How to Have A Calm Conversation With The Politically Polarized

just a minute on how to have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. So type in where you are from. And as always, if you have questions during this live stream, which will probably last 20 minutes or 30 minutes, type them in the comment section. They do pop up on my platform, and I will do my best to answer the questions, and I'll also reserve a few minutes at the end for any questions you might have. All right, so let's get started. This is how to have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. So let me flip my view. Oops, go this way. There we are. And obviously this is topical, and I thought with the— I was hopeful that maybe with the swap in administrations, maybe we would not be so politically polarized, but we can obviously see that polarization is with us for the foreseeable future. And knowing how to talk to people who have radically different views than you is a very useful skill to have. And so in this livestream, we're going to walk through all of this. So let's get started. So we live in the most politically polarized environment I have ever seen. I'm 70 years old. I've been around for a while. I have never ever seen the kind of radical polar opposite stuff that I see today. And I make my living solving conflicts as a peacemaker, and I haven't seen anything, anything ever like what we've seen in the last 6 years. For example, we've got people pro-life, pro-gun, conservative media, MeToo, protection of power, position, privilege at any cost. These are all different things that are going on now. The Citizens United decision that allowed for huge, huge contributions with no accountability. Vaccines, you know, you're either for it or against it. Maybe you believe that Democrats hate America. What about gender orientation identity and the culture wars that are going on, or Antifa, or pro-choice, or conservative media, or liberal media? I mean, it doesn't matter which side of the fence you're on in all of this. Dollars are driving a lot of this, political dollars and dollars to media to try to get eyeballs on screen. We've got conflicts and polarization over rural versus urban America. We've got evangelicals and the Christian right. We've got the Proud Boys. We've got pro-gun rights, and we've got journalistic irresponsibility where journalists aren't doing their job. We've got Masks, do you wear them or not, and why have masks become a political statement, which is in my personal opinion is sad because it's causing a lot of deaths. However, it's polarizing. Black Lives Matter, very polarizing. End of white privilege, extremely threatening to people and politically polarizing. So all of these issues have just emerged over the last 6 years, and there seems like there just is a pile-on of issues that divides everybody— families, friends, countries, regions in the country, neighbors— we're all divided by all of this stuff. And so I decided that I would do a livestream on this issue to show you, those of you who are watching, how we can have a calm conversation with a political politically polarized. And I'm going to show you how to do just exactly that in just a moment, but before I get there, we need to talk about the neuroscience of beliefs because once you understand what's going on inside the brain, you'll understand why we have to have a— why we have to do certain things to have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. So let's step back and take a look a little bit at what the science is telling us. First of all, tons and tons and tons of research show that people favor political arguments and statements that reinforce their existing views and disparage those that contradict their views. This has been known for a long, long time, but it's only in the last, say, 10 years that this has become extremely polarizing, where we have broad swathes of our population in the United States or even in North America, where we're seeing people take vehement sides on any given political issue or cultural issue, and they tend to flock to people who have similar beliefs, and they tend to disparage, uh, disparage, uh, those that contradict their views, and there's all kinds of research that shows why this is happening. So the first thing to understand is that in our brains there are two kinds of reasoning. The first is called motivated reasoning and the second is called emotional reasoning. Another way of describing this is to say emotional reasoning, reasoning versus cold reasoning, and these occur in different parts of our brain. Cold reasoning which we would call rational thinking, if there is such a thing, occurs in one location in the prefrontal cortex, basically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Motivated or emotional reasoning occurs in the medial prefrontal cortex, different part of the brain, different processes altogether. And it's the motivated reasoning, the emotional reasoning, that leads us to political polarization. Now, the problem is that if you confront a polarized person with facts or evidence or information that contradicts their beliefs, you get what's known as the backfire effect, and what you are actually doing is strengthening their beliefs in the face of the contradictory but true evidence. So for example, if you're on— and I don't— I'm going to be agnostic in this, in this talk, although I'm a pure moderate. I'm