Think Again

MIXED FEELINGS
In polarized discussions, a common piece of advice is to take the other
side’s perspective. In theory, putting ourselves in another person’s shoes
enables us to walk in lockstep with them. In practice, though, it’s not that
simple.
In a pair of experiments, randomly assigning people to reflect on the
intentions and interests of their political opposites made them less receptive
to rethinking their own attitudes on health care and universal basic income.
Across twenty-five experiments, imagining other people’s perspectives
failed to elicit more accurate insights—and occasionally made participants
more confident in their own inaccurate judgments. Perspective-taking
consistently fails because we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing.
If we don’t understand someone, we can’t have a eureka moment by
imagining his perspective. Polls show that Democrats underestimate the
number of Republicans who recognize the prevalence of racism and sexism
—and Republicans underestimate the number of Democrats who are proud
to be Americans and oppose open borders. The greater the distance between
us and an adversary, the more likely we are to oversimplify their actual
motives and invent explanations that stray far from their reality. What
works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to
people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good
scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on
minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.
For a long time, I believed that the best way to make those
conversations less polarizing was to leave emotions out of them. If only we
could keep our feelings off the table, we’d all be more open to rethinking.
Then I read evidence that complicated my thinking.
It turns out that even if we disagree strongly with someone on a social
issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about the issue, we trust her
more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a
sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind
it.
It can help to make that respect explicit at the start of a conversation. In
one experiment, if an ideological opponent merely began by acknowledging

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that “I have a lot of respect for people like you who stand by their
principles,” people were less likely to see her as an adversary—and showed
her more generosity.
When Peter Coleman brings people together in his Difficult
Conversations Lab, he plays them the recording of their discussions
afterward. What he wants to learn is how they were feeling, moment by
moment, as they listen to themselves. After studying over five hundred of
these conversations, he found that the unproductive ones feature a more
limited set of both positive and negative emotions, as illustrated below in
the image on the left. People get trapped in emotional simplicity, with one
or two dominant feelings.
As you can see with the duo on the right, the productive conversations
cover a much more varied spectrum of emotions. They’re not less
emotional—they’re more emotionally complex. At one point, people might
be angry about the other person’s views, but by the next minute they’re
curious to learn more. Soon they could be shifting into anxiety and then
excitement about considering a new perspective. Sometimes they even
stumble into the joy of being wrong.
In a productive conversation, people treat their feelings as a rough
draft. Like art, emotions are works in progress. It rarely serves us well to
frame our first sketch. As we gain perspective, we revise what we feel.
Sometimes we even start over from scratch.

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What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of emotion;
it’s a restricted range of emotion. So how do we infuse our charged
conversations with greater emotional variety—and thereby greater potential
for mutual understanding and rethinking?
It helps to remember that we can fall victim to binary bias with
emotions, not only with issues. Just as the spectrum of beliefs on charged
topics is much more complex than two extremes, our emotions are often
more mixed than we realize.
*
 If you come across evidence that you might
be wrong about the best path to gun safety, you can simultaneously feel
upset by and intrigued with what you’ve learned. If you feel wronged by
someone with a different set of beliefs, you can be simultaneously angry
about your past interactions and hopeful about a future relationship. If
someone says your actions haven’t lived up to your antiracist rhetoric, you
can experience both defensiveness (I’m a good person!) and remorse (I
could’ve done a lot more).

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In the spring of 2020, a Black man named Christian Cooper was bird-
watching in Central Park when a white woman walked by with her dog. He
respectfully asked her to put the dog on a leash, as the nearby signs
required. When she refused, he stayed calm and started filming her on his
phone. She responded by informing him that she was going to call the
police and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”
She went on to do exactly that with a 911 operator.
When the video of the encounter went viral, the continuum of
emotional reactions on social media rightfully spanned from moral outrage
to sheer rage. The incident called to mind a painful history of false criminal
accusations made against Black men by white women, which often ended
with devastating consequences. It was appalling that the woman didn’t
leash her dog—and her prejudice.
“I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,” the
woman declared in her public apology. “I think I was just scared.” Her
simple explanation overlooks the complex emotions that fueled her actions.
She could have stopped to ask why she had been afraid—what views about
Black men had led her to feel threatened in a polite conversation? She could
have paused to consider why she had felt entitled to lie to the police—what
power dynamics had made her feel this was acceptable?
Her simple denial overlooks the complex reality that racism is a
function of our actions, not merely our intentions. As historian Ibram X.
Kendi writes, “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a
racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” Humans, like polarizing
issues, rarely come in binaries.
When asked whether he accepted her apology, Christian Cooper
refused to make a simple judgment, offering a nuanced assessment:
I think her apology is sincere. I’m not sure if in that apology
she recognizes that while she may not be or consider herself a
racist, that particular act was definitely racist. . . .
Granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation, maybe
a moment of spectacularly poor judgment, but she went there. . . .
Is she a racist? I can’t answer that—only she can answer
that . . . going forward with how she conducts herself, and how she
chooses to reflect on the situation and examine it.

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By expressing his mixed emotions and his uncertainty about how to
judge the woman, Christian signaled his willingness to rethink the situation
and encouraged others to rethink their own reactions. You might even be
experiencing some complex emotions as you read this.
It shouldn’t be up to the victim to inject complexity into a difficult
conversation. Rethinking should start with the offender. If the woman had
taken responsibility for reevaluating her beliefs and behaviors, she might
have become an example to others who recognized a bit of themselves in
her reaction. Although she couldn’t change what she’d already done, by
recognizing the complex power dynamics that breed and perpetuate
systemic racism, she might have spurred deeper discussions of the range of
possible steps toward justice.
Charged conversations cry out for nuance. When we’re preaching,
prosecuting, or politicking, the complexity of reality can seem like an
inconvenient truth. In scientist mode, it can be an invigorating truth—it
means there are new opportunities for understanding and for progress.

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