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Preroll: PolicyCast explores evidence-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

Intro (Julia Minson): So, the studies we’ve done involve taking two people, giving them a topic that they strongly disagree on, and then only training one person in conversational receptiveness and then seeing how the second person responds. And what we find is that, first of all, the second person likes the first person better. They think they’re more thoughtful, they are more trustworthy, they’re more reasonable. So, they just see them as a more pleasant human being. Secondly, they want to interact with that person again in the future. So, when we think about constructive conversations and bridging conversations, this is a way to create a bridge to the next conversation because now this person isn't trying to run away from you, they’re okay with talking to you again. And then perhaps most importantly, especially from our community-building perspective right now, is the second person who doesn’t know anything about conversational receptiveness starts mimicking it… So there’s an opportunity to sort of change the culture by kind of seeding conversational receptiveness among people who are most socially connected, do the most talking, appear in some of the most controversial conversations and say, okay, if we model this approach in this type of setting, it looks like other people will pick up on it and just sort of naturally start doing it. 

Intro (Erica Chenoweth): I think that our students and faculty and staff will all avail ourselves of the different opportunities that our implementation team will provide to improve on these skills. Because polarization interferes with all of the things that we would otherwise associate with good public policy and the ability to effectively lead in challenging times and turbulent times, but it’s not permanent. We have agency, and in fact, people are what changed these things, people who are equipped with the skills and motivated to help. And so I think we can have a real impact and the thing about democracy is that it really is a set of institutions that manage conflict. That’s what democracy is. Conflict is always going to be there; we’re going to have competing interests. Democracy is a way of managing it without us all killing each other. That’s really how it came about and why it still exists. 

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome to the Spring 2024 season of the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast. I’m Ralph Ranalli. In so many of our conversations these days—whether they’re taking place over social media, in meetings or classrooms, or face-to-face—it can seem like we’re not really talking to each other anymore. Sometimes we’re talking past each other. Sometimes we’re talking over each other. And sometimes we’re even trying to cancel the other person and shut them up for expressing thoughts we don’t like. Anything to win the argument or win the narrative. Yet as our discourse and our politics have become both more polarized and paralyzed, some scholars are now saying that we need to refocus on listening to understand, instead of talking to win, and that we need to relearn how to have discussions that are both frank and productive. So about a year and a half ago, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf started the Candid and Constructive Conversations initiative, based on the idea that those sorts of discussions over differences are not only vital to democracy and a functioning society, but that the ability to have them was also an essential skill for students, staff, and faculty in the ����vlog���� community and beyond to learn. That effort took on even more urgency after the recent events in Israel and Gaza and their fallout in the United States, including at Harvard and other universities. My guests today are helping lead that initiative. Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and the academic dean for faculty engagement at ����vlog����, as well as one of the world’s leading authorities on conflict and alternatives to political violence. Associate Professor of Public Policy Julia Minson is a decision scientist who studies the psychology of disagreement, and has developed research-based, practical methods that nearly anyone can use to make difficult conversations into productive ones. They’re here with me today to talk it out. 

Ralph Ranalli: Erica, Julia, welcome to PolicyCast. 

Erica Chenoweth: Thank you. 

Julia Minson: Thanks. It's great to be here. 

Ralph Ranalli: I think sometimes when we're doing these policy discussions, we sort of forget that we're all living, breathing human beings and with feelings and emotions. And I just wanted to ask you how you’re doing. It's been an interesting few months for Harvard people, myself included, and I just wanted to ask how this has been for you. Has it led to any moments of introspection or realization?  

Julia Minson: So to me, somebody who studies conflict and disagreement, it’s been really interesting to observe just the environment around me and to observe my own behavior and realize actually how hard it is to do some of the things we study and some of the things we advise. Lots of conversations that I could have had that I chose not to because it seemed too scary. So it’s kind of fascinating living my own research right now. 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I would say it’s been a challenging time to be in higher ed, and it’s also been a challenging time to be a caring human being on this planet, who cares about how others are doing. So, I would say being somebody also who studies conflict and studies groups and organizations and violent and nonviolent conflict, it’s added a sense of perspective to what we’ve been seeing around the world. To some extent, one can be compartmentalizing about it because it’s an area of expertise for me, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch how things unfold and be disturbed by it. So, I think it’s been a challenging time, but all things considered and relative to what it could be like, I'm doing pretty well. 

