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society builders, with your host, Duane Varan
(Duane) Welcome to another exciting
episode of Society Builders.
And thanks for joining the
conversation for social transformation.
Well, I've got a blockbuster episode for you today.
Today we're continuing in our sequence of
episodes exploring the science of depolarization.
And I'm so excited because today we're interviewing Dr.
Peter Coleman, who's one of the leading
authorities in the world on how to
bring antagonistic groups closer together.
He's the author of hundreds of
articles, ten books, numerous awards.
I mean, this is THE guy most in
the know on this science of depolarization.
Peter's also Director of the world famous
'Difficult Conversations Lab' at Columbia University.
We'll talk a little bit more
about that later in the podcast.
And his latest book, 'The Way Out: How
to Overcome Toxic Polarization', provides an amazing summary
of his research in this arena.
So Peter.
We're so excited.
Thanks for joining our conversation
and welcome to Society Builders.
(Peter) Duane thank you for inviting me.
I'm eager to have a conversation with your community.
(Duane) Fantastic. Thanks.
So, Peter, let's start with this idea of polarization.
What is polarization?
(Peter) So polarization is just a phenomenon we see
in science when, for example, particles move either
towards or away from two different poles.
That's essentially what it is.
It's just a natural phenomenon that
exists in terms of political polarization.
It is when partisans or political parties move towards
or away from each other on how they feel
towards one another, on how they view certain issues.
And polarization, in my view, is not a bad thing,
particularly in two party systems like in the US.
You want to have passionate true believers who
believe in progress and change and also believe
in sort of protecting the status quo in
conversation, pushing each other forward.
In fact, in the 1950s in the US.,
there was a lack of polarization or distinction
between the political parties and people were sort
of saying, 'we need some choice here'.
Well, now we're in a state that I call TOXIC polarization,
which is sort of a phenomenon from complexity science, where you
get stuck in what we call an attractor pattern that is
very difficult to break out of, but it is filled with
sort of enmity for the others hate.
Love for the in group, hate for the out group.
A sense of contempt.
And that has been boiling and running for
about 50 to 60 years in the US.
Elsewhere as well.
But it's particularly bad here right now.
So I distinguish toxic polarization from other
forms of political polarization, which, again, can
be useful and constructive phenomenon.
But when we get stuck in patterns like this, it can
take on a life of its own and become destructive.
(Duane) I think one of the things you talk about in
your book that's really interesting is when you look at
the lack of people from different political parties marrying one
another is at the highest level it's been since 1973.
I mean, that's pretty phenomenal. (Peter) Yeah, it's true.
It's true that over the last several decades,
we've gone from about 25% what we would
call mixed political marriages to more about 10%.
So there's a steep decline in that.
And as you can understand, what comes from mixed
political families is the children are raised in a
space where they hear different points of view and
they hear people disagreeing constructively, and that leads to
their sort of political tolerance down the road.
If you have less and less of that,
you have less and less political tolerance.
You grow up with one point of view, and either you
adopt that point of view or you react against it. Right.
So it's a basic thing in social
science we call a cross-cutting structure.
If you have marriages with mixed political connections, if
you go to schools or you have friends that
have different political points of view, if you are
in sports teams, if you're in religious communities that
have mixed political views, those create a sense of
tolerance, kind of higher sense of identity and connection
to people beyond politics.
When those things start to disappear, which
is what we're seeing in the US.,
particularly around marriages, it is a cause for
great concern because it's much easier to vilify
an entire group of people if you have
very few connections with them.
(Duane) Yeah, you also use the example in the
book of Botswana and the deliberate policy towards
depolarization that the government adopted there of forcing
public servants to serve in different regions around
the country, basically kind of creating that mixing
up of people's, contact with people from other
tribes, other clans, et cetera.
Really fascinating.
(Peter) Yeah, it's true.
They got independence from the colonial powers about
the same time as Angola and Mozambique did.
And Angola and Mozambique sort of broke out
into ethnic tribal warfare that was very violent.
And Botswana was very worried about that because they,
in some ways had the same kinds of political
conditions and origins that these other countries in Africa
had, were now an independent movement as well.
And they feared that kind of violence.
So they imparted this basically a strategy that
requires civil servants, which I think is 45%
of the population of the workforce, to move
every seven years to some other part of
Botswana where there are different ethnic groups.
And some account that policy for the fact that it's
one of the most peaceful and most prosperous, thriving nations
in Africa and has been to date, been able to
sort of avoid that kind of civil war, civil violence.
So it's an interesting phenomenon. Right.
I mean, it's inconvenient for people.
Imagine if someone said to you, all right,
every seven years you got to move to
wherever somewhere else in the US.
Or somewhere else. Right.
It's not a small thing.
On the other hand, in terms of the greater good,
it creates contact and ambassadors that go to places.
These are doctors and lawyers and teachers and engineers
who travel, bring their families, and it ensures a
kind of integration and contact across these ethnic differences
that makes a difference over time.
(Duane) You use another example in the Book of Costa Rica.
And in Costa Rica, the government there adopted
a policy of mandatory peace education in schools.
