Embrace Complexity To Overcome Polarization?
Discussing a Way Out with Dr. Peter Coleman of The Difficult Conversations Lab
June 29, 2021
Police reform, gun violence, global warming... When did you last have a civil, informative, productive conversation with someone of differing opinions on any of these hugely important but instantly polarizing topics?
In the current U.S. political climate, such conversations range from difficult to impossible to regrettable – or worse. The eminent social psychologist, Peter Coleman (Director of The Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University) is deeply familiar with this unfortunate situation and also with longstanding group conflicts within and among nations. Yet he remains optimistic enough to suggest a blueprint for reversing toxic polarization currently afflicting U.S politics and society.
In Episode 9, “Embrace Complexity to Overcome Polarization,” we speak with Dr. Coleman about the methods and examples at the heart of his book, The Way Out, recently published by Columbia University Press. For starters, everything is more complex than it seems – or should be.
“Certainty,” he states in this Purple Principle interview, “is the collapse of complexity.” He goes on to warn, “When you believe without a doubt that they are all idiots, misinformed and trying to harm our country. And you believe without a doubt that we are all victimized by their insanity, that's a problem.”
In Dr. Coleman’s view, embracing complexity is thus an essential first step on the way toward real dialogue and away from weaponized debates. He recounts a pop-up forum where he laid out this definition of dialogue, including self-examination and discovery, to a Facebook Executive. The response: “there is no major platform on the internet that promotes that.”
Undeterred, Dr. Coleman describes several hopeful examples that suggest how seemingly intractable conflicts can and do improve over time. Costa Rica, for one example, emerged from a bloody civil war with a broad consensus for change. This resulted in the disbanding of the armed forces and mandatory peace instruction in the schools. Closer to home, he describes Watertown, New York as a less polarized case in point. Sitting in deep red territory, this town rates as one of the least polarized in the country by several measures, including high rates of intermarriage between “red” and “blue” citizens (a metric in decline elsewhere in the U.S.).
To learn more about the lost art of real dialogue and the appropriately complex science of reconciliation, tune into Episode 9, “Embrace Complexity to Overcome Polarization: Discussing a Way out with Dr Peter Coleman, of Columbia University.”
Show Notes
Our guest
Peter T. Coleman, Columbia University
The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (Columbia University Press)
Additional Resources
The Difficult Conversations Lab
The Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4)
Costa Rica: Choosing a Path to Build and Sustain Peace.
Support for universal background checks on gun buyers is near 90%
Transcript
[Archival Audio Collage]
Peter Coleman
So I studied toxic emotions, like humiliation. And I studied identity formation in the context of escalating conflicts. But what I realized is that these kinds of problems don't lend themselves to that kind of atomistic analysis. So I got much more interested in thinking systemically.
Robert Pease (host)
That’s our special guest today, Peter Coleman, he’s the founder of Columbia University’s Difficult Conversations lab. He’s been studying the most intractable conflicts for decades. His new book is called The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.
Peter Coleman
And that's when we built the Difficult Conversations Lab, because we had ideas from physics and biology that were useful in understanding conceptually how these conflicts get stuck and when they change.
Robert Pease (host)
This is the Purple Principle, a podcast about the perils of polarization. I’m Robert Pease.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And I’m Emily Crocetti, excited today to be speaking with one of the world’s authorities on conflict resolution, though not simply because he’s an authority. I’m excited because he feels there is a way out of the deep polarization that we have here in the U.S.
Robert Pease (host)
But to make progress there, Dr. Coleman suggests we get way more comfortable with the complexity of the problem, move away from debate contests and move toward open-minded discussion.
Emily Crocetti (host)
First, though, let’s get to know Peter Coleman, Professor of Social Psychology, Director of the perfectly named Difficult Conversations Lab, and author of this challenging but rewarding new book, The Way Out.
Peter Coleman
So I was a professional actor for a long time. I was on television shows and things like that. And then at some point I started to work in psychiatry and psychology, and was working with young adolescents, violent adolescents, who were 12-28 year olds. And so in that context, I became very interested in conflict and violence and de-escalation and how to work with groups like that constructively. And so I had some intuition for how to do it, but I had no training in it and no conceptual frameworks. I started to read and I found a man at Columbia named Morton Deutsch, who is an eminent theorist in the study of cooperation and competition and conflict resolution. So I was trained as a social psychologist. And that was my main focus. So what I initially did was I became interested in what I call intractable conflict: long-term, difficult, proactive conflicts. So I got much more interested in thinking systemically and trying to think in terms of complex systems and how those factors evolve.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And so could you walk us through a typical exercise you conduct with the participants at the Difficult Conversations Lab?
