The article didn’t just leave people open to rethinking their views on abortion; they also reconsidered their positions on other divisive issues like affirmative action and the death penalty.* If people read the binary version of the article, they defended their own perspective more often than they showed an interest in their opponent’s. If they read the complexified version, they made about twice as many comments about common ground as about their own views. They asserted fewer opinions and asked more questions. At the end of the conversation, they generated more sophisticated, higher-quality position statements—and both parties came away more satisfied.

For a long time, I struggled with how to handle politics in this book. I don’t have any silver bullets or simple bridges across a widening gulf. I don’t really even believe in political parties. As an organizational psychologist, I want to vet candidates’ leadership skills before I worry about their policy positions. As a citizen, I believe it’s my responsibility to form an independent opinion on each issue. Eventually, I decided that the best way to stay above the fray was to explore the moments that affect us all as individuals: the charged conversations we have in person and online.

Resisting the impulse to simplify is a step toward becoming more argument literate. Doing so has profound implications for how we communicate about polarizing issues. In the traditional media, it can help journalists open people’s minds to uncomfortable facts. On social media, it can help all of us have more productive Twitter tiffs and Facebook fights. At family gatherings, it might not land you on the same page as your least favorite uncle, but it could very well prevent a seemingly innocent conversation from exploding into an emotional inferno. And in discussions of policies that affect all of our lives, it might bring us better, more practical solutions sooner. That’s what this section of the book is about: applying rethinking to different parts of our lives, so that we can keep learning at every stage of our lives.

     Non Sequitur ? 2016 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

In 2006, Al Gore starred in a blockbuster film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and spawned a wave of activism, motivating businesses to go green and governments to pass legislation and sign landmark agreements to protect the planet. History teaches us that it sometimes takes a combination of preaching, prosecuting, and politicking to fuel that kind of dramatic swing.

Yet by 2018, only 59 percent of Americans saw climate change as a major threat—and 16 percent believed it wasn’t a threat at all. Across many countries in Western Europe and Southeast Asia, higher percentages of the populations had opened their minds to the evidence that climate change is a dire problem. In the past decade in the United States, beliefs about climate change have hardly budged.

This thorny issue is a natural place to explore how we can bring more complexity into our conversations. Fundamentally, that involves drawing attention to the nuances that often get overlooked. It starts with seeking and spotlighting shades of gray.

A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are shaped by our motivations. What we believe depends on what we want to believe. Emotionally, it can be unsettling for anyone to admit that all life as we know it might be in danger, but Americans have some additional reasons to be dubious about climate change. Politically, climate change has been branded in the United States as a liberal issue; in some conservative circles, merely acknowledging the fact that it might exist puts people on a fast track to exile. There’s evidence that higher levels of education predict heightened concern about climate change among Democrats but dampened concern among Republicans. Economically, we remain confident that America will be more resilient in response to a changing climate than most of the world, and we’re reluctant to sacrifice our current ways of achieving prosperity. These deep-seated beliefs are hard to change.

As a psychologist, I want to zoom in on another factor. It’s one we can all control: the way we communicate about climate change. Many people believe that preaching with passion and conviction is necessary for persuasion. A clear example is Al Gore. When he narrowly lost the U.S. presidential election in 2000, one of the knocks against him was his energy—or lack thereof. People called him dry. Boring. Robotic. Fast-forward a few years: his film was riveting and his own platform skills had evolved dramatically. In 2016, when I watched Gore speak in the red circle at TED, his language was vivid, his voice pulsated with emotion, and his passion literally dripped off him in the form of sweat. If a robot was ever controlling his brain, it short-circuited and left the human in charge. “Some still doubt that we have the will to act,” he boomed, “but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.” The audience erupted in a standing ovation, and afterward he was called the Elvis of TED. If it’s not his communication style that’s failing to reach people, what is?

At TED, Gore was preaching to the choir: his audience was heavily progressive. For audiences with more varied beliefs, his language hasn’t always resonated. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore contrasted the “truth” with claims made by “so-called skeptics.” In a 2010 op-ed, he contrasted scientists with “climate deniers.”

This is binary bias in action. It presumes that the world is divided into two sides: believers and nonbelievers. Only one side can be right, because there is only one truth. I don’t blame Al Gore for taking that position; he was presenting rigorous data and representing the consensus of the scientific community. Because he was a recovering politician, seeing two sides to an issue must have been second nature. But when the only available options are black and white, it’s natural to slip into a mentality of us versus them and to focus on the sides over the science. For those on the fence, when forced to choose a side, the emotional, political, and economic pressures tilt in favor of disengaging or dismissing the problem.

To overcome binary bias, a good starting point is to become aware of the range of perspectives across a given spectrum. Polls suggest that on climate change, there are at least six camps of thought. Believers represent more than half of Americans, but some are concerned while others are alarmed. The so-called nonbelievers actually range from cautious to disengaged to doubtful to dismissive.

It’s especially important to distinguish skeptics from deniers. Skeptics have a healthy scientific stance: They don’t believe everything they see, hear, or read. They ask critical questions and update their thinking as they gain access to new information. Deniers are in the dismissive camp, locked in preacher, prosecutor, or politician mode: They don’t believe anything that comes from the other side. They ignore or twist facts to support their predetermined conclusions. As the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry put it in a plea to the media, skepticism is “foundational to the scientific method,” whereas denial is “the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.”*

The complexity of this spectrum of beliefs is often missing from coverage of climate change. Although no more than 10 percent of Americans are dismissive of climate change, it’s these rare deniers who get the most press. In an analysis of some hundred thousand media articles on climate change between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate contrarians received disproportionate coverage: they were featured 49 percent more often than expert scientists. As a result, people end up overestimating how common denial is—which in turn makes them more hesitant to advocate for policies that protect the environment. When the middle of the spectrum is invisible, the majority’s will to act vanishes with it. If other people aren’t going to do anything about it, why should I bother? When they become aware of just how many people are concerned about climate change, they’re more prepared to do something about it.

As consumers of information, we have a role to play in embracing a more nuanced point of view. When we’re reading, listening, or watching, we can learn to recognize complexity as a signal of credibility. We can favor content and sources that present many sides of an issue rather than just one or two. When we come across simplifying headlines, we can fight our tendency to accept binaries by asking what additional perspectives are missing between the extremes.

This applies when we’re the ones producing and communicating information, too. New research suggests that when journalists acknowledge the uncertainties around facts on complex issues like climate change and immigration, it doesn’t undermine their readers’ trust. And multiple experiments have shown that when experts express doubt, they become more persuasive. When someone knowledgeable admits uncertainty, it surprises people, and they end up paying more attention to the substance of the argument.