The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Disagree Better

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

It feels like our world is deeply polarized. We seem to fundamentally disagree with so many people - and with those disputes comes anger and hatred. Can anything bridge these yawning divides?  It turns out that we aren’t as divided as all that. Our minds often fool us into thinking we disagree with people more than is actually true. Dr Laurie Santos and Dr Jamil Zaki look at ways we can tame this misconception and get on with people who think a little differently to us. Jamil's book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is out now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. It's no secret that politics around the world has become more divided and more toxic. Here in the U.S., our political parties seem further apart on key issues than ever before. Back in the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans reported liking people in their own party and feeling relatively neutral about folks on the other side. But today those feelings are much more polarized. One survey from 2020 found that Democrats and Republicans now dislike their rivals more than they like the people who share their political views. This level of emotional polarization is new in American politics. But

it's not that surprising given, well, pretty much every screen you look at these days. Cable news shows, social media sites, emailed attack ads, they all show us a very extreme version of the other side. Our opponents aren't just wrong about the policies, they're immoral and out to destroy our nation. The brainwashing that's going to the young people right now is unbelievable. Now they're inviting the government into their bedroom to tell any woman what to do with her private parts. I don't think that's right. We're being flooded in by illegal people coming in. A lot of people that vote for a certain candidate are voting against democracy. This level of division, distrust, and anger takes a huge toll on us. It's exhausting. I'm Jamil Zaki, and in my lab at Stanford, we found that more than 80% of Americans on both sides

are fed up with it and wish that the country was less divided. But if you're convinced that the other side is made up of terrible, hostile people, there's little hope for things to get any better. They're so annoying. They're coming with so many negatives. That's what a Republican would come with. You know, it's always put out there that Republicans are this, Republicans are that. We're racist. We don't listen to other people.

A lot of my family are Republicans, but I'm not friends with any Republicans. But are we right to imagine that everyone on the other side is just plain awful? And if we're not, can we fight this polarization and connect with our fellow citizens across the aisle? Is there any hope that we even could be less divided? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. And me, Dr. Jamil Zaki. Amanda, it's great to meet you.

I'm a huge fan. Oh, thanks for saying that. Yeah, I recommend your book to everybody. Likewise, I've really been enjoying it. When I was writing Hope for Cynics, I wanted to learn more about how cynical thinking might worsen polarization. One of the people who inspired me the most here was Amanda Ripley.

I've been a journalist for 20 years, and I spent a lot of time covering conflict. That's part of the job, and I thought I was pretty good at it. I thought I understood it pretty well. I thought I was comfortable with it. And then, you know, six or eight years ago, I started to feel like things were happening in the country politically that didn't make sense.

And anything I might do as a journalist was either going to have no impact or make things worse. People have gotten more polarized in the past few decades, but so has the media. When I was a kid, not quite in the age of the dinosaurs, TV news was like the ancient landmass of Pangea, a single continent of information on which we all lived. We might not have shared our views,

but at least we shared a sense of what was going on. But then the tectonic plates shifted. That single continent of news broke into pieces that drifted apart, with media companies competing for our attention. A new business model emerged. Instead of trying to get the most viewers, news channels started cultivating audience loyalty by feeding people what they wanted to hear 24 hours a day. Partisan cable

news was born, pumping out divisive rhetoric and encouraging us to fear and loathe our rivals. It's just painful because you can see the ways in which the places I worked exploited and incited conflict without anyone knowing it. So, according to Amanda, the news wasn't just reflecting polarization, it was profiting from it. Research suggests this is spreading cynicism through what's called mean world syndrome. The more people tune into the news, the worse they think humanity is. And that makes sense, because in addition to becoming more divisive, the news has also grown more negative. Since the beginning of this century, the presence of angry words in headlines has increased by 100% and the presence of fear by 150%. Unsurprisingly, none of this makes us happy.

One survey asked people to complete the following sentence. The news makes me feel blank. The top answer is hopeless, agitated, and despair. What would your answers be? Amanda was devastated that her industry was making people miserable. She hated the idea that she might be contributing to the conflict brewing all around us.