Peter Coleman
So typically what we do is we identify a population, we send out a set of issues that are usually polarizing issues. And so that can be, you know, pro-life and pro-choice and gun control. And so we find people who are opposed on these sorts of moral dilemmas and find them moderately to strongly important to them. And then we match them and usually bring them into the lab. So, what sometimes is confusing to people is our lab isn't like – there aren't magic beans. We don't solve everything that comes in. We're interested in studying when those conversations go well, when they go poorly. So we've had a program of research that has looked at different things like how we frame the conversation, like how we facilitate the conversation, the attitudes people are coming in with. And it's important to understand that people don't, in a 25 minute conversation, come to an agreement over abortion. But they can have a conversation that is sufficiently nuanced, interesting, that they'll be willing to continue that conversation.
Emily Crocetti (host)
So then how do you scale up interpersonal conflict resolution to a larger group level?
Peter Coleman
So we have a theory about why these kinds of conflicts, like polarization today, get stuck. And that theory is based on attractor dynamics, right? So it's not one thing. It's how a constellation of things come together and create patterns that really resist change. And so we're interested in studying what are the conditions under which those patterns actually do change and sustainably so. Right? And the insights that we get from that research scales across levels. So, again, one of the things that I write about in the book, one of the chapters is, the premise is, complicate your life. And the idea there is that when we get into these very divisive, simplistic conflicts, us versus them, the issues become simple. You know, the wall's a great idea; or the walls or ridiculous idea. You're all evil; we're all great. You know, we oversimplify our understanding of everything. What mitigates that is if you can complicate how you think, how you feel, how you behave towards one another, the media you listen to, the places you travel – complicating your life scales up across levels. So in our lab, we study some of the basic principles that then allow us to, as I do in my book, try to say this idea of complicating is not just about presenting people with information. It's about the principle that a more complicated presentation of the information under these conditions is better. One of the things I advocate for is that you pick three people on the other side of the political divide, who you think are smart and interesting and listen to them and think with them and learn with them.
Emily Crocetti (host)
So you said there's a lot of different forces involved with conflict, but if you had to point to the biggest force, what would that be?
Peter Coleman
Well, again, that's a tough question to ask me. But I will give you a meta-level response, which is: certainty. Certainty is the collapse of complexity. When you believe without a doubt that they are all idiots, misinformed and trying to harm our country. And you believe without a doubt that we are all victimized by their insanity, that's a problem, right? And that is ultimately often what our experience is of the other side.
Emily Crocetti (host)
So how do you think the media plays into this? It's kind of paradoxical that you'd think it would make us pay more attention, but it often makes us way more distracted.
Peter Coleman
Absolutely. I mean, again, and this is the world of social media and sort of journalism, right? And I think both have fallen prey to business models that are highly problematic for us as humans in terms of relating to each other and understanding complex problems. So I was invited two years ago to a pop-up meeting. I was invited via Twitter. I'd been on Twitter for like two months. In fact, one of the founders of Facebook, not him, but another one, was there. And this was an hour long conversation. And the facilitator wrote up on the board, what kind of dialogue should we be having online in order to promote a healthy virtual society? And I said, well, what do you mean by dialogue? And there was silence. And I said, because when most people use that term, what they mean is debate, right? And debate is a type of communication that is really a game. And it's about winning an argument. And so I listened carefully to you to weaponize your flaws and your logic and use them against you to win the argument. That's typically what debate is. I did it in high school, right? And that's how most of us are trained. And that's what we see politicians do. And lawyers do, right? So it's part of what we assume is good, “dialogue.” Dialogue in my field is the opposite. Dialogue is a space where you learn and discover, and you can learn things about your own position and attitudes and where they came from. You can learn things about other people and why this is important to them. And you learn that these issues are messy and complicated. That's what dialogue processes do. So I said, “so what are you talking about when you talk about dialogue?'' Again, there's silence in the room. And then this co-founder of Facebook says, “Oh, well, if that's dialogue, then there is no major platform on the internet that promotes that.”
