February 10, 2025 • 38 mins
In this episode, we talk with James Coan, Co-Founder and Executive Director of More Like US, a national organization that seeks to correct political misperceptions – helping people see that we’re not really as different as we sometimes think we are. Coan says the goal of More Like US is to help increase the scale of bridging efforts.
For more information and to check out the lesson plans and other resources, go to MoreLikeUS.org.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
We've got to stand together on common ground.
(00:08):
We've got to be together before we all fall down.
Welcome to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different.
Moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
(00:29):
In this episode, we talk with James Coan, co-founder and executive director of More Like Us,
a national organization that seeks to correct political misperceptions,
helping people see we're not really as different as we sometimes think we are.
Coan says the goal of More Like Us is to help bring scale to bridging efforts.
(00:50):
Okay, so the first thing I want to do is kind of jump in and do the civity thing right away and ask you, why do you do what you do?
And I can share first if you want. I was a journalist and now I teach journalism and podcasting and media.
And I do what I do because I love sharing information so that people have what they need to work with each other in communities and solve problems.
(01:14):
And I thought it was through journalism and I thought it might be through education.
And now I think it's through bridging in civity and relationship building.
But that's been my sort of thing. And I do that because I love making connections. I love people.
I love to see people connect and build those communities. So that's why I do what I do. How about you?
My interest in this field starts with the 2016 election. I was concerned my country was tearing itself apart.
(01:39):
I was trying to figure out what I thought was wrong and what I could do about it.
And that's led to an ish year journey, which brings me here today.
This may sound like a dumb question because I too felt the exact same way in 2016.
But why did it matter to you? Why do you think that mattered so much to you that it led you to more like us?
(02:00):
Concerned about the future of the country. I mean, when there are at least perceived intense divisions,
this will be a repeated topic today. What is real and what is perceived?
There are real risks of our system of government collapsing and or political violence, neither of which is a desirable outcome.
(02:26):
And I will try to do what I can to prevent either of those from occurring.
I think a lot of people feel the way you feel. And now, again, we're in it and it feels more intense and heightened.
Why do you think you did something about it in this way?
To me, my life can be described in kind of like two lightning bolts.
Sometimes people have to figure out what interests them. What do they like to do?
(02:51):
For me, it just kind of slaps me across the face. So the first one was at 16.
I took a class in high school to design a car.
And it led to my education career for 15 years in the field of energy.
And then the next one was in 2016 when we have our system of government.
(03:18):
We have representatives or we have freedoms.
And now suddenly are some of these under threat. And what could we do about it?
And so I was very happy because I had a career that I generally liked.
So I was trying to find ways to volunteer in the existing field.
(03:40):
A couple of years ago, I just realized the only way forward was to create something different.
I thought the only way to scale was to do something that wasn't already being done in the field.
But yeah, right. The compulsion intensity is just there.
(04:01):
And it seems like the morally right thing to do. So there's no reason to stop that intensity.
And so really in terms of my life, mostly I have to come up with boundaries when I will not work on this.
Because the intensity would just keep going and going.
It will energize or bunny. I just have to accept that that's who I am and issues that I care about.
(04:29):
And then try to be as useful as possible with these topics.
You were looking in the field, looking for ways to volunteer and didn't.
Sounds like you didn't quite see exactly what you wanted to see. And so you developed More Like Us.
So I'd love to hear about More Like Us.
I'd love to hear about what led you to exactly what More Like Us is and how More Like Us fits into this field of bridging.
(04:51):
What do you do specifically?
More Like Us corrects dangerous political misperceptions that Americans have of each other at scale.
There's quite a bit of research that shows that, yes, there are some divisions in this country who do not want to deny that.
But they're often perceived to be larger than they really are.
(05:15):
And there's quite a bit of academic research suggesting that correcting these misperceptions would be quite fruitful in a number of ways.
But there really is not another organization that is dedicated to directly closing the misperceptions.
So right there are a lot of groups. I don't know if we want to call Siviti one of them, that emphasize interpersonal communication, dialogue, deliberation, however we want to describe it.
(05:44):
And there are a few organizations that do the underlying research that show these misperceptions, but then they more or less stick with the research and they don't do a tremendous amount of outreach.
And so to me, I was a business consultant for more than a decade, focused on energy, but I could use those skills for this.
And to me, sort of be called a white space opportunity. If no one else is going there, then why not us?
(06:12):
Very cool. And I love the idea of getting into the space to correct misperceptions.
Talk to me a little bit about how More Like Us is thinking about the social media ecosystem. How are you dealing with that or thinking about that?
One of the resources that More Like Us has is a lesson plan about this perception gap.
So for secondary students, particularly high schoolers, but also can be used for college students and adults.
(06:37):
And as part of this, we not only cover various examples of the perception gap, but also causes, consequences, and potential solutions.
And when it comes to causes, we think about various perverse incentives.
And so there are perverse incentives in social media, but also news media, electoral systems, and even among fellow nonprofits.
(07:01):
And that the way to get attention, clicks, ultimately dollars, is usually by being very dramatic, focusing on outrage, activating people's identities, dividing, talking in us versus them terms.
And that is counter to what Civity or More Like Us would prefer. But if that's what pays, then people are going to do this.
(07:33):
So I just consider social media to be one of those elements.
And I'm going to write some in a publication called The Fulcrum. And there's an article that I wrote last summer about adding trust and subtracting factors that diminish it.
(07:54):
More Like Us right now is focused mostly on adding what would be called horizontal trust.
Think of two roughly equal groups, Democrats, Republicans, increasing trust among them, but there's also vertical trust.
And then on the negative side, on the subtraction side, there is dissuading people from making things worse and disincentivizing.
(08:17):
I think the work Civity does and the work More Like Us does is critically important.
But I appreciate that you're sort of tailoring the space that you think More Like Us needs to be in.
You mentioned going in and talking to students. And I think that's a lovely place to be because, yes, they're getting ideas on social media and they walk into the room with some biases or perceptions or misperceptions or whatever the case may be.
(08:38):
But they're potentially able to still hear and listen.
And I think some people, especially in this sort of ultra-polar or I'm sorry, perceived polarized tribal context that we find ourselves living, that I might cling to my idea or might cling to my misperception because it ties me to this group that I think I'm a part of.