There are stories I've written or headlines I've approved that definitely piled on, that exploited the conflict in order to get attention or status or profit. Amanda wanted to better understand how good journalists wound up fanning the flames of polarization and what they could do to break free. So I started following people who have been through really dysfunctional conflict and now are in healthier conflict. Amanda interviewed rival gang leaders in Chicago. She traveled to Columbia to learn about that country's civil war. She shadowed radical environmentalists and even did a deep dive into small-town politics. What she discovered turned

into a book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Conflict is not a problem, right? And we know this from all of the research into human behavior, the conflict unto itself can be really important and helpful. The problem is high conflict or intractable conflict, which becomes kind of like conflict for conflict's sake. So if conflict can be just fine, when does it turn into a problem? According to Amanda, the first step is when we draw up rigid battle lines. We literally lose our peripheral vision.

We start to cleanly divide the world into us and them and miss all the people that don't really fit. Once we define ourselves as members of a group, we begin stereotyping the other group as the enemy, caught in a zero-sum competition. We win only if they lose. This is when emotional polarization takes over. We begin to dislike the other side and take pleasure in their suffering, an experience known as schadenfreude. It even opens the door to us finding a justification to hurt them ourselves. We know that when people feel like they are better than another person or another group,

when they feel maybe humiliated by that other person or other group, all of that makes violent conflict much more likely. So this cycle of fear creates hatred and even violence. It's exhausting, and most of us wish it would stop. Remember that statistic saying 80% of us want less division? But it does help at least one group of people. Amanda calls them conflict entrepreneurs. So people who exploit or inflame conflict for their own ends. We've always had conflict entrepreneurs who earned a living saying outrageous things in newspapers or on TV.

But these days, anyone can engineer conflict and profit from it, reaching millions of people from the comfort of their own home. You know, you can go viral online, as we all know, with like really cool, inspiring, hopeful, surprising content. You can absolutely do that. But it's a lot easier to go viral with like really uninspired and kind of mediocre content if you can provoke outrage. So we've kind of set things up to create a golden age for conflict entrepreneurs. And it's very easy to be one. You can raise money by being a conflict entrepreneur. You can get attention. You can get a sense of belonging. You be one. You can raise money by being a conflict entrepreneur. You can get attention. You can get a sense of belonging. You get followers. You get likes. You know, Amanda, it's easy to think about the conflict entrepreneur as somebody cynical

who's trying to make money from or gain notoriety from their ideological bomb throwing. But you're actually saying sometimes conflict entrepreneurs are looking for what the rest of us are looking for, community and belonging. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it, Jamil. I mean, I think certainly profit is maybe the least seductive reward for conflict entrepreneurs. It's definitely in there. But what is money, right? Money is often, especially for someone who's been doing this their whole life, it's a proxy for being loved, for being respected, for being powerful, right? So it's a way for people to feel like they matter. and again, to whatever makes us feel that way. And conflict, even when it's scary,

can make us feel a sense of purpose, belonging, and mattering. Because of this, it can suck people in, turning any of us into mini-conflict entrepreneurs. And once it gets going, it's also hard to get out of. Once we're in a state of high conflict, we experience a whole host of psychological changes. Our thinking becomes oversimplified.

If you think you're smart, your enemy must be dumb. If you're good, they're bad. If you want one thing, they must want the exact opposite. But lots of these assumptions are just plain wrong. The Democratic way drives me absolutely nuts. I can't tell you how many terrorists are actually coming into our country right now. I think the Republicans are very hard people. Democrats are real stupid, and they don't know much.

And they think that they're better than everyone. At least in the U.S., political groups are wrong about each other in almost every way we can measure. We don't know what people on the other side are like, even at a basic level. For example, Democrats tend to think that Republicans are super rich. When asked how many Republicans have a salary of over $250,000 a year, Democrats on average guess around 44%. I think the real number is something like 12%. I don't want to correct Amanda, but the actual statistic is 2%. See, even I just did it. I just did the same mistake.