not a liberal and I'm not a conservative. I'm right in the middle of the road politically and socially, but I'm going to take sides just for the purposes of explanation. Supposing that you are a person who believes that the the COVID vaccines are essential, and you're trying to argue to a person who is an anti-vaxxer all the reasons why, scientific reasons and health public policy reasons why they should get vaccinated, what you're going to do in that argument is actually strengthen the anti-vaxxer's belief that he or she should not get vaccinated. This is a really quirky part of our brain that evolved in really strange ways. So we're really talking about beliefs, and so it's useful to kind of look at what beliefs are and try to understand what this backfire effect is before we start talking about, well, what do we do about all of this? So in— there was a really interesting neuroimaging study done by Drew Weston and his associates at Emory University in 2006, and what they did is they looked at the 2004 presidential election from George Bush and John Kerry, and they found 30 partisans, 15 hardcore conservatives, 15 hardcore liberals, and they put these people in a scanning machine, so they get fMRI, so they could see what their brains were doing, and they read a series of statements to each partisan. In the case of President Bush, they would read statements that statements Bush made during the campaign that were true. And whenever Bush made a statement that was true, the partisans' brains were comfortable and relaxed and happy, and nothing really interesting happened. But when they read a statement that Bush made during the campaign and then he later made a statement that was in direct contradiction to it, a lie, the Parkinson's brain did something really interesting. So for example, during the campaign, uh, Bush said something to the effect that Ken Lay is a great American and Enron is one of the most wonderful, powerful companies in America. And of course we know that Enron collapsed and Ken Lay was indicted. He died before he could be convicted. Or rather tried. But, uh, after the election and after the scandal, the Enron scandal was revealed, Bush said, Ken Lay, I don't even know who he is. Just a flat lie. And what happened was that the emotional centers of the conservative brain lit up. But even more importantly, a part of the brain called the ventral striatum— and I'll show you where that is in the brain in just a second— which involves the neurotransmitter dopamine lit up, and the same thing happened with the dopamine was being released in the face of contradictory but true evidence that contradicted a strongly held belief of the partisan. For John Kerry, Kerry said during the campaign that Social Security was— oh, uh, let's see, I can't remember which one, which way it was, but he said that, he said that while he was a senator before he ran for president, he made the statement that Social Security is going to run out of money and it needs to be means tested. And then during the campaign, he said that Social Security was inviolate and would never be means tested. Again, flat-out contradiction, and he just lied. I mean, he just flip-flopped. We don't call that lying, but it is lying. And the same thing happened to the liberal or Democratic partisan brain. When the statement was consistent with true facts, the partisan's brain was calm and relaxed. And when the partisan was read a statement that established that the candidate was lying, emotional centers of the brain lit up. The ventral striatum lit up, dopamine was released. And so Weston and his colleagues concluded that when people are highly partisan, they're polarized, as we would call it today, they do everything they can to defend their beliefs against incontrovertible, incontrovertible evidence but opposing facts. They deny the truth because it's more comfortable to deny the truth than it is to accept the fact that their beliefs are wrong. And in fact, this is so powerful in our brains that we are actually rewarded for holding on to a belief that is plain wrong in the, in the face of contradictory facts. We reward ourselves for holding on to erroneous beliefs. And the more people try to persuade us or argue with us or try to convince us with evidence that we're wrong, the stronger that belief becomes embedded in our brains. This probably will start to make sense and resonate with you. If it does, just type in the box, yeah, this resonates. I see this all the time. I try to argue with somebody over an issue and show them why I think they're wrong, and they become agitated and animated and defensive, and they just hold on to— they get— become more and more stubborn. And it's because of how our brains are hardwired. So part of— there are a lot of causes of political polarization which are beyond what I want to talk about today, but part of the problem is the way that our brains are wired together. We are wired to hold on to beliefs. And the reason for that is for many, many thousands of years, millions of years, humans were living in a very scary environment. We didn't have fangs or teeth or claws. The only way we could survive were in groups. So we learned social cohesion and cooperation. But really, from generation to generation, cultural change was very, very slow, almost unnoticeable to the people living there. And so having a belief structure that worked was useful because