No Man's Sky Optional Conversations Attempt to Read Data
Complicating the Narratives
What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually deport when they are polarized and suspicious?
By Amanda Ripley [updated Jan 11, 2019]
Last summer, hr brought xiv people — half Republicans, half Democrats — to a converted ability constitute in downtown M Rapids, MI. The goal was to encourage Americans to talk — and listen — to those with whom they disagree. Oprah Winfrey led the conversation, her debut as a hr Special Contributor — and her return to Television receiver news, where she'd started her career equally a Baltimore anchor four decades earlier.
Information technology was an extraordinary opportunity. For 3 hours, ix cameras captured the group's conversation nearly Twitter, President Trump, health care and the prospect of a new civil war. The crew even built a special table, just for the occasion. The edited xvi-infinitesimal segment would stand for the first of a serial of planned hr shows focused on a divided America. It was a gamble for a respected news outlet to go across the clichés and name-calling and excavate richer, deeper truths, at a time of profound division in America.
In the cease, that was not what happened. The episode drew nearly 15 one thousand thousand viewers, making it the tertiary-nigh-watched TV show of the week, according to Nielsen ratings. Simply the on-air conversation was strangely dull and superficial.
First, a heavyset man named Tom said he loved Trump more than every 24-hour interval; next, a blonde woman named Jennifer said Trump made her feel sick to her breadbasket. After, Winfrey went around the table request each person for i word to describe the typical Trump voter, then repeating their answers. "Frustrated," said Tom. "Frustrated," said Winfrey.
What went incorrect? How could one of the nigh successful, relatable interviewers in American history create such uninspired television?
Deep in their bones, talk-show hosts (like journalists generally) empathise certain things about human psychology: we know how to grab the brain'south attention and stimulate fear, sadness or acrimony. We can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that practiced stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we've reached our collective limitations.
Equally politicians have become more polarized, we take increasingly immune ourselves to be used by demagogues on both sides of the aisle, amplifying their insults instead of exposing their motivations. Again and again, we have escalated the disharmonize and snuffed the complication out of the conversation. Long before the 2016 election, the mainstream news media lost the trust of the public, creating an opening for misinformation and propaganda. If the purpose of journalism is to "see the public into fuller being," equally Jay Rosen once wrote, it's hard to conclude that we are succeeding.
"Conflict is important. It'southward what moves a democracy frontward," says journalist Jeremy Hay, co-founder of Spaceship Media, which helps media outlets appoint divided communities. "But as long as journalism is content to let conflict sit like that, journalism is abdicating the ability it has to aid people discover a manner through that conflict."
Merely what else can we practice with conflict, besides letting it sit? We're not advocates, and we shouldn't be in the business of making people experience better. Our mission is not a diplomatic i. So what options does that leave?
To find out, I spent the past iii months interviewing people who know conflict intimately and have developed creative ways of navigating it. I met psychologists, mediators, lawyers, rabbis and other people who know how to disrupt toxic narratives and get people to reveal deeper truths. They practise it every day — with livid spouses, feuding business organisation partners, spiteful neighbors. They take learned how to go people to open upwards to new ideas, rather than closing down in judgment and indignation.
I'chiliad embarrassed to admit this, but I've been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all kinds of places, and I did not know these lessons. Subsequently spending more than than 50 hours in grooming for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I've overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fright and the need to vest. I've been operating similar an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.
For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a rational world. When people fabricated mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was assumed, more often than not prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all fashion of biases and illusions.
"We are influenced by completely automatic things that we accept no control over, and we don't know we're doing it," as Kahneman put it. The practiced news was that these irrational behaviors are also highly predictable. So economists accept gradually adjusted their models to account for these systematic human quirks.
Journalism has withal to undergo this awakening. We like to think of ourselves equally objective seekers of truth. Which is why virtually of the states have simply doubled downwardly in recent years, continuing to exercise more than of the same kind of journalism, despite mounting testify that we are not having the affect we once had. We continue to collect facts and capture quotes as if we are operating in a linear world.
But it's condign clear that we cannot FOIA our way out of this problem. If nosotros want to learn the truth, we have to observe new means to mind. If we desire our best work to take consequences, nosotros have to be heard. "Anyone who values truth," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, "should stop worshipping reason."
We demand to find ways to aid our audiences get out their foxholes and consider new ideas. So we have a responsibleness to use all the tools nosotros can find — including the lessons of psychology.
"It's time to stop making excuses," as Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler wrote in his book Misbehaving. He was speaking to economists but he could have been addressing journalists. "We need an enriched approach…that acknowledges the existence and relevance of Humans."
Your Brain in Disharmonize
Researchers have a proper noun for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They call this an "intractable conflict," as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman describes in his book The Five Percent, and it's very similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge in most one out of every 20 conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people'due south encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, indigenous, racial or otherwise) become more and more than charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It's impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.
In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary demand to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will modify our heed, no thing what.
Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to cease the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds "seem to accept a power of their own that is inexplicable and full, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin," Coleman writes. "We often think we understand these conflicts and tin can cull how to react to them, that we accept options. We are ordinarily mistaken, however."
Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. "Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others," according to grooming literature from Resetting the Tabular array, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Heart Due east and the U.S.
The cost of intractable disharmonize is also anticipated. "[East]veryone loses," writes Resetting the Table's co-founder Eyal Rabinovitch. "Such conflicts undermine the dignity and integrity of all involved and stand as obstacles to artistic thinking and wise solutions."
There are means to disrupt an intractable conflict, as history bears out. Over decades of piece of work, in laboratories and on the margins of battlefields, scholars similar Coleman, Rabinovitch and others take identified dozens of ways to break out of the trap, some of which are direct relevant to journalists.