The right gets the left wrong too. When Republicans are asked how many Democrats identify as LGBTQ, they assumed it was around 38%. The actual proportion? 6%. We don't know who the other side is or what they think. This is called false polarization. Of course, we are polarized, but these divisions are larger in our minds than in reality. Both Democrats and Republicans report that the average person they disagree with is much more extreme than they really are.

And it gets worse. We also think our average rival is about twice as hateful as they really are. And it gets worse. We also think our average rival is about twice as hateful as they really are. We kind of caricature each other, or rather I should say conflict entrepreneurs caricature each other. And then we believe these things, especially when we're really segregated like we are right now. The good news is there is way more common ground in our political landscape than we realize. Most of us agree on at least some issues, and almost all of us share certain values. Most Americans want peace and democracy. The bad news is that conflict entrepreneurs convince us that people on the other side are awful, so we avoid talking with them, even when those conversations might help us become less

wrong. What's worse, we end up thinking that we need to escalate conflict, even though almost no one wants to. This feeds even more division. An exhausted majority wishes things could be different, but feels, incorrectly, that they're alone. I think people are getting really tired of it, but they also feel totally trapped. We know this doesn't feel right. I think we all know that something is wrong in our culture, in our politics, and that we need to do better. I think there's huge unmet demand for a different way to do politics, a different way to do journalism, a different way to fight. Is there hope that we can find a way out of high conflict? Well, after the break, we'll meet someone who's had to diffuse

lots of polarizing situations and open a type of dialogue not where we agree, but where we can still see each other's humanity and common goals, even with our families. Half my family's Republican. It always makes for a great Thanksgiving, you know?

More on that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. A lot of people surprise us, both good and bad. Britt Barron tries not to see the world in black and white. Instead, she's a self-proclaimed master of nuance. You know, traditional cartoon Disney movie, there's just a good guy, there's a bad guy. You want the good guy to win. That is it.

That is the entire story. And so we have this idea in our mind that things are that clean and that things can be that clean. But Britt's own identities never fit cleanly into simple categories. I grew up in the evangelical church. My parents were both very committed. And so that identity actually shaped a lot of decisions I made,

schools I went to, things I was a part of. But growing up as a Black woman in these predominantly white religious spaces was isolating. To achieve a sense of belonging, Britt wound up embracing some strong fundamentalist beliefs, like the idea that homosexuality is a sin and that girls need to save themselves for marriage. I think when I was like 12 or something, I was in this youth group and the youth pastor passed around a glass of water and everyone spit in the water. And at the end, he said, would anyone want to drink this? This is what happens every time you sleep with someone. This is what's happening. I mean, even now saying that, I'm like, you said, would anyone want to drink this? This is what happens every time you sleep with someone. This is what's happening.

I mean, even now saying that, I'm like, you know, throwing up in my mouth. But yeah, I carried all of these stories. And then I passed these stories on. Britt was a dynamic speaker. She quickly rose through the leadership ranks of her mostly white congregation. And I found myself at a very young age of 26 being a pastor at a mega church. Things were going smoothly until Britt and the church's creative director, Sammy, fell in love. And so that is where I feel like I had a decision to make. Sammy is not the sort of person that Britt expected to fall for.

Sammy is a woman, and Britt had spent her career preaching that same-sex relationships were evil. I struggled a lot with feeling like this seems like a good thing, but what if it's bad? What if this is a trick? What if, you know, the devil is tricking? You know what I mean? I was like so deeply in this religion, cult, you know, whatever you want to call it.

I was so deep in it. Eventually, Britt and Sammy decided to declare their love openly and came out to their church community. I thought we would lose our jobs, which we both did. I thought that we would get weird messages on the internet, and we did. Britt and Sammy lost much of the community they'd built over decades. Many of Britt's friends were so steeped in binary thinking, they simply couldn't accept that their former friends had become a loving couple.