it minimized metabolic demand on how— trying to puzzle out solutions to problems, because that's what beliefs are. Beliefs are nothing more than decision-making shortcuts. They allow us to apply a belief to our environment, and rather than have to engage in critical thinking or rationality or logical thought or any of the other many task-focused systems of our brain, we instantly have an answer because we've got a belief that informs us what the answer is. So it's, so it really saves a lot of time and energy. Well, that's really an evolutionary advantage because rather than puzzling through whether or not, what a decision should be, we can make an instantaneous decision, effortless, that allows us to spend more time and effort on doing important things. Like making babies and finding food. And so those of our predecessors that were able to hold on to beliefs in the face of challenges to those beliefs survived and passed their genes on to us. And those that didn't, those that had to think about everything, tended to drop out of the gene pool. So having a strong belief structure was evolutionarily adaptive. Today, of course, not so much. So partisan brains reward the partisan with a dopamine squirt for successfully defending a belief. And if you don't know what dopamine is, dopamine is one of 150 or so neurochemicals that course through our brain. Dopamine has some really unique properties. It's associated with memory, it's associated with learning, and it's associated with the feelings of pleasure and pleasantness. A lot of dopamine, a lot of pleasure. A little bit of dopamine, you just feel good. Almost all addictive disorders involve the dopaminergic system in one way or another, and various chemicals such as opioids affect the dopamine system in various ways. So dopamine is a really important— dopamine is involved in a lot of other stuff too. So for example, Parkinson's disease is thought to be caused by a lack of dopamine because dopamine smooths out muscle movement. And if you don't have enough dopamine in your nerve endings, then you're gonna, you're gonna start to shake, which is of course one of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So dopamine is really important, and one of the things it does is it reinforces behaviors that we find to be useful. And those behaviors could be negative or positive depending upon context. But it's dopamine that causes the reinforcement because it makes us feel good. So partisans, when confronted with information that contradicts their beliefs, actually reward themselves. They pleasure themselves. They get a little squirt of dopamine. They feel good. I know better than you do. And we see this all the time. All right, so just quick neuroscience trip down neuroscience lane. So we can see that the striatum is in the middle of the brain, pretty much. It's in the center of what's known as the limbic system, which is a physical structure in the center of the brain that is associated with memory, it's associated with learning, it's associated— strongly associated with emotions and reactivity. And you can see the ventral striatum, ventral meaning underneath, is the reward hub. That's a little blue dot there. And then above that on the dorsal striatum, there's the habit hub. So the striatum has a lot to do with forming habits, doing effortless thinking, what Kahneman calls system 1 thinking, and it has to do with our reward system for feeling pleasure when dopamine is released into the— out of the— into and out of the striatum and around the rest of the brain. So the whole point of this is very simple: never ever try to argue with the politically polarized, because number one, you're not going to change their mind, and number two, all you're going to do is make them more stubborn. They're just going to dig in their heels and they're going to feel pleasure at holding on to their beliefs despite the fact that the evidence that you're presenting contradicts those beliefs irrefutably. No amount of evidence is going to convince the politically polarized that they're wrong. The only way that political polarization changes, or attitudes change around political polarization, is if there's a cultural shift and the viewpoint that the politically polarized is holding is no longer tenable or acceptable by a vast majority of a community, and in those cases there's enough pressure, social pressure, for the politically polarized to shift their views. So let me just give you an example of how this might work. Supposing that somehow, some way, wearing masks became not only socially acceptable but expect— an expected norm, and somehow that swept across our country, the U.S., and maybe into Canada too, and all of a sudden 90% of the people felt that instead of masks being either something we did to protect ourselves, or for people not to wear a mask was an expression of freedom and a political statement, that the vast majority of people felt that wearing a mask was appropriate and socially accepted and socially accepted. Within a couple of months, all those anti-maskers would abandon their anti-mask stance and start wearing a mask because there was enough pressure, social pressure imposed upon them to cause them to change their political beliefs around masks. But if they remain isolated and insulated in their own little bubbles, they're not going to have any effect. They're not going to have the, the effect that we