic saying eighty percent of us want less division.
But it does help at least one group of people.
Amanda calls them conflict entrepreneurs, So.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
People who exploit or inflame conflict for their own ends.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
We've always had conflict entrepreneurs who earned a living saying
outrageous things in newspapers or on TV. But these days
anyone can engineer conflict and profit from it, reaching millions
of people from the comfort of their own home.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
You know, you can go viral online, as we all know,
with like really cool, inspiring, hopeful, surprising content. You can
absolutely do that, but it's a lot easier to go
viral with like really uninspired and kind of mediocre content
if you can provoke outrage. So we've kind of set
things up to create a golden age for conflict entrepreneurs,
(08:29):
and it's very easy to be one. You can raise
money by being a conflict entrepreneur. You can get attention,
you can get a sense of belonging, you get followers.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You get likes.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
You know, Amanda, it's easy to think about the conflict
entrepreneur as somebody cynical who's trying to make money from
or gain notoriety from their the ideological bomb throwing. But
you're actually saying, sometimes conflict entrepreneurs are looking for what
the rest of us are looking for, community and belonging.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, that's a great way of putting into meal. I mean,
I think certainly profit is maybe the least seductive reward
for conflict entrepreneurs. It's definitely in there.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
But what is money?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Right? Money is often, especially for someone who's been doing
this their whole life, it's a proxy for being loved,
for being respected, for being powerful. Right, So it's a
way for people to feel like they matter.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Mattering it's a core psychological need we all share. We
go back again and again to whatever makes us feel
that way, and conflict, even when it's scary, can make
us feel a sense of purpose, belonging and mattering because
of this it can suck people in, turning any of
us into many conflict entrepreneurs. And once it gets going,
(09:45):
it's also hard to get out of. Once we're in
a state of high conflict, we experience a whole host
of psychological changes. Our thinking becomes oversimplified. If you think
you're smart, your enemy must be dumb. If you're good,
they're bad. If you want one thing, they must want
the exact opposite. But lots of these assumptions are just
(10:06):
plain wrong.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The democratic way it drives me absolute.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I can't tell you how many terrorists are actually coming
into our country right now.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
I think their Republicans is very hard paper.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
Democrats are real stupid, and they don't know much, and they.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Better than everyone.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
At least in the US. Political groups are wrong about
each other in almost every way we can measure. We
don't know what people on the other side are like,
even at a basic level. For example, Democrats tend to
think that Republicans are super rich. When asked how many
Republicans have a salary of over two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars a year, Democrats, on average guess around forty
(10:46):
four percent.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I think the real number Epison like twelve percent.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
I don't want to correct, Amanda, but the actual statistic
is two percent.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
See even I just did it.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
I just did the same mistake.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
The right gets the left wrong too. When Republicans are
asked how many Democrats identify as LGBTQ, they assumed it
was around thirty eight percent, the actual proportion six percent.
We don't know who the other side is or what
they think. This is called false polarization. Of course, we
are polarized, but these divisions are larger in our minds
(11:21):
than in reality. Both Democrats and Republicans report that the
average person they disagree with is much more extreme than
they really are, and it gets worse. We also think
our average rival is about twice as hateful as they
really are.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
We kind of caricature each other, or rather, I should say,
conflict entrepreneurs caricature each other, and then we believe these things,
especially when we're really segregated like we are right now.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
The good news is there is way more common ground
in our political landscape than we realize. Most of us
agree on at least some issues, and almost all of
us share certain values. Most Americans want peace and democracy.
The bad news is that conflict. Entrepreneurs convince us that
people on the other side are awful, so we avoid
talking with them, even when the those conversations might help
(12:10):
us become less wrong. What's worse, we end up thinking
that we need to escalate conflict even though almost no
one wants to. This feeds even more division. An exhausted
majority wishes things could be different, but feels incorrectly that
they're alone.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I think people are getting really tired of it, but
they also feel totally trapped. We know this doesn't feel right.
I think we all know that something is wrong in
our culture, in our politics, and that we need to
do better. I think there's huge unmet demand for a
different way to do politics, a different way to do journalism,
(12:46):
different way to fight.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Is there hope that we can find a way out
of high conflict. Well, after the break, we'll meet someone
who's had to diffuse lots of polarizing situations and open
a type of dialogue not where we agree, but where
we can still see each other's humanity and common goals.
