Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: There's two parties who may have really different views value systems that need to be respected and need to learn how to live together because there's no getting out of this relationship.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Does America need a marriage counselor?

A new study suggests our political divide might benefit from the same techniques use to heal troubled relationships.

Instead of shouting matches and cold shoulders, participants engaged in structured conversations that emphasized understanding over argument.

Just like in a struggling marriage, learning to listen and empathize made a real difference.

It reduced hostility and even fostered a sense of common ground.

Joining me today is Doctor Jessica Gottlieb, an associate professor at the University of Houston and one of the authors of this study.

Thank you for joining us.

It's great to be here.

Now, please tell me what inspired the idea to apply marriage counseling techniques to political polarization?

Well, all the credit is due to our partner organization, Braver Angels, who— who created and led the intervention that we wanted to study the impact of, given its importance in today's society and the organization was founded almost ten years ago, I believe, by David Blankenhorn and Bill Dougherty.

And Bill Dougherty is a clinical psychologist who specializes in marriage counseling.

So we believe a lot of the ideas for the content of these workshops came from his experience working with people who need to learn how to agree to disagree, sometimes.

And tell me some of the techniques that you use.

Sure.

So, you know, just like in a marriage, I think the interesting correlation is that there's two parties who may have really different views, value systems that need to be respected and need to learn how to live together because there's no getting out of this relationship.

And in the same way, Democrats and Republicans in the US are never going to have identical values, nor should they.

But we're not getting rid of each other.

And so learning how to, you know, respect, listen to, appreciate each other's views is really— is really what's going to—what's going to work.

So the process of these workshops is different from a lot of the other cross partisan interventions that I've seen out there where you're often taught to learn, taught to listen to the other side, or taught how to communicate.

And what's different about these workshops that we studied, is that a lot of the discussio happens within your own group.

And so a lot of what you do with respect to the other group is just listen to them report back to what happened within their own group.

And what's—I think I' hopeful about that model is that people tend to be more willing to be vulnerable and honest when they're in a in-group setting.

They feel more protected and secure.

And then when they report out to the other group, the other group gets to hear some of that introspection and vulnerability.

And then, you know, it works because each side has agreed at the outset to do this.

And so there's that reciprocity and trust that comes from there.

I can talk a little bit about the actual exercises because I think they're quite telling.

So yeah, the first exercise, that that I think is— it was hard.

I participated in one of these myself.

And each group is asked to, within their own group, reflect on some of the stereotypes that the other partisan group has of them.

And then to identify a kernel of trut in each of those stereotypes and it's hard, it's hard to admit that some of the things that the other group thinks negatively of us has some truth to it, and it may not all be true.

But often these stereotypes come from somewhere.

And so, you know, being forced to be vulnerable in that way and then let the other group hear that vulnerability and that introspection was a really eye opening experience for both sides, and I think a foundation of trust for both sides.

And then another piece of the workshop that I think is really interesting and valuable and something we don't often do very much is there was—it's called a fishbowl exercise, where each group took turns sitting in a fishbowl in a circle where they're meant to talk amongst themselves, but they're watched by members of the outside group.

And the topic of conversation is, what are the values that lead you to the policies that you hold?

And one of the really interesting things about this exercise is that people have different sets of values that they're trading off, or that are often competing with each other.

And not everybody agrees on the policies, the positive outcomes or on the values that generate these policies.

And so wha the opposing group gets to hear is this diversity of views and perspectives and values within the other group.

And often they see—I mean, s one thing that comes out of this and we know this because after each of these, after each of these exercises, the group is asked to reflect on what the exercise meant to them, what they learned.

And one of the things we heard a lot from that particular exercise was, wow, a lot of the values that the opposing group was talking about, leading to their particular polic solutions, were shared values.

We just come to different conclusions about what the policy should look like.

But the motivating value is often very similar.

Pardon m for being a bit of a cynic, but how long—have you done studies to show how long this lasts?

Like, it' one thing to be in a conference and, you know, touchy feely, realizing that the person you oppose on one issue or another is is actually a real human bein and a good person in many ways.

But I would think tha a few weeks after the conference and going back to this incredibly divided country that we live in, that the effect would kind of wear off.

Yeah.

Great question.

So one thing to note from this particular study is we evaluated the effect three weeks after.

So it was at least that durable.

And then we also evaluated the effects six months later.

And some of the the effects had dissipated.

But we still do see some effects on some measures.

And I think one of the reasons that this particula type of intervention might work, might be more durable than others is because of the group aspect.

So one of the psychological mechanisms that we, we think is going on to explain what happened in this workshop is that not only do people change their beliefs about the individual who they're talking to, what you might get from, you know, having a conversation with an opposing partisan, they change their beliefs about the entire group.

Right?

So they ascribe this diversity of views within the opposing group to the whole group, or they ascribe this new newfound respect for some of the values that the other group holds to the whole group.

So it's not just about, you know, oh I know this one neighbor of mine who you know, is a good person, but they're just an anomaly.