would want to start wearing masks, for example, would not occur, and so they're still going to hold on to their beliefs even though maybe vast swaths of a population think that wearing masks is not only normal and acceptable, but it's essential for public health. You'll still have people, if they're in their community bubbles, that will resist mask wearing. Earlier I said that we would cover how to have a calm conversation with the political pluralites, so here's where you want to take out your pen and pencil. Or come back and watch the video again later on because I'm going to lay out how you do it. And as a peacemaker and a mediator and a visionary, this is the only way I found to be able to have a conversation with somebody who holds radically different beliefs than myself. So the first thing you have to understand is the need to be right, or vindication, the need for vindication. Vindication is one of the six needs of justice, just very briefly. Maybe I'll do a stream on this in the future, but the 6 needs of justice are vengeance, vindication, validation, the need to be heard, the need to create meaning, and the need for safety. If you're writing those down, I'll come back and do it again. Vengeance, vindication, validation, the need to be heard, the need to create meaning, and the need for safety. Unless all of those, unless vengeance is dealt with separately, but if the other 5 needs are all met, people feel like there's been justice. If any of those needs are unmet, people feel like there is not justice, there is injustice. People don't need to be told that they're, for example, they don't need to win a case, a lawsuit. In order to feel like a process was fair or like they had justice. They just have to feel like they were, they were vindicated, validated, they were heard, they were able to create meaning, and they were safe. And if those 5 needs are met, then the need for vengeance, which is the need to hurt somebody more than they hurt you, goes away. So vindication is one of the 6 needs of justice. We all have needs for vindication, and one of the things that you have to overcome when you want to have or need to have a conversation with the politically polarized is you have to let go of your need to be right. You have to let go of your need for vindication because you are not going to get vindicated by the politically polarized. You're never going to be vindicated by somebody who holds a polar opposite viewpoint of yourself. And if your need to be vindicated is so strong that you're going to get into an argument with the politically polarized hoping that they will vindicate you, you're in for, you're in for frustration, resentment, anger, a feeling of being disrespected, and a feeling of being ignored. And guess what? That politically polarized person across from you is going to feel the same thing: resentment, anger, frustration, disrespect, the feeling of not being heard, feeling of being ignored. You're all going to have the same feelings because each of you is trying to be vindicated. You're trying to say, 'I'm right, you're wrong.' If you have that need, You cannot have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. This is not about being right. It's about creating common ground and understanding. Your goal when having a calm conversation with the politically polarized is to listen that person into existence. Listen that person into existence. And when you do that, well, you do do that by listening to the emotions and reflecting those emotions back with a simple "you" statement. So when you engage in the process I'm about to show you, you don't necessarily want to listen to the words. You can, you dan, but more importantly, you want to listen to the emotions. And you want to, as much as possible, reflect the emotional experience of that politically polarized person. Because when you do that, all kinds of things happen in that other person's brain. You basically calm them down and de-escalate them. And that allows for a calmer conversation than would otherwise happen if all you did— well, if you entered into normal conversation where in normal conversation we're never listening to other people. There's a great story, apocryphal I think, about Franklin D. Roosevelt back in Whoa, what happened? I'm going to keep talking here, but I want to find out what happened to my camera. Um, there's a great story about, uh, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the story goes that he was in a receiving line and he got so sick of people not, uh Oh, there I am. Let's go here. And finally, the last person in line was the ambassador from Spain, and Roosevelt said, I murdered my aunt this evening. And the ambassador looked, stepped back and said, whoa, She must have deserved it. So the point being that in normal conversation, we almost never listen to each other. Basically what happens in conversation is we're listening, we've got a half an ear open to what the other person is saying, and then what we're doing is formulating what we're gonna say next, and it's all about me. So when you are engaging with the politically polarized, you can't do that. You have to be in listening mode and you have to be listening to emotions as well as words and being prepared to reflect back those emotions. So when you engage with the politically polarized person, you're going to ask 4 questions, and after each question, you're going to reflect