Ralph Ranalli: So we’re talking about the candid and constructive conversation initiative that you’re both part of. And it actually dates back to the fall of 2022 when Dean Douglas Elmendorf asked Erica to lead it, but it’s obviously taken on a greater urgency in our current context. Can you both talk a little bit about that effort—where it started and where we are now? Erica, do you mind starting? 

Erica Chenoweth: Sure. Yeah. So Julia joined me and a number of other faculty colleagues and some students and staff colleagues on this effort to really study what we knew about what it takes for an organization, not only to facilitate and create space for effective conversations around controversial issues across difference, but also how we could build those skills for our students to be able to practice it outside the Kennedy School where the rubber meets the road as it were. And so that involved a lot of taking inventory of what we already have in house that has been working well. It involved looking around Harvard and other peer institutions at what initiatives or resources were available there. It involved taking a kind of assessment of the climate at the Kennedy School for students, faculty, and staff. And then it also involved coming up with a series of recommendations of activities and efforts that we thought could basically fulfill those goals. 

And I think what we came up with was a pretty comprehensive, pretty rigorous assessment, and some pretty ambitious recommendations that we’re already putting into practice and already seeing the fruits of. So, I think that the Kennedy School is well positioned to be a world leading institution on enhancing constructive and candid conversations across difference. And it’s just a matter of focused effort and continuing to center it as part of what the culture is here and what we are aiming to achieve here. The real fortunate thing for us is that, in fact, we have a number of different faculty like Julia, whose research is directly focused on this issue from her disciplinary perspective. 

But we also have faculty from a variety of different disciplines looking at this issue from a variety of different perspectives, but all leading in the same direction. And I think what’s really important to know about this is that there’s not kind of one right or wrong way to go about it, that the most important thing is people sort of all pushing in the same direction and coming at it from the skills and the background and the discipline and expertise they’ve got. And that helps also our students and other people who we might affect to see that they can also take on this effort. 

Julia Minson: Yeah, I think I like the idea of thinking about the timeline of all of this because I do think about the timeline a lot. At every point in time, every few months, something happens in the world that makes it hard for people who disagree about that thing to have a productive, thoughtful conversation. And of course, right now there's a lot of focus on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. There’s the war in Gaza, closer to home we have the resignation of President Gay. But if you look back at the last few years, we had COVID, we had the vaccines, we had the masks, we had the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court case, we had the murder of George Floyd. Every few months there is a new set of world events that brings to the forefront the necessity for us to be able to thoughtfully discuss these types of events. They're not going away. 

And so, I think the launch of this initiative over a year ago was just in recognition of the fact that these things keep happening. And one of our prerogatives as a school is to prepare our students to deal with them both in the school and out in the world. 

Ralph Ranalli: Was it gratifying to you—coming from your decision science perspective and this really going to the core of what you do—to actually have the school become your lab, in a sense?  

Julia Minson: It’s really interesting because yes, I am glad that this kind of work is really becoming a priority, but my initial reaction, and I think a lot of academics’ is, “Oh, well I know how to do this. Why do we need to have a big committee? Why do we need to spend a year studying it?” And now that we’ve studied it for a year, I'm like, “Oh, there are all kinds of things I haven't thought of.” So, it has been interesting realizing how much there is in fact to learn from looking at this from multiple points of view. 

Ralph Ranalli: Well, that’s a great segue because—while I want to get to the recommendations in a bit—before you came up with them, you did some surveys and interviews and where you went out and you actually put your ear to the ground about how people were feeling about their ability to have candid conversations about hard topics. Can you talk a little bit about what those findings were and maybe the ones that surprised you in particular? 