In every example, the goal is not to wash abroad the disharmonize; information technology'south to assist people wade in and out of the muck (and back in once again) with their humanity intact. Americans will go along to disagree, always; but with well-timed nudges, nosotros can help people regain their peripheral vision at the same fourth dimension. Otherwise, we tin be certain of at least one matter: we will all miss things that matter.
The Chat Whisperer
In a difficult-to-observe windowless room at Columbia University, there is something called a Difficult Conversations Laboratory. Coleman and colleagues use the lab to study real-life conflict in a controlled setting, inspired in part past the Beloved Lab in Seattle (where psychologists Julie and John Gottman have famously studied thousands of married couples for many years).
Over the past decade, the Difficult Conversations Lab and its sister labs around the earth have hosted and recorded close to 500 contentious encounters. They intentionally generate the kind of discomfort that virtually people spend all of Thanksgiving trying to avoid. To exercise this, the researchers first survey participants to learn their views on a few polarizing issues, such as abortion or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then they friction match each person with someone who strongly disagrees.
When the ii participants see, they are asked to spend xx minutes crafting a statement on the contentious subject — one that they could in theory both agree to make public with their names fastened.
Some of these conversions go so terribly that they need to be shut down before the time is officially up. But many conversations do non. Over time, Coleman and his colleagues noticed that in the non-terrible conversations, people still experienced negative emotions–just not consistently. They cycled through the usual roundabout of anger and blame, simply they also exited from time to time. They experienced positive emotions and then negative and then positive again, demonstrating a flexibility that was absent from the stuck conversations.
Later the chat ends and the participants are separated, they each heed to audio of their conversations and report how they felt at each indicate. Over time, the researchers noticed a fundamental difference between the terrible and not-terrible conversations: The better conversations looked similar a constellation of feelings and points, rather than a tug of war. They were more complex.
Only could that complexity be artificially induced? Was in that location a style to cultivate improve conversations? To discover out, the researchers started giving the participants something to read earlier they met — a short article on some other polarizing issue. I version of the article laid out both sides of a given controversy, similar to a traditional news story — arguing the case in favor of gun rights, for example, followed past the example for gun control.
The alternate version independent all the same information — written in a different fashion. That article emphasized the complexity of the gun debate, rather than describing it as a binary issue. So the writer explained many different points of view, with more nuance and pity. Information technology read less like a lawyer'south opening argument and more like an anthropologist's field notes.
Later reading the commodity, the two participants met to discuss Middle Due east peace — or another unrelated controversy. It turns out that the pre-chat reading mattered: in the difficult conversations that followed, people who had read the more simplistic article tended to get stuck in negativity. Merely those who had read the more complex manufactures did not. They asked more questions, proposed higher quality ideas and left the lab more than satisfied with their conversations. "They don't solve the debate," Coleman says, "merely they do accept a more nuanced agreement and more willingness to continue the chat." Complication is contagious, it turns out, which is wonderful news for humanity.
On my ain visit to the Hard Conversations Lab in January, I was matched with a female person graduate educatee who is persuaded by the notion of "trigger words" and supports the idea of "safe spaces." I am not at all persuaded, so we were a perfect friction match.
Earlier we met, we were each asked to read a nuanced article on gun rights. Equally predicted, the conversation that followed was polite and careful. The grad student was guarded but thoughtful. No one stormed out or threw the stapler. We did come upward with a argument we could both agree upon. I won't telephone call it revolutionary, merely we institute but enough common ground to hold us both on tippy toes. My opinion on trigger words has not inverse; but I can no longer dismiss its supporters equally clueless, coddled automatons. (Well, I can, but information technology requires a slight effort, which is new.)
The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work volition matter — peculiarly if information technology is virtually a polarizing effect. When people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information. They listen, in other words.
There are many ways to complicate the narrative, every bit described in detail under the vi strategies beneath. But the chief idea is to feature nuance, contradiction and ambiguity wherever you can observe it. This does not mean calling advocates for both sides and quoting both; that is simplicity, and it usually backfires in the midst of conflict. "Just providing the other side will merely move people further abroad," Coleman says. Nor does it mean creating a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and their opponents. That is just simplicity in a inexpensive suit. Complicating the narrative means finding and including the details that don't fit the narrative — on purpose.
The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. "The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete," novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her mesmerizing TED Talk "A Single Story." "[I]t'south incommunicable to appoint properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person."
Usually, reporters do the opposite. Nosotros cutting the quotes that don't fit our narrative. Or our editor cuts them for us. Nosotros await for coherence, which is tidy — and natural. The trouble is that, in a time of high conflict, coherence is bad journalism, bordering on malpractice.
In the midst of conflict, our audiences are profoundly uncomfortable, and they want to feel better. "The natural human tendency is to reduce that tension," Coleman writes, "past seeking coherence through simplification." Tidy narratives succumb to this urge to simplify, gently warping reality until ane side looks proficient and the other looks evil. We soothe ourselves with the knowledge that all Republicans are racist rednecks — or all Democrats are precious snowflakes who hate America.
Complexity counters this craving, restoring the cracks and inconsistencies that had been air-brushed out of the movie. Information technology's less comforting, yes. But information technology's too more than interesting — and truthful.
Correct now, half of Democrats and Republicans see members of the opposing party equally not just sick-informed but actually frightening, according to the Pew Research Middle. Republicans think Democrats are much more liberal than they actually are — and vice versa. If part of our job is to accurately portray different points of view in means people can understand, we are declining. (And by "we," I mean all journalists — only especially Telly news reporters. Despite the post-election angst over Facebook, virtually vi in ten American adults say their well-nigh important source of election information was not digital news feeds, but quondam-fashioned Goggle box news.)
In reality, explicitly racist behavior crisscross party boundaries. In a 2016 Reuters/Ipsos poll, nearly a third of Hillary Clinton supporters described black people as more "trigger-happy" and "criminal" than white people, and a quarter said blackness people are lazier. No party (or person) is without bias.