And the incredible results of that, particularly when
you compare Costa Rica to its neighboring countries,
just how positively that's contributed to the maintenance
of peace in the country.
Pretty remarkable story. (Peter) Yeah. Imagine that.
I mean, Costa Rica, if you think
of where it's at and the neighborhood
that it's thrived in, it's pretty extraordinary.
It is in the sort of alleyway of the
drug cartels supply and demand to the US.
I mean, what's interesting about Costa Rica is they
came out of a horrible civil war in 1948.
Thousands of deaths, a bloody civil war.
And there was something about that shock, the audacity of
that problem, that really made them pause and reset.
And they really started to deinvest in
military and invest in business and the
ecology and environment and tourism and education.
And they intentionally, eventually mandated peace
education in all the schools.
And they believed that that was necessary in
order to grow a more peaceful culture, right?
That they'd come out of a period of
violence and war like many other nations.
But they really wanted to socialize their kids,
to be more tolerant and respectful and have
some conflict resolution skills and attitudes.
So they really believed that they grew that
over time, and that's allowed them to be
a more resilient community in this difficult neighborhood.
(Duane) So, Peter, you're the director of the world
famous Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University.
I mean, this is truly the frontier
in studying the science of depolarization.
Now, for the benefit of the audience, what
happens at the Difficult Conversation Lab is that
Peter and his research team conduct experiments around
different approaches to polarized conversations.
So people come in.
I mean, they're really human subjects, so to speak.
They come into the lab, and
they get allocated into different conditions.
In one cell, for example, people may read a
fictitious news story that is highly polarizing and then enter
into a conversation about it, while in another, they might
read a story that is much more nuanced.
So in this way, the research team can tease out the
effect of the way news is reported in this example.
And so, through conducting these experiments, patiently
teasing out one variable at a time,
they discover principles for effective depolarization.
So, Peter, tell us about the
lab and what you've been finding.
I mean, what happens, for example, when you ramp
up the rhetoric and then get a conversation going?
(Peter) So people come into these conversations when
pro/con is presented armed for battle really.
They want to come in and they have
their talking points and they're ready to go.
That's basically an oversimplification
of the world, right?
You take something like immigration
policy, immensely complicated phenomenon, right?
Legal dimensions, moral
dimensions, economic dimensions.
But if you do a pro/con perspective, then
you are framing this as a dichotomy, right?
When it's not, it's a complex set of issues.
So if you take the same information, which is
what we do in the lab, and present it
as a set of complex decisions or dilemmas, right?
You say to people immigration is a complex set of
sub issues and you present the information like that.
You present the same content but you frame it
not as either or, but you frame it as
a set of dilemmas that we have to navigate.
They're more willing to have the conversation,
they're more willing to continue the conversation.
They feel much better about themselves and the other.
Their understanding of the issue becomes more nuanced.
They generate statements afterwards.
So that's the major finding we have is
whatever you can do to complicate people's oversimplified
understanding of moral issues or divisive issues.
What the news tends to do
is oversimplify and present two sides.
Politicians do that automatically.
Activists do that as well.
We oversimplified them and us their position
versus our position to mobilize their base.
And again, there's utility in that.
But the result is that the population
becomes simplistic in our understanding and our
communications about these complex issues.
So what we've been studying is how do you do that?
How do you bring people together and create conditions
where they can think in a more nuanced way,
feel more positive and negative experiences as you have
these conversations behave in ways both advocating for your
position but also asking questions and listening.
So how do you mix it up?
How do you stay in this more nuanced
mode of understanding and communication over time?
Sometimes it's the process that we walk them through.
We actually will have them go through a
process where they either learn about each other's
story first before they get into divisive issues.
So anything that can basically
obstruct their oversimplification, right?
Again, if I know you're on the other side of an
issue, I may make all kinds of assumptions about you as
a human being before we even have a conversation.
And you can also have processes that elicit a
more nuanced relationship or communication process that moves people
more into what we call dialogue and away from
debate, at least initially, so that they learn about
each other and they learn about the issues in
ways that, again, are more human before you get
into the political differences.
They're both necessary, right?
In a society like ours, we ultimately
need to debate and make decisions.
But if you do that prematurely,
then it's a game to win.
It's a cognitive process that's very narrow.
And so you have to sort of build up
enough of a human respect relationship in order to
be able to have conversations that are both humanized
and ultimately where decisions can be made.
(Duane) Yeah, you talk about that in
the book about discussion versus debate.
To a Baha'i, the concept of discussion is like
what we would call 'consultation', hearing, making sure
that you're hearing every view, not having a
sense of where the answer is, where the
remedy is, searching in everybody's comments for that.
But, you know, as a society, we're very
deeply engrained in the idea of debate.
It's like you're taught to succeed in business
and everything in life by winning the debate.
Like everything is about framing the decision making
process as a debate rather than a consultation.
(Peter) It's true.
I mean, I was trained in debate in high school, right?
There's a purpose to it, but it's inherent
to our politics and our political processes.
But it's more of a game to play. Right.
That's what I mean by it being
a sort of narrow cognitive process.