In fact, in this setting it seemed like people were able to generalize what they learned about the other party to the larger party itself, so that that's one thing.

Another thing that in an— I can talk about, if you'd like another intervention that this organization has that has a very different mechanism and structure, is all about how to depolarize within your own party.

So it involve no contact with the other party, but rather teaches you how when you hear polarizing language or polarizing attitude from members of your in-group, that you learn to recogniz that that's unhelpful language or behavior, and you learn how to constructively address it.

And we tested this kind of a workshop.

It was done in an online setting.

And it's more of a skills building workshop than experiential workshop.

And we found that it had effects about three weeks later and we weren't able to test longer term effects, but for that one, we think that that could als have more promising durability because of the repeated ability to practice the skill.

So one of the problems with learning skills to talk across the partisan divide is that a lot of people don't get opportunities to practice that skill very often.

A lot of us live in geographically segregated neighborhoods where everybody in our neighborhood is of a particular partisan persuasion.

Everybody in our workplace is of a particular partisan persuasion, our friend groups.

And so even if you learn skills about how to constructively talk to out-partisans, you may never get to practice those skills.

And that's what you need to do in order to depolarize.

Whereas if you learn how to work on depolarizing yourself and your own co-partisans, you will get practice.

And that can help each group depolarize within itself.

One major difference I see between therapy, marriage therapy, marriage counseling for a married couple who or maybe not a married couple, but a couple who have been partners for a long time, is that at one point, these people loved each other, supposedly.

And they want to keep want to keep each other in their lives or they wouldn't be in the counseling session.

But when you have large groups of people, so I can see why you would be able to persuade the couples in that situation to drop the facad and make themselves vulnerable.

But how do you do it when you have large groups of people with you know, even differences among themselves, not just differences with each other?

Yeah.

So I think what one of the things I'm hearing this question is, how do you even get people to the table?

And this is a challenge that we faced in recruiting for the study of this intervention and also a challenge I know that our partners in Braver Angels and other sort of bridging-the-divide organizations also face.

And, you know, we know that a lot of these interventions do work, but that's only half the challenge.

The other half of the challenge is getting the people to the table in the first place.

And I don't know the answer to that.

I think that's a a really hard problem.

I think that there are some ways in which you could imagine doing this.

You know, in the workplace, if there are leaders in a workplace who are comfortable having some, you know, civic dialog skill building trainings, in the same way that many workplaces have other kinds of workplace training sessions, then you know, it's sort of a requirement.

You could do this in civic education programs, in schools, in universities.

Braver Angels is doing a lot to reach in to universities and try to do this.

I know there are other organizations working i primary and secondary schools.

So I think there are ways to get around this recruitment problem by going to places where, you know, you have an audience that's already there and sort of mandating some of these skill building trainings or opportunities.

And I think there's also a role of elites.

So where there ar media elites or political elites or role models or influencers of some form or another that demonstrate the value of this kind of behavior that that can have bigger effects.

Now, when you say, you know, you know these programs have worked, how do you measure that?

Great question.

So there's two pieces to that.

One is how do we actually— what are the measures, the outcomes that we use?

And the other is, how do we know that our conclusions are rigorous?

So for the first thing, the outcome that we use is basically a thermometer where at the mean outcome is we ask people how warml they feel toward their in-party.

So if you're a Republican, how warmly they feel toward Republicans on a scale of 1 to 100, and then how warmly they feel toward the opposing party.

So Democrats, on a scale of 1 to 100.

And then we look at how that gap moves.

There are other questions that we build in to understand more fully.

So one might be how willing would you be to have a neighbor who is of the opposite party to marry someone who's of the opposite party, to have a colleague who's of the opposite party?

So there are a bunch of questions like this that we collapse togethe to get a more holistic sense of what people—how people view the other side, a second way.

So that's explicit attitudes.

We're asking people to self-report how they feel.

Then we have implicit attitude tests.

I don't know if you've seen these.

But you give people opportunities to look at something on a screen and you get their visceral reaction to thing like a good or a bad reaction.

And this gives you a better sense of people's knee jerk reaction without giving them time to really reflect and think about their attitudes.

And sometimes these can be more honest than the self-reported or explicit attitudes.

So we have both of those measures and we saw both of those measures move.

And lastly we have a more behavioral measure where we sort of ask people to put their money where their mouth is, and we give them an endowment in the in the context of a survey and say, you know, you would gain $20 from taking this survey, but were asking you if you'd like to donate part of that $20 t a depolarization organization.

And then we measure how ofte people are willing to do that.

So it's not exactly measuring their partisan animus, but measuring how much the value de-polarization in general So all three of those kinds of measures moved.

Then on the how do we know this is true and this is a real effect?

We ra a randomized controlled trial.

So this is the same logic of medical trials where you get a study sample together and then you randomly assign some people to a control group and some people to a treatment group, and then you're able to see people who look like the ones in your treatment group and compare them, and how they might have shifted, because if we didn't have that and we just looked a how people in the group shifted relative to some, you know, sample in our population, the people who take the intervention or who, you know, who sign up for the intervention are likely very different from the people in the general population.