And it'south not merely Democrats who worry most offending people; in fact, 28% of Republicans with no more than than a loftier school instruction say people need to be more careful with their language to avoid offense (double the share of Republican college graduates who say then). "There's no limit to how complicated things can get," as Due east.B. White wrote, "on account of ane thing always leading to some other."
There is a business organisation example for complication, likewise. Correct at present, Play tricks News and MSNBC assume their viewers want outrage, which is to say, simplicity. And many practice. Just what about all the people who aren't watching? Many Americans have tuned out of the news, demoralized by the sniping, depressed by the hopelessness. What would happen if they ane day stumbled upon a different kind of story — one that intrigued them instead of terrifying them?
Meanwhile, as online news sites keep to struggle to make ends run across with clickbait headlines and advertisement revenue, more outlets are turning to subscribers to aid fund their reporting. That means they take to shift from a one-night stand business model to a long-term relationship with readers — which has to exist based on something deeper than cats and Trump tweets. Indignation volition always be the easiest manner to lure readers, just by itself, information technology'southward non enough to brand people pay for the privilege of coming back day after day.
1. Amplify Contradictions
To imagine what complexity might look similar on a TV news magazine, I asked two veteran conflict mediators to watch Winfrey's threescore Minutes conversation with Michigan voters. Sara Cobb directs the Center for Narrative and Conflict Resolution at George Mason Academy, and John Winslade, at California State Academy, San Bernardino, has co-authored eight books on conflict resolution.
From the start seconds of video, the mediators questioned Winfrey'due south tactics. Her opening question — how President Trump is doing in his job so far — got low marks. "It's a relatively closed question," Cobb said. A ameliorate opener might be, "What is dividing us?" That way, "the chat becomes about the division, and Trump doesn't become the blackness hole where all this complexity is going to get dumped."
Then came the starting time answer Winfrey got — from Tom:
"Every day I love him more and more. Every unmarried mean solar day. I nonetheless don't similar his attacks, his Twitter attacks, if you lot will, on other politicians. I don't remember that's appropriate. But, at the same time, his actions speak louder than words. And I beloved what he'southward doing to this state. Honey it."
Hearing this, Winfrey turned, without comment, to the woman next to Tom to solicit her (polar opposite) opinion.
Both mediators jumped all over Winfrey for failing to respond to Tom. It was a perfect opportunity, said Cobb. "I would have said, 'Gosh Tom, I didn't know from out of the gate that we were going to have this kind of complexity in the room, and I compliment you lot considering information technology's so piece of cake to say Yes or No, merely yous've really said ii things at the same fourth dimension."
In the commencement infinitesimal, Winfrey could take set a tone for complexity. Which would have been more accurate and more interesting. Most of united states of america accept more than than ane story, and so did Tom. Winfrey could have drawn out this complexity, Winslade said, by request something like: "'And so on the one mitt, you honey him more and more, and on the other hand, y'all don't similar some things he'due south doing. Tell me what you lot don't like about his attacks.'"
In that location are many things that journalists cannot practise. Just we tin can destabilize the narrative. Nosotros can remind people that life is non as coherent every bit we'd like. Otherwise, the spiral to simplicity is all but certain: "As the disharmonize progresses, the narratives get skinnier," Cobb says. She sees this in every kind of dispute, across dinner tables and halls of parliament. "The first fight a couple has, in that location's a lot of confusion. Only as time goes past, the story gets consolidated, and they tin tell you in three minutes what a wiggle their partner is. And the aforementioned is true in international conflicts." But if we destabilize the narratives, as Coleman found in his lab, people tend to exhale; they keep arguing just they holster their weapons.
[To see the full transcript of the sixty Minutes segment with note from the expert mediators, click here.]
2. Widen the Lens
In early on 2015, a classic dispute arose in the metropolis of Gloucester, a coastal customs on Massachusetts' Northward Shore. City Council officials appear that a 25-foot high steel sculpture would be installed at a public park near the town's waterfront. The sculpture would be funded through public and private funds.
The locals began fighting near the sculpture almost immediately. "Information technology just got the hackles of everybody up," says Kathy Eckles, a Gloucester resident who is as well a therapist and trained facilitator. Some felt the boondocks's elites were dictating the use of public space. On Facebook, the insults turned vicious. The Gloucester Daily Times ran a story quoting the City Council president, who chosen the proposed sculpture "beautiful," followed by a skeptical resident who questioned the ceremoniousness of the slice. "It's just not right, I don't think, for this port. I'd rather see our icons recognized offset."
It was shaping up to be an former-fashioned NIMBY boxing of the most predictable kind: art work, honey it or hate it. Then something unexpected happened. Metropolis officials turned for advice to a group called Gloucester Conversations, which Eckles and her colleague John Sarrouf had recently formed with other residents in hopes of creating more than effective interactions in the city. "Our community, which is very beloved, was also very divisive," Eckles says. A previous dispute about what to exercise with a decaying Birds Eye factory had dragged out for several years, dividing the boondocks into factions. The same thing happened with a debate over a lease schoolhouse. And then there was the backyard chicken controversy of 2014. "It was just on and on," Sarrouf says, "almost everything."
This time, instead of getting sucked into the sculpture quagmire, the grouping (with assistance from the nonprofit Essential Partners, where Eckles and Sarrouf work) widened the lens on the dispute. They intentionally took the opportunity to get-go a bigger chat — nigh what Gloucester wanted from its public art and how these decisions should exist made.
First, they invited all the local arts and civilization leaders in the community together and asked them blueish-sky questions: What is public art? What is included? How should we decide? So the group held a public meeting at the City Hall to enquire the same wide-open questions. Nearly 100 people showed upwardly. After that, organizers went out into the neighborhoods and held still more conversations. Residents covered a huge map of Gloucester with gluey notes, mark old buildings that should be renovated; statues that had been forgotten; and locations where new works might become.