Erica Chenoweth: Sure. So, you’re right. We did a survey, which was an anonymous survey conducted over Qualtrics basically on the web. And then we also did a number of listening sessions where we sat down with groups across the school and listened to people’s experience and ideas. And I think that one of the more striking and consistent findings across all of the different constituencies of the school is that people are much more comfortable sharing candid views one-on-one and being willing to have a hard conversation with one person than they are to have it in a larger group or a very public setting. People are the most intimidated, the more public it is. So social media, for example, is maybe the potentially worst place for people to have a productive discourse according to this survey and our responses in the listening sessions. And I think a big part of that is exactly because the sort of extremes get represented very quickly and in a very polarized way. 

And then there’s also this sort of dehumanization dynamic that takes place. And so, arguments can go ad hominem very quickly. Whereas in smaller group settings, there’s more of a basis for forming norms and trust and people are more willing then to take a risk and say something that’s not fully thought through or whatever, and to self-censor less. And I think that actually being able to self-censor less is one of the most important things for having a full conversation. There’s a sense in our respondents that people felt like a very narrow set of views were often expressed at the school, but I don’t think that means that we have a very narrow set of views at the school. I think we have a really wide range of views at the school and that we have to create and enable and facilitate the space for us to have a full conversation. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I think one of the findings was that 64% of faculty and 73% of students strongly or somewhat disagreed with the assertion that ����vlog����’s overall climate makes people comfortable expressing their opinions on controversial political and policy issues. That’s basically three quarters of students. So, you’re talking about really suppressing opinions and viewpoints even in classroom settings. 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. Although I think the finding was that the more public it is, so a Forum event, for example, where people can ask questions on the floor, is maybe the least likely place that they were willing to do it. Classrooms more, but the most safe space was in one-on-one or small peer groups. And I think that, one thing to note is that I don’t know that ����vlog���� is particularly an outlier on this. I think that if you did surveys like this across many different institutions and even different parts of Harvard, you might find a similar pattern. It is just that we think we can do a lot better if we focus our effort in a way and make it a priority and provide the space and the facilitation for people to practice these skills more effectively.

And part of the reason I think that is because the Law School a few years ago had its own kind of moment where they were reviewing the problems of self-censorship, but also where they felt like not all viewpoints were being expressed. And that was actually not good for their professional development because students really need to be able to inhabit different legal positions in order to do their jobs effectively. And so they just basically initiated a bit of a culture shift and within a few years, the faculty I’ve talked to there anyway, report that there has been a really significant culture shift at the school. So, I think we can do that. And I think we're already on our way. 

Ralph Ranalli: Julia, you've done a lot of work on the practical methods to do just that, right? 

Julia Minson: Yes. And I think to add to the story of the findings of the survey, the thing that I found surprising was the very obvious tension between what people said they were uncomfortable doing, which is expressing minority views in large groups, and yet their desire to be able to do so. So, you could imagine sort of a situation where people say, "Look, these types of views are not welcome, and also this is not something we should be talking about in public, so why are you even asking?" But that’s not what we heard. We heard a real eagerness from the community to have authentic conversations where people get to really speak from their experience base and from their evidence base, ideology, whatever the case may be, and have those views sort of heard and respected and debated without getting canceled on social media. 

And, so, I think that drive to have that kind of community then much more naturally feeds into creating the culture that we want to create because there seems to be a real underlying motivation to become that kind of place. And, so, once you have that underlying motivation, then you can talk about what are the opportunities and structures and training approaches you can put into place to give people the tools to have the kind of communication they want to have. If they don’t want to have it in the first place, then training them in it is not going to get you very far. 

Ralph Ranalli: So, the desire was there, it’s just the ability to execute. 

Julia Minson: The ability to execute and I think the trust, as Erica put it, the trust that you’re not going to get punished for it. So I mean, you can imagine in any relationship people want to speak authentically about their feelings. They just don’t want to be rejected by the other person. 