(09:01):
It does More Like Us have a way to help people sort of let go of the clinging to that idea to sort of be in the room with each other.
Thankfully, the share of Americans that have ideological perspectives that are kind of on the extremes is relatively small.
So both a group that is very involved in this space called More In Common that we're very close with and also Pew Research Center have developed these political typologies, seven or nine categories.
(09:32):
And in both cases, there's only about 15% of Americans who actually fit into the farthest most left category or the farthest more right combined.
So 85%, somewhere in the middle to be fewer people who are probably clinging to these identities that tightly.
Unfortunately, those 15% tend to be the loudest and the wealthiest, most connected.
(09:58):
So they just get a disproportionate kind of share of airtime in this.
Now, So More Like Us has three main resources at the moment. So there's this lesson plan.
Then we have something with all sides called Similarity Hub. We've aggregated hundreds of individual data points from surveys from places like Gallup and Pew and More In Common that show either overlaps between Democrats and Republicans,
(10:27):
at least 50% of Democrats and Republicans agreeing on a topic, or a super majority, at least 70% of Americans that agree, and we have it for more than 20 different topics, more than 400 data points.
And then we have some guidance for content creators for how to portray people across the political spectrum in a better and more accurate light.
(10:51):
More Like Us focuses greatly on breadth, rather than depth.
So, from all of these, it's reaching people where they are and asking almost nothing of them, sometimes absolutely nothing of them, right. So students are in a classroom, the information can go to them.
(11:13):
If people are already watching news or reading it, we have a relationship with a professor and then another nonprofit to test the use of Similarity Hub in newspaper articles.
So if a newspaper article on a contentious topic points out a data point or two that says actually there's some overlap here, right, we don't even have to find common ground, we've already found it like 400 times, just share it.
(11:44):
And then in the arts, right, when people are just watching Netflix or like watching something on YouTube, right.
We try to reach people where they are and ask essentially nothing of them to change the media information environment that people are in.
And I think it's an empirical question, how effective that is for someone who may have more ideologically extreme or more intensely negative feelings and attitudes toward those in the other party compared to people who are more moderate, but at least the research that I know does not suggest that people are like unreachable.
(12:27):
More in common did do a test, they call it the journey of persuasion. So not just showing people these numbers that show that we're more similar than we tend to realize, but showing people kind of going through this process of first being like, oh, they're totally different and then seeing how they kind of change and seeing how someone on the other side seems more reasonable than they thought.
And when they broke it down by their different kind of typologies, it's called hidden tribes in their case, and they also more liberal, more conservative.
(12:58):
I don't recall the finding being that the people on the extremes didn't move. So, as far as we can tell that they do move but knowing in this, maybe compared with civity, right, it's not just like a one shot thing.
It's more like an advertising model, where you got to get the information again and again and again. And that's where we're trying to hit people from all these different angles.
(13:22):
That's amazing. I love that because you're right civity is sort of this, we're the conversation before the conversation before we do any of that let's sit down and have this conversation, so that there's a little bit of trust between us a little bit of relationality.
And then I love that you're bringing people in to really think about where do we stand, I will never say that we're more similar than different. I don't know what the numerator would be what would the denominator would be, we can say we're more similar
(13:45):
than we tend to realize, and certainly we're more similar than the kind of parties and people in general are portrayed.
So, unfortunately, right, a result from more in common was that people, you know this is five, six years old at this point, but people who read the news more, the more news they read, the more distorted their views were of those in the other party which is exactly the opposite of what we'd hope to be the case.
(14:11):
Right, exactly, exactly. Do you have any anecdotes that you'd like to share that you can share about, about work with more like us about the people that have engaged with it?
More like us, we are still in relatively early days. So there has been some piloting of the lesson plan, if you're a teacher and listening to this.
(14:34):
We are working with Georgetown University and we would love for you to pilot the perception gap lesson plan that we have. It was quite an experience for me, I am not a teacher.
But suddenly I was put in front of a couple of high school classes, and right having to explain perception gap to students of different levels of interest.
(15:00):
I have had some really good experiences. I led a, it was an event over the summer 40, 50 high schoolers attended, and for the lesson plan. I just kind of stopped and before each section over causes and consequences and solutions I asked the students, what they thought
(15:24):
the causes were and what they thought the consequences were of perception gaps. They did a very good job of thinking through a lot of them.
You mentioned you're not dealing with differentials of power right now that you're looking at sort of equal, but what do you think the role of more like us could be in disrupting power differentials and polarization in that way?
(15:45):
At least when we think of power differentials, I mean so vertical trust. Some of this is institutional. So, trust in institutions that are seen as leaning one way or another so Hollywood and evangelical churches would be extreme examples, for instance, of an institution where one, many more liberal one, one more conservative, and increasing trust in them among those in kind of the opposite parts of the world.
(16:14):
The opposite party, the other other ideological persuasion, and then there is a less clear aspect of status and respect or positioning in society gets into resentment and contempt and things like that.
(16:35):
So, listening to This is Civity, I'm Gina Baleria. We're talking with James Coan of More Like Us about how to scale efforts to correct political misperceptions.
One of the onus is on the institutions themselves to make sure that perception reality again, so some of it is them speaking in ways that are aligned with how maybe those in the other kind of party would would think but also giving people roles and listening.
(17:12):
So, there are some political divisions but obviously there are educational divides in terms of voting behavior.
Then, status in society is a really fascinating one.
I talked to a professor, very liberal guy who was open with the Trump campaign in 2020 and said I'm going to volunteer for you for five months, and then write this ethnographic account.
(17:43):
And in this ethnographic account, a lot of it was real and perceived status loss.
How does that get addressed? I think there can be commonalities found about how we want to approach the larger system together, rather than divisions amongst whatever, in this case education level, you know what I mean?
(18:04):
Like whatever the case may be, I think you're hitting on something interesting there because if we would just come together and check, we'd see we actually having the same experience from a different space.
It's this idea that I think more like us and in a different way, civity, when you bring people together in a relationship or to see, you know, that their perceptions may indeed be perceptions and not reality, that we can then start thinking about things differently together.
(18:31):
So, you know, wherever you fall on a specific idea, bringing people together and enlightening and taking them through these exercises can be super helpful.