Interestingly, information technology wasn't difficult to augment people's imagination. "All the fashion through, people were so responsive," Eckles says. It turned out that they wanted to exist part of a conversation that was bigger than themselves. "More often than not," says Sarrouf, "it's a relief to people to exist pulled out of deadlock."
And then the feud became an inquiry — in a way that made the story more interesting, not less. The sculpture never did go installed. Only later that twelvemonth, the Gloucester Daily Times ran a dissimilar kind of article — focused on the city's quest for a new arts policy.
Decades of research have shown that when journalists widen the lens like the Gloucester organizers did, the public reacts differently. Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political scientific discipline professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of Idiot box news stories: wider-lens stories (which he chosen "thematic" and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled "episodic" and which focused on one individual or upshot — say, for example, i welfare mother or homeless man).
Again and over again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more than likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By dissimilarity, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame authorities and guild for the issues of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the arraign, in other words.
In reality, most stories include both broad and narrow-lens moments; a feature on a welfare mother will even so invariably include a few lines nigh the status of job-grooming programs or government spending. But every bit Iyengar showed in his book Is Anyone Responsible?, TV news segments are dominated by a narrow focus. Equally a result, TV news unintentionally lets politicians off the claw, Iyengar wrote, because of the framing of near stories. The narrow-lens nudges the public to agree individuals accountable for the ills of society — rather than corporate leaders or authorities officials. We don't connect the dots.
Great storytelling e'er zooms in on individual people or incidents; I don't know many other ways to bring a complicated trouble to life in means that people will retrieve. But if journalists don't then zoom out over again — connecting the welfare mother or, say, the controversial sculpture to a larger problem — then the news media simply feeds into a human bias. If nosotros're all focused on any modest threat is right in front of us, it's easy to miss the big catastrophe unfolding effectually u.s.a..
3. Ask Questions that Go to People's Motivations
Sandra McCulloch was a veteran reporter for the Victoria Times Colonist in Victoria, Canada, when her sister stopped talking to her — and wouldn't say why. It tore McCulloch up to have no contact and no answers. And so one solar day, McCulloch signed upward for a short, introductory form in conflict mediation, just to see what she could learn.
"It was the most powerful thing I call up I'd ever done," she says. A year later, on her 55th birthday, McCulloch quit her 25-yr newspaper career to start a new life. She'd always loved people, and while journalism gave her admission to their darkest stories, mediation seemed like a style to help them to the light. "It gives y'all then many more tools — to find out who people are and why they do the things they practice."
The most useful tool was the questions she asked, as it turned out. She'd e'er asked questions, but now she asked unlike ones in different ways. She tried to utilise questions equally a spade — to get beyond the usual script.
"If I'd known then what I know now, I think I would have asked a lot more questions almost conflict," she says. This surprised me. I'd e'er thought journalists focused also much on conflict; wasn't that the problem? But McCulloch says nosotros just buzz effectually conflict, never getting to the centre of the matter. Our questions stay on the surface, stoking conflict like a rake but never getting to the richer soil beneath.
Mediators spend a lot of their energy on this thought of digging underneath the disharmonize. They take dozens of tricks to get people to stop talking about their usual gripes, which they phone call "positions" — and start talking about the story underneath that story, also known every bit "interests" or "values."
Opposing Obamacare is a position; a conventionalities in self-sufficiency is, for many people, the value underlying their position. Whether you concur or not, these deeper motivations matter far more than to the argue than the facts of the conflict (and also happen to exist more interesting).
People are driven by their gut and centre, non their reasoning, as New York Academy social psychologist Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, citing research going back decades. In fact, superficial self-interest has never been a skilful predictor of political beliefs. (Notation to journalists: information technology might be time to stop doing stories on how Trump voters in the Rust Belt voted against their economic interests; that'southward about as insightful as a story revealing that beach-goers don't clothing sunscreen.)
Instead, Haidt identifies six moral foundations that course the basis of political thought: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. These are the golden tickets to the human status. Liberals (and liberal members of the media) tend to be very conscious of iii of these foundations: care, fairness and liberty. Conservatives are especially attuned to loyalty, potency and sanctity, but they care nearly all six. And conservative politicians reliably play all six notes, Haidt argues.
Conservatives (and bourgeois media, I'd add together) have a systemic advantage as a event. They can motivate more people more than often because they hit more notes. (Notice how Democratic leaders still exercise non talk very ofttimes about Trump's disloyalty to America, his chiffonier members and his wives, in those terms, despite existence bombarded with prove of such disloyalty. They mutter more often about injustice, indecency and unkindness, because those are the notes they about similar to play.)
If journalists want to broaden their audiences, they need to speak to all six moral foundations. If any of us desire to understand what's underneath someone's political rage, we need to follow stories to these moral roots — just like mediators. "People tend to keep describing their stories in the same mode," McCulloch says. "In mediation, y'all try to flip that over and say, 'How did you lot come to that? Why is this story of import to you lot? How exercise you feel when you lot tell information technology to me?'" Those questions may seem touchy feely, but it's surprising how rarely people get asked them. "You see people kind of blink and go, 'I never thought of it that fashion.'"
These kinds of questions reveal deeper motivations, across the immediate conflict. Sometimes, the entire conflict disappears when this happens — because people suddenly realize they agree on what matters most. More often, the questions reveal that the dispute is about something other than what anybody thought. "Experienced mediators dear telling stories like this," says Mary Conger, a mediator who co-founded the American Dialogue Project, which matches Americans up for conversations across political divides. "We all thought we were in the room for a totally different reason. Information technology unlocks this world of possibilities."