Erica Chenoweth: Can we say too, that this came across very clearly, people aren’t afraid of being punished by authorities, they’re afraid of being punished by their peers. They’re afraid of social consequences from their peers. And so actually, it makes a lot of sense at a place like the Kennedy School, where you come in as a student and it becomes very obvious that you're surrounded by your future professional network. And that means everything is building these relationships and getting the most out of being here with all these incredible people who you’re going to go forward and change the world with. So, you wouldn’t want to alienate any of those people if you can avoid it. And if you do, maybe you don’t do it again. So I think what we need to do is sort of thread the needle on saying, yeah, of course these are very important relationships, but let’s also be clear that this is an institution for learning. 

And we can’t learn, we can’t have full conversations, we can’t all get better at having the types of conversations that as an effective public servant, we really need you to be able to have unless you speak your mind and unless you let others do the same without fear that they are not going to be invited to your table again. So, this I think is really an important message, and I think our students will get it. 

Julia Minson: Well, and to build on that, I think another unique feature of the Kennedy School, it’s not super unique relative to the Law School, but it’s unique relative to some other professional schools. We recruit people who are leaders and change makers. So we recruit people who are used to having strong opinions that they express loudly, usually in the face of dissent, sometimes at the cost of tremendous personal risk. And when they happen to disagree, and there’s 800 of them in the same building, if you are the person who expresses an unpopular opinion, you can expect that somebody who feels very strongly in the opposite direction is not going to shy away. That’s a much lesser risk if you don't go to a school that selects people for public leadership. 

Ralph Ranalli: So we’ve mentioned social media a couple of times, and obviously we've had lots of discussions at the Kennedy School about various ways that social media is problematic, including in this context. I was interested in some of the practical ways that can address that problem; the way social media acts as sort of a funhouse mirror that distorts our view of reality and skews the way we communicate. One recommendation was a wider adoption of the so-called Chatham House rule. Would you mind just explaining what that is and what difference you think it could make? 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. So the Chatham House rule is basically a norm in which people are not identified or associated with an idea. So for example, if I’m in a class and my classmate says something that I find provocative or whatever, that I'm not going to go and say, guess who said what? I’m not going to talk about that outside the classroom with anyone else. Or if I'm an event and there's a speaker who comes, and that event would basically be not for attribution. So, I wouldn't get to go home and tell my family, “Oh, guess who came and spoke today? And guess what they said.” That's not allowed anymore. And the reason why the rule kind of came to be at Chatham House and perhaps next at the Kennedy School, and it’s practiced many places of course, is that we just are more frank when we know that the conversation is confidential. 

And so that’s just like a human thing. So, the idea that maybe in our classrooms and maybe at our events, we should default to a Chatham House rule as opposed to it only appearing in certain classes in certain events, but not being a standard practice, is that it might help us to nudge toward the type of culture we’re talking about. So, where we begin to exercise a set of professional responsibilities toward one another, and it also orients us to understanding the collective aim, which is we’re here to learn. We’re not here to listen to who says what next so that we can go and talk about that person in a negative way or whatever. 

Julia Minson: Well, and I think part of it is that you can discuss the idea. You just can’t say who said it. So, we can keep debating the idea no matter how provocative it is, and it becomes about debating ideas, which is what we're here to do, and not gossiping about the person. 

Erica Chenoweth: So you could definitely say, “The thought was expressed in this class X, Y, Z, and it really generated a lot of controversy and I want to talk about it.” That is totally fine. So, I think that that enhances learning and even enhances social connection in a way because it enhances learning, but without the adverse social effects. 

Ralph Ranalli: So, once you’ve made progress on establishing a better atmosphere of trust, one that’s more conducive to people opening up, there are still communications skills people can learn to foster candid and constructive conversations. Julia, I know you’ve done a lot of work on this on a technique where it goes by the name of HEAR. It's an acronym, H-E-A-R. Can you tell us about that, the science is behind it and how it works? 

