Fair Point Studio: Dr. Tanya Israel is Professor Emeritus of Counseling Psychology at UC Santa Barbara. She's an award-winning author, TED speaker, and a leading voice in how we communicate through disagreements. Her books Beyond Your Bubble and Facing the Fracture have helped countless people to find common ground. She's been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Today Show. And now, Dr. Tanya Israel, welcome to Fair Point.
Davis: It's so great to have you on the podcast. I'm wondering, could you please ⁓ share an that has either shaped the way you think about political dialogue or that exemplifies why it matters?
Tania Israel: Absolutely. I'm gonna go back to the 1990s, which is forever ago. ⁓ I started a group to bring together pro-choice and pro-life people to have dialogue with each other. And I was just tired of being angry at the other side and wanted to try something new. And it turns out it was a transformational experience for me. It didn't change anything about how I felt about abortion.
Davis: Okay
Tania Israel: but it changed so much about how I felt about people who disagreed with me about it. And I've really taken that experience forward with me through my whole career and in this work that I do now.
Davis: That's so cool. I know you a background in psychology and also you're very interested in depolarization. there any insights you have about there are benefits of discourse, not only for society at large, but like for an individual? I know you said you thought it was a great experience for you. Is there like some science behind that?
Tania Israel: Absolutely. So I started this work, I really leaned into it after the 2016 election because it was clear that we were having trouble in this country ⁓ bridging this divide. I'm a counseling psychologist. So my question is always, ⁓ how can I ⁓ And I thought, I've been teaching listening skills for decades. ⁓ And I had experience of dialogue back in the 90s. Maybe I can do something. So I started doing workshops and I ended up writing this book Beyond Your Bubble, which is about how to have dialogue. And some people are like, this is great. This is exactly what I need. Thank you so much. And then there were all the other people who said, well, how nice that you wrote a book about how to have dialogue, but I don't want to talk to those people, but I'm still kind of losing it. So what do you have for me? And that's the group that I think, you know, is really helpful for us to talk about because there's a mental health consequence to being just in the midst of this political division. It's not even all about whether or not you're talking to somebody who disagrees with you. You can be sitting by yourself in your room, like losing your mind about what's going on with politics, like looking at social media or listening to the radio or looking at the news.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: anything or you just hear somebody use a term that means something in particular to you and you can just feel your blood pressure rising and you get flushed and you get tense. there is absolutely a personal, a relational benefit to addressing this. Like I said, whether or not we actually want to have dialysis.
Davis: Right.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I think it's important to think about how obviously it has mental health benefits, but at the same time, you know, we think of dialogue as something that goes from two different, drastically different sides, but it's something as simple as talking to the person that you agree on if pancakes or waffles are better at your dinner table. And so it can like translate in multiple different levels from your family to people that you've barely met. I think that's important to think about how those skills. can be brought into every scenario possible and how that can improve and also the people around you.
Tania Israel: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, even finding other people who think that pancakes and waffles are appropriate dinner cuisine, I think, you know, is is a win. So you can just bridge a divide right there. But but it's it, you know, it's even if there's somebody who agrees with you on everything ideologically, they might have a different way of dealing with things emotionally, like they've got a different emotional reaction or they don't want to hear about the news all the time. Or, you know, you can agree with them on everything.
Davis: Bye.
Jesse Horowitz: Okay, yes, yes. Yeah.
Tania Israel: but just be dealing with the situation that we're in with political division in a different way.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: same ⁓ note... As high school student, I always hear people saying they want less division, but then people go home, they watch news channels that only align with their own political views, they follow people on social media who think exactly like them, they surround themselves with individuals who are very like-minded to them. So my question to you is, if people say they hate polarization so much, why do you think they constantly feed into it?