I feel like this, again, focuses so much on scale. There's two main ways to have a view of another group.
Personal interaction or information environment. That was not really or. I mean, right, it's a combination of the two. And so for some groups, there would be a lot of personal interaction.
(19:02):
For other groups, there would be very little interaction. And right in a place I live in DC, right, it is very easy to write like only encounter other people with four year degrees.
When we think about millions and and think about relative positions and society, it is an open question to me, the extent to which conversations can do it. I've just been concerned from the last eight years of being in this field, where I do not see
(19:37):
scale being really possible through conversation. A more like us approach that, you know, one area that we can go into is like helping organizations that are already there, you know, already trying to increase trust across the political spectrum,
and helping them to scale. I think in many cases that can come through misperceptions which can be nice precursors so people don't have so much anxiety about having conversations and developing relationships and have more motivation to do it.
(20:11):
If the goal is also like the skills of having conversation, like what is the stop drop and roll that people can just memorize, and it can be communicated to many, again, right with a focus on breadth over depth, not to say that normatively one is better than another,
but we have kind of, you know, put our stake in the ground that we're on the breadth side. Yes, no and I appreciate that. Civity, we were part of Rob Willard's Stanford Strengthening a Democracy study, which we love.
(20:40):
And we came with this little eight minute intervention that it's a bit of scale. But I think someone who's thinking intentionally and consistently a long term about scale is needed. And so it's wonderful that more like us is here to help with that.
I'm glad you're thinking about scale and you're right, it needs to be a part of this conversation. So I want to reincorporate the civity idea. We always have those two questions we ask.
(21:03):
So I want to ask you something surprising about you that people don't know as a way to engage more deeply in relationship a little bit.
I like to dance.
What kind of dance?
Do something called blues dancing occasionally, as partnered. But I played in a jazz band in high school. I was also more of kind of like a longer sprinter in track.
(21:27):
So if I can move quickly and I can improvise and have some kind of rhythm, very creative, never know what's coming next. Dancing.
So that's the random thing. How does that relate to this? You know, I have all these kind of like different ways of thinking about things.
So it's sort of like, okay, I have this context. Instead of a song, I guess it's like academic research and political environment that we're in. And then try to keep playing with this and constantly try to be creative.
(22:03):
You know, to make something that is hopefully memorable and effective. But I guess this flexibility, hopefully, that comes through immediately through dancing or over long term process of hit and miss attempts after attempts, just kind of constant improvement to get to some kind of more polished result that hopefully has some kind of effect.
(22:31):
Oh my gosh. First of all, I also do. I swing dance and I love it so much. And I feel that I apply just the same lessons that you apply to like dancing through whatever I'm doing and like responding.
And I love how you applied that so easily to the work you're doing. That's so awesome. So tell me what you're most proud of in your work with More Like Us.
Again, it's pretty early days. At some level, right, it's getting to a point of plausibility. But when we're talking about a large country, you know, over 300 million people and how to potentially scale, having anything that I've considered to be plausible to reach enough people, right?
(23:11):
I just haven't really seen it. So to feel that we're at all on this path with our few resources, I think is good. And one thing I haven't talked about, I do think that we're able to be quite flexible as the research changes.
So in 2024, I kept kind of encountering research that suggested that threat was a really big issue, right? If we misperceive how threatening those in the other party, right?
(23:43):
You know, okay, there's all sorts of misperceptions, but it's not just like, you know, pick a misperception out of the hat and like, you know, that's this magical thing, right? Right, different misperceptions have different impacts to different groups of people, but it seems like threat is particularly important.
And like, being able to kind of pivot, which obviously is easier early in the creation of an organization toward trying to reduce this overblown threat, this over threat, you might call it, which relates to under trust, you know, too little trust in each other, I think has been cool and right to be able to keep pivoting or going from song to song.
(24:27):
Continue the dancing analogy, right? Yes, for sure. Is there anything else you want to add about why you see more like us or how you see more like us as important in this moment? More like us having a potential to scale, to change attitudes.
Because we haven't talked too much about the strengthening democracy challenge. Civity did very well in it. Congratulations. There were three interventions that achieved all three main goals that the researchers were looking for to reduce partisan animosity, sometimes known as affective polarization, but also to reduce support for breaking democratic norms and supporting political violence.
(25:10):
Two of those three explicitly focused on misperceptions and even that misperceptions of threat. So meta dehumanization, we think they think we're monkeys, but they don't.
And then this other overestimating the willingness of those in the other party to break democratic norms in terms of trying to impact the issues that matter at scale. I think that's very important. More like us, there's a good chance that a lot of our utility will come from helping organizations that are already in this space or other entities that want to do something like a college or university.
(25:53):
How do they have impact, again, at scale? And even a university, scale is tricky because, okay, you can have a dialogue, 20 students might show up, but if there's a campus of 10,000 students, how does one reach so many? And correcting misperceptions has this nice benefit that in theory, the misperception change can be relatively brief.
(26:21):
And so therefore can be put in all sorts of different packages, emails, signs on campus, right? The social norms campaign that we're talking about with some other organizations that, right, almost all or at least a large share of the students can become aware of something.
(26:43):
They can also become aware of a statement like, it'd be good to talk to someone who's different. I never want to presuppose difference. Someone who might think is very different and realize that in many cases they're not quite as different, not as threatening, you might imagine.
It makes me feel, I mean, one, that Civity and More Like Us could have a nice sort of partnership in space, you know, of people doing the work. When you talk about perceived perceptions of difference and having people engage with your materials and what More Like Us does and then move on into the world, what I found with my study was these ideas of feeling more comfortable engaging across unknowns or differences persisted.
(27:22):
And so my students were like, you know, I did that and it wasn't scary at all. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it. I'm totally more likely to actively reach across an unknown again.
Like they actually, and this was a small, you know, just a handful of students, but this idea of it wasn't just that one time and now I'm living my life, it was like, okay, now that I've done that, I am willing, in fact, I am desiring to reach across an unknown again. If I see an unknown, I'll do it.
(27:46):
And I thought that was cool and I thought it related to what you said, this idea of taking it with them.
And more like Us's kind of perspective on it, again, from a scale kind of view is like, it is cool for two people to meet, but then they go home.