back what they said. Mostly you want to reflect back their emotional experience. So here are the 4 questions. Question number 1: So what life experiences have led you to the beliefs that you have today? What life experiences led you to have the beliefs you have today? In this question, you are opening up a space for the politically polarized to tell a story, basically tell a story of what happened, what life events caused that person to hold the beliefs that he or she has. They never get to do that. Nobody ever asks for a life story explaining how it is that I came to the beliefs that I have. And so automatically it's going to start calming them down. They don't have to defend themselves. You're not going to attack, you're not going to justify, you're not going to try to argue with them for all the reasons I explained a few minutes ago. You're just going to listen to their story, and as they tell their story, it's going to have emotional content and you want to reflect back the emotions as they tell their story. And when they're done, you don't get to talk. All you're doing in this whole process is listening. When they're finished, you'll say, 'Oh, that's really interesting. Hey, I got another question for you.' And that question is, 'How do you think your beliefs help you in your everyday life?' The politically polarized person has never thought about how their beliefs either get in their way or help them in their everyday life. And so this is going to take them by surprise, and they're going to have to think, well, you know, I really never thought about that. And so I said, well, you have this really— you have obviously have a lot of beliefs. How do you— how do your beliefs help you? And so, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if they help me or not, or maybe they do. Maybe they'll have, if they're insightful, which many people are not, whether they're politically polarized or not, they would say something like, my beliefs soothe me. My beliefs help me not to have to wrestle with what I call a VUCA environment, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and risky. So it's too complicated, life's too complicated out there, and my beliefs help me navigate a complexity that I don't want to mess with. 'And so it gives me the breathing space to be able to do what I need to do, live my life, without worrying about or getting anxious around things that I just don't understand and don't want to understand.' That's the transparent, authentic, accurate response about what a belief does. You're not going to get that normally from any person who has not done a lot of self-development. However, you are going to get some interesting information. You're going to learn whether or not this person even— I can figure out how their beliefs help them. And if you're patient with this question, what you'll get is start seeing that person, that politically polarized person, will start getting a little bit of insight in themselves. Not much, don't expect much, incremental, but just a little bit. The third question then is How do you deal with people who have different beliefs than you? How do you deal with people who have different beliefs than you? Now, you're almost always going to get a snarky comment, especially if you're talking to somebody from the right. I get, I take my gun out and I shoot them. And you're always going to get some kind of snappy, snarky comment like that. Uh, and depending on who the person is, it might be racist or it might be homophobic or it could be any kind of prejudicial statements that they'll make, and you just, you just ignore that, and, uh, you, you just ignore that. Getting my camera back here. Nope, come on, bring it back. There we are. Uh, you ignore it and say, no, no, yeah, I get that, yuck, yuck. No, really, how, how do you deal with people? And probably the answer you're going to get is, I try to avoid them. I really don't want to hang around people who have politically— or polar opposite beliefs than me because it makes me uncomfortable to be around them, and I just prefer not to be in that presence. And that's a legitimate answer. And then, so after you've explored that a little bit, then you go to the last question, which again is a real thought provoker, and that is, how should our society manage such a wide diversity of beliefs. This one's a— this is a little bit of a showstopper for people because now they've got to think about, well, I avoid people that I don't agree with, but should we have a society that where only one type of belief is allowed, or should we have a society where many types of beliefs are allowed? And what does that mean? And maybe for the first time you shake their edifice a little bit without intending to. You're not trying to be malicious here, but you're trying to open up some space for them to conceive of the idea that a liberal society— liberal with a small l, not a big L— a liberal society is a society that embraces many, many different types of diversity, many different ways of seeing the world, and many different kinds of beliefs. Because When you have all these different beliefs and diversities mingling with each other, it's the thrust of imagination, creativity, and innovation, and thinking, and thought, and art, and science, and technology. When people are all clones of each other, there's no room for creativity or innovation, and society's stagnant. So these