Last year, I signed up for Conger'due south project as a journalist and a participant. I was matched with Bill, a retired principal from Wisconsin who is more conservative than I am. We spoke on the phone for a 40-minute, facilitated phone telephone call, post-obit the protocol that Conger created. The first question was, "How did you come up to take your political views?"
I hesitated to answer, which made me realize I had never once thought of how I came to believe what I believe. At some level, I think I'd causeless I came to my political opinions scientifically — by looking at all the information and choosing the "truth." Which is utter nonsense. In fact, I'd been raised in New Bailiwick of jersey by a feminist mother who voted Democrat and raged against injustice, aslope a more conservative father who grew up on a cattle ranch and who consistently voted for Republicans throughout my babyhood. As I got older, other experiences shaped my views, just I had never really articulated that development to myself or anyone else.
If the chat had started by asking me what I thought of Trump (like the 60 Minutes episode), I would have had no problem giving an ad-lib monologue on the subject, replete with superlatives and metaphors. Instead, I had to tell Nib my own story, which was necessarily more complex, and Neb had to tell me his story. Eventually, we learned that we both cared near access to health care for anybody; but Beak likewise cared a lot virtually arrears spending, something I could remember my dad worrying about over the dinner table in the 1980s (just I almost never read almost in the pages of the New York Times). Later on the call, neither of united states of america had changed our positions, but the conversation helped widen my lens.
Of course, information technology's easier to get regular people to dig into their back stories; upending the script of a well-rehearsed executive or politician tin can be impossible, no thing what questions they are asked. As a reporter, McCulloch had never liked interviewing politicians. "I always felt similar I was existence played," she says. But she at present thinks there are means to get underneath the surface, even with politicians. "At present I remember I would have pressed more — 'I want to know why yous experience this way.'"
Hither are some specific questions that McCulloch and other mediators I interviewed suggested that reporters (or anyone) could ask to get underneath the usual talking points:
- What is oversimplified nearly this issue?
- How has this conflict affected your life?
- What do y'all think the other side wants?
- What's the question nobody is request?
- What exercise you and your supporters need to larn about the other side in order to sympathize them better?
Another journalist-turned-mediator, Samantha Levine-Finley, spent a decade covering homeland security and politics for United states of america News & Earth Report, the Houston Relate and other outlets earlier deciding to change careers. She worked on Capitol Hill, which is basically Ground Null for tribal rage. "I felt like I was mostly giving airtime to bad behavior — which mostly fosters more bad behavior," Levine-Finley told me.
Since so, she has spent much of the past decade working in the Ombudsman offices of the National Institutes of Health and the American Cerise Cross, leading trainings, coaching employees and mediating conflicts. If she ever returned to journalism, she says, she'd care nigh unlike things. "I'd care less near how clever I was," she says, "and more about the $.25 and pieces that don't fit, the people whose perspectives were inconvenient."
In McCulloch's instance, she never did go an caption from her sister. Her mom passed away, and the two sisters rarely accept crusade to interact anymore. Still, McCulloch has found some peace by understanding the universality of her story. "Yous realize everybody has conflicts like this in their lives," she says. "I know how awful information technology is. Merely you can go past it."
iv. Listen more, and amend
Americans' trust in mass media (newspapers, TV and radio) "to report the news fully, accurately and adequately" is at its lowest level in Gallup polling history, dating back to 1972. The problem is serious amid Democrats, and dire among Republicans — simply 14% of whom say they trust the media.
We can debate the reasons for this, just we'll somewhen just be talking to ourselves. Our stories don't matter if we are not believed. "Trust precedes facts," as Eve Pearlman, co-founder of Spaceship Media, likes to say.
Everyone I spoke to said that one powerful way to build trust is by listening better — in ways people can see. Reporters rarely go trained in how to do this; we get a lot of feedback almost our stories from editors and readers but very little about our methods.
I've come to realize that this is nuts. In many other professions that involve delicate conversations, people go trained in the art of asking questions and listening. They approach interviewing like an art, one they never terminate learning. Why don't journalists? No i has listened to my interviews for a impress article and given me feedback — always. I learn by trial and error, which is like studying a language past yourself. You tin can go better, but it will have yous forever.
Lynn Morrow, by dissimilarity, has been coaching college students for 9 years for InsideTrack, a company that helps universities ensure starting time-generation and other students terminate their degrees. She has over 150 students in Wisconsin on her caseload. The central claiming of Morrow's job is to build trust — usually over the phone or in text or email messages — with at-run a risk students who are extremely reluctant to share their doubts and fears.
Building trust is and then important — then hard — that Morrow and her colleagues become through hours of training, including a role-play coaching exercise with the visitor's CEO. She's a veteran at the visitor, but to this twenty-four hour period, every call she makes gets recorded, analyzed and scored on a scale from one to four, depending on how well she listened and responded to her students.
One of Morrow's most common mistakes, she says, has been to miss very subtle cues. For example, she used to ask students how things were going and accept the offset answer she got — which was commonly, "Great!" After, when she got the students' grade reports, she'd realize things were non great. Like all humans, the students had been reluctant to lead with their vulnerability. "Nosotros talk about what nosotros're comfy and confident with first — and what you think the person wants to hear," Morrow says. "When you actually push them to go further is honestly when yous go the almost important information."
She learned to heed not merely to what students say — but to their "gap words," or the things that they don't say. If they hesitate, for instance, before answering a question about their last math test, or if they contrivance a question altogether. Then she knows to dig deeper. She asks important questions multiple times — sometimes weeks apart — and almost always gets different answers. Usually each answer is true — and each represents a different piece of the story. Most of all, she tries to keep her mind open for as long as possible in every conversation. "It's so easy to become in with the idea that you know exactly what is going on — which shuts down other possibilities."