If you and I are debating an issue,
my objective is to win this argument, to
score points and to win the argument.
And to do so, I do listen carefully to
what you're saying, but I'm looking for flaws in
your logic or your argument that I can weaponize
and say, AHA, you're wrong, I'm right.
And so it is this kind of game
to play and there's rewards to that and
satisfaction to that and there's value in it.
But it's not a process of discovery, right?
And dialogue, as we call it the peace building
world, is more of a process of learning.
And so when you start with your story and
I listen to your story or you listen to
my story and then we talk about how the
issue under discussion is important to us, then not
only do you discover things about the other, right?
And their world and their life and the essence
of where their attitudes come from, you learn a
lot about the issues and that there are very
different ways to experience these issues.
And oftentimes you learn about yourself
if you're really in a dialogue.
You think, this issue for me is important because my
brother was a seminarian and he was really passionate about
this and I've never made that connection before. Right.
So that is an opening discovery
process that rarely happens in debate. Right?
There's no room for it.
But our society is saturated in
debate as the primary way to
certainly discuss politics or political differences.
(Duane) Beyond the complicating the narrative idea, what
other things have we learned about how
to best depolarize antagonistic groups?
(Peter) Well, we've learned a lot.
When I talk about this state of toxic polarization, it
is a problem that's bigger than any of us alone. Right.
It is what we would
call a biopsychosocial structural problem.
In that way, it's like a bad addiction, right.
Because it gets in our neurological structures
how we process information and don't.
It gets in our psychology.
It affects our relationships, who we're comfortable
being with, who we're not comfortable being
with, where we want to travel, where
we want to shop, internet media, right?
So there are many forces that are effecting
this pull that pits us against each other.
It's something that's in the water
in which we swim, right?
So we have to recognize that and understand
how do you affect change at different levels?
And then if you recognize that there are, what I
try to articulate in the book I wrote, the Way
Out, is sort of five basic principles of evidence based
processes that help us basically loosen the constraints of the
system in which we're embedded, right.
The divisions that are pulling us apart
or pitting us against each other.
How do you loosen their impact on
us, our relationships and our communities?
And so there are these five evidence based practices.
One of them is to complicate, right?
That you really want to try to intentionally
complicate your understanding of the other side of
these issues, of your own reactions.
So that is one of them.
But another one that I just want to emphasize
because I think it's in some ways counterintuitive and
less well known, is the power of movement.
So this comes from research.
(Duane) Very interesting.
Let's talk about movement. Yeah.
(Peter) So this comes from the idea that we have what
we call neuroplasticity in our brains and how we process
information, and that shaking it up sometimes helps.
Right.
We've done research and there's,
again research on neuroscience.
There's research with chimps and humans on this.
What we find from neuropsychological research is that
when people move together, ideally outside or side
by side, they study combat troops that march
together, they study dance troops that move together,
marching bands that move together.
When people move in sync,
there's a physiological connection.
They think it's related to mirror neurons,
which are kind of mimicking each other.
And it creates in us a sense of connection,
even a feeling of compassion and cooperation that isn't
going to solve these problems, these differences.
But it is a leg up. Right.
If we're stuck in how we see or experience each other,
then going for a walk outside, side by side can help.
And I recommend that to people whose brother-
in-law they feel are insane and stuck.
Invite them to take a walk outside.
There is something about movement moving together and ideally moving
outside and sort of seeing the same world pass us
that both shakes us up and challenges our assumptions and
helps us connect to one another in a way that
makes it easier to at least agree to disagree.
(Duane) In your book, you talk about one experiment among
many where people just did something as simple as
tapping their finger in synchronization with another person.
The benefits that happens in terms of people
becoming more synchronized as a result of even
doing something as simple as that.
You also talk about the Soviet American peace negotiations
during the nuclear kind of like pact discussions and
how when they'd hit an impasse, they'd learn that
just going for a walk out in Camp David
or whatever, just a walk, would help them kind
of like break through that impasse that they had.
(Peter) Yeah, it's something that intuitively, I think diplomats
came to in and of their own. Right.
They would be stuck in these conference rooms with coffee for
days or weeks at a time and feel really stuck.
And at some point somebody would
say, let's just take a walk.
And oftentimes they found that
breakthroughs would happen there.
There is a play and I think a film called
'A Walk in the Woods', which is based on a
nuclear disarmament negotiation that was taking place, which represents that.
But this is something that diplomats understand, right?
There is something to this physical movement that
can just help us reset, reconnect and maybe
begin to think about things or feel about
things in very different ways.
Yeah, but just a little note for our
audience as you think about your own activities.
(Duane) I think one of the takeaways from Peter's
advice here is don't think about just it
being a consultation or a discussion.
Think about some physical activity.
Think about components of it that have physical
activity that get people doing something together.
Not just talking, but actually doing something
together as well because that helps create
this layer of synchronization between people.
Neurophysiologically.
Peter, I should tell you that in
my research we've discovered this as well.
Of course, we're analyzing audience behavior, but one
of the things that we've discovered is that
we can tell when a drama is doing
better or worse based on whether people's facial
expression synchronizes with the actors.
It's that same principle.