Julia Minson: Certainly. So, one of the things that we’re really trying to do is get people to think much more rigorously about how do you have these types of conversations. So, the Chatham House rule is one example of how you think about it. Another example, you mentioned social media. If you’re going to talk about something delicate, controversial, hot button, just don’t do it online, do it in person, do it in a small group, do it thoughtfully. So that general premise of let’s consider what it takes to do this well, I think is the spirit behind everything we’re doing. The specific toolkit you’re referring to comes out of my research on what we call conversational receptiveness. So, the idea is that we’ve run many studies that show that people really value when they feel that their counterpart is being receptive to their point of view. What does it mean to be receptive? 

It doesn’t mean that they’re changing their mind, it doesn’t mean that they’re exceeding a point. What it means is that I’m showing you that I’m listening and I’m engaging with your perspective. I’m really sort of taking it into my head and chewing on it and having kind of a conversation with what you are trying to say. And so then the question becomes, how do I show that? How do I demonstrate it in a way that’s recognizable? And so we did work using natural language processing where we basically went through transcripts of thousands of conversations and identified specific words and phrases that people can say that make their counterparts feel heard. So, kind of the departure from prior research is that we’re not saying be more empathetic or be more curious. We’re saying say these things so your counterpart knows you are trying to be curious. And, so, you mentioned the acronym HEAR. HEAR stands for four components of conversational receptiveness that we found to be particularly effective. 

The H stands for hedging, sort of hedging your claims. The E stands for emphasizing agreement, recognizing that in every conversation where we disagree about a particular topic, we still agree on some broader ideas. The A stands for acknowledgement, acknowledging the other person’s point of view, so restating the other person’s perspective. So they have seen evidence of the fact that I’ve really heard them. And then the R stands for reframing to the positive. So using fewer negative contradictory phrases like no, can’t, won’t, don’t. And using more positively valenced words like, “I think it would be great,” or “I would really appreciate it if you did X, Y, Z.” 

Ralph Ranalli: So if you put those into effect when you’re having these conversations and the other person can see and hear what you’re doing, what happens to that other person? What have you found about how they change? 

Julia Minson: So, the studies we’ve done involve taking two people, giving them a topic that they strongly disagree on, and then only training one person in conversational receptiveness and then seeing how the second person responds. And what we find is that first of all, the second person likes the first person better. They think they’re more thoughtful, they are more trustworthy, they’re more reasonable. So, they just see them as a more pleasant human being. Secondly, they want to interact with that person again in the future. So, when we think about constructive conversations and bridging conversations, this is a way to create a bridge to the next conversation because now this person isn’t trying to run away from you, they’re okay with talking to you again. 

And then perhaps most importantly, especially from our community-building perspective right now, is the second person who doesn’t know anything about conversational receptiveness starts mimicking it. And, so, we can literally transcribe their words and show that they’re picking up on the same words and phrases as what the first person was trained in. So there’s an opportunity to sort of change the culture by kind of seeding conversational receptiveness among people who are most socially connected, do the most talking, appear in some of the most controversial conversations and say, okay, if we model this approach in this type of setting, it looks like other people will pick up on it and just sort of naturally start doing it. 

Ralph Ranalli: So, obviously getting our own house in order here at Harvard is a priority. But I think it’s good to remember that it’s part of our mission to create these environments. But the university environment is purposely not the real world—we create these environments that don't necessarily exist out there where these conversations are also going on. How do you take the good things that we’re learning and modeling here and push them out into the real world where you don’t have as many controlled environments where you can put these techniques and rules and guidelines into effect? How do you take it from in here to out there? 

Erica Chenoweth:  Well, as somebody who’s taught at universities for the last 20 years or so, I think any of us who’ve been in this position know that the biggest impact we have is through our students. And, so, giving our students every opportunity to hone these skills while they’re here is the way that we’re going to have a positive impact out there because when they go out, they can’t pick their constituents. This is a school that is in the university. Primary purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, but the Kennedy School's mission is to improve public policy and leadership. And, so, we are both producing new knowledge and engaging in learning and rigor, but we are also preparing our students to go out and be effective and principled and to improve public policy. So, in a setting in which we’re at kind of record-high levels of polarization, not just in the United States, but all across the world, these skills are needed more than ever. 