Tania Israel: I love that question, especially because I'm a psychologist. So I want to talk a little bit about our cognitive biases. So as humans, have what I think of as flaws in our operating system. And there are three biases that we have that are just built in that I think are really fueling polarization. The first one is confirmation bias. That's the one where we pay attention to information that supports what we already believe to be true. And we ignore or dismiss information that conflicts with our existing beliefs. So then we end up thinking, well, I'm right. Everything I look at says I'm right. And therefore, you must be wrong. The second bias is naive realism. And naive realism is one that where we think that we're objective ⁓ other people are biased. And we all believe that, so it can't be true that, you know, that, ⁓ in fact, what's true is that we're all kind of biased, but ⁓ it leads us to really discount what somebody else would think because we think, ⁓ well, no, like, I'm seeing things clearly and they've got a really skewed perspective. But the one that I think is actually most corrosive is called motive attribution asymmetry. And this is the one where we think that we are motivated by love and protection and doing good. And we think that the other side is motivated by hate and greed and hostility. And that's the one that when I hear people talking about the other side in that way, think, ⁓ they are, you know, people say, I absolutely don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't even want to understand them because to understand them would be understanding evil and I don't want to do that. So that's why I think we're so like queued up to really embrace division.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: And I know you study psychology a lot. You're very interested in it. And going back to your point on naive realism, if you could get every American to unlearn one psychological habit that you might think could cause this inherent polarization that's feeding into their confirmation bias, what do you think it would be?
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, we.
Tania Israel: I love this question. ⁓ So I was at a conference and there was a colleague and we were at this session and I was like, you know, why are you here? And she said, you know, there's this thing going on on our listserv and people have these real strong opinions about things that I'm like, I don't know where they're coming from. And she said, so I wanted to understand what am I missing? And I was like, ⁓ my gosh, that. is the crucial question. It's unlearning this habit that we have of when we see something that we disagree with, we're like, well, here's what I think, or this is why they're wrong. But to actually look at somebody who's got a different view or even something we're reading and say, well, maybe this can help me to understand how to view things in a way that's different from how I'm already viewing it. And that kind of humility in the face of disagreement, it would be a miracle if we could all take that.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I guess a lot of people think of discourse and conversation to be kind of person to person relational, but are you saying that you must cultivate inner peace and be able to understand yourself and your intentions and your desires before you can have conversation with others?
Tania Israel: ⁓ well, I always ask people, you know, if they come to my workshops and things, I'm like, why are you interested in dialogue? And like, why do even want to talk to somebody who disagrees with you? So I get four answers to that. One is people say there's somebody in my life who I disagree with and we're having trouble maintaining our relationship because of that. Some people say I want to persuade or convince someone. Some people say I want to find common ground or bridge the divide. And some people say I cannot fathom how people can think or act or vote as they do and I'm trying to understand. So these are the motivations and I've always been trying to get people to key into their motivations because I'm like, that's gonna help them. But it turns out that it doesn't matter which of those motivations you have because no matter what brings you to the table, what you wanna do is to create a warm and trusting relationship where you're trying to understand them. So no matter what your goal is, that's what's gonna be most helpful. So yes, I do think it's good, like inner peace, absolutely always a good thing. But ⁓ good to know what your motivations are, but no matter what your motivations are, you're gonna wanna do the same kinds of things relationally. I will say, the thing that I learned the most in doing this ⁓ that people have more than one motivation. So people might be like, yes, I wanna maintain a relationship, but I also wanna voice my opinion openly. ⁓ or yes, I wanna bridge the divide, but I also wanna feel validated. So it's helpful to know what those overt motivations are, and it's also good to know what might be acting against those intentions that we have.
Davis: It's so interesting you mentioned multiple different goals and how the actions you take should really be the same. What advice would you give in terms of sometimes needing to balance certain goals like maintaining or upholding your own beliefs versus trying to make sure you're understanding those of others?