We'd be interested to how does one capture something about this conversation into some kind of content that can be used.
(28:11):
It's a much obvious kind of interaction between an organization like More Like Us and, you know, a more conversation focused organization like Civity, this motivational piece.
How do we get people in the room to start with? Because if they have all sorts of misperceptions, will they want to show up?
(28:33):
And if even if they get there, will they all be like, why do you think this? And then the other is, I was like, what are you saying? I think this, I don't think this, like what, you know, more antagonistic attitude when maybe it's not needed, warranted.
If I'm understanding correctly, when More Like Us scales, you're presenting information and having the students think critically about it.
Okay, so the lesson plan on the website, anyone can download it again for teacher. Love for you to try it. Civic Education Research Lab at Georgetown is testing its effectiveness.
(29:04):
Yeah, so there's different kinds of misperceptions. So there's ideological misperceptions, thinking that people in the other party are more ideologically extreme than they really are.
There are misperceptions of threat, thinking that people are more threatening than they really are. There are misperceptions of conversation, thinking that people in the other party don't want to learn as much as you learn a lot, much larger share.
(29:27):
I think it would be appropriate to act in very antagonistic ways during a conversation when they don't. And what's amazing is that these, I mean, there's some differences, depending on the question.
But in general, the misperceptions are incredibly symmetrical between Democrats and Republicans.
The actual attitudes are usually pretty similar. I mean, depending on what we're talking about, the degree of misperceptions are fairly similar.
(29:54):
It can be wild looking at these graphs because it's like, were they copied? No, they're slightly different.
So in this lesson plan, the students are exposed to these different slides that show these different kinds of misperceptions. And, you know, it's kind of up to the teacher how much they want to have students break off in groups.
(30:16):
So this gets into another thing about like how much critical thinking is needed.
And more like us would probably focus on less critical thinking than most organizations in this space, right? Because like the data is there.
If we think that, right, it's, you know, whatever, 50 points different and it's 20 points different, like it just is wrong.
(30:45):
So we can think really deeply why is this the case? But then we have the next section on causes. So you just, you know, why do we care? What's the next section on consequences?
So like, I mean, there's some reasons to think.
But also in this breadth kind of model, right, the shortcuts often involve defaults.
(31:08):
Not having to think incredibly deeply, right? They stop, drop, and roll approach. It's like, how should I stop? What is the proper way to stop?
No, you just stop and you fall and start rolling. Right? Like, don't go overboard about thinking about something.
Now, this can go overboard, right? Like, we don't want people to not think. That's not what we're trying to achieve. But sometimes the goals don't necessarily require a lot of deep thought and struggle.
(31:45):
I mean, the struggle might be like, I don't believe this or like, I can't, wow, huh?
When I was talking with Malka about More Like Us, Malka was saying that something like More Like Us can help civity with the motivation piece.
You know, people need to want to be trained. And Malka perceives More Like Us as a way to help people be motivated to want to engage in something like civity, right?
(32:06):
They see what you provide. They look through your lesson plan. They are exposed to that content. And then they have a desire to engage themselves, right?
And so I really appreciate that in that spectrum of what we need in the space to really be holistic about it and do all the things and that we can be related and connected.
(32:27):
Well, I think motivation is a major, in terms of working with this field. Okay, let's think of the term bridging.
The term bridging could mean any form of interaction that would reduce divides between groups. It basically means interpersonal communication at the moment, right?
(32:48):
Like that is, you know, it's almost an equal sign for interpersonal communication. I do think that correcting misperceptions can increase motivation.
Now, I guess I do have questions just how far it can go. The more obvious direction is reducing anxiety and hesitancy to have a conversation.
(33:12):
So these dissuading, these counter-motivational factors helping to relieve them. There's a different question about positive motivation, like desire to have a conversation.
I do think it's helpful from the motivational side, but more to reduce the negative. So More Like Us can definitely deal with counter-motivational factors.
(33:37):
It's an open question to me whether it can be like positive motivation and desire to do it.
But I think with the right misperception, if they exist, if people actually have like fantastically wonderful experiences frequently, then some of this kind of data before a conversation could actually lead to desire.
(34:02):
You know, given the fact that our country is polarized or we perceive each other kind of in these sort of extreme contexts sometimes, and given the recent election, which is, you know, there was 2016 and then we've had eight years and now we're in this moment, which is, I would say, similar but different.
So given where we are at this moment, where would you like to go from here with the work you're doing and with others engaging with the work?
(34:27):
I mean, one thing that might be surprising to people is that the election hasn't changed our work that dramatically.
When we're dealing with misperceptions, we are primarily dealing with misperceptions of fellow Americans in the public at large.
When the administration does things that would cause a lot of people around where I live to usually approach it pretty negatively, I often ask the question, why do supporters, you know, even if they were very atypical actions, why does support remain?
(35:08):
And I think a fair amount of it deals with this kind of social psychology, these intergroup dynamics. What is the Michelle Obama statement, right?
When they go low, we ask why?
Why? Why are they going low?
Right? That's the more like us answer.
(35:32):
Because we don't know where they're coming from. Typically, people don't go low for funsies.
I mean, often it's just like online because they're incentivized to do it.
You want likes, you go low.
But what is the pain, the hurt, the perceptions that are leading to the low behavior?
(35:55):
It would be much more where we come up with it. So sometimes I get into arguments with my friends because the typical approach on authoritarianism is to fight.
Democracy fights authoritarianism.
But the actual work on authoritarianism shows that it is, you know, yeah, there's genetic aspects, but it's activated by perceptions of threat.
(36:25):
So if these perceptions of threat to safety and security are exaggerated, then the desire for authoritarianism will be exaggerated.
So the goal, instead of just fighting straightforward, it's to drain the swamp, to drain the source, the desire for the authoritarianism through this overblown sense of threat.
(36:52):
This went well beyond your question, but this is the kind of thinking that relates to this field.
Because, right, I mean, do we say anything about the administration? Maybe not. But if we were to say it, or if we were to try to go in a certain direction, this would be the kind of path we would take.
I appreciate you answering it the way you perceived it, because that was a very interesting answer.
(37:14):
This is how I read the literature and think about it. So it sometimes takes me and takes more like us in different directions.
