Think Again

PART III
Collective Rethinking
Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners

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E
CHAPTER 8
Charged Conversations
Depolarizing Our Divided Discussions
When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news.
—
AMANDA
RIPLEY
ager to have a jaw-clenching, emotionally fraught argument about
abortion? How about immigration, the death penalty, or climate
change? If you think you can handle it, head for the second floor of a
brick building on the Columbia University campus in New York. It’s the
home of the Difficult Conversations Lab.
If you’re brave enough to visit, you’ll be matched up with a stranger
who strongly disagrees with your views on a controversial topic. You’ll be
given just twenty minutes to discuss the issue, and then you’ll both have to
decide whether you’ve aligned enough to write and sign a joint statement
on your shared views around abortion laws. If you’re able to do so—no
small feat—your statement will be posted on a public forum.
For two decades, the psychologist who runs the lab, Peter T. Coleman,
has been bringing people together to talk about polarizing issues. His
mission is to reverse-engineer the successful conversations and then
experiment with recipes to make more of them.
To put you in the right mindset before you begin your conversation
about abortion, Peter gives you and the stranger a news article about
another divisive issue: gun control. What you don’t know is that there are
different versions of the gun control article, and which one you read is

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going to have a major impact on whether you land on the same page about
abortion.
If the gun control article covers both sides of the issue, making a
balanced case for both gun rights and gun legislation, you and your
adversary have a decent chance at reaching consensus on abortion. In one of
Peter’s experiments, after reading a “both-sides” article, 46 percent of pairs
were able to find enough common ground to draft and sign a statement
together. That’s a remarkable result.
But Peter went on to do something far more impressive. He randomly
assigned some pairs to read another version of the same article, which led
100 percent of them to generate and sign a joint statement about abortion
laws.
That version of the article featured the same information but presented
it differently. Instead of describing the issue as a black-and-white
disagreement between two sides, the article framed the debate as a complex
problem with many shades of gray, representing a number of different
viewpoints.
At the turn of the last century, the great hope for the internet was that it
would expose us to different views. But as the web welcomed a few billion
fresh voices and vantage points into the conversation, it also became a
weapon of misinformation and disinformation. By the 2016 elections, as the
problem of political polarization became more extreme and more visible,
the solution seemed obvious to me. We needed to burst filter bubbles in our
news feeds and shatter echo chambers in our networks. If we could just
show people the other side of an issue, they would open their minds and
become more informed. Peter’s research challenges that assumption.
We now know that where complicated issues are concerned, seeing the
opinions of the other side is not enough. Social media platforms have
exposed us to them, but they haven’t changed our minds. Knowing another
side exists isn’t sufficient to leave preachers doubting whether they’re on
the right side of morality, prosecutors questioning whether they’re on the
right side of the case, or politicians wondering whether they’re on the right
side of history. Hearing an opposing opinion doesn’t necessarily motivate
you to rethink your own stance; it makes it easier for you to stick to your
guns (or your gun bans). Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part
of the polarization problem.

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Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human
tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum
into two categories. To paraphrase the humorist Robert Benchley, there are
two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people,
and those who don’t.
An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range
of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress
by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are
actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the
many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a
multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.
A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur
rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and more
doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough to discover
information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it took was framing
gun control not as an issue with only two extreme positions but rather as
one involving many interrelated dilemmas. As journalist Amanda Ripley
describes it, the gun control article “read less like a lawyer’s opening
statement and more like an anthropologist’s field notes.” Those field notes
were enough to help pro-life and pro-choice advocates find some areas of
agreement on abortion in only twenty minutes.
The article didn’t just leave people open to rethinking their views on
abortion; they also reconsidered their positions on other divisive issues like
affirmative action and the death penalty.
*
If people read the binary version
of the article, they defended their own perspective more often than they
showed an interest in their opponent’s. If they read the complexified
version, they made about twice as many comments about common ground
as about their own views. They asserted fewer opinions and asked more
questions. At the end of the conversation, they generated more
sophisticated, higher-quality position statements—and both parties came
away more satisfied.
For a long time, I struggled with how to handle politics in this book. I
don’t have any silver bullets or simple bridges across a widening gulf. I
don’t really even believe in political parties. As an organizational
psychologist, I want to vet candidates’ leadership skills before I worry
about their policy positions. As a citizen, I believe it’s my responsibility to
form an independent opinion on each issue. Eventually, I decided that the

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best way to stay above the fray was to explore the moments that affect us all
as individuals: the charged conversations we have in person and online.
Resisting the impulse to simplify is a step toward becoming more
argument literate. Doing so has profound implications for how we
communicate about polarizing issues. In the traditional media, it can help
journalists open people’s minds to uncomfortable facts. On social media, it
can help all of us have more productive Twitter tiffs and Facebook fights.
At family gatherings, it might not land you on the same page as your least
favorite uncle, but it could very well prevent a seemingly innocent
conversation from exploding into an emotional inferno. And in discussions
of policies that affect all of our lives, it might bring us better, more practical
solutions sooner. That’s what this section of the book is about: applying
rethinking to different parts of our lives, so that we can keep learning at
every stage of our lives.
Non Sequitur © 2016 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by 
ANDREWS
MCMEEL
SYNDICATION
. Reprinted with
permission. All rights reserved.