Tania Israel: Yeah, that's a great question because I think people get worried that they're going to need to compromise their values if they're going to engage in any kind of bridging the divide. And there's there's actually a psychological concept called intellectual humility. And with intellectual humility, you can hold strong and even more extreme beliefs, but still be respectful of and curious about somebody who holds a belief that's different from your own. I actually think if I don't understand how people can see things in a different way, I will never be an effective advocate. I'm really gonna have to understand from their perspective why they buy into this if I'm gonna try to change policy, change their minds. change my approach in how I'm dealing with this and even just change my inner reactivity to it. If I can recognize that, oh, they're not actually like trying to control women's bodies, they're trying to protect people. that understanding actually helps to even calm me in a way that I think I can be more effective.
Davis: Thank you. you Right, so understanding other people's beliefs is actually, you think, a way to better uphold or, like, I guess, reaffirm your own ⁓ confidence in your beliefs sometimes.
Tania Israel: Absolutely, but I think both your confidence and your effectiveness in acting on those beliefs.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: So as someone... who runs a civil discourse club at my school, going back to the confirmation bias and reaffirming your own opinions, I've noticed that sometimes conversations can fall apart when people aren't equally informed on a certain topic. For example, one person in the discussion would think they know everything on the topic, and then someone might be a little bit less informed on that topic. My question is, Is it still even possible to have productive dialogue and productive conversation when there's knowledge gaps like these?
Tania Israel: That's a great question because I think a lot of people feel like they don't really know enough about a lot of political issues to be able to have conversations with other people. It turns out that what's more important than sharing information is sharing our stories and sharing our stories about like, I don't know if we have a belief we came to it somehow. It probably wasn't actually by an accumulation of evidence.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: Right.
Tania Israel: It probably had something to do with experiences that we had or people who we encountered or maybe values that we gained from our communities and our culture and our families. And if we can share that actually sharing stories, people believe stories more than they believe facts. And if your story, especially if it's got some emotional content to it, people are going to remember that. So if you wanna be persuasive or if you even just wanna be understood, telling that story about your path to how you got there is gonna be a really powerful way to do that. And so you don't have to know everything. ⁓ And I think that when we turn it into like this battle of fact, well, you know what it is, we're thinking about this model of debate. because that's what we see. We see it on a stage, we see it on TV, ⁓ and we think that we're supposed to have a debate with somebody, you know, with all of our facts lined up. But when there's a debate, we never think that we're gonna lay out all of our facts and our well-crafted arguments, and then the other team is gonna go, ⁓ I never thought about things that way, and like come over to our side of the podium and be on our side.
Davis: That's right.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Tania Israel: That's not what happens in a debate because in a debate, we're not trying to convince the other team. We're trying to convince an outside observer, ⁓ a judge, the voters, the audience. And so we're talking with another human being as if there's an outside evaluator of this conversation. And when we're doing that, we're really losing the power that is in that human connection to be able to ⁓ I don't know, to have a more human and powerful interaction.
Jesse Horowitz: So would you say that ⁓ healthy and constructive discourse is able to happen without understanding the story and the background of someone else or do you really have to know the person to be able to engage with them effectively?
Tania Israel: You know, I've had conversations with people who I know really well, like people in my family. I've also had conversations with like somebody standing behind me in line at the airport. ⁓ And so I think that because and the thing is for me, I see any conversation where there's disagreement as an opportunity for me to learn something because I'm like, gosh, if I can't understand the way somebody thinks about things, it's sort of like if I don't understand how my TV works.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: and I've got an instruction manual in front of me and I'm like, nope, don't wanna read it, don't wanna know. I have to admit, I actually don't understand how my TV works, but it does and I can use it. But it's like we've got somebody in front of us who can help us to understand. And if we don't engage with them, I mean, it's fine. Everybody's gotta make their own choices. Sometimes we don't have the energy. It's not a mandate to do it. But it is an opportunity. And so I usually like to take those opportunities because I think, wow, I really am missing something, you know, because I can't understand how they can see it that way. But they could help me to understand.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: I really appreciate what you said about listening to other story because at times we think how can the other person think that when you're really considering their story because stories at the end of the day they influence their own politics and their own opinions so when you're understanding all the different stories of someone it's easier to empathize with whatever they believe politically and it's easier to have more functioning, healthy
Davis: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: discourse.