More like us will try to be, in many cases, helpful to the field, to scale.
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on.
Yeah, thanks so much, Gina. Yeah, it's great.
(37:35):
Thank you to my guest, James Coan, co-founder and executive director of More Like Us, a national organization that seeks to correct political misperceptions.
For more information and to check out the lesson plans and other resources, go to MoreLikeUs.org.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different, moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
(38:04):
To learn more, go to civity.org.
Civity's theme song is Common Ground, performed by Tommy Castro and the Painkillers,
written by Tommy Castro and Kevin Bow, and used courtesy of Alligator Records and Dangerous Entertainment.
Thank you for listening to This is Civity.
We've got to stand together on common ground.
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We've got to be together before we all fall down.
Welcome to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different.
Moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
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In this episode, we talk with James Coan, co-founder and executive director of More Like Us,
a national organization that seeks to correct political misperceptions,
helping people see we're not really as different as we sometimes think we are.
Coan says the goal of More Like Us is to help bring scale to bridging efforts.
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Okay, so the first thing I want to do is kind of jump in and do the civity thing right away and ask you, why do you do what you do?
And I can share first if you want. I was a journalist and now I teach journalism and podcasting and media.
And I do what I do because I love sharing information so that people have what they need to work with each other in communities and solve problems.
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And I thought it was through journalism and I thought it might be through education.
And now I think it's through bridging in civity and relationship building.
But that's been my sort of thing. And I do that because I love making connections. I love people.
I love to see people connect and build those communities. So that's why I do what I do. How about you?
My interest in this field starts with the 2016 election. I was concerned my country was tearing itself apart.
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I was trying to figure out what I thought was wrong and what I could do about it.
And that's led to an ish year journey, which brings me here today.
This may sound like a dumb question because I too felt the exact same way in 2016.
But why did it matter to you? Why do you think that mattered so much to you that it led you to more like us?
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Concerned about the future of the country. I mean, when there are at least perceived intense divisions,
this will be a repeated topic today. What is real and what is perceived?
There are real risks of our system of government collapsing and or political violence, neither of which is a desirable outcome.
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And I will try to do what I can to prevent either of those from occurring.
I think a lot of people feel the way you feel. And now, again, we're in it and it feels more intense and heightened.
Why do you think you did something about it in this way?
To me, my life can be described in kind of like two lightning bolts.
Sometimes people have to figure out what interests them. What do they like to do?
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For me, it just kind of slaps me across the face. So the first one was at 16.
I took a class in high school to design a car.
And it led to my education career for 15 years in the field of energy.
And then the next one was in 2016 when we have our system of government.
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We have representatives or we have freedoms.
And now suddenly are some of these under threat. And what could we do about it?
And so I was very happy because I had a career that I generally liked.
So I was trying to find ways to volunteer in the existing field.
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A couple of years ago, I just realized the only way forward was to create something different.
I thought the only way to scale was to do something that wasn't already being done in the field.
But yeah, right. The compulsion intensity is just there.
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And it seems like the morally right thing to do. So there's no reason to stop that intensity.
And so really in terms of my life, mostly I have to come up with boundaries when I will not work on this.
Because the intensity would just keep going and going.
It will energize or bunny. I just have to accept that that's who I am and issues that I care about.
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And then try to be as useful as possible with these topics.
You were looking in the field, looking for ways to volunteer and didn't.
Sounds like you didn't quite see exactly what you wanted to see. And so you developed More Like Us.
So I'd love to hear about More Like Us.
I'd love to hear about what led you to exactly what More Like Us is and how More Like Us fits into this field of bridging.
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What do you do specifically?
More Like Us corrects dangerous political misperceptions that Americans have of each other at scale.
There's quite a bit of research that shows that, yes, there are some divisions in this country who do not want to deny that.
But they're often perceived to be larger than they really are.
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And there's quite a bit of academic research suggesting that correcting these misperceptions would be quite fruitful in a number of ways.
But there really is not another organization that is dedicated to directly closing the misperceptions.
So right there are a lot of groups. I don't know if we want to call Siviti one of them, that emphasize interpersonal communication, dialogue, deliberation, however we want to describe it.
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And there are a few organizations that do the underlying research that show these misperceptions, but then they more or less stick with the research and they don't do a tremendous amount of outreach.
And so to me, I was a business consultant for more than a decade, focused on energy, but I could use those skills for this.
And to me, sort of be called a white space opportunity. If no one else is going there, then why not us?
(06:12):
Very cool. And I love the idea of getting into the space to correct misperceptions.
Talk to me a little bit about how More Like Us is thinking about the social media ecosystem. How are you dealing with that or thinking about that?
One of the resources that More Like Us has is a lesson plan about this perception gap.
So for secondary students, particularly high schoolers, but also can be used for college students and adults.
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And as part of this, we not only cover various examples of the perception gap, but also causes, consequences, and potential solutions.
And when it comes to causes, we think about various perverse incentives.
And so there are perverse incentives in social media, but also news media, electoral systems, and even among fellow nonprofits.
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And that the way to get attention, clicks, ultimately dollars, is usually by being very dramatic, focusing on outrage, activating people's identities, dividing, talking in us versus them terms.
And that is counter to what Civity or More Like Us would prefer. But if that's what pays, then people are going to do this.
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So I just consider social media to be one of those elements.
And I'm going to write some in a publication called The Fulcrum. And there's an article that I wrote last summer about adding trust and subtracting factors that diminish it.
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More Like Us right now is focused mostly on adding what would be called horizontal trust.
Think of two roughly equal groups, Democrats, Republicans, increasing trust among them, but there's also vertical trust.
And then on the negative side, on the subtraction side, there is dissuading people from making things worse and disincentivizing.
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I think the work Civity does and the work More Like Us does is critically important.
But I appreciate that you're sort of tailoring the space that you think More Like Us needs to be in.
You mentioned going in and talking to students. And I think that's a lovely place to be because, yes, they're getting ideas on social media and they walk into the room with some biases or perceptions or misperceptions or whatever the case may be.
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But they're potentially able to still hear and listen.
And I think some people, especially in this sort of ultra-polar or I'm sorry, perceived polarized tribal context that we find ourselves living, that I might cling to my idea or might cling to my misperception because it ties me to this group that I think I'm a part of.
