Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that kind of listening is. Among managers rated as the worst listeners by their employees, 94 percent of them evaluated themselves as good or very good listeners. Dunning and Kruger might have something to say about that. In one poll, a third of women said their pets were better listeners than their partners. Maybe it wasn’t just my kids who wanted a cat. It’s common for doctors to interrupt their patients within 11 seconds, even though patients may need only 29 seconds to describe their symptoms. In Quebec, however, Marie-Hélène experienced something very different.

When Marie-Hélène explained that she was concerned about autism and the effects of administering multiple vaccines simultaneously, Arnaud didn’t bombard her with a barrage of scientific facts. He asked what her sources were. Like many parents, she said she had read about vaccines on the internet but didn’t remember where. He agreed that in a sea of conflicting claims, it’s difficult to gain a clear sense of whether immunization is safe.

Eventually, when he understood Marie-Hélène’s beliefs, Arnaud asked if he could share some information about vaccines based on his own expertise. “I started a dialogue,” he told me. “The aim was to build a trusting relationship. If you present information without permission, no one will listen to you.” Arnaud was able to address her fears and misconceptions by explaining that the measles vaccine is a weakened live virus, so the symptoms are typically minimal, and there’s no evidence that it increases autism or other syndromes. He wasn’t delivering a lecture; he was engaging in a discussion. Marie-Hélène’s questions guided the evidence he shared, and they reconstructed her knowledge together. Every step of the way, Arnaud avoided putting pressure on her. Even after talking through the science, he concluded the conversation by telling her he would let her think about it, affirming her freedom to make up her own mind.

In 2020, during the worst snowstorm of the winter, a married couple drove an hour and a half to visit Arnaud. They hadn’t vaccinated any of their children, but after forty-five minutes of discussion with him, they decided to vaccinate all four of them. The couple lived in Marie-Hélène’s village, and seeing other children vaccinated there made the mother curious enough to seek more information.

The power of listening doesn’t lie just in giving people the space to reflect on their views. It’s a display of respect and an expression of care. When Arnaud took the time to understand Marie-Hélène’s concerns instead of dismissing them, he was showing a sincere interest in her well-being and that of her son. When Betty Bigombe stayed with displaced Ugandans in their camps and asked them to air their grievances, she was proving that what they had to say mattered to her. Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

If we can convince a mother to vaccinate her vulnerable children—or a warlord to consider peace talks—it’s easy to conclude that the ends justify whatever means are necessary. But it’s worth remembering that the means are a measure of our character. When we succeed in changing someone’s mind, we shouldn’t only ask whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.

PART III

Collective Rethinking

Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners

CHAPTER 8

Charged Conversations

   Depolarizing Our Divided Discussions

    When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news.

—Amanda Ripley

Eager to have a jaw-clenching, emotionally fraught argument about abortion? How about immigration, the death penalty, or climate change? If you think you can handle it, head for the second floor of a brick building on the Columbia University campus in New York. It’s the home of the Difficult Conversations Lab.

If you’re brave enough to visit, you’ll be matched up with a stranger who strongly disagrees with your views on a controversial topic. You’ll be given just twenty minutes to discuss the issue, and then you’ll both have to decide whether you’ve aligned enough to write and sign a joint statement on your shared views around abortion laws. If you’re able to do so—no small feat—your statement will be posted on a public forum.

For two decades, the psychologist who runs the lab, Peter T. Coleman, has been bringing people together to talk about polarizing issues. His mission is to reverse-engineer the successful conversations and then experiment with recipes to make more of them.

To put you in the right mindset before you begin your conversation about abortion, Peter gives you and the stranger a news article about another divisive issue: gun control. What you don’t know is that there are different versions of the gun control article, and which one you read is going to have a major impact on whether you land on the same page about abortion.

If the gun control article covers both sides of the issue, making a balanced case for both gun rights and gun legislation, you and your adversary have a decent chance at reaching consensus on abortion. In one of Peter’s experiments, after reading a “both-sides” article, 46 percent of pairs were able to find enough common ground to draft and sign a statement together. That’s a remarkable result.

But Peter went on to do something far more impressive. He randomly assigned some pairs to read another version of the same article, which led 100 percent of them to generate and sign a joint statement about abortion laws.

That version of the article featured the same information but presented it differently. Instead of describing the issue as a black-and-white disagreement between two sides, the article framed the debate as a complex problem with many shades of gray, representing a number of different viewpoints.

At the turn of the last century, the great hope for the internet was that it would expose us to different views. But as the web welcomed a few billion fresh voices and vantage points into the conversation, it also became a weapon of misinformation and disinformation. By the 2016 elections, as the problem of political polarization became more extreme and more visible, the solution seemed obvious to me. We needed to burst filter bubbles in our news feeds and shatter echo chambers in our networks. If we could just show people the other side of an issue, they would open their minds and become more informed. Peter’s research challenges that assumption.

We now know that where complicated issues are concerned, seeing the opinions of the other side is not enough. Social media platforms have exposed us to them, but they haven’t changed our minds. Knowing another side exists isn’t sufficient to leave preachers doubting whether they’re on the right side of morality, prosecutors questioning whether they’re on the right side of the case, or politicians wondering whether they’re on the right side of history. Hearing an opposing opinion doesn’t necessarily motivate you to rethink your own stance; it makes it easier for you to stick to your guns (or your gun bans). Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem.

Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories. To paraphrase the humorist Robert Benchley, there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.

A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and more doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough to discover information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it took was framing gun control not as an issue with only two extreme positions but rather as one involving many interrelated dilemmas. As journalist Amanda Ripley describes it, the gun control article “read less like a lawyer’s opening statement and more like an anthropologist’s field notes.” Those field notes were enough to help pro-life and pro-choice advocates find some areas of agreement on abortion in only twenty minutes.