Jesse Horowitz: And Matias, I think that's where social media and online platforms really play in because it can exacerbate that situation where you're kind of just hearing the perspective of the other person in a short clip or a short headline without really understanding where it's coming from. And so obviously social media can go both ways, but I think that's where we see it go in the negative way, where it creates hate when you're just reading the opinion, but not the background.
Tania Israel: Absolutely. Social media is a terrible place to try to have dialogue or discourse of any sort. It's just it's not going to be very effective.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Davis: Right. It seems like on this call, we've actually been talking a lot about the positives of disagreement ⁓ like the fact that we all have these different viewpoints. Sometimes I though, do you think the world would even be better if we all believe the same versus having these different viewpoints.
Tania Israel: Well, it's a good question. But I sort of think that in a democracy, ⁓ it's important to have, like, to be able to tolerate and even embrace multiple viewpoints. There was actually a point where people in Congress agreed with each other too much and the parties were like, we have to be more distinct from each other because, I mean, otherwise you don't necessarily even bring in new ideas that might be helpful. I think the trick is not for everyone to have the same viewpoint and to agree, because really we've got so much diversity in this country. ⁓ I mean, we talk about cultural diversity, but there's also, we've got different economies, different industries in this country. And we have ever since the beginning. There's the agriculture people, and then there's the urban people. And we've got, ⁓ I just finished. going to my final state. I've been to all 50 states now. And it's so interesting seeing how things are different. Just the geography of each state is so different. And I can see how that then affects the economy and the people and the culture and so many things. So I think I've gone a little bit off track. But do I think it would be better if we all agree? I think it would be better if we all embraced
Davis: Okay. I'll roll my face.
Tania Israel: disagreement, but I don't think that I don't even know that I'd want everyone to see things exactly the same.
Davis: on the inoff, I actually agree with everything you just said.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. think politically definitely ⁓ or socially, we need some disagreement just to be able to grow. But also if we think about, someone to challenge the common sense, if someone didn't disagree with how the world is created, we wouldn't have done research, we wouldn't have figured out what it is. So I think constant disagreement and challenging of kind of what's already known is important for growth and development the whole entire world. It goes from ⁓ and also in a way scientifically too.
Davis: within the screen. With constructive tools though, obviously. ⁓ Having this disagreement.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: In all aspects, not just science though.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I actually had a question about when dialogue can go in a negative way. I'm wondering about a lot of people say, Let's agree to disagree. What are your thoughts on that statement? Do you think it's constructive or do think it's settling with something and avoiding the true disagreement and conversation?
Davis: Sure. Yeah.
Tania Israel: You know, I talk to a lot of people in families where there's disagreement and people are dealing with it in so many different ways. So some people are like, I don't go to holiday gatherings anymore. I don't talk to my aunt anymore. Some people are like taking the tools and trying to, you know, have a conversation. And some people are saying, you know what, like, We don't need to talk about this. We don't need to talk about politics all the time. We all love the kids in the family, and we can talk about that, and we can share recipes. There are other things that are more important. And actually, so many people in this country are not.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: interested in talking about politics. Like it seems like everybody is because that's what we see and people who who post about politics and social media are like one more extreme than other people are. They're also kind of angrier than other people are and they're also more interested in politics than most people are. So we think that everyone's interested in politics but actually there's
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Tania Israel: Most people are in this segment that there's this great research that Moore in Common did called the Hidden Tribes Study. And they're like, yes, there are people who are on the right. Yes, there are people on the left. But most people are in what they call the exhausted majority. And the exhausted majority is so tired of all of this division. And they're just tired of talking about politics. They're like, can we? Like there's other things in life. And I know that politics affects all of these things in our lives. You know, it does. ⁓ And at the same time, like a lot of times I'm like, you know what? I'd really just rather talk about Taylor Swift.