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It does More Like Us have a way to help people sort of let go of the clinging to that idea to sort of be in the room with each other.
Thankfully, the share of Americans that have ideological perspectives that are kind of on the extremes is relatively small.
So both a group that is very involved in this space called More In Common that we're very close with and also Pew Research Center have developed these political typologies, seven or nine categories.
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And in both cases, there's only about 15% of Americans who actually fit into the farthest most left category or the farthest more right combined.
So 85%, somewhere in the middle to be fewer people who are probably clinging to these identities that tightly.
Unfortunately, those 15% tend to be the loudest and the wealthiest, most connected.
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So they just get a disproportionate kind of share of airtime in this.
Now, So More Like Us has three main resources at the moment. So there's this lesson plan.
Then we have something with all sides called Similarity Hub. We've aggregated hundreds of individual data points from surveys from places like Gallup and Pew and More In Common that show either overlaps between Democrats and Republicans,
(10:27):
at least 50% of Democrats and Republicans agreeing on a topic, or a super majority, at least 70% of Americans that agree, and we have it for more than 20 different topics, more than 400 data points.
And then we have some guidance for content creators for how to portray people across the political spectrum in a better and more accurate light.
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More Like Us focuses greatly on breadth, rather than depth.
So, from all of these, it's reaching people where they are and asking almost nothing of them, sometimes absolutely nothing of them, right. So students are in a classroom, the information can go to them.
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If people are already watching news or reading it, we have a relationship with a professor and then another nonprofit to test the use of Similarity Hub in newspaper articles.
So if a newspaper article on a contentious topic points out a data point or two that says actually there's some overlap here, right, we don't even have to find common ground, we've already found it like 400 times, just share it.
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And then in the arts, right, when people are just watching Netflix or like watching something on YouTube, right.
We try to reach people where they are and ask essentially nothing of them to change the media information environment that people are in.
And I think it's an empirical question, how effective that is for someone who may have more ideologically extreme or more intensely negative feelings and attitudes toward those in the other party compared to people who are more moderate, but at least the research that I know does not suggest that people are like unreachable.
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More in common did do a test, they call it the journey of persuasion. So not just showing people these numbers that show that we're more similar than we tend to realize, but showing people kind of going through this process of first being like, oh, they're totally different and then seeing how they kind of change and seeing how someone on the other side seems more reasonable than they thought.
And when they broke it down by their different kind of typologies, it's called hidden tribes in their case, and they also more liberal, more conservative.
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I don't recall the finding being that the people on the extremes didn't move. So, as far as we can tell that they do move but knowing in this, maybe compared with civity, right, it's not just like a one shot thing.
It's more like an advertising model, where you got to get the information again and again and again. And that's where we're trying to hit people from all these different angles.
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That's amazing. I love that because you're right civity is sort of this, we're the conversation before the conversation before we do any of that let's sit down and have this conversation, so that there's a little bit of trust between us a little bit of relationality.
And then I love that you're bringing people in to really think about where do we stand, I will never say that we're more similar than different. I don't know what the numerator would be what would the denominator would be, we can say we're more similar
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than we tend to realize, and certainly we're more similar than the kind of parties and people in general are portrayed.
So, unfortunately, right, a result from more in common was that people, you know this is five, six years old at this point, but people who read the news more, the more news they read, the more distorted their views were of those in the other party which is exactly the opposite of what we'd hope to be the case.
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Right, exactly, exactly. Do you have any anecdotes that you'd like to share that you can share about, about work with more like us about the people that have engaged with it?
More like us, we are still in relatively early days. So there has been some piloting of the lesson plan, if you're a teacher and listening to this.
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We are working with Georgetown University and we would love for you to pilot the perception gap lesson plan that we have. It was quite an experience for me, I am not a teacher.
But suddenly I was put in front of a couple of high school classes, and right having to explain perception gap to students of different levels of interest.
(15:00):
I have had some really good experiences. I led a, it was an event over the summer 40, 50 high schoolers attended, and for the lesson plan. I just kind of stopped and before each section over causes and consequences and solutions I asked the students, what they thought
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the causes were and what they thought the consequences were of perception gaps. They did a very good job of thinking through a lot of them.
You mentioned you're not dealing with differentials of power right now that you're looking at sort of equal, but what do you think the role of more like us could be in disrupting power differentials and polarization in that way?
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At least when we think of power differentials, I mean so vertical trust. Some of this is institutional. So, trust in institutions that are seen as leaning one way or another so Hollywood and evangelical churches would be extreme examples, for instance, of an institution where one, many more liberal one, one more conservative, and increasing trust in them among those in kind of the opposite parts of the world.
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The opposite party, the other other ideological persuasion, and then there is a less clear aspect of status and respect or positioning in society gets into resentment and contempt and things like that.
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So, listening to This is Civity, I'm Gina Baleria. We're talking with James Coan of More Like Us about how to scale efforts to correct political misperceptions.
One of the onus is on the institutions themselves to make sure that perception reality again, so some of it is them speaking in ways that are aligned with how maybe those in the other kind of party would would think but also giving people roles and listening.
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So, there are some political divisions but obviously there are educational divides in terms of voting behavior.
Then, status in society is a really fascinating one.
I talked to a professor, very liberal guy who was open with the Trump campaign in 2020 and said I'm going to volunteer for you for five months, and then write this ethnographic account.
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And in this ethnographic account, a lot of it was real and perceived status loss.
How does that get addressed? I think there can be commonalities found about how we want to approach the larger system together, rather than divisions amongst whatever, in this case education level, you know what I mean?
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Like whatever the case may be, I think you're hitting on something interesting there because if we would just come together and check, we'd see we actually having the same experience from a different space.
It's this idea that I think more like us and in a different way, civity, when you bring people together in a relationship or to see, you know, that their perceptions may indeed be perceptions and not reality, that we can then start thinking about things differently together.
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So, you know, wherever you fall on a specific idea, bringing people together and enlightening and taking them through these exercises can be super helpful.
I feel like this, again, focuses so much on scale. There's two main ways to have a view of another group.
Personal interaction or information environment. That was not really or. I mean, right, it's a combination of the two. And so for some groups, there would be a lot of personal interaction.