Even with our families.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Half my families Republicans. It always makes for a great thanksgeving.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
It out more on that when the happiness lab returns
in a moment.
Speaker 7 (13:24):
A lot of people surprise us, both good and bad.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Britt Baron tries not to see the world in black
and white. Instead, she's a self proclaimed master of nuance.
Speaker 6 (13:34):
You know traditional cartoon Disney. They're just a good guy,
there's a bad guy. You want the good guy to win.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That is it. That is the entire story. And so
we have this.
Speaker 6 (13:44):
Idea in our mind that things are that clean and
that things can be that clean.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But BRIT's own identities never fit cleanly into simple categories.
Speaker 7 (13:53):
I grew up in the Evangelical church.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
My parents were both very committed, and so that identity
I actually shaped a lot of decisions I made, schools,
I went to things I was a part of.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
But growing up as a black woman in these predominantly
white religious spaces was I to achieve a sense of belonging.
Britt wound up embracing some strong fundamentalist beliefs, like the
idea that homosexuality is a sin and that girls need
to save themselves for marriage.
Speaker 6 (14:20):
I think when I was like twelve or something, I
was in this youth group and the youth pastor passed
around a glass of water and everyone spit in the water,
and in the end he said, would anyone want to
drink this?
Speaker 7 (14:31):
This is what happens every time you sleep with someone.
This is what's happening.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
I mean even now saying that, I'm like, you know,
throwing up in my mouth. But yeah, I carried all
these stories and then I passed these stories on.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Britt was a dynamic speaker. She quickly rose through the
leadership breaks of her mostly white congregation, and I.
Speaker 6 (14:49):
Found myself at a very young age of twenty six
being a pastor at a megachurch.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Things were going smoothly until Britt and the church's creative director, Sammy,
fell in love.
Speaker 6 (14:59):
And so that is where I feel like I had
a decision to make.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Sammy is not the sort of person that Britt expected
to fall for. Sammy is a woman, and Britt had
spent her career preaching that same sex relationships were evil.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
I struggled a lot with feeling like this seems like
a good thing, but what if it's bad?
Speaker 7 (15:17):
What if this is a trick? What if you know,
the devil tricking you know?
Speaker 6 (15:20):
I mean, I was like so deeply in this religion
called you know, what if you want to call it.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
I was so deep in it.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Eventually, Britt and Sammy decided to declare their love openly
and came out to their church community.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
I thought we would lose our jobs, which we both did.
Speaker 6 (15:33):
I thought that we would get weird messages on the internet,
and we did.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Britta and Sammy lost much of the community they'd built
over decades. Many of BRIT's friends were so steeped in
binary thinking they simply couldn't accept that their former friends
had become a loving couple.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
We got engaged not too long after coming out, and
there were three people, some of our closest friends in life,
who we asked to be in our wedding, who eventually
said this sort of stands against what they believe in.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
They're not able to participate.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
In with this.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The experience was devastating, but it got Brit thinking could
people who DRIs agreed so deeply on key issues ever
find a way to connect. She dedicated the next stages
of her career to helping people start meaningful dialogue to
see beyond their usual black and white views. I first
learned about BRIT's work through her book Do You Still
Talk to Grandma? When the problematic people in our lives
(16:25):
are the ones we love.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
I was at dinner with a group of friends and
one of our friends was saying, oh, yeah, my grandma
voted for Trump, And someone else was like, do you
still talk to her? And she was like my nana,
And I was like, oh my gosh, are we cancling Grandma's?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Like?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Are we saying?
Speaker 6 (16:42):
It's too hard for me to sit in any gray?
So I am just going to talk to people with
whom I'm on the same page.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Britt argues that we'd all be happier if we found
ways to disagree more agreeably.
Speaker 6 (16:55):
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot
of us are actually looking for a way to disagree
and still be in relationships with each other.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
But to do that, we need to recognize that we
actually agree with the vast majority of people more than
our lying minds think. False polarization is just that false.
Take the US for example. Did you know that seventy
two percent of Americans think that climate change is happening
and agree we should take action, Or that more than
eighty percent of Americans believe that racism is a problem
(17:27):
we need to address. Over eighty percent of our fellow
citizens agree we should be fighting for a free press,
for freedom of speech, and for reasonable gun control measures
like background checks. Ninety percent of Americans support everyone's right
to a fair vote. Those stats make it clear we
actually see eye to eye on way more of the
(17:48):
fundamentals than we think.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
If we can agree on the what, then we don't
necessarily have to agree.