Davis: It's so great to have you on the podcast. I'm wondering, could you please ⁓ share an that has either shaped the way you think about political dialogue or that exemplifies why it matters?
Tania Israel: Absolutely. I'm gonna go back to the 1990s, which is forever ago. ⁓ I started a group to bring together pro-choice and pro-life people to have dialogue with each other. And I was just tired of being angry at the other side and wanted to try something new. And it turns out it was a transformational experience for me. It didn't change anything about how I felt about abortion.
Davis: Okay
Tania Israel: but it changed so much about how I felt about people who disagreed with me about it. And I've really taken that experience forward with me through my whole career and in this work that I do now.
Davis: That's so cool. I know you a background in psychology and also you're very interested in depolarization. there any insights you have about there are benefits of discourse, not only for society at large, but like for an individual? I know you said you thought it was a great experience for you. Is there like some science behind that?
Tania Israel: Absolutely. So I started this work, I really leaned into it after the 2016 election because it was clear that we were having trouble in this country ⁓ bridging this divide. I'm a counseling psychologist. So my question is always, ⁓ how can I ⁓ And I thought, I've been teaching listening skills for decades. ⁓ And I had experience of dialogue back in the 90s. Maybe I can do something. So I started doing workshops and I ended up writing this book Beyond Your Bubble, which is about how to have dialogue. And some people are like, this is great. This is exactly what I need. Thank you so much. And then there were all the other people who said, well, how nice that you wrote a book about how to have dialogue, but I don't want to talk to those people, but I'm still kind of losing it. So what do you have for me? And that's the group that I think, you know, is really helpful for us to talk about because there's a mental health consequence to being just in the midst of this political division. It's not even all about whether or not you're talking to somebody who disagrees with you. You can be sitting by yourself in your room, like losing your mind about what's going on with politics, like looking at social media or listening to the radio or looking at the news.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: anything or you just hear somebody use a term that means something in particular to you and you can just feel your blood pressure rising and you get flushed and you get tense. there is absolutely a personal, a relational benefit to addressing this. Like I said, whether or not we actually want to have dialysis.
Davis: Right.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I think it's important to think about how obviously it has mental health benefits, but at the same time, you know, we think of dialogue as something that goes from two different, drastically different sides, but it's something as simple as talking to the person that you agree on if pancakes or waffles are better at your dinner table. And so it can like translate in multiple different levels from your family to people that you've barely met. I think that's important to think about how those skills. can be brought into every scenario possible and how that can improve and also the people around you.
Tania Israel: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, even finding other people who think that pancakes and waffles are appropriate dinner cuisine, I think, you know, is is a win. So you can just bridge a divide right there. But but it's it, you know, it's even if there's somebody who agrees with you on everything ideologically, they might have a different way of dealing with things emotionally, like they've got a different emotional reaction or they don't want to hear about the news all the time. Or, you know, you can agree with them on everything.
Davis: Bye.
Jesse Horowitz: Okay, yes, yes. Yeah.
Tania Israel: but just be dealing with the situation that we're in with political division in a different way.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: same ⁓ note... As high school student, I always hear people saying they want less division, but then people go home, they watch news channels that only align with their own political views, they follow people on social media who think exactly like them, they surround themselves with individuals who are very like-minded to them. So my question to you is, if people say they hate polarization so much, why do you think they constantly feed into it?