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For other groups, there would be very little interaction. And right in a place I live in DC, right, it is very easy to write like only encounter other people with four year degrees.
When we think about millions and and think about relative positions and society, it is an open question to me, the extent to which conversations can do it. I've just been concerned from the last eight years of being in this field, where I do not see
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scale being really possible through conversation. A more like us approach that, you know, one area that we can go into is like helping organizations that are already there, you know, already trying to increase trust across the political spectrum,
and helping them to scale. I think in many cases that can come through misperceptions which can be nice precursors so people don't have so much anxiety about having conversations and developing relationships and have more motivation to do it.
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If the goal is also like the skills of having conversation, like what is the stop drop and roll that people can just memorize, and it can be communicated to many, again, right with a focus on breadth over depth, not to say that normatively one is better than another,
but we have kind of, you know, put our stake in the ground that we're on the breadth side. Yes, no and I appreciate that. Civity, we were part of Rob Willard's Stanford Strengthening a Democracy study, which we love.
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And we came with this little eight minute intervention that it's a bit of scale. But I think someone who's thinking intentionally and consistently a long term about scale is needed. And so it's wonderful that more like us is here to help with that.
I'm glad you're thinking about scale and you're right, it needs to be a part of this conversation. So I want to reincorporate the civity idea. We always have those two questions we ask.
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So I want to ask you something surprising about you that people don't know as a way to engage more deeply in relationship a little bit.
I like to dance.
What kind of dance?
Do something called blues dancing occasionally, as partnered. But I played in a jazz band in high school. I was also more of kind of like a longer sprinter in track.
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So if I can move quickly and I can improvise and have some kind of rhythm, very creative, never know what's coming next. Dancing.
So that's the random thing. How does that relate to this? You know, I have all these kind of like different ways of thinking about things.
So it's sort of like, okay, I have this context. Instead of a song, I guess it's like academic research and political environment that we're in. And then try to keep playing with this and constantly try to be creative.
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You know, to make something that is hopefully memorable and effective. But I guess this flexibility, hopefully, that comes through immediately through dancing or over long term process of hit and miss attempts after attempts, just kind of constant improvement to get to some kind of more polished result that hopefully has some kind of effect.
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Oh my gosh. First of all, I also do. I swing dance and I love it so much. And I feel that I apply just the same lessons that you apply to like dancing through whatever I'm doing and like responding.
And I love how you applied that so easily to the work you're doing. That's so awesome. So tell me what you're most proud of in your work with More Like Us.
Again, it's pretty early days. At some level, right, it's getting to a point of plausibility. But when we're talking about a large country, you know, over 300 million people and how to potentially scale, having anything that I've considered to be plausible to reach enough people, right?
(23:11):
I just haven't really seen it. So to feel that we're at all on this path with our few resources, I think is good. And one thing I haven't talked about, I do think that we're able to be quite flexible as the research changes.
So in 2024, I kept kind of encountering research that suggested that threat was a really big issue, right? If we misperceive how threatening those in the other party, right?
(23:43):
You know, okay, there's all sorts of misperceptions, but it's not just like, you know, pick a misperception out of the hat and like, you know, that's this magical thing, right? Right, different misperceptions have different impacts to different groups of people, but it seems like threat is particularly important.
And like, being able to kind of pivot, which obviously is easier early in the creation of an organization toward trying to reduce this overblown threat, this over threat, you might call it, which relates to under trust, you know, too little trust in each other, I think has been cool and right to be able to keep pivoting or going from song to song.
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Continue the dancing analogy, right? Yes, for sure. Is there anything else you want to add about why you see more like us or how you see more like us as important in this moment? More like us having a potential to scale, to change attitudes.
Because we haven't talked too much about the strengthening democracy challenge. Civity did very well in it. Congratulations. There were three interventions that achieved all three main goals that the researchers were looking for to reduce partisan animosity, sometimes known as affective polarization, but also to reduce support for breaking democratic norms and supporting political violence.
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Two of those three explicitly focused on misperceptions and even that misperceptions of threat. So meta dehumanization, we think they think we're monkeys, but they don't.
And then this other overestimating the willingness of those in the other party to break democratic norms in terms of trying to impact the issues that matter at scale. I think that's very important. More like us, there's a good chance that a lot of our utility will come from helping organizations that are already in this space or other entities that want to do something like a college or university.
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How do they have impact, again, at scale? And even a university, scale is tricky because, okay, you can have a dialogue, 20 students might show up, but if there's a campus of 10,000 students, how does one reach so many? And correcting misperceptions has this nice benefit that in theory, the misperception change can be relatively brief.
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And so therefore can be put in all sorts of different packages, emails, signs on campus, right? The social norms campaign that we're talking about with some other organizations that, right, almost all or at least a large share of the students can become aware of something.
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They can also become aware of a statement like, it'd be good to talk to someone who's different. I never want to presuppose difference. Someone who might think is very different and realize that in many cases they're not quite as different, not as threatening, you might imagine.
It makes me feel, I mean, one, that Civity and More Like Us could have a nice sort of partnership in space, you know, of people doing the work. When you talk about perceived perceptions of difference and having people engage with your materials and what More Like Us does and then move on into the world, what I found with my study was these ideas of feeling more comfortable engaging across unknowns or differences persisted.
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And so my students were like, you know, I did that and it wasn't scary at all. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it. I'm totally more likely to actively reach across an unknown again.
Like they actually, and this was a small, you know, just a handful of students, but this idea of it wasn't just that one time and now I'm living my life, it was like, okay, now that I've done that, I am willing, in fact, I am desiring to reach across an unknown again. If I see an unknown, I'll do it.
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And I thought that was cool and I thought it related to what you said, this idea of taking it with them.
And more like Us's kind of perspective on it, again, from a scale kind of view is like, it is cool for two people to meet, but then they go home.
We'd be interested to how does one capture something about this conversation into some kind of content that can be used.
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It's a much obvious kind of interaction between an organization like More Like Us and, you know, a more conversation focused organization like Civity, this motivational piece.
How do we get people in the room to start with? Because if they have all sorts of misperceptions, will they want to show up?
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And if even if they get there, will they all be like, why do you think this? And then the other is, I was like, what are you saying? I think this, I don't think this, like what, you know, more antagonistic attitude when maybe it's not needed, warranted.