[Archival Audio Collage]
Robert Pease (host)
There it is. Emily, social media rears its hyperpartisan head again. Or maybe its heads. Either way, I’m pretty confident that when aliens investigate the rubble of our planet, they’re going to say, look, social media feeds. And echo chambers. Happens every time. Our work is done here.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Maybe. But you’re simplifying things just a bit. And putting words into aliens, who may not have mouths. Or at least not word mouths. Remember what Dr. Coleman emphasizes here: it’s not any one thing like social media that triggered polarization. It’s a constellation of things.
Robert Pease (host)
But then that puts in a Rubik’s cube situation, with all these problems interlocked. And every move creates more problems. Way back in Season One, Charles Wheelan, founder of Unite America, summarized that predicament for us.
Charles Wheelan
One of the scary things going on here is you've got a lot of different forces at work. Anyone who's been watching TV for more than 15 years knows that's new – the rise of television news, where you pick your ideology; the rise of social media. But also think about something like gerrymandering, which means more safe seats, which means the primaries matter more. They're more expensive races. Who do you get the money from? The people who are the most extreme. Every single force that is going on is pushing us apart.
Emily Crocetti (host)
All true. And all problematic. But Dr. Coleman has concrete examples of real success, despite these forces, which we will get to in a bit. First, though, let’s dig a little deeper into his diagnosis of conflict starting with these Rubik’s Cube-like patterns, which he calls attractors.
Peter Coleman
Attractors are just patterns that mathematicians find when they study things over time. So you can be studying how a married couple interacts when they're in conflict. John Gottman does this in his Love Lab on the west coast, where he's studied thousands of couples, brings them into the lab, has them have a conversation over something that they have conflict over. And then they start to just measure their emotional experiences from moment to moment for that hour of conversation. And what you see if you measure things like that is eventually there are clusters of emotional experiences that this couple has. So usually if you measure a couple a month later, you bring them in, measure them again, six months later, a year out, their clusters are fairly stable, and those are what we call attractor patterns. And so this is a way, what complexity science and things like attractors allow us to do is not to over-simplify something like political polarization, because that is our tendency in science is to say, well, you know, what's the essence of the problem? Well, it's moral differences or it's gerrymandering, or it's the entertainmentization of media. If you read about political polarization today, most authors have their pet theory of their thing that matters. And I agree that many of these things matter, but they matter more at some times than others. And not all of them explain a lot, certainly not a 50 year trajectory. But what does explain it is when these things come together and start to feed each other, to create these patterns, that, like an addiction, are very difficult to change.
Robert Pease (host)
Yeah, it's certainly a very complex problem and you paint that portrait very well. And then you have a great line about solutions that are too simple, that a screwdriver can't fix bad weather, and by analogy, just bringing people together isn't quite enough. So if that's not enough, tell us about the ways that you like to bring people together for a more productive discussion.
Peter Coleman
So, you know what I'm arguing, the reason I wrote this, this particular book, is that I've studied long-term difficult conflicts for a long time. But I started to be approached by some journalistic organizations that were doing matching of people from different sides of an issue and asking them to go off and have a cup of coffee or a drink and a conversation and meet each other. But the research on that – and there's been about 500 studies of that – but there are certain conditions under which intergroup contact helps. And there are many conditions that don't. And unfortunately, some of the organizations that are encouraging people to get together, particularly without facilitation, for short periods of time to focus immediately on their differences, these things backfire. And so usually, you know, one of the things I advocate for strongly in my book is to find what we call positive deviance: find the groups and organizations within your community that know how to bring people together, know that you can't do it once for an hour, that it should be facilitated. That people have to kind of agree to certain kinds of guidelines, that it will take a while to start to change and shift attitudes. So there's a website, the Princeton group,the Bridging Divides Initiative, which is organized by a woman named Nealin Parker. They have a map in the U.S. of currently something like 7,000 organizations and groups across the country that are doing this work. So my recommendation is, go to the website, go to the map, look at your community, find groups that are already doing this work, and reach out to them because they can help you have conversations and change relationships and attitudes, and even move into action that we can't do by ourselves.
Robert Pease (host)
In your book, you talk about how a bombshell effect, a major, in some cases almost cataclysmic event, can help facilitate progress. And so we wondered when COVID hit, did you think, “Hmm. Maybe, maybe there's a silver lining here. Maybe people might come together,” and have you seen any evidence of that? Do you think that could happen in the longer term?