It's that when we're in that mode of empathy,
our physiological responses start to harmonize as well.
(Peter) So, interesting, we find that in the typical
conversations lab, we find that when people get
stuck in a disagreement and it's not going
well, their emotional dynamics decouple.
So they feel different things, mostly negativity,
but they don't move together when the
conversations go better, go well, and there
is some kind of understanding that's emerging.
What we see is their emotional dynamics get in sync.
And so I start to feel the same types of
things you're feeling at the same time over time. Right?
So there is this secret dynamic that happens which,
again, you're studying and you have evidence of.
John Gottman finds this in his Love lab.
But we find that in the typical conversation
lab as well, there is something about movement
and eventually getting things done that is important.
If groups that are estranged from one another can meet
and humanize first in dialogue, get a human experience of
the other, and then even begin to talk about an
issue that divides them or that they're different on and
try to come to an understanding of that.
They actually join forces and say,
well, let's do something about that.
If you move from dialogue to debate to action,
then you're actually incorporating a lot of what we're
talking about, which is complicating your relationships, your understanding,
focusing on things that you can do that have
efficacy and then doing it physically together.
Like Habitat for Humanity, for example.
Great thing, right?
Because it's building houses for poorer communities.
And oftentimes it brings together very different people
who just want to do that in physical
activity with a greater purpose of helping others.
Right.
But you're physically working
together and coordinating together.
So those are tremendous examples of the
power of movement and physical activity in
uniting groups and connecting groups across differences.
(Duane) This is one of the points of guidance that we've
had so far on this task within the Baha'i community,
which is this idea of finding something where people can
agree on the pursuit of a common goal.
So try to find something that can become a
basis for people having a common goal to help
act as that bridge, bringing people together. (Peter) Yeah.
Well, that's a very powerful idea, and it's, again,
an idea supported by all kinds of research.
I want to give you one example of this.
There's a film called 'The First Step Act', which
is a film about legislation that happened during the
Trump administration, which was the most significant prison reform
legislation that had come out in decades.
(Duane) This was with Van Jones, is that right? Yeah.
(Peter) The major actors driving it were Van Jones,
who is a self professed radical progressive, right.
And Jared kushner.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law.
Son in law and noted conservative.
And what Van describes in this documentary called The
First Step Act is that they have first of
all, they didn't quite like each other.
They had vilified each other in the media.
And what Van Jones says is that there
are 900 things we disagree on fundamentally, but
there's one we agree on, which is that
prison should be a different experience.
And we need to reduce number of people in prison
and the experiences, because Jared Kushner's father went to prison
and Van Jones is a Black man in America and
this is very personal, important to him. Right.
So they came together and they worked together with
Kellyanne Conway, and ultimately Trump signed this legislation because
they found that space that they really were both
passionate about in order to work together.
It was difficult, obviously.
And both of them are attacked from their own sides.
Right.
Van is attacked from progressives and
Kushner is attacked from conservatives.
But they come together because they believe in this.
And I think the film is a very provocative account
of this process that they went through, but it is
a great illustration of what you're talking about.
(Duane) I think probably the single most popular idea, the single
most common idea about how to bring groups together is
just to put them in a room together, right?
What in academic terms we'd call 'Contact Theory'.
But I know from conversations we've had that you think
that's a form of malpractice in this kind of space.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
What's wrong with contact theory?
What's wrong with just getting these people from these
different groups and putting them in a room and
closing the door, letting them solve their problems?
(Peter) Well, imagine if you will, that there is someone across
the political divide from you that has an extreme point
of view on some important issue to you, and you
feel very passionately about your side of this issue, and
you're put into a room and they say, Just go.
Imagine what's going to happen, right?
It's a cocktail for escalation.
So that's the issue.
Contact theory came out of the 1950s of a man named
Gordon Allport - was studying race relations in the US.
- found that bringing people together across racial differences in
dialogue, in conversation, was useful and helpful in humanizing
one another and seeing the soul of the other,
as someone would say, and that there's great power
in that under certain conditions.
So he was a researcher and studied
the conditions under which that went well.
And that caveat, under certain conditions, is something
that I think is misunderstood today because there
are well intentioned organizations in this country and
around the world that basically say, okay, go
on this website, fill out this survey on
political issues, and we'll match you with somebody
in your community who differs from you.
Go off and have a cup of coffee or a conversation.
Well, under many conditions that can be fine.
But when you have passionate true believers who
really believe their rights are being taken away,
they're being usurped in their country, whatever, encouraging
them to just go off and have a
conversation is unethical, I think, because what we
hear of if you push the organizers of
these groups on what happens, you hear these
cautionary tales about explosions that occur and alienation.
And in fact, Pew Research Foundation done research on
the effects that Democrats and Republicans have when they
talk to people on the other side.
And most of us leave those like 60,
some percent, leave those conversations feeling more alienated
and frustrated because we can't communicate, right?
So what that means is not that we
shouldn't get together, but that we have to
understand the conditions under which that works.
And it's really important, as you say, that there
be some kind of shared goal that we have,
that we do it in a respectful manner.