So this wa we have a group of our sample in in the control group are peopl who wanted to participate.

But in the context of our study, we said we had a cap.

Everyone knew going in that not everybody would get enrolled in the intervention.

But everybody wanted to be there.

Interesting.

So, you talked about you also use this technique to bring people together who are in the same party or in the same political playing field as each other, to get them to listen to each other better and, and, and to, you know, adopt a more open attitude.

Tell me about how those techniques and how those workshops go versus when it's two parties against each other?

Sure, sure.

So the first thing that was different about the depolarizing within workshop that we studied was that it was online and it is more scalable because of that.

And it's a skill building workshop.

So it's not based on having to have that direct contact or experience with other people.

So the people never get to meet each other.

Theyre just on a— There's a bit of both.

So in the online workshop, it's— I think it's well conceived in that there is a moderator who teaches skills.

And then there are breakout groups where people get to act— interac with a subset of the real humans in the workshop.

So you can have a workshop of 200 people.

And it's pretty effective because then you get a small group discussion time of 2 or 3 people, where you're really practicing the skills and rhe skill set that is different in this particular context is that first you have to learn to recognize your inner polarizer So there is some introspection.

And you know, what— what do I do in my life and behavior with my in-group that might be unhelpful, tha you know, isn't just a genuine expression of my values, but that is, you know, really employing stereotypes or prejudices about the other side to just inflate my sense of being a good in-party member or whatever.

So, you do that introspection, then you learn the skills when you see that kind of behavior in others to address those skills.

So the set of skills that is used, I think, across most of the Braver Angels programing, they use this acronym: LAPP.

Listen, acknowledge, pivot, perspective.

So you listen to what someone is saying, you acknowledge them.

You have some pivot where you, you say, well, I actually don't agree with you or I agree with some of what you're saying, but not others.

And then you offer your own perspective, which might be, you know, I agree that that value that the other party holds is irresponsible.

And I really think that that's a bad idea.

Bu trying to address it in this way and denigrating the is not going to get us anywhere or something.

Yeah.

Tell me what the— when you do—when you have the opposing groups, what are the issues that most often keep them apart and the issues they mostly disagree on?

What's interesting about a lot of the Braver Angels programing is that they don't want to convince— they don't want opposing partie to moderate their policy views.

They think like— in a democracy, policy disagreement and ideological conflict is necessary.

I mean, we don't all have the same opinions about— We all come from very different experiences.

And so the goal is not to persuade people to come to your side, but rather to better understand where people are coming from, respect that they can hold those views, and we can agree to disagree and maybe come to some sort of consensus.

But that's not even necessary.

It's more the hatred and mistreatment of and the dehumanization of the other side that is the problem that these programs seek to address.

So a lot of the discussion will revolve around how there's different ideas about reproductive rights o different ideas about policing, or different ideas about the economy where the policie that everybody thinks should be put in place are quite different on either side.

But what's striking is that many of the values that motivate those policies, you know, we want our families to be healthy an happy and successful and safe.

A lot of those values are similar across both groups.

And what about just outright hate?

How do you deal with, you know, one side hates LGBTQ people.

The—you know, the other side hates fiscal conservatives.

I don't know, I'm making this up, but— Yeah.

What are— how do you deal with that?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And it gets to what I thin are the limits of this approach, which is that there's, you know, some amount of, some amount of animus that's justified when there are views of one side that explicitly discriminate or target an identity group.

There is no way to have that discriminated or, you know, marginalized groups say it's okay.

Like we're fine with that, right?

Like that is an expectation that no one should have.

And so I think that the goal is to depolarize when the animus comes from stereotypes that are untrue.

But when there are—and perhaps depolarization needs to happen more amongst majority groups that haven' or aren't facing discrimination and that there i this downside of depolarization, like there's work on, you know, if there's too much tolerance, you'r tolerating intolerant behavior.

And we don't want that.

And so when one thing we actually did in this study was we evaluated the effects on the willingness of participants to engage in standing up when they heard a racist or when they heard someone saying something racist or heard someone saying something that they knew was untrue.

So misinformation.

And one of the effects of the study—of the intervention was that people were less willing to engage in this conflictual behavior.

So we have to take that seriously and know that, you know, this isn't meant to solve all problems and that it's not going to decrease the extent to which there is discrimination and targeting.

And that's another problem and probably needs to be addressed in a different setting.

I do think that being forced to take a step back, take a breath, think about that, you know, maybe they shouldn't believe everything that they hear being spouted about the other side.

I think that could help our current climate in bringing people to, you know, more similar understandings of what's going on in the country.

I know it's not going to solve all of our problems, but I think it could help.

Thank you so much, Jessica Gottlieb of the University of Houston, for joining us for this conversation.

Very enlightening.

And, boy, if it could have even the smallest impac on how divided this country is, it would be terrific to do something like this.

Yeah.

Thanks.

It's been a pleasure to share this with you.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary.

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