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