Episode 21: The Science of Polarization (Interview with Dr. Peter Coleman)

(MUSIC) Society Builders pave the way to a better world, to a better day, a united approach to building a new society. Join the conversation for social transformation society builders 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. Society Builders pave the way to a better world, to a better day, a united approach to building a new society. There's a crisis facing humanity. People suffer from a lack of unity. It's time for a better path to a new society. Join the Conversation for Social Transformation. Society Builders. Join the Conversation for Social Transformation. Society Builders. So engage with your local communities and explore all the

exciting possibilities. We can elevate the atmosphere in which we move. The paradigm is shifting. It's so very uplifting. It's a new beat, a new song, a brand new groove. Join the conversation for Social Transformation. Society Builders. Join the conversation for social transformation. Society Builders. The Baha'i Faith has a lot to say, helping people discover a better

way, with discourse and social action framed by unity. Now the time has come to lift our game and apply the teachings of the Greatest Name and rise to meet the glory of our destiny. Join the conversation for social transformation. Society Builders. Join the conversation for social transformation. Society Builders.