Speaker 7 (17:53):
On the how.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
The problem is that we don't realize how aligned we
really are. But what would happen if we did realize
if we corrected our mistaken intuitions and developed a more
accurate view of what people on the other side actually believe.
That's what Stanford's sociologist Rob Willer and his colleagues tested.
They brought Democrats and Republicans into the lab and asked them,
(18:17):
how much do you feel it's justified for your party
to use violence to advance political goals. He then had
the same people predict what the other side would answered.
Willer found that each side overestimated the other's approval of
violence by nearly three hundred percent three hundred percent. But
Willer and his colleagues didn't stop there. They showed a
(18:38):
different group of people how big the usual overestimate was.
They explained just how off the average person was in
their predictions about the other side and what happened while
those new participants corrected their beliefs about the other side's
violent tendencies, and maybe more importantly, their own support for
political violence went down. Simply correcting our inaccurate perceptions of
(19:02):
our rivals can help us dial back our willingness to
strike preemptively. It can make us seek more peace.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Brit thinks that results like these prove that we need
to embrace a bit more nuance and drop the binary
judgments we make about say a grandma who's kind and
loving but also votes for someone.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
We hate, So is she good or is she bad?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
Right, very few of us are willing to sit with
the fact of Grandma's both, and so are we.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And that gets to the heart of BRIT's strategy for
disagreeing better. We need to bring some humility to our
own views too.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
I think a lot of us have convinced ourselves that
we can fully exist on the quote unquote right side
of the line. So if someone can be all bad,
then we can be all good, and we can exist
in only right answers, and we can know the formula
and we can have it right, and we know the
right people to follow, we know the right things to repost,
we know the right books to read, and oh my gosh,
(19:56):
I just wipe this one off my brow because I
don't have to worry about ever being bad.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Brit worries that we don't just think we're right right now.
We assume we've always been right and that we always
will be right. It's a bias calls progressive amnesia.
Speaker 6 (20:10):
Progressive amnesia is our ability to conveniently forget a time
before we knew what we know now. We have all
seen a movie that we like love from our childhood.
We rewatch it only to find and we've all said
this phrase before that movie doesn't hold up. And owning
that and experiencing that should give us a different perspective.
Speaker 7 (20:32):
It should change our lens.
Speaker 6 (20:34):
To sort of soften some of that black and white
line we've drawn so firmly.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Noticing just how much our own views have changed can
help us remember that other people have the capacity for
change too. It's a reminder that Britt turns to whenever
she encounters someone she disagrees with.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
I have outgrown so many beliefs I used to firmly
hold right. I believe these fundamentally Christian things. I had
thoughts about women and purity culture. I used to believe
that being gay was a sin, like I bought into that.
Now I can't look at the people who are there
as just like antiquated, prehistoric idiots who don't stand a
(21:11):
chance and they're just dumb and they're bad, when in
reality they're just me.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Fifteen years ago.
Speaker 6 (21:15):
I think there's just a lot of empathy I feel
for people who have only ever been told one story
and now are retelling that story because what else.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Would they know?
Speaker 6 (21:24):
And that doesn't change the work that we have to
do in terms of justice and fighting for equity, but
it should change our approach to the work as we
understand those people in a different way.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
But we don't just need to change the way we
think about people on the other side of political debates.
We also need to change how we act. We actually
need to talk to the people we disagree.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
With, and so talking to people is so wildly important
because that is how we see them as people.
Speaker 7 (21:49):
Again, I think there are a lot of ways in.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
Which human interaction can actually turn the needle quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Because I've experienced that.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
But how do we get those tricky conversations going. We'll
find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break.
Hey Lisa, how's it going?
Speaker 6 (22:13):
Hello?
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Doing well?