Peter Coleman
So that thinking comes originally from something called Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, and that came out of Biology. It seems that, you know, like a species might change and adapt incrementally at the margins over time, but you don't see new species come about or dramatic changes unless there's some kind of major shock to the system. When you sometimes see a tsunami or wildfires, you see communities that are in intense conflict, even ethnic violence, put down their arms and put down their conflict and help the community heal and rebuild. And that oftentimes does happen with things like COVID. So what was so interesting to me is that it didn't. COVID was weaponized, right? It was a hoax. So one side disagreed with this belief, you know, kind of populist view that science is bogus. And so the political polarization of our nation, in fact, trumped, and I mean, that pun intentionally, COVID, right? Or the effects of what could have been disaster diplomacy. So that is the bad news in the short term. The Trump approach to governance – COVID, the economic downturn, the increased awareness of racial injustice in this country – all of these things are happening simultaneously. And so there is this time of great destabilization. You know, we've all been home for a year and change just sitting in one room, talking to each other on the computer. So there's a lot of fundamental shifts that have happened in what they call our deep structure, our basic assumptions about how we treat people, our basic decision making processes. And so that's fertile ground for change. That's what the research suggests. Now is a great time to reset and think about, what are our priorities? How do we want to live our life? How do we want to set up our families and our communities? Where do we want to live? You know, these are times to make those decisions and they are ripe times to create the opportunity for change.
[Archival Audio Collage]
Robert Pease (host)
Well, Emily, I don’t think anyone would dispute that we’ve been through a few really destabilizing years now and are more than ready for a reset.
Emily Crocetti (host)
But Dr. Coleman also suggests that these things don’t happen magically, or instantaneously, just because a bombshell event occurs. They take time and effort and guidance. And he highlights several examples in the book where positive change has occurred.
Robert Pease (host)
Costa Rica is an interesting case. Maybe some of our listeners have visited there. Incredibly beautiful country, world leader today in eco-tourism. But that Civil War backstory is not so well known.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And a lesser known example much closer to home, in upstate New York, where they have among the highest rates of intermarriage in the country, meaning marriage between Democrats and Republicans – which is on a steep decline in the rest of the country.
Robert Pease (host)
That’s Watertown, New York, which may vote red, but, according to Dr. Coleman, doesn’t see red or act red but much more purple. That’s because the town took steps to combat polarization early on – Including some pretty simple ones, like community breakfasts.
Peter Coleman
It's cooked by a reverend and they intentionally bring people from different sides and they have ongoing long conversations about the issues that divide us. And what he said, which was, I think poignant, is that they have conversations around these issues long enough to start to realize what they really don't know and what they don't understand. So they're not, you know, hour debates on an issue about immigration and the wall. They're, you know, ongoing conversations where people start to unpack their own assumptions and their own misinformation, or lack of knowledge about these really complicated issues. So they have spaces like that. A lot of community level spaces like that. It's not a utopia, Watertown, New York, because it, you know, it has racism and has bias and discrimination against some groups. But it's an interesting place because it's in the middle of Trump country. It went for Trump, I think in the last election by about 20 points; a lot of the population are somehow associated or affiliated with Fort Drum, which is a major army unit up there. So there are a lot of people that are employed there. But again, on the one hand, that means that people from different political persuasions are working there. And so it is what we call a cross cutting structure, where people can kind of get to know each other in a way around just work. But even though it is politically more Republican and more Trump supporting, it's still one of the most tolerant places in the world. And that's the goal here. The goal for me is trying to understand, how do we bring the heat down? How do we bring the kind of what I call American psychosis down to a point where people can start to differ on things, have reasonable conversations about their differences and address the problems that we're all facing?
Robert Pease (host)
And another interesting example, more at the national level, is Costa Rica, where I believe you have spent some time and studied how they came out of Civil War and developed a very tolerant and peaceful nation. So tell us a little bit about Costa Rica.