We got engaged not too long after coming out, and there were three people, some of our closest friends in life who we asked to be in our wedding, who eventually said this sort of stands against what they believe in. They're not able to participate in this. The experience was devastating,

but it got Britt thinking. Could people who disagreed so deeply on key issues ever find a way to connect? She dedicated the next stages of her career to helping people start meaningful dialogue, to see beyond their usual black and white views. I first learned about Britt's work through her book, Do You Still Talk to Grandma?, when the problematic people in our lives are the ones we love. I was at dinner with a group of friends, and one of our friends

was saying, oh yeah, my grandma voted for Trump. And someone else was like, do you still talk to her? And she was like, my Nana? And I was like, oh my gosh, are we canceling grandmas? Like, are we saying it's too hard for me to sit in any gray? So I am just going to talk to people with whom I'm on the same page. Britt argues that we'd all be happier if we found ways to disagree more agreeably. My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationships with each other. But to do that, we need to recognize that we actually agree with the vast majority of people more than our lying minds think. False polarization is just that, false. Take the U.S., for example. Did you know that 72% of Americans think that climate change is

happening and agree we should take action? Or that more than 80% of Americans believe that racism is a problem we need to address? Over 80% of our fellow citizens agree we should be fighting for a free press, for freedom of speech, and for reasonable gun control measures like background checks. 90% of Americans support everyone's right to a fair vote. Those stats make it clear. We actually see eye to eye on way more of the fundamentals than we think. If we can agree on the what, then we don't necessarily have to agree on the how. The problem is that we don't realize how aligned we really are. But what would happen if we did

realize, if we corrected our mistaken intuitions and developed a more accurate view of what people on the other side actually believe? That's what Stanford sociologist Rob Willer and his colleagues tested. They brought Democrats and Republicans into the lab and asked them, how much do you feel is justified for your party to use violence to advance political goals? He then had the same people predict what the other side would answer. Willer found that each side overestimated the other's approval of violence by nearly 300%. 300%! But Willer and his colleagues didn't stop there. They showed a different group of people how big the usual overestimate was. They explained just

how off the average person was in their predictions about the other side. And what happened? Well, those new participants corrected their beliefs about the other side's violent tendencies. And maybe more importantly, their own support for political violence went down. Simply correcting our inaccurate perceptions of our rivals can help us dial back our willingness to strike preemptively. It can make us seek more peace. Britt thinks that results like these prove that we need to embrace a bit more nuance and drop the binary judgments we make about, say, a grandma who's kind and loving, but also votes for someone we hate. So is she good or is she bad, right? Very few of us are

willing to sit with the fact of grandma's both and so are we. And that gets to the heart of Britt's strategy for disagreeing better. We need to bring some humility to our own views too. I think a lot of us have convinced ourselves that we can fully exist on the quote-unquote right side of the line. So if someone can be all bad, then we can be all good. And we can exist and only write answers. And we can know the formula and we can have it right. And we know the right people to follow. We know the right things to repost. We know the right books to read. And oh my gosh, I just wiped the sweat off my brow

because I don't have to worry about ever being bad. Britt worries that we don't just think we're right right now. We assume we've always been right and that we always will be right. It's a bias she calls progressive amnesia. Progressive amnesia is our ability to conveniently forget a time before we knew what we know now. We have all seen a movie that we like love from our childhood. We rewatch it only to find, and we've all said this phrase before, that movie doesn't hold up. And owning that and experiencing that should give us a different perspective. It should change our lens to sort of soften some of that black and white line we've drawn so firmly.

Noticing just how much our own views have changed can help us remember that other people have the capacity for change too. It's a reminder that Britt turns to whenever she encounters someone she disagrees with. I have outgrown so many beliefs I used to firmly hold, right? I believe these fundamentally Christian things. I had thoughts about women and purity culture. I used to believe that being gay was a sin.

Like I bought into that. Now I can't look at the people who are there as just like antiquated, prehistoric idiots who don't stand a chance and they're just dumb and they're bad. When in reality, they're just me 15 years ago. I think there's just a lot of empathy I feel for people who have only ever been told one story and now are retelling that story because what else would they know? And that doesn't change the work that we have to do in terms of justice and fighting for equity,

but it should change our approach to the work as we understand those people in a different way. But we don't just need to change the way we think about people on the other side of political debates. We also need to change how we act. We actually need to talk to the people we disagree with. And so talking to people is so wildly important because that is how we see them as people again. I think there are a lot of ways in which human interaction can actually turn the needle quite a bit because I've experienced that. But how do we get those tricky conversations going? We, doing well.