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Thank you for having.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Me, No, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 7 (22:17):
I love, love love.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
This is Louisa Santims no relation to Laurie. In fact,
she hails from a different continent than our fearless host.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
I was born in Brazil, and Brazil has an interesting
history because we had a military dictatorship. So my parents
lived through that and I kind of saw their shifting
and their political beliefs.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
Louise's homeland has seen decades of political upheaval and division,
and sadly, those disagreements have driven a painful wedge directly
between members of her closest family.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
My mom and one of my cousins stopped talking until
this day, don't really communicate, and it's been, you know,
ten years, and so that was really shocking for me
to see how something that at times in people's lives
feels abstract can really corrode these very real relationships.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Left Brazil to study psychology in the US, eventually working
with me at Stanford, and quickly realized that the rise
of populist politicians was causing worrying levels of polarization in
both countries.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So I was in college when thewenty sixteen election happened,
and I kind of saw the fabric of both countries
unraveling because of these dynamics, and I became really interested
in if there's anything we could use to help mitigate
some of these effects.
Speaker 5 (23:37):
Louisa became interested in false polarization, the idea that people
simply don't disagree as much as they think. She began
to wonder what was causing us to be so wrong
about the views of others. Louisa gravitated towards an answer.
Study after study showed that, like in her own family,
people don't know what the other side really thinks because
(23:58):
they're unwilling to even talk to them.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
People might see value in it, but they are just
very concerned about how these conversations are going to go
and tend to imagine kind of the worst a breeding
ground for these misperceptions.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And that breeding ground has grown pretty extreme. One recent
experiment found that people will refuse money if it requires
listening to a political opponent. In another study, subjects predicted
that talking to a political opponent would feel about as
bad as getting a tooth pulled, and family members who
spent their Thanksgiving dinners in a town where people voted
differently than they did wound up leaving that holiday meal
(24:33):
fifty minutes earlier than those who wait in communities that
voted more similarly.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
Hold up, LORI wait a minute, you're saying that these
people leave before dessert. They're giving up pie. I mean
pumpkin pie, apple pie. That's an incredible desire to avoid
a conversation if you're willing to give that up.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
So our idea was, can we get everyday people who
disagree on topics that are important for the country to
just sit and have a conversation for twenty minutes and
what are the consequences of that?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
The idea turned into Luisa's PhD dissertation.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
We basically out and asked a bunch of Republicans and
Democrats about their beliefs on three hot button topics. It
was immigration, gun control, and climate change. And we explained
to them that we were trying to have the study
where people would meet over zoom and talk about disagreements
(25:28):
with a person who supported the other party, And then
we asked them to forecast how these conversations were going
to go, So we asked them how pleasant do you
think the conversation will be?
Speaker 7 (25:37):
How productive?
Speaker 4 (25:37):
How much do you think you're going to like the
person on the other side, And a week later we
actually paired people to have conversations.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Louisa's methods seems straightforward enough, but her PhD advisor was
a little worried, more than a little.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
One of our core missions in research, as you know, Laurie,
is not just to find out about people, but to
keep them safe. Louisa and I were terrified that people
would threaten each other, or dox each other, you name it.
We wanted to do everything we could to avoid harm,
so Luisa.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
And Jamille put protections in place to make make sure
that the conversations went smoothly. They added a moderator who
had explicit instructions about what to do if the conversation
went south. The moderator began the conversation by reminding the
participants about the political questions they'd answered before, and explained
that they'd now be having a conversation with someone who
disagreed with their views. The moderator that introduced the first
(26:29):
of two hot fun topics, say gun control, and invited
the strangers to exchange their views.
Speaker 4 (26:35):
And then a moderator would mute themselves and turn their
camera off, and then people will basically have this ten
minute conversation with the stranger that person they just met
on this issue.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Well, I think we need guns because there are a
lot of crazies out there.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
I think the real problem is that there are just
too many crazy people with guns.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
When I first heard about Luisa's study, my initial reaction was, man,
I hope she plaid those poor moderators a lot of money,
because I assumed most conversations would turn into twenty minute
screaming matches. And I wasn't the only one with this prediction.
Luisa recruited a different group of people and asked them
to forecast how many conversations would require moderator intervention.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
And people thought that twenty five percent of conversations would
have to be stopped, when in fact none did.
Speaker 7 (27:25):
I was shocked.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
I did not think that they were gonna love it,
but people.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Did love it. They shared their views civilly and listened
to stories from a complete stranger on the other side
with genuine curiosity.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
My Mom's not guns.
Speaker 5 (27:38):
I mean, she's in her eighties, SAEs it make her
feel safer. I guess I can understand that my sister's
the same way.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
But the most shocking finding came when Luisa asked people
how much they enjoyed the conversation on a scale from
one not at all to one hundred extremely enjoyable.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
The most common response was one hundred out of one hundred.