Tania Israel: I love that question, especially because I'm a psychologist. So I want to talk a little bit about our cognitive biases. So as humans, have what I think of as flaws in our operating system. And there are three biases that we have that are just built in that I think are really fueling polarization. The first one is confirmation bias. That's the one where we pay attention to information that supports what we already believe to be true. And we ignore or dismiss information that conflicts with our existing beliefs. So then we end up thinking, well, I'm right. Everything I look at says I'm right. And therefore, you must be wrong. The second bias is naive realism. And naive realism is one that where we think that we're objective ⁓ other people are biased. And we all believe that, so it can't be true that, you know, that, ⁓ in fact, what's true is that we're all kind of biased, but ⁓ it leads us to really discount what somebody else would think because we think, ⁓ well, no, like, I'm seeing things clearly and they've got a really skewed perspective. But the one that I think is actually most corrosive is called motive attribution asymmetry. And this is the one where we think that we are motivated by love and protection and doing good. And we think that the other side is motivated by hate and greed and hostility. And that's the one that when I hear people talking about the other side in that way, think, ⁓ they are, you know, people say, I absolutely don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't even want to understand them because to understand them would be understanding evil and I don't want to do that. So that's why I think we're so like queued up to really embrace division.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: And I know you study psychology a lot. You're very interested in it. And going back to your point on naive realism, if you could get every American to unlearn one psychological habit that you might think could cause this inherent polarization that's feeding into their confirmation bias, what do you think it would be?
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, we.
Tania Israel: I love this question. ⁓ So I was at a conference and there was a colleague and we were at this session and I was like, you know, why are you here? And she said, you know, there's this thing going on on our listserv and people have these real strong opinions about things that I'm like, I don't know where they're coming from. And she said, so I wanted to understand what am I missing? And I was like, ⁓ my gosh, that. is the crucial question. It's unlearning this habit that we have of when we see something that we disagree with, we're like, well, here's what I think, or this is why they're wrong. But to actually look at somebody who's got a different view or even something we're reading and say, well, maybe this can help me to understand how to view things in a way that's different from how I'm already viewing it. And that kind of humility in the face of disagreement, it would be a miracle if we could all take that.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I guess a lot of people think of discourse and conversation to be kind of person to person relational, but are you saying that you must cultivate inner peace and be able to understand yourself and your intentions and your desires before you can have conversation with others?
Tania Israel: ⁓ well, I always ask people, you know, if they come to my workshops and things, I'm like, why are you interested in dialogue? And like, why do even want to talk to somebody who disagrees with you? So I get four answers to that. One is people say there's somebody in my life who I disagree with and we're having trouble maintaining our relationship because of that. Some people say I want to persuade or convince someone. Some people say I want to find common ground or bridge the divide. And some people say I cannot fathom how people can think or act or vote as they do and I'm trying to understand. So these are the motivations and I've always been trying to get people to key into their motivations because I'm like, that's gonna help them. But it turns out that it doesn't matter which of those motivations you have because no matter what brings you to the table, what you wanna do is to create a warm and trusting relationship where you're trying to understand them. So no matter what your goal is, that's what's gonna be most helpful. So yes, I do think it's good, like inner peace, absolutely always a good thing. But ⁓ good to know what your motivations are, but no matter what your motivations are, you're gonna wanna do the same kinds of things relationally. I will say, the thing that I learned the most in doing this ⁓ that people have more than one motivation. So people might be like, yes, I wanna maintain a relationship, but I also wanna voice my opinion openly. ⁓ or yes, I wanna bridge the divide, but I also wanna feel validated. So it's helpful to know what those overt motivations are, and it's also good to know what might be acting against those intentions that we have.
Davis: It's so interesting you mentioned multiple different goals and how the actions you take should really be the same. What advice would you give in terms of sometimes needing to balance certain goals like maintaining or upholding your own beliefs versus trying to make sure you're understanding those of others?
Tania Israel: Yeah, that's a great question because I think people get worried that they're going to need to compromise their values if they're going to engage in any kind of bridging the divide. And there's there's actually a psychological concept called intellectual humility. And with intellectual humility, you can hold strong and even more extreme beliefs, but still be respectful of and curious about somebody who holds a belief that's different from your own. I actually think if I don't understand how people can see things in a different way, I will never be an effective advocate. I'm really gonna have to understand from their perspective why they buy into this if I'm gonna try to change policy, change their minds. change my approach in how I'm dealing with this and even just change my inner reactivity to it. If I can recognize that, oh, they're not actually like trying to control women's bodies, they're trying to protect people. that understanding actually helps to even calm me in a way that I think I can be more effective.