And so there are some kind of
norms or facilitation process that happens.
But most importantly, what we often miss is in
a pro-Trump, anti-Trump era, we can't just
have people come together for an hour.
It might be that we have a decent enough conversation,
but that's not going to move the needle right because
then it's just you and I can talk, but the
rest of the people on your side are insane. Right.
It really requires some kind of ongoing opportunity
to have conversations that are decent conversations, facilitated,
or at least respectful conversations with people that
differ from you that matters.
It's the extent of the contact and
the conditions under which it happens.
And unfortunately, the reason I wrote The Way Out
is because when 2016 2017 started to happen, political
rhetoric was heating up in this country.
A lot of these organizations started to reach out
to me because of the difficult conversations lab and
say, 'hey, we want to do this thing'.
And as I listened to them, I mostly would say, 'yeah, I
wouldn't do that if I were you, I wouldn't do that.'
'What I would do', I would say to them,
'is I'd find groups and organizations already in your
community that know how to do this, that do
this well, and partner with them and point community
members to these groups that know how to create
safe spaces and continue the conversation.'
But people like to invent their own things,
so they were less inclined to do that.
So yes, I'm critical of a misuse or
misunderstanding of contact in situations where people are
passionate true believers, because I think that understanding
the extent of the science and the conditions
under which this works is critical.
(Duane) Yeah, it's not intentions, it's not
good intentions that are sufficient.
You really have to understand a little bit of the
science of it, a little bit of what the evidence
has taught us about how to do it successfully.
And you alluded to this as well,
about it not being one off.
You're alluding here, really, to the temporal
dimension of the problem that these problems
take a while to create.
They're not going to get solved,
like in a single conversation.
So there does need to be this commitment to an ongoing
process and not just kind of like a one off encounter.
(Peter) Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
So there's a book I'll recommend to your community
that's out of print, but it's worth reading.
It's called 'The Logic of Failure'.
It was written by a German psychologist named Dietrich
Dorner, published, I think in the mid ninety's.
And he basically was a person who, in Germany would
bring well intentioned people onto his lab, put them into
situations where they had a lot of influence and said,
okay, here is a West African village, or here's a
small community in the north of the UK.
You're the mayor or you're the World Bank, and
you have all these resources make their life better.
And what he found is that most of us
basically go in and do harm, not intentionally.
We go in with good intentions,
but we're oftentimes uninformed by the
unintended consequences of what we're doing. Right?
So when you work in complex environments
that are changing, well intentioned initiatives can.
Have consequences, can backfire, can work or not work.
It can take a long time to see
the impacts because you may do something that's
well intentioned and it may backfire.
And so then you have to make
an adjustment and go back in. Right.
That's the temporal dimension of these things is there
aren't quick fixes to something that's called toxic polarization
that has taken us 60 years to get into.
It oftentimes will take almost as much
time to get out with intentionality respect
and hopefully support. (Duane) Another construct
you explore, that's again, evidence-based, is
this idea that you call 'positive deviance'.
It's got elements of what's called 'bubble theory'.
Sometimes it's called 'islands of agreement'.
Tell us a little bit about this.
What is this about?
What does the evidence tell us about this
idea about finding little gains and not just
the big points of conflict, if you will?
(Peter) Yeah, I think it's a very important perspective and understanding
is that when you have problems that have settled into
very long term ingrained patterns, what we tend to do
is go in with some kind of solution. We think. Ah.
Okay, I've seen this.
I don't know what to do.
Instead of asking ourselves, are there any people, individuals,
groups in the community that are actually making things
better or keeping things from getting worse? Right?
That should be our first question.
The notion of positive deviance comes from someone
named Jerry Sternin who studied malnutrition, was in
Vietnam trying to understand malnutrition in communities.
And what he noted was that in certain communities
of impoverished people who worked mostly in rice patties,
most of the children were malnourished, but some weren't.
And so he was curious, like, what up there?
So he would go to the mothers and say, how do you help?
And they'd say, well, we work in the rice patties.
And if you do that, you see that there's occasionally
a little crab or a little shrimp, and you can
take it and tuck it in your apron.
And then when you go home and make lunch or dinner,
you can put protein into the rice, and that helps.
So they knew how to solve this, right,
but it wasn't information that was widely shared.
So then they would say, well, how about
inviting your friends over and cooking together?
And through that there would be a sort
of diffusion of this innovation and ultimately change.
In other words, pockets of the community were
figuring out solutions to their own problems.
And that's when you talk about islands of agreement.
There's a book by a woman named Gabriella Blum
who's a Harvard law professor who studies places like
Kashmir and Israel, Palestine, long term intractable conflicts, but
says even in war zones, you always have these
what they call 'islands of agreement'.
You have some kinds of groups, individuals, oftentimes they're
clergy or merchants who, for whatever reason, are able
to keep conversation across differences going in civil ways
and are islands of hope, right.
In these seas of war and destruction in Mozambique
during the 16 years civil war that had broken
out, there was a horrible civil war, and people
couldn't even imagine talking to somebody on the other
side because you would be killed by members of
your own side just to even imagine that.