At that place are other tricks for doing this, even nether time force per unit area. In conversations beyond profound divides, Resetting the Tabular array trains people to listen for specific clues or "signposts," which are usually symptoms of deeper, hidden pregnant. Signposts include words like "always" or "never," any sign of emotion, the employ of metaphors, statements of identity, words that get repeated or any signs of confusion or ambivalence. When you hear one of these clues, identify it explicitly and ask for more than.
At one point in the 60 Minutes chat in Michigan, a homo named Matt explained his Trump vote this style: "We wanted somebody to go in and flip tables. We're tired of the status quo…"
In response, Winfrey asked: "In your mind, what table got flipped?"
That was a good question, our mediator experts said, considering it showed curiosity about Matt's metaphor. People oftentimes utilise metaphors when they feel emotion; investigating those metaphors tin help reveal a deeper, more compelling truth.
Even better, Winslade said, would take been to inquire what tables have not gotten flipped — to prefer Matt's metaphor and so challenge information technology. To ask, in essence, "Are in that location any parts of the Trump administration that perpetuate the status quo?"
Another related and very common strategy for building trust is to double check — to give the person a distillation of what you thought they meant and see what they say. Gary Friedman, i of the godfathers of arbitration, calls this "looping for understanding," and he suggests doing it every time you lot feel y'all've heard someone say one affair that is of import to him or her.
Our brains make rapid assumptions that we aren't even enlightened we're making. We are incorrect more often than we call back. To understand what someone really means requires a lot of double-checking. It'south a uncomplicated tactic that sounds something similar this: "So you were disappointed by the Mayor's deportment because y'all care securely about what happens to the kids in this school system. Is that right?"
It seems obvious and maybe a flake contrived, but it works like magic. In training with Friedman and a dozen other mediators in February, I practiced looping and beingness looped, over and over once again. I was amazed at how oft I thought I'd understood the person — but had missed some important dash. ("No, I wasn't disappointed by the Mayor'due south actions; I was heartbroken." In that location is a departure.) It was equally surprising how reassuring information technology felt when other people looped me correctly. It felt like a tiny victory: even if the other person didn't agree, she'd truly heard and digested my indicate.
Since and then, I've been trying to loop every time I become into whatsoever kind of vaguely emotional conversation, even outside of piece of work. When my son rages that he has to go to bed, I now say something extremely unremarkable like, "You're actually frustrated that you can't stay up." Before, I would have ignored him or argued with him, explaining how reasonable his bedtime is and how lucky he is to take a bed, etc. At present, after I evidence him that I've heard him, he but…goes to bed. It'due south news you can use, every damn day.
Granted, I don't always have the self-command to loop. Only when I do pull information technology off, it ever helps — lowering the heat of the conversation and the odds it will go incorrect. This sounds squishy just it is a key to the kingdom. Having someone articulate your almost of import message proves that you've been understood, which is all almost of united states of america want.
"When people feel heard and seen as they wish to exist heard and seen, they relax their guard," says Melissa Weintraub, a rabbi and the co-founder of Resetting the Table. "Information technology'south both very unproblematic and very hard to accomplish. We have to give them the most powerful and eloquent articulation of their ain thinking." Then and only and then will people fifty-fifty begin to consider information that does not fit their usual narratives. In fact, this is 1 of the only means to go people to listen when they are emotional or entrenched in a detail worldview. Humans need to be heard before they will heed.
Once you commencement listening for looping, though, information technology's surprising how rarely y'all hear it. For the past ii years, CNN political commentator (and self-proclaimed liberal activist) Van Jones has been traveling the country, talking to Trump supporters in an effort to "build bridges" and "try to understand why Americans are so divided." Shortly before the 2016 ballot, he visited a family unit of Trump supporters in Gettysburg, PA, for the first in a series of shows called The Messy Truth.
I asked Friedman, who has mediated over two,000 cases in his career, to watch the 10-minute CNN segment and share his thoughts. He started out hopeful. "I thought it was a wonderful thought — to get to people's homes is cracking," Friedman says. "Hopefully they feel a niggling stronger in their homes, and it helps brand for a more fair, counterbalanced dialogue."
Simply just similar the mediators who watched the sixty Minutes segment, Friedman started cringing nearly immediately. Jones looped almost zilch that the family said, Friedman noticed. At one betoken, a woman shared a very personal story about how the election has affected her life: "Ane of my friends blasted me on social media: 'How can a mother who professes to then love her children support Trump?' And she chosen me two-faced, and she just cut into me big time."
The woman's eyes filled with tears, and her vocalisation bankrupt every bit she swung between sadness and acrimony. "I lost a friend I really liked and cared nearly. How did my mothering come into play with who I am supporting for president? Like, 'How dare you, put me out there to exist this evil individual?' It broke my heart. Information technology simply bankrupt my heart."
In response to this display of 18-carat suffering, Jones said aught to recognize that he had heard her. He did not share any personal stories of his own experiences with accusations and heartbreak (although he presumably has enough). Instead, he told her that liberals needed her help, and and so he delivered a short lecture on the different ways conservatives and liberals view liberty and justice. He took a very personal, painful revelation and made it impersonal and sterile.
Jones could have responded like this, Friedman suggested: "I remember that we actually have something in common here. We both feel as if we are being put in a box that we don't belong in." He could have acknowledged the woman's heartbreak — and connected information technology to his own: "We each feel disrespected and misunderstood."
To be off-white, Jones did what near of u.s.a. do when we are trapped in a conflict. He was so busy convincing the family unit they were wrong that he failed to prove he was listening. So the conversation just cycled round and round, going nowhere interesting. "He uses everything they say as a chance to retort and accuse," Friedman said. "I encounter nothing just missed opportunities left and right."
"As long as they understand that he'southward non going to try to understand them, they're on the defensive. And he's on the attack," Friedman says. "He'due south trying to change the game, but this is the aforementioned game. It's simply washed with the appearance of marvel."