Davis: Thank you. you Right, so understanding other people's beliefs is actually, you think, a way to better uphold or, like, I guess, reaffirm your own ⁓ confidence in your beliefs sometimes.
Tania Israel: Absolutely, but I think both your confidence and your effectiveness in acting on those beliefs.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: So as someone... who runs a civil discourse club at my school, going back to the confirmation bias and reaffirming your own opinions, I've noticed that sometimes conversations can fall apart when people aren't equally informed on a certain topic. For example, one person in the discussion would think they know everything on the topic, and then someone might be a little bit less informed on that topic. My question is, Is it still even possible to have productive dialogue and productive conversation when there's knowledge gaps like these?
Tania Israel: That's a great question because I think a lot of people feel like they don't really know enough about a lot of political issues to be able to have conversations with other people. It turns out that what's more important than sharing information is sharing our stories and sharing our stories about like, I don't know if we have a belief we came to it somehow. It probably wasn't actually by an accumulation of evidence.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: Right.
Tania Israel: It probably had something to do with experiences that we had or people who we encountered or maybe values that we gained from our communities and our culture and our families. And if we can share that actually sharing stories, people believe stories more than they believe facts. And if your story, especially if it's got some emotional content to it, people are going to remember that. So if you wanna be persuasive or if you even just wanna be understood, telling that story about your path to how you got there is gonna be a really powerful way to do that. And so you don't have to know everything. ⁓ And I think that when we turn it into like this battle of fact, well, you know what it is, we're thinking about this model of debate. because that's what we see. We see it on a stage, we see it on TV, ⁓ and we think that we're supposed to have a debate with somebody, you know, with all of our facts lined up. But when there's a debate, we never think that we're gonna lay out all of our facts and our well-crafted arguments, and then the other team is gonna go, ⁓ I never thought about things that way, and like come over to our side of the podium and be on our side.
Davis: That's right.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Tania Israel: That's not what happens in a debate because in a debate, we're not trying to convince the other team. We're trying to convince an outside observer, ⁓ a judge, the voters, the audience. And so we're talking with another human being as if there's an outside evaluator of this conversation. And when we're doing that, we're really losing the power that is in that human connection to be able to ⁓ I don't know, to have a more human and powerful interaction.
Jesse Horowitz: So would you say that ⁓ healthy and constructive discourse is able to happen without understanding the story and the background of someone else or do you really have to know the person to be able to engage with them effectively?
Tania Israel: You know, I've had conversations with people who I know really well, like people in my family. I've also had conversations with like somebody standing behind me in line at the airport. ⁓ And so I think that because and the thing is for me, I see any conversation where there's disagreement as an opportunity for me to learn something because I'm like, gosh, if I can't understand the way somebody thinks about things, it's sort of like if I don't understand how my TV works.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: and I've got an instruction manual in front of me and I'm like, nope, don't wanna read it, don't wanna know. I have to admit, I actually don't understand how my TV works, but it does and I can use it. But it's like we've got somebody in front of us who can help us to understand. And if we don't engage with them, I mean, it's fine. Everybody's gotta make their own choices. Sometimes we don't have the energy. It's not a mandate to do it. But it is an opportunity. And so I usually like to take those opportunities because I think, wow, I really am missing something, you know, because I can't understand how they can see it that way. But they could help me to understand.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: I really appreciate what you said about listening to other story because at times we think how can the other person think that when you're really considering their story because stories at the end of the day they influence their own politics and their own opinions so when you're understanding all the different stories of someone it's easier to empathize with whatever they believe politically and it's easier to have more functioning, healthy
Davis: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: discourse.