But the fishermen who would fish on the coast
and then come in were able to cross enemy
lines with their fish because everybody needed to eat.
And so it was a source of information
and even communication that they ultimately could use
once they understood that they were there. Right.
So those are the kinds of things
that exist in most societies, things just
in your family, if you ask yourself.
So if you have a family that's politically
divided and you feel very hostile, is there
anybody in your family who is good at
bringing us together and having a conversation?
Sometimes it's a grandmother.
In my family, it was my oldest brother.
My oldest brother just had a way of communicating
and gathering that reduced defensiveness, got people to sit
down and calm down and to hear each other.
It was just a talent he had.
So who is that in your community?
Those are what we would call the positive deviants, the
people that even under very stressful antagonistic times can show
up in a way that changes the dynamic.
They should be the first people or groups or organizations
that we seek out when we try to affect change.
(Duane) Amanda Ripley talks about the opposite as well.
People who are really good at weaving conflict.
Yeah, often those are the people that we turn to.
(Peter) Absolutely.
The conflict entrepreneurs. That's what she calls it.
Yeah, they're people that trade in conflict
and provocation and of course, they get
a lot of attention these days.
The people that usually don't get
attention are the quiet people.
I'll mention quickly.
Last week I was at Congress working with speaking
to the bipartisan working group there, which are Republicans
and Democrats that are trying to sit together every
week and make some kind of bipartisan progress.
And I have to say, Derek Kilmer, who
is the chair of this group right now,
is one of these quiet voices, right?
He's not getting all the media attention that
others are getting all the time, but he's
quietly diligently working to find ways to bring
people together and make them connect.
And those are the quiet heroes that you want to seek
out in these times, because they know how to do it,
and they're not doing it to draw attention to themselves.
They're doing it for the greater good.
(Duane) Amazing. Another area that you talk about in the book, where,
again, there's evidence to show the impact of this, is
the whole idea about how that discussion actually starts, how
critical the first few minutes of that are in terms
of setting the stage for what then basically follows.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about why that's
so important, what you have to do, what is it
about that that we need to get right? Yeah. Great.
So in the world of complexity science, when
we think about systems and how systems establish
what they find, is there's a phenomenon that
they call the 'sensitivity to initial conditions'?
The very first things that happen in a new
group, in a new encounter, in a new company
and whatever, the first things you do, the ways
you interact, this is true in marital therapy. Right.
John Gottman finds this the very first
things that are said in a session
really oftentimes will affect the trajectory.
So understanding that that is a powerful
place to maybe approach a relationship differently.
Right.
We teach this in mediation when mediators are convening, disputants,
is that the first thing you do, how you present
yourself, how you set up the room, how you frame
what you're going to do, is a very powerful determinant
of how this is going to go.
So in the world of political divisions
and polarization, oftentimes we wander into conversations
with people who differ from us automatically.
We trigger them, they trigger us,
we escalate, it gets ugly.
And we leave there thinking, never
want to see them again.
And this is unfortunately happening pretty commonly.
So our recommendation is to sort of be
mindful of the power of initial conditions if
your intention is something else, right.
Not to go through the same kind of destructive pattern.
(Duane) You talk about a colleague of yours, Laura
Chasen, who starts the sessions with a little
bit of an introduction to the team, explaining
what she's not asking them to do.
I found that really a fascinating idea, helping
give people a little bit of comfort, helping
them feel safe, not having expectations that they're
going to solve the problem, necessarily just reshaping
expectations at the outset. (Peter) Yeah.
Laura Chasen was an extraordinary woman and ran a
thing called the Public Conversations Project out of Boston.
And part of the story I tell on the way
out is a dialogue session that she facilitated with three
pro life and pro choice leaders in Boston right.
After a horrific shooting that had taken place there.
They met in secret for a long time.
I'd interviewed her afterwards and she said, part of
what these people, the reason that they don't want
to talk to each other is because they don't
want to come to an agreement.
They don't want to tolerate the other's point of view.
And so what she would say is, okay, I'm
not going to ask you to agree to anything.
I'm not going to ask you to love each other.
I'm not going to ask you to embrace each other.
I'm really going to ask you to
sit and listen as best you can.
We'll facilitate this in a safe way
so that we can avert future violence.
That's what I'm going to ask of you.
And under those conditions, they
said, okay, I'll do that.
I don't want a mediation.
I don't want an agreement.
I don't want anybody to even know about
this, but I will listen under those conditions.
So it was basically saying to
people, I know what you're expecting.
I'm going to offer you something
else, right, that is different.
And there is something about that that can be
freeing and was, in fact, and ultimately was profoundly
effective for these six advocates who built better relationships
over time and ultimately brought the rhetoric that had
created the conditions for violence, reduced that rhetoric in
the Boston area and beyond.
(Duane) In line with that evidence
base, the evidence based findings,
one of those findings that actually really
surprised me was how influential people's theory
of change is to the process.
Talk a little bit about that.
That's really fascinating how you come to the party.
What theory of change you bring with you to
that party has a huge influence on what unfolds.
Then talk to us a little bit about that.
(Peter) So we're human beings, and we've engaged with the
world and solved problems all of our lives.