If I'm understanding correctly, when More Like Us scales, you're presenting information and having the students think critically about it.
Okay, so the lesson plan on the website, anyone can download it again for teacher. Love for you to try it. Civic Education Research Lab at Georgetown is testing its effectiveness.
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Yeah, so there's different kinds of misperceptions. So there's ideological misperceptions, thinking that people in the other party are more ideologically extreme than they really are.
There are misperceptions of threat, thinking that people are more threatening than they really are. There are misperceptions of conversation, thinking that people in the other party don't want to learn as much as you learn a lot, much larger share.
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I think it would be appropriate to act in very antagonistic ways during a conversation when they don't. And what's amazing is that these, I mean, there's some differences, depending on the question.
But in general, the misperceptions are incredibly symmetrical between Democrats and Republicans.
The actual attitudes are usually pretty similar. I mean, depending on what we're talking about, the degree of misperceptions are fairly similar.
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It can be wild looking at these graphs because it's like, were they copied? No, they're slightly different.
So in this lesson plan, the students are exposed to these different slides that show these different kinds of misperceptions. And, you know, it's kind of up to the teacher how much they want to have students break off in groups.
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So this gets into another thing about like how much critical thinking is needed.
And more like us would probably focus on less critical thinking than most organizations in this space, right? Because like the data is there.
If we think that, right, it's, you know, whatever, 50 points different and it's 20 points different, like it just is wrong.
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So we can think really deeply why is this the case? But then we have the next section on causes. So you just, you know, why do we care? What's the next section on consequences?
So like, I mean, there's some reasons to think.
But also in this breadth kind of model, right, the shortcuts often involve defaults.
(31:08):
Not having to think incredibly deeply, right? They stop, drop, and roll approach. It's like, how should I stop? What is the proper way to stop?
No, you just stop and you fall and start rolling. Right? Like, don't go overboard about thinking about something.
Now, this can go overboard, right? Like, we don't want people to not think. That's not what we're trying to achieve. But sometimes the goals don't necessarily require a lot of deep thought and struggle.
(31:45):
I mean, the struggle might be like, I don't believe this or like, I can't, wow, huh?
When I was talking with Malka about More Like Us, Malka was saying that something like More Like Us can help civity with the motivation piece.
You know, people need to want to be trained. And Malka perceives More Like Us as a way to help people be motivated to want to engage in something like civity, right?
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They see what you provide. They look through your lesson plan. They are exposed to that content. And then they have a desire to engage themselves, right?
And so I really appreciate that in that spectrum of what we need in the space to really be holistic about it and do all the things and that we can be related and connected.
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Well, I think motivation is a major, in terms of working with this field. Okay, let's think of the term bridging.
The term bridging could mean any form of interaction that would reduce divides between groups. It basically means interpersonal communication at the moment, right?
(32:48):
Like that is, you know, it's almost an equal sign for interpersonal communication. I do think that correcting misperceptions can increase motivation.
Now, I guess I do have questions just how far it can go. The more obvious direction is reducing anxiety and hesitancy to have a conversation.
(33:12):
So these dissuading, these counter-motivational factors helping to relieve them. There's a different question about positive motivation, like desire to have a conversation.
I do think it's helpful from the motivational side, but more to reduce the negative. So More Like Us can definitely deal with counter-motivational factors.
(33:37):
It's an open question to me whether it can be like positive motivation and desire to do it.
But I think with the right misperception, if they exist, if people actually have like fantastically wonderful experiences frequently, then some of this kind of data before a conversation could actually lead to desire.
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You know, given the fact that our country is polarized or we perceive each other kind of in these sort of extreme contexts sometimes, and given the recent election, which is, you know, there was 2016 and then we've had eight years and now we're in this moment, which is, I would say, similar but different.
So given where we are at this moment, where would you like to go from here with the work you're doing and with others engaging with the work?
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I mean, one thing that might be surprising to people is that the election hasn't changed our work that dramatically.
When we're dealing with misperceptions, we are primarily dealing with misperceptions of fellow Americans in the public at large.
When the administration does things that would cause a lot of people around where I live to usually approach it pretty negatively, I often ask the question, why do supporters, you know, even if they were very atypical actions, why does support remain?
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And I think a fair amount of it deals with this kind of social psychology, these intergroup dynamics. What is the Michelle Obama statement, right?
When they go low, we ask why?
Why? Why are they going low?
Right? That's the more like us answer.
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Because we don't know where they're coming from. Typically, people don't go low for funsies.
I mean, often it's just like online because they're incentivized to do it.
You want likes, you go low.
But what is the pain, the hurt, the perceptions that are leading to the low behavior?
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It would be much more where we come up with it. So sometimes I get into arguments with my friends because the typical approach on authoritarianism is to fight.
Democracy fights authoritarianism.
But the actual work on authoritarianism shows that it is, you know, yeah, there's genetic aspects, but it's activated by perceptions of threat.
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So if these perceptions of threat to safety and security are exaggerated, then the desire for authoritarianism will be exaggerated.
So the goal, instead of just fighting straightforward, it's to drain the swamp, to drain the source, the desire for the authoritarianism through this overblown sense of threat.
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This went well beyond your question, but this is the kind of thinking that relates to this field.
Because, right, I mean, do we say anything about the administration? Maybe not. But if we were to say it, or if we were to try to go in a certain direction, this would be the kind of path we would take.
I appreciate you answering it the way you perceived it, because that was a very interesting answer.
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This is how I read the literature and think about it. So it sometimes takes me and takes more like us in different directions.
More like us will try to be, in many cases, helpful to the field, to scale.
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on.
Yeah, thanks so much, Gina. Yeah, it's great.
(37:35):
Thank you to my guest, James Coan, co-founder and executive director of More Like Us, a national organization that seeks to correct political misperceptions.
For more information and to check out the lesson plans and other resources, go to MoreLikeUs.org.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different, moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
(38:04):
To learn more, go to civity.org.
Civity's theme song is Common Ground, performed by Tommy Castro and the Painkillers,
written by Tommy Castro and Kevin Bow, and used courtesy of Alligator Records and Dangerous Entertainment.
Thank you for listening to This is Civity.
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