Jesse Horowitz: And Matias, I think that's where social media and online platforms really play in because it can exacerbate that situation where you're kind of just hearing the perspective of the other person in a short clip or a short headline without really understanding where it's coming from. And so obviously social media can go both ways, but I think that's where we see it go in the negative way, where it creates hate when you're just reading the opinion, but not the background.
Tania Israel: Absolutely. Social media is a terrible place to try to have dialogue or discourse of any sort. It's just it's not going to be very effective.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Davis: Right. It seems like on this call, we've actually been talking a lot about the positives of disagreement ⁓ like the fact that we all have these different viewpoints. Sometimes I though, do you think the world would even be better if we all believe the same versus having these different viewpoints.
Tania Israel: Well, it's a good question. But I sort of think that in a democracy, ⁓ it's important to have, like, to be able to tolerate and even embrace multiple viewpoints. There was actually a point where people in Congress agreed with each other too much and the parties were like, we have to be more distinct from each other because, I mean, otherwise you don't necessarily even bring in new ideas that might be helpful. I think the trick is not for everyone to have the same viewpoint and to agree, because really we've got so much diversity in this country. ⁓ I mean, we talk about cultural diversity, but there's also, we've got different economies, different industries in this country. And we have ever since the beginning. There's the agriculture people, and then there's the urban people. And we've got, ⁓ I just finished. going to my final state. I've been to all 50 states now. And it's so interesting seeing how things are different. Just the geography of each state is so different. And I can see how that then affects the economy and the people and the culture and so many things. So I think I've gone a little bit off track. But do I think it would be better if we all agree? I think it would be better if we all embraced
Davis: Okay. I'll roll my face.
Tania Israel: disagreement, but I don't think that I don't even know that I'd want everyone to see things exactly the same.
Davis: on the inoff, I actually agree with everything you just said.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. think politically definitely ⁓ or socially, we need some disagreement just to be able to grow. But also if we think about, someone to challenge the common sense, if someone didn't disagree with how the world is created, we wouldn't have done research, we wouldn't have figured out what it is. So I think constant disagreement and challenging of kind of what's already known is important for growth and development the whole entire world. It goes from ⁓ and also in a way scientifically too.
Davis: within the screen. With constructive tools though, obviously. ⁓ Having this disagreement.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Mattias Gitron-Beer: In all aspects, not just science though.
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah, I actually had a question about when dialogue can go in a negative way. I'm wondering about a lot of people say, Let's agree to disagree. What are your thoughts on that statement? Do you think it's constructive or do think it's settling with something and avoiding the true disagreement and conversation?
Davis: Sure. Yeah.
Tania Israel: You know, I talk to a lot of people in families where there's disagreement and people are dealing with it in so many different ways. So some people are like, I don't go to holiday gatherings anymore. I don't talk to my aunt anymore. Some people are like taking the tools and trying to, you know, have a conversation. And some people are saying, you know what, like, We don't need to talk about this. We don't need to talk about politics all the time. We all love the kids in the family, and we can talk about that, and we can share recipes. There are other things that are more important. And actually, so many people in this country are not.
Jesse Horowitz: Mm-hmm.
Tania Israel: interested in talking about politics. Like it seems like everybody is because that's what we see and people who who post about politics and social media are like one more extreme than other people are. They're also kind of angrier than other people are and they're also more interested in politics than most people are. So we think that everyone's interested in politics but actually there's
Jesse Horowitz: Yeah.
Tania Israel: Most people are in this segment that there's this great research that Moore in Common did called the Hidden Tribes Study. And they're like, yes, there are people who are on the right. Yes, there are people on the left. But most people are in what they call the exhausted majority. And the exhausted majority is so tired of all of this division. And they're just tired of talking about politics. They're like, can we? Like there's other things in life. And I know that politics affects all of these things in our lives. You know, it does. ⁓ And at the same time, like a lot of times I'm like, you know what? I'd really just rather talk about Taylor Swift.