And so we all have these very deep, implicit
theories of change, even if we don't recognize them.
Especially if we don't. Right?
I once had the honor of interviewing
George Mitchell, who was a world class
peace builder and helped with the Irish.
He went to Ireland and helped with the crisis there.
Yeah, the Good Friday peace agreement.
He helped broker that over a couple of years there.
So he was very skilled.
And I was interviewing peacemakers who
brought warring parties together to try
to understand how they did that.
And I said I was interested in their theory of change.
And so I explained that to him, and he
said to me, well, I don't believe in theory.
I don't really have a theory.
So I'll talk to you and tell you what I
do, but I don't really find value in theory.
And then he spent in the
next hour articulating his theory.
He had a very coherent theory of change, right?
And we all do, right?
We think about how to do things.
It's always like, what's the best way to do this?
That's your theory, right?
Because we oftentimes don't know.
So in the book, what I try to talk
about again, this kind of goes back to what
we're facing here in terms of polarization in this
country and around the world, is that sometimes it
is a problem that can be addressed interpersonally.
It can be just me and my assumptions.
It can be our relationship, and they can
be things that can be sort of fixed.
And that is the clock theory of Popper, right?
That this is something a clock is.
If it breaks, you take it apart, you
find the spring that's broken, you replace it,
put it back together, and it functions. Right?
And many problems are like that, but
some problems are just fundamentally different.
And that's what I encourage people to ask themselves is
are you dealing with clock problems or cloud problems?
If they're clock problems, you can just
go in and talk it out.
I can sit down and work
it out and that's enough, right?
And most conflicts are in that bucket, but it
might be that we've tried that and we've tried
that and we've tried that and we're getting nowhere.
And then we have to realize this is
a different caliber of problem and we have
to think about it at a different level.
And we have to use some of these strategies that we've
been talking about which can help loosen the problem set in
ways that we can navigate our ways out of it.
So that is a different theory of change.
It's recognizing that some problems are what he calls
cloud problems, which are a set of different kinds
of problems that interact in weird ways.
So we go in and do something that's
smart like try to bring people together to
talk and it backfires, okay, that didn't work.
Can try it again backfires. Okay.
So we have to zoom out and understand
the context and then think about it and
work with it in a fundamentally different way.
Again, we have these theories of change.
It's useful to articulate it on
the website for the book.
And on this 'challenge' that I'll mention, we have
some exercises where people can sort of sketch out
what their theory of change is and then think
about, well, what would an alternative be in a
more complicated problem that doesn't seem to be addressed
with our typical strategies?
(Duane) Another area you've researched is the balance
that's needed between positive and negative comments.
And I think the results of your research here
might surprise our listeners because you find that it
takes many more positive comments to balance out the
effect for every negative comment that's made.
Tell us about your findings here.
(Peter) So yes, in research with romantic couples, in research
in strategy teams and organizations, and in our research
on difficult conversations over moral issues, what we find
is that you need to have some kind of
balanced ratio of Positivity to negativity.
So what Gottman finds, and this is over now
40 years of research, is that in psychology there's
a thing called the 'negativity effect', which means that
negative encounters, negative experiences are more powerful than positive
because we remember them, they're formative, they stay with
us, they have much more impact on us.
So there is an asymmetry, an
imbalance on the power of negativity.
And if you recognize that what you realize in relationships
is that you need to have enough Positivity in your
bank account and your reservoir of emotions, that you have
trust and rapport and fun and good memories so that
you can actually learn from conflict.
And what Gottman defines in his studies with
romantic relationships is that conflict is important.
Right?
If you don't have conflict in your relationships,
then you're either disengaged or you're psychotic.
Because we're humans, right?
We're making mistakes, right?
So either you just don't care or
you're not really in the same reality.
If humans are engaged with each other in
ongoing relationships, there's going to be conflict.
And conflict allows them to grow and learn.
They learn about themselves, about their relationship,
about the other, about the situations that
they're in that are changing. Right.
So conflict is a necessary component of
thriving relationships, but you need to have
a good reservoir of positivity.
So what Gottman finds in his research and Julie
Gottman is his partner in this, John and Julie
Gottman, what they find in their Love lab is
that thriving couples, when they're in conflict, when they're
discussing divisive issues or conflictual issues in their life.
There is a ratio of five positive
to one negative encounters in their conversations.
Which means that we're talking about a problem raising
our child or a financial problem we have. Or sex.
Those are basically the three things
that most couples fight over.
And in that conversation, we'll be playful or
we'll be understanding or apathetic or warm.
And then every once in a while I'll say,
but this is a real problem I have. Right.
And it's that balance of having enough
rapport and warmth in order to be
able to tolerate and learn from conflict.
We find that in the Difficult Conversation Lab, again, if
you have a 50/50 ratio, half positive, half negative,
the negativity is powerful and it will overwhelm and eventually
you end up in a bad place.
So we find in our conversations, which are between people that
don't know each other, that a three to one ratio is
ideal, three and a half to one or so.
So again, you need to establish enough respect, rapport,
connection so that you can differ, but do so
respectfully, right, and not escalate and get worse.