Thank you for having me. No, thanks for coming on. I love, love, love you. This is Luisa Santos, no relation to Lori. In fact, she hails from a different continent than our fearless host. I was born in Brazil, and Brazil has an interesting history because we had a military dictatorship. So my parents lived through that, and I kind of saw their shifting in their political beliefs. Louise's homeland has seen decades of political upheaval and division.

And sadly, those disagreements have driven a painful wedge directly between members of her closest family. My mom and one of my cousins stopped talking until this day, don't really communicate. And it's been, you know, 10 years. And so that was really shocking for me to see how something that at times in people's lives feels abstract can really corrode these very real relationships. Luisa left Brazil to study psychology in the U.S., eventually working with me at Stanford,

and quickly realized that the rise of populist politicians was causing worrying levels of polarization in both countries. So I was in college when the 2016 election happened, and I kind of saw the fabric of both countries unraveling because of these dynamics. And I became really interested in if there was anything we could use to help mitigate some of these dynamics. And I became really interested in if there's anything we could use to help mitigate some of these effects. Louisa became interested in false polarization, the idea that people simply don't disagree as much as they think. She began to wonder, what was causing us to be so wrong about the views of others? Louisa gravitated towards an answer. Study after study showed that, like in her own family, people don't know what the other side really thinks

because they're unwilling to even talk to them. People might see value in it, but they are just very concerned about how these conversations are going to go and tend to imagine kind of the worst. It creates a breeding ground for these misperceptions. And that breeding ground has grown pretty extreme. One recent experiment found that people will refuse money

if it requires listening to a political opponent. In another study, subjects predicted that talking to a political opponent would feel about as bad as getting a tooth pulled. And family members who spent their Thanksgiving dinners in a town where people voted differently than they did wound up leaving that holiday meal 50 minutes earlier than those who ate in communities that voted more similarly. Hold up, Lori. Wait a minute. You're saying that these people leave before dessert? They're giving up pie? I mean, pumpkin pie? Apple pie? That's an incredible desire to

avoid a conversation if you're willing to give that up. So our idea was, can we get everyday people who disagree on topics that are important for the country to just sit and have a conversation for 20 minutes? And what are the consequences of that? The idea turned into Louisa's PhD dissertation. We basically went out and asked a bunch of Republicans and Democrats about their beliefs

on three hot button topics. It was immigration, gun control, and climate change. And we explained to them that we were trying to have the study where people would meet over Zoom and talk about disagreements with a person who supported the other party. And then we asked them to forecast how these conversations were going to go. So we asked them how pleasant do you think the conversation will be? How productive? How much do you think you're going to like the person on the other side? And a week later, we actually paired people to have conversations. Luisa's method seems straightforward enough, but her PhD advisor was a little worried. More than a little. One of our core missions

in research, as you know, Lori, is not just to find out about people, but to keep them safe. Louisa and I were terrified that people would threaten each other or dox each other, you name it. We wanted to do everything we could to avoid harm. So Louisa and Jamil put protections in place to make sure that the conversations went smoothly. They added a moderator who had explicit instructions about what to do if the conversation went south. The moderator began the conversation by reminding the participants about the political questions they'd answered before and explained that they'd now be having a conversation with someone who disagreed with their views. The moderator then introduced the first of two hot button topics, say gun control, and invited the strangers to exchange their views.

And then the moderator would mute themselves and turn their camera off. And then people would basically have this 10 minute conversation with the stranger, that person they just met on this issue. Well, I think we need guns because there are a lot of crazies out there. I think the real problem is that

there are just too many crazy people with guns. When I first heard about Luisa's study, my initial reaction was, man, I hope she paid those poor moderators a lot of money. Because I assumed most conversations would turn into 20-minute screaming matches. And I wasn't the only one with this prediction. Luisa recruited a different group of people and asked them to forecast how many conversations would require moderator intervention. And people thought that 25% of conversations would have to be stopped, when in fact, none did. I was shocked. I did not think that they were going to love it. But people did love it. They shared their views civilly and listened to stories from a complete stranger on the other side