Curiosity should be natural for journalists — and it is, with some stories. But over time, as we start to hear the same arguments and story lines over and over, our curiosity fades. It's a human tendency, but one that our sources notice.
Joe Figini, a veteran attorney in Washington, DC, has been interviewed past national reporters for stories well-nigh death-penalty cases, corporate failures and other complex issues. The experience is consistently unsatisfying. "[Reporters] ask a very narrow prepare of questions," Figini says. "It was never like, 'We want to sympathise what really happened.' They ever came with a thesis."
I way that journalists tin practise better is to let become — by ceding some command to our audiences (who are usually less jaded than nosotros are). Companies like Hearken help newsrooms partner with the public throughout the reporting procedure — soliciting ideas, asking people to vote for their favorite ones and then reporting them out. Hearken is currently working with about a hundred newsrooms in 15 countries. "The public has infinite marvel," Jennifer Brandel, Hearken'south founder and a radio journalist, tells reporters and editors. "And too, by the way, yous are a member of the public."
Over the course of i year, for example, Bitch Media published 20 stories prompted by reader input and plant that readers spent more fourth dimension with those stories than with other stories — and were more likely to sign up for a membership afterwards. This kind of work requires a shift in reporters' mindsets, needless to say. "There are reporters who withal feel that the audition is made of a bunch of idiots and assholes," says Brandel, "but we try to prove them that the reason they think that is because their connection to the public has heretofore just been them complaining to you. You lot haven't given them a adventure."
Trust is mutual, in other words. It'south easier to get trust if you lot give information technology.
5. Betrayal People to the Other Tribe
The most powerful way to become people to stop demonizing each other, as decades of inquiry into racial prejudice have shown, is to introduce them to one another. The technical term is "contact theory," but it just ways that once people have met and kind of liked each other, they have a harder time caricaturing one another.
18-carat human connections permanently complicate our narratives. Communities with more cross-cut relationships tend to be less fierce and more tolerant, as Diana Mutz, a political scientist professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has found.
Journalists can innovate people in at to the lowest degree two ways: vicariously, through skillful storytelling, or literally, by bringing communities together in live or virtual events. Only doing this right is harder than it sounds. And it's possible to make things worse if certain atmospheric condition are not in place.
Vicarious storytelling can unintentionally narrow the lens, as previously discussed, past focusing on individual accountability instead of systemic ills. It is important to widen the lens and connect a particular representative of the "other" tribe to a larger history and story — or the story can end up but confirming the audience's biases.
Literal convenings, meanwhile, are happening more ofttimes equally more than media outlets look to subscribers to back up their work over the long term — instead of depending on bulldoze-by clicks. But here once again, the execution makes all the divergence. It'southward important, for instance, that everyone invited to a customs gathering feels like they are on equal ground. The situation needs to be nonthreatening and fair (so you wouldn't want to host a conversation most race in the whitest neighborhood in town, for example).
At that place should be moments of levity and shared history or purpose, besides. And ideally food. People however bond when they break bread, but every bit they always have. These details affair a lot — only equally much as the substance of the conversation. In the Difficult Conversation'southward Lab, Coleman and his colleagues found that conversations become ameliorate when people have about iii positive interactions for every 1 negative come across. And the tone is unremarkably prepare in the starting time few minutes.
The best conversations across differences usually start with personal questions similar, "Which of your life experiences have shaped your political views?" When we tell our own story, we tend to speak with more nuance, because real life is not a bumper sticker.
When Spaceship Media works with a newsroom to engage a divided customs, they usually offset by asking four questions (often through Facebook):
- What do you think the other customs thinks of you?
- What do yous think of the other customs?
- What do you want the other customs to know near you lot?
- What practise you want to know virtually the other community?
Notice none of those questions are about President Trump, unlike the sixty Minutes segment. Each question requires some amount of reflection, which leads to a more than curious, less charged mindset.
So the journalists get to work — trying to get the answers to the questions people asked about their counterparts. They do this with unusual levels of transparency, oftentimes sharing what they are finding and from where — and asking readers for feedback and suggestions.
Afterwards the 2016 ballot, Spaceship Media filled a closed Facebook group with fifty women, half of them Trump voters from Alabama and the other one-half Hillary Clinton voters from California. For 1 calendar month, the women had difficult conversations about abortion, wellness intendance, race and politics. At i point, when information technology became clear that the Alabama women had a very dissimilar view of Obamacare than the California women, the journalists got involved, investigating how Obamacare functioned in each place. They shared their findings with the group, including the fact that healthcare premiums had been increasing faster in Alabama than in California. The women's alien perceptions were rooted in some real geographic differences.
Over time, the participants on both sides started asking for more than reporting. They started to trust the reporters, who had trusted them.
6. Counter Confirmation Bias (Carefully)
1 of the most well-studied biases in the human portfolio is confirmation bias — our nasty habit of believing news that confirms our pre-existing narratives and dismissing everything else.
Worse yet, people exposed to data that challenges their views can actually cease upwards more convinced that they are right. (And more than educated people are not necessarily less biased in this way. For example, scientific literacy and numeracy are non strong predictors of believing climate change poses a serious risk to the public, equally Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan has plant.) In other words, confirmation bias is the Kryptonite of traditional journalism; it renders all of our most vivid and meticulous piece of work utterly impotent.
That's because people don't make up one's mind to believe something based on its statistical validity. That'south just not how our brains accept evolved to piece of work. Nosotros judge information based on its source and its harmony with our other beliefs. As Daniel Kahneman puts it in Thinking Fast and Slow: "How do you lot know if a statement is true? If it is strongly linked past logic or clan to other behavior or preferences y'all hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you lot volition feel a sense of cognitive ease."