People thought it was extremely pleasant, that these conversations were
extremely productive, that they found a lot of common ground
with their partner, and that they liked their conversation partner
a lot. And a very common comment at the end
of the survey was that people were shocked by how
(28:18):
well it went and how much they liked the person
they talked to. They even wrote things like I would
love to have this person over for cocktails in dinner,
and you know, they really seemed to connect with one another,
even though they were talking about these frot topics of
political disagreement. And I think it speaks a little bit
to the hunger that people have to find these types
(28:40):
of connections, you know, to kind of feel that there
is common ground out there when everything around.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Us seemed to indicate otherwise.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But why did these conversations go so shockingly well? Luisa
think's part of the success involved the way strangers talked
about their views. Rather than give some lecture aimed at
convincing the other side, most participants just talked about their
lived experience. They told stories about how and why they
came to believe what they did.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
For example, in one of our conversations, this person who
the Republican gun supporter, shared that he's gay, he lives
in an area where he feels very unsafe, and he
has received death threats in the past, and that was
the time where he bought his first gun. So he
kind of shares the story about how he was actually
opposed to guns before and then this setting of being
(29:28):
frightened made him purchase a gun, and nowadays he feels
safer because of that purchase. I feel like stories like
that really shatter kind of preconceived ideas of who that
person on the other side is, and it kind of
opens us up to understanding how a person can disagree
with us, and it might not fully change or believes,
but at least gives insight into the humanity of that
(29:48):
person who believes that.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Luis's conversations involved a rhetorical tactic that we've talked about
before on the Happiness Lab, asking deep questions. Research shows
that people feel more hurt when their conversation partners ask
deep questions and listen to their replies. Hearing a partner's
question can also help us think more carefully about our
own views on a.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
Topic, like sometimes when people ask enough questions, even the
person who was very confident in their beliefs starting out
become a little less confident as it goes on.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Asking questions also helps your conversation partner know that you
really care about their experiences and perspective.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
So I think that sometimes people come to conversations thinking
that the sole goal on the other side is to
persuade you, but actually people are more interested in learning
than we give them credit for.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Louis's study shows that hard political conversations are much more
effective and enjoyable than we think. Her findings about the
power of a quick one on one political dialogue have
made her much more hopeful that we can fight our
polarization and fix the toxic conflict that so many of
us despise.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Most people do not want the world that we currently
live in, and they kind of would like more connection.
Speaker 5 (30:55):
Louise's research is so encouraging and compelling, but has it
fixed the rift between her mother and her cousin.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
I try in private conversations with each of them, and
both of them asked me about each other, you know,
So there's a lot of care there and love, And
I think that like both of them seem when I
talk to them in private, very open to the idea
of it. But no one wants to do the first step.
So I hope I can come back to this podcast
in a few years and say that that conflict has ended.
Speaker 5 (31:25):
This points to a new frontier for Louisa's work. Getting
strangers to be polite to each other is one thing,
but the emotions of a family dynamic are on another
level of challenge, one we hope to explore in the future.
Of course, there are real disagreements in our country and
around the world. There are real violent extremists and bad
(31:45):
faith actors out there, and real threats to our values
and even democracy itself. But our problems only get worse
when we cynically decide that absolutely everyone we disagree with
is awful. The way we see each other now shapes
the future we can imagine together. When we write off
the other side, we give up on things getting any better.
(32:07):
The common ground we could explore it together remains an
undiscovered country. But we don't have to give into this.
The data about what people really want is more accurate
than our assumptions and more hopeful too. By opening our
minds and paying closer attention, we can rediscover the things
most of us want and maybe even start to mend division.
(32:31):
And that new approach probably won't hurt our happiness either.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
In our next episode, in this special season on Finding Hope,
we'll build on what you've heard so far and talk
to people who put their cynicism aside to work with
others to fix the problems our society is facing, and
in doing so made their communities and themselves a lot happier.
Speaker 7 (32:49):
There was no guarantee we were going to be successful.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
If anything, everybody told us all the reasons.
Speaker 7 (32:53):
We would fail, and yet we.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Were willing to try anyways.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
All that next time on the Happiness Lab would be
doctor Laurie Santos and me, doctor jimille Zaki.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
Yes,
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