are the 4 questions. And as you ask these questions and listen to and help reflect the emotional experience of the politically polarized as they ask these questions, you will learn a lot. What you're really looking for— here are the questions again so you can write these down. What life experiences led you to have the beliefs you have today? How do your beliefs help you in your everyday life? How do you deal with people who have different beliefs than you? And finally, how should our society manage such a wide diversity of beliefs? Now, if you listen carefully as your politically polarized colleague is talking, you will find common ground. This is all— it always happens. So for example, you might find out in the answer to the first question that the politically polarized grew up in a, in a family where certain values were emphasized, like work ethic, hard work, or honesty, or loyalty. And those are the same values you have. And you'll find out that as, as you listen to the answers to these questions, that this politically polarized person has more in common with you than has different from you. And you'll begin to realize that it's the common ground that brings us together, not the differences. And that perhaps you'll have the insight that there are many people out there who want to exploit those small differences and make them huge in order to protect their power position and privilege. And they don't want to heal. And they don't want people to find common ground, and they don't want to find ways to accommodate people with different beliefs. They want to agitate and anger people of their beliefs so that they can raise money and gain votes. Very selfish and destructive, and it preys on the natural tendency of the brain to reinforce its own belief structures. And you'll learn that, and maybe your, your person you're speaking to is politically polarized will maybe have an, uh, an insight about that too. So that is how you have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. Don't go into the conversation thinking that you're going to be able to persuade or argue. Don't go in thinking that you have to be vindicated. And ask 4 questions. What life experiences led you to have the beliefs you have today? How do your beliefs help you or inform you in your everyday life? How do you deal with people who hold different beliefs than you do? How should our society be organized around the fact that there are so many radically different beliefs? Those are the 4 questions. And that will lead you into some really interesting, honest conversations with people who appear to be quite different from you, but in fact are more similar than you can possibly imagine. So let me know whether these ideas work for you, and if you've got questions, put them up in the comments because I can see the comments as they come through. And if you want to learn more about my work, you can go to my website, DougNoll.com. I have courses, I give workshops, I give talks, I have online courses and I'm always available by email. I don't have a big entourage, I don't have an organization, it's just me. Doug@dougnoll.com is my email address. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want to learn more, and feel free of course to nose around my website. Uh, 4 questions again. All right, I'll say it again. In fact, let me, let me go back to them. Easier to see it as it is to— here they are. What life experiences led you to have the beliefs you have today? How do your beliefs help you in your everyday life? How do you deal with people who have different beliefs than you? And how should our society be structured Or how should our society manage such a wide diversity of beliefs? These are the 4 questions. I'll leave this up for a second so you can get these written down, and of course you can come back the video, you can pick up the video when it gets posted and just scrub through it and find, find these questions again, and if you lose the questions, feel free to email me at Doug@dougnull.com. I'll be happy to respond back with them. Okay, any other questions? Let's flip forward. Any other questions? There's my website, find me there, explore around, lots of good stuff on the website, a lot of free resources. So if you liked this video, uh, you can subscribe. This is being live streamed to Facebook and YouTube, so you can subscribe to my YouTube channel or just watch out for the Facebook You can like my Facebook page and hopefully be notified. I do these every Thursday morning at 11:00 AM on, my system is deciding that it wants to be funny. Every Thursday morning at 11:00 AM Pacific, I do a topic, one topic, and so the topic that we're going to cover next week is why active listening doesn't work. Many people have been trained in active listening, and I'm going to explain where active listening came from, how it was developed, and why it is fatally flawed, why active listening has never worked, never will work, and should be completely abandoned in pop psychology. And of course it won't be, too many people are invested in it, but that's what I'll be teaching next week. So I'm going to sit here just for a minute and type in any other questions you've got, if anybody else has questions, and Otherwise, thank you for joining me, and I hope this was useful. Please put in the comments if you felt this was a useful, useful talk. Any other questions? Okay then, well, thank you so much.