Shutterstock
A war on truth has been raging in the United States for most of the last decade, making it hard to imagine productive civil discourse, democratic consensus-building, or an end to politics inflamed by election deniers, COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, and the Republican chaos caucus in Congress.
In an increasingly polarized world, social scientists, political organizers, and journalists have started to focus on a way to slip out of intractable political stand-offs.
In his book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, published last year, journalist and podcaster David McRaney describes the work of various researchers and activists who have demonstrated the efficacy of deep, empathetic listening in changing minds.
The political technique known as “deep canvassing,” McRaney writes, moved the needle on acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights in the early 2000s by Californians who had previously rejected a ballot initiative recognizing same-sex marriage, as well as the rejection of Donald Trump during his second run at the presidency in 2020. The key to getting people to change their minds in both cases was empathic interviews that overcame defensive “us versus them” thinking and gently encouraged people to identify inconsistencies in their own thinking.
Deep canvassing interviews on LGBTQ+ issues pioneered by the Los Angeles LGBT Center have proven to have a significant impact, flipping some voters’ views of gay marriage and transgender rights. In 2020, People’s Action repeated the experiment in swing states by deep canvassing hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters and achieving, on average, a 3.1-point swing in favor of Joe Biden.
Psychiatrist Karin Tamerius has been doing similar work, creating the organization Smart Politics to draw on therapy techniques to teach progressives to have more fruitful conversations with their conservative family members. She even created an artificial intelligence chatbot, called “Angry Uncle Bot,” to help progressives practice talking with argumentative relatives.
“It’s an illusion that you are talking about facts,” Tamerius tells McRaney. “You both think that you are talking about the issue, but what’s more important is the person.” Making people feel safe and respected is critical to avoiding pitfalls and making progress in these conversations, she says.
While I was reading McRaney’s book—along with a lot of other people who were participating in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Go Big Read reading program—Hamas launched the brutal October 7 attack in Israel, killing 1,200 civilians and soldiers and generating shocking images of people who were tortured, burned alive, and dragged across the border into Gaza as captives. Then the Israeli military began its campaign of retaliation, pounding the densely populated Gaza Strip with a barrage of missiles that has killed more than 11,000 people and injured more than 27,000, as of this writing. Israel also shut off Gaza’s supplies of food, fuel, and water, in what Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described as a “complete siege” aimed at fighting “human animals.”
The propaganda war on social media began immediately, with videos of atrocities lobbed by each side against the other.
This is the sickening, hyperpolarized, quick-reaction world we’re living in now.
During a protest at the White House organized by If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, two groups that are calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, demonstrators held signs declaring “Don’t Weaponize My Grief.”
We are living in a world of weaponized grief. It is dehumanizing and morally repugnant to wave images of dead children in political opponents’ faces to make a point. But viral images, instant punditry, and polarization are how we communicate now, while sitting in isolation in front of our screens, seeking hits of adrenaline and dopamine.
As I was scrolling through a dismaying social media feed about the war, watching people who felt victimized by Hamas and by the Israeli government trading personal attacks, I stumbled across a YouTube video of Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef being interviewed about the war by British television host Piers Morgan.
Youssef, who has been called Egypt’s Jon Stewart, has a gift for pointing out the absurd. In this case, he did so by agreeing with everything Morgan and his rightwing guests said about the justification for war and the need for a “disproportionate” response to the Hamas attack. How disproportionate, though, he asked, holding up a chart of Israeli and Palestinian deaths over the past several years. The pointlessness of this endless cycle of violence could not have been more clear. But what made an impression on me was not what Youssef said but how he said it. His use of humor changed the channel in the conversation, adding an element of surprise that, it seemed to me, opened a pathway for his points to break through, instead of reinforcing his listeners’ defenses and closing their minds.
“The truth is tribal,” McRaney writes in his book on changing minds. He traces the evolutionary biology of confirmation bias and the neurology of our desire to be part of a group. For a primate, being ostracized is worse than being wrong, he writes.
Turning down the temperature on tribal conflict and making people feel safe is the way to reach across a cultural divide, reinforce our common humanity and, ultimately, to change minds.
Viral images, instant punditry, and polarization are how we communicate now, while sitting in isolation in front of our screens, seeking hits of adrenaline and dopamine.
McRaney is an optimist. In writing his book, he got to know and like former 9/11 truther Charlie Veitch as well as a couple of former members of the virulently homophobic Westboro Baptist Church. He describes how they freed themselves from oppressive echo chambers and came to see the world differently—in each case because someone outside their circle offered a friendly helping hand.
McRaney also made friends with a leading spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society, and had an engaging conversation with him about how he came to reject the idea that the Earth is round.
Empathy, understanding, but also humor and appreciation for the wild diversity of human experiences and points of view, inform the work of deep canvassing, or “street epistemology,” as some practitioners call it.
Maybe part of the antidote to the way we are so often divided into two hostile sides is realizing that there are many sides—many different, quirky human expressions, and underneath that, similar motivations to stake out an identity, find a community, and feel connected and affirmed.
The founder of street epistemology began as a committed atheist determined to disabuse religious people of their beliefs. But doing the work softened him, he tells McRaney, and he has become a more friendly observer of his subjects.
All of us have tribes. All of us have beliefs that are not informed by deep expertise, but rather by the people we trust. There’s something about that attitude of acceptance and the effect it has on people who can drop their defensiveness and really talk about why they believe what they believe that seems not just persuasive but also healing.
We’ve become increasingly alienated and disaffected from one another, not just because of the rise of a frightening rightwing authoritarian politics around the globe, but also because of the way pandemic shutdowns and social media made people’s isolation and paranoia worse. We need to get back in touch with each other, get out of our heads, and reconnect with our common humanity.
Call it deep canvassing or street epistemology or just talking to your uncle. Let the healing begin now.