So one style to gently counter confirmation bias is to create a little cerebral ease first: for example, use sources from a wide range of tribes. If you lot're doing a story about the scientific evidence for the safety of vaccines, and you know your most liberal readers are highly suspicious of this statement, it would be best to utilise sources that surprise them — ideally ones from their tribe.
Another tactic is to use graphics instead of text. In a series of experiments, Nyhan and colleagues constitute that presenting information visually increased the accuracy of people'southward beliefs near charged issues — including the number of insurgent attacks in Republic of iraq afterwards the U.Due south. troop surge and the change in global temperatures over the by 30 years.
Cognitive ease as well comes from a feeling of hope. Uncomfortable information that could generate fear (such as a report on the destruction of this year'south influenza epidemic) is more palatable to people if it comes with a side of specific actions that people can take in response (such every bit a listing of pharmacies offer free flu shots forth with their hours of operation).
In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies on fearfulness messaging, Kim Witte and Mike Allen establish that fear without a sense of agency backfires — leading people to respond with denial, abstention and disgust. The vast bulk of news stories part precisely this manner, which should give u.s.a. intermission. Generating denial, avoidance and disgust cannot be a skilful business organization model. But when people are reminded that a problem has possible solutions (some of which they agree with and tin can act on in the nearly time to come) they are more open to considering the warning.
Finally, some simple advice: information technology'due south of import non to echo a false belief in an endeavor to right it, Nyhan has found. If people are told Barack Obama is not Muslim, many will remember that he is Muslim. The negative simply vanishes from their minds, because it doesn't fit with their pre-existing biases. The best way to counter this disturbing tendency is to merely land that Obama is Christian — and avert ringing any imitation notes altogether.
Breaking the Narrative
In early 2018, hr held a reunion for the Democrats and Republicans they'd gathered together in Michigan. Oprah Winfrey was at that place, besides (having recently vowed non to run for president later all). Some of the group members had stayed in affect over the past half dozen months, as Winfrey mentioned with pride in the opening: "Members from opposite sides of the split actually became friends, organizing outings and talking every solar day in a individual Facebook conversation group."
Merely the conversation that followed remained maddeningly banal. One Trump supporter said she felt "safer" under the assistants: "I feel like I tin can say Merry Christmas to anyone I want, wherever I desire," she said. Trump critics seized on the Christmas angle: "Spare me the simulated outrage," said 1. "Obama always said Merry Christmas," added another. Nosotros never got to hear more about why the woman used the word safer.
Later on, at that place was disagreement about whether Trump had really complained about immigrants coming to America from "shithole countries," as was widely reported in the media.
Winfrey: "Who here believes that he made the comment…?"
Tim: "Absolutely."
Kim: "Absolutely."
Winfrey: "You think he made the comment?"
Paul: "Yep, I think he fabricated the annotate."
Information technology was like watching a family scarred by dysfunction fence the way the yams were cooked; everyone was arguing merely no one brought upwardly anything that actually mattered.
Just the fact that the Michigan group had stayed in touch was important, even so. Despite the superficial bickering, they however wanted to see each other equally man. And that reveals some other human bias, ane that is way undervalued. "People don't desire to be at each other'southward throats," says Sarrouf, who convenes conversations about gun rights and other divisive issues, in improver to his piece of work in Gloucester. "People don't desire to exist seen as callous. They want to be understood deeply."
Humans share a tendency to simplify and demonize, it's true; just we as well share a desire for agreement. Encouragingly, perhaps, nosotros are starting to see sporadic examples of loftier-contour journalists trying to break through the tribalism. Aside from Winfrey and Van Jones, Jake Tapper held a CNN town hall on gun violence earlier this year — in response to the Parkland, FL, schoolhouse shooting. Even Glenn Beck (yes, Glenn Beck!) has tried in recent years to get his audience to terminate demonizing the other side and hear more than complexity.
In all these encounters, the media personalities seem to have proficient intentions. They desire to do this differently; they simply lack the skills. It's like watching your granddad use Twitter; he could acquire but it probably won't happen naturally.
Talking to people in loftier conflict is a piece of our clinical preparation that wasn't properly handled, and now we are dangerous. The result is not only boring TV; we are adding to the toxicity when nosotros don't intend to. The reaction to Tapper'due south town hall — on TV and on social media — was a shrieking match betwixt FOX News supporters, who accused CNN of feeding questions to the students, and CNN supporters, who accused the critics of lying and applauded their own righteousness.
Interestingly, it was left to the politician — Senator Marco Rubio, who participated in the town hall despite existence wildly outnumbered politically — to explicate what was at stake:
"We are a nation of people that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people considering [of whom] they voted for in the last ballot," he said. "We're a nation of people that have isolated ourselves politically and to a point where discussions like this accept become very difficult."
And indeed, it was a very difficult dark for Rubio. Just information technology could have been so much more than difficult. Information technology could have been revealing.
Journalists need to learn to dilate contradictions and widen the lens on paralyzing debates. We demand to ask questions that uncover people'south motivations. All of us, journalists and non-journalists, could larn to listen better. Equally researchers take established in hundreds of experiments over the past half-century, the fashion to counter the kind of tribal prejudice we are seeing is to expose people to the other tribe or new information in ways they tin can accept. When conflict is cliche, complexity is breaking news.
The Solutions Journalism Network has developed a Complicating the Narratives (CTN) preparation program for journalists and newsrooms. The interactive training is built upon Amanda Ripley's inquiry and the experiences of experts in conflict. We're holding virtual training sessions on techniques and strategies to help journalists produce stronger, more than nuanced, inclusive reporting on divisive issues. If you or your newsroom is interested in learning more than, please contact CTN Manager Hélène Biandudi Hofer: helene@solutionsjournalism.org
Source: https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-the-narratives-b91ea06ddf63
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