So that's the power of positivity, but it
speaks to the power of negativity, right.
How influential negativity is in our life.
That's why we see it so much in social media
and mainstream media, because it's an addictive substance, right.
Outrage is addictive.
So you need to counter that by
establishing relationships that are thick and caring
and understanding or at least sufficiently trustworthy.
(Duane) Now, Peter, you're currently working on a
project which you're calling 'The Challenge'.
Tell us about that project. (Peter) Right.
So about a year ago, there was a group of
us, so my oldest daughter, who's way smarter than me.
And then some of my students were talking about The
Way Out, the book, and how it was doing.
And I sort of came to the understanding that we're
in a time of urgent need to depolarize this country.
I feel like we're on a really bad trajectory.
I'm not alone in this.
There are historians like John Meacham who are
anticipating a different kind of civil war, but
definitely political violence on the rise.
So I was concerned about that and concerned that you
can write a book and I can do podcasts, and
I can try my best to get the news out.
But it's really hard to help people change their
life unless they're clear on what to do.
So what we did last summer is
we created what we call a Challenge.
Which was we asked, okay, so if I was
going to actually live these principles that you and
I talked about different theory of change, resetting, complicating
our understanding, moving together, adapting long term.
If I were to do these things
every day, what would I do?
How would it change my behavior?
So we created a set of what we
call micro exercises, or nudges, and we organized
it around a four week challenge.
And so what you can do, if you're interested,
is you go to there's a nonprofit called 'Starts
With US', which is founded by Daniel Lubetzky, who's
the Kind Bar founder, and it's a nonprofit, and
they're trying to do things to depolarize America.
And one of the things they did is
help set up a website for our challenge.
And you can go to it and sign up.
And then basically what you do is you go to it
every day for about four weeks, five days a week.
We give you the weekends off.
You go through this each week.
First week is you, second week is us, third
week is across the divide, and the fourth week
is trying to move it into the community.
But again, it's a commitment of
five minutes or more a day.
And it's an attempt to get people thinking about
these things at different levels and trying these different
exercises in their life that are feasible.
So we've started this.
We're working now with college students on it.
We're working with congressional staffers on it,
and we're trying to get more and
more communities to try this out.
And again, they may find some things
not useful, other things surprisingly useful.
But the idea is to just get in the
habit of reflecting on this and trying to work
at these different levels to develop a new sense
of political tolerance, political courage, and more compassion.
(Duane) What other advice do you have for Baha'i communities?
Remember, these are Baha'i communities globally, like in
remote villages and, you know, in the Highlands
in Papua New Guinea and in Africa and
I mean all over the world.
What advice would you have for our listeners in terms
of how they as communities can best contribute to this?
So it's a great question because we piloted
this challenge last summer, and what we found
is that the experience of going through a
challenge like this is best in community, right?
It's best if you reach out to two or three
people that you want to do this with or more,
because the experience of doing this can be hard and
can be challenging or can be really hopeful, but processing
that with your friends, with your colleagues, with your community
members is a really important part of that.
That's what we found last summer is we would do
this for a week, then I would have a zoom
session with my students and we'd chat about it.
And some of them would say, I tried this, I hated it.
I reached out to people and they laughed at me.
I don't want to do that again. Right.
Others would say, I did this, and I thought it was going
to be a pain in the neck and it was fantastic. Right.
So it's just sharing those experiences because we
learn not only from our own experience, but
from how others experience these things.
And so communities that adopt this and try
this together are the best space to ultimately
have it continue on as a practice and
ultimately transform yourself and your community.
So the idea would be that people would
sign up for it individually and it's free.
People would sign up for it individually
and then maybe once a week, they
would come together to discuss their experience.
Yes, you check in, I would say once a
week to just debrief and talk about it.
We find critical to do this together so
that there is a sense of community that
comes from grappling with these habits that are
destructive but that are flexible and changeable.
(Duane) Peter, wow, you've been a
real wealth of information here.
What I love about your work is
that you're a scholar, you're a scientist.
It's all evidence based.
And again, as you say,
good intentions alone aren't enough.
You really have to have the
science and the evidence working with.
You really looking at what the
science of depolarization is about.
Thank you so much for joining us on Society Builders.
(Peter) Oh, it's been a pleasure.
And I welcome your community to the conversation.
And I would be more than happy to
have follow up conversations with any individuals or
groups that want to learn more.
(Duane) Oh, you're going to regret that.
(Peter) Okay.
It's a good problem to have these days, more
energy behind trying to crack this pattern, the better.
(Duane) Well, that was fantastic.
Thanks again, Peter.
And I want to thank you,
our audience, for joining today's conversation.
I've included references to some of the books that Peter
mentioned in our show, notes together with a link to
the website for that Challenge that Peter talked about.
Now, you won't want to miss our next episode, where
we continue our sequence on the science of Depolarization.
I'll be interviewing Gary Friedman, who is co-
founder of the Center for Understanding and Conflict
and is one of the world's leading trainers
in the art of mediation.
It's an amazing episode
you won't want to miss. That's
next time, on Society Builders.
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