with genuine curiosity. My mom's got guns. I mean, she's in her 80s. She says it makes her feel safer. I guess I can understand that. My sister's the same way. But the most shocking finding came when Luisa asked people how much they enjoyed the conversation

on a scale from one, not at all, to 100, extremely enjoyable. The most common response was 100 out of 100. People thought it was extremely pleasant, that these conversations were extremely productive, that they found a lot of common ground with their partner, and that they liked their conversation partner a lot. And a very common comment at the end of the survey was that people were shocked by how well it went and how much they liked the person they talked to. They even wrote things like, I would love to have this person over for cocktails and dinner. And, you know, they really seemed to connect with one another, even though they were talking about these fraught topics of political disagreement.

And I think it speaks a little bit to the hunger that people have to find these types of connections, you know, to kind of feel that there is common ground out there when everything around us seemed to indicate otherwise. But why did these conversations go so shockingly well? Louisa thinks part of the success involved the way strangers talked about their views. Rather than give some lecture aimed at convincing the other side, most participants just talked about their lived experience. They told stories about how and why they came to believe what they did. For example, in one of our conversations, this person who's a Republican gun supporter shared that he's gay, he lives in an area where he feels very unsafe,

and he had received death threats in the past. And that was the time where he bought his first gun. So he kind of shares this story about how he was actually opposed to guns before. And then this setting of being frightened made him purchase a gun. And nowadays, he feels safer because of that purchase. I feel like stories like that really shatter kind of preconceived ideas of who that person on the other side is. And it kind of opens us up to understanding how a person can disagree with us. And it might not fully change our beliefs, but at least gives insight into the humanity of the person who believes that. Luis's conversations involved a rhetorical tactic that we've talked

about before on the Happiness Lab, asking deep questions. Research shows that people feel more heard when their conversation partners ask deep questions and listen to their replies. Hearing a partner's question can also help us think more carefully about our own views on a topic. Like sometimes when people ask enough questions, even the person who was very confident in their beliefs starting out become a little less confident as it goes on. Asking questions also helps your conversation partner know that you really care about their experiences and perspective. I think that sometimes people come to conversations thinking that the sole goal on the other side is to persuade you, but actually people

are more interested in learning than we give them credit for. Louise's study shows that hard political conversations are much more effective and enjoyable than we think. Her findings about the power of a quick one-on-one political dialogue have made her much more hopeful that we can fight our polarization and fix the toxic conflict that so many of us despise. Most people do not want the world that we currently live in, and they kind of would like more connection. Louise's research is so encouraging and compelling. But has it fixed the rift between her mother and her cousin? I try in private conversations with each of them, and both of them ask me about each other. You know, so there's a lot of care there and love. And I think that, like, both of them seem, when I talk to them in private,

very open to the idea of it, but no one wants to do the first step. So I hope I can come back to this podcast in a few years and say that that conflict has ended. This points to a new frontier for Louisa's work. Getting strangers to be polite to each other is one thing, but the emotions of a family dynamic are on another level of challenge, one we hope to explore in the future. Of course, there are real disagreements in our country and around the world. There are real violent extremists and bad faith actors out there, and real threats to our values and even democracy itself.

But our problems only get worse when we cynically decide that absolutely everyone we disagree with is awful. The way we see each other now shapes the future we can imagine together. When we write off the other side, we give up on things getting any better. The common ground we could explore together remains an undiscovered country.

But we don't have to give in to this. The data about what people really want is more accurate than our assumptions and more hopeful too. By opening our minds and paying closer attention, we can rediscover the things most of us want and maybe even start to mend division. And that new approach probably won't hurt our happiness either. In our next episode in this special season on Finding Hope, we'll build on

what you've heard so far and talk to people who put their cynicism aside to work with others to fix the problems our society is facing. And in doing so, made their communities

and themselves a lot happier. There was no guarantee we were going to be successful. If anything, everybody told us all the reasons we would fail. And yet, we were willing to be successful. If anything, everybody told us all the reasons we would fail. And yet, we were willing to try anyways.

All that next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. And me, Dr. Jamil Zaki.