Peter Coleman
Also a very interesting place. So, you know, I tend to study the two major projects I have. One is on what I call intractable conflicts. Long-term stuck patterns of division and enmity like our current state of political polarization in this country, which has a 50 plus year history of increasing intensity. But we also study sustainably peaceful societies. Costa Rica has a really interesting history, first of all, because of where it's located in the drug corridor, between Latin America and the United States. But they came out of a really terrible bloody Civil War in 1948. And they were one of the first nations in the world to dismantle their military, take all the money from the military, put it into education, environmentalism and healthcare. And to then intentionally try to grow a peaceful society. So they mandated peace education, so that they teach conflict resolution, respect, and tolerance fundamentally to all of their young people. And they believe that that is ultimately what grew a more peaceful society. I mean, some of it was moving away from militancy as a way to solve problems. But some of it really was to grow a population that would be more tolerant and accepting of others and difference and therefore more resilient. And it too is today seen as one of the most peaceful places on earth.
Robert Pease (host)
And one of the most beautiful. One more example, you mentioned the work of More in Common, and we had a chance to talk to their research director, Stephen Hawkins, in our first season of the Purple Principle.
Stephen Hawkins
So we identified four tribes that we described as belonging to something called the “exhausted majority,” which is two-thirds of Americans. We found that while they differed in terms of being either independents or Republicans or Democrats, what they shared was a sense of fatigue at American politics and a sense that they were more likely to support compromise and were less eager to see their side defeat their opponent.
Robert Pease (host)
But it's interesting to hear from you, an expert in conflict resolution. Why is More in Common’s work important and also helpful to your own?
Peter Coleman
Well, for a couple of reasons. So I mean, they do good kind of quantitative work in terms of surveys around attitudes and they are more nuanced in their analysis. So as opposed to just looking at extremes, they really start to break down the different, what they call the hidden tribes, that oftentimes differentiate really different groups from one another. And so you do have extreme wings, people that on the left and the right that are much more engaged and active and have polled much more extreme attitudes. But you have these other groups in the middle. They're what they call the exhausted middle majority, which is possibly a lot of your audience, which are people that today are just fed up with dysfunction, vitriol, hate, the entertainmentization of media. So they're just sick and tired. And that is oftentimes a necessary condition. When you have long-term conflicts like we have in this country between reds and blues, the conditions under which they change require a couple of things. And one is that you have enough people that are miserable and fed up with the status quo, and they're really longing for a pivot or a way to change. But they also need to have some clear sense of what that means. What does that look like? It's what they call a mutually enticing opportunity – some way to pivot that it isn't too costly. They don't lose too much face, and feels like a feasible alternative. That's why I wrote The Way Out. It is trying to articulate specifically what that looks like.
[Archival Audio Collage]
Robert Pease (host)
Those were some examples of longstanding, seemingly intractable conflicts that were resolved in recent history. Our special guest today, Dr. Peter Coleman, has been studying conflict resolution for decades internationally and more individually in his Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University. His recent book is The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.
Emily Crocetti (host)
We should say The Way Out is a thoughtful and challenging book. Not full of technical jargon but a serious read nonetheless. Then again: how could it not be, with the message of embracing the full complexity of polarization?
Robert Pease (host)
Yet it’s also full of examples like Costa Rica and Watertown, New York, and many other places and groups finding ways to bridge the partisan divide in our country and around the world. Not miraculously. Not in a conversation or two. But through patient, informed efforts.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And that’s cause for some hope as we emerge from a year and a half of anxiety and introspection, looking for better days ahead.
Robert Pease (host)
Next time on the Purple Principle, we’ll talk to another author who refuses to oversimplify his subject.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Dr. Chris Bail is Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab. In his new book, Breaking the Social Media Prism, he takes a novel, almost contrarian view of why we spend so much time online.
Chris Bail
We have kind of an outdated idea of what social media really does in the world. We have this idea that we're all individuals out searching for information, but social media is really shaping how we understand each other and ourselves. We don't think that social media is a competition of ideas. It's a competition of identities.
Robert Pease (host)
Please adopt your less partisan, more purple identity and join us for that discussion, share us on social media, and review us on Apple Podcasts.
Emily Crocetti (host)
We want to thank a recent Apple podcast reviewer who said: “I didn’t want to bother checking out this podcast. So glad I pushed myself into listening finally. Many thanks for a super job.”
Robert Pease (host)
No pushing allowed, but please nudge a few friends and colleagues to check us out on their favorite podcast app or straight off our website, at purpleprinciple.com. This has been Robert Pease and Emily Crocetti for the Purple Principle team: Alison Byrne, producer; Kevin A. Kline, Senior Audio Engineer; Emily Holloway, Digital Operations & Outreach; Dom Scarlett, Research Associate. Our resident composer is Ryan Adair Rooney. The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production.