And, so, it’s our hope, I think that our students and faculty and staff will all avail ourselves of the different opportunities that our implementation team will provide to improve on these skills. Because polarization interferes with all of the things that we would otherwise associate with good public policy and the ability to effectively lead in challenging times and turbulent times, but it’s not permanent. We have agency, and in fact, people are what changed these things, people who are equipped with the skills and motivated to help. And, so, I think we can have a real impact and the thing about democracy is that it really is a set of institutions that manage conflict. That’s what democracy is. Conflict is always going to be there; we’re going to have competing interests. Democracy is a way of managing it without us all killing each other. That’s really how it came about and why it still exists. 

And what that acknowledges is that our societies are highly pluralistic and that actually our pluralism is a strength. It’s not a weakness, but it also means that we need to prepare people to engage across differences on the stuff that’s controversial precisely because it’s not morally settled yet. There are real deep fundamental questions about these things. We need to talk about them, we need to talk about them honestly, and that there aren’t going to be just caricatures of the other side and then that the conversations we have about them don't just devolve into the sort of polarized discourse that doesn't allow us to move ahead together. 

Julia Minson: I think another thing that’s a unique ability we have by virtue of being at a university is that we don’t just think up an initiative, roll it out and sort of cross our fingers. We base it on research, and then usually we measure outcomes. And so to the extent that we can look at the data we’ve collected last year and then do some things to change the culture and then measure how things are looking next year or the year after that, we can then say with some confidence,  “Here you go, world—here is a tested toolkit, go to town.” Which is a very different approach than a lot of other organizations take. So I have sort of a great amount of faith in the value of taking the tools that we use for research and applying it to the problems that we're actually trying to address in the real world. 

Ralph Ranalli: It’s interesting you brought up research, empirical evidence, and truth, for lack of a better word. After all that’s what it says on the Harvard shield, Veritas, which is Latin for truth. And the notion of truth can be problematic, but basically I think it’s like a lot of other ideals, in that just because it’s hard to come by, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing. But we’re also in an age when people are being herded into ideological bubbles by social media and by political and societal actors who stand to benefit from that. And there are many surveys and polls which have shown that there are just large groups of people who believe in things that are just empirically false. When you’re trying to foster candid and constructive conversations, how do you account for truth and disinformation in that equation? How do you solve for that? 

Erica Chenoweth: One of the things that Julia has said before, if I can repeat it well, is that it depends on the goal of your conversation. And the most important goal for any conversation is to create a bridge to the next conversation. It is going to be slow work, finding common ground across the polarized discursive space that exists not just in American politics, but in many other countries, politics as well. And that’s what we need. We need people who are motivated and committed to do the slow and steady work of rebuilding that common ground. It can be done, it really can, but it’s going to be slow and steady work. I will also say that the thing with the type of polarization that we’re in right now, some people call active polarization, is that what you get is you get a very clear in-group and out-group, and of course the in-group is defined largely by who’s out of it. 

So, we have kind of in-groups and out-groups, and the in-group and the out-group demonize one another for sure. But the other thing that happens is that there’s a lot of in-group policing, so if you’re in the in-group, you have to say certain things a certain way. You have to reject certain things as untrue and that’s why you get this sort of spiral of different facts and whatever. And so that’s like a process that has to be kind of reversed. So one of the exercises that Julia and Rob Wilkinson walked our school through last Friday was around taking some of these less controversial and more controversial statements and then trying to pick the top three that you want to debate with another person, and then have that conversation where you’re sure you’re going to disagree and just practice that toolkit, that here framework. 

And people found it remarkably illuminating and constructive, and in some cases even felt maybe some breakthroughs in their conversational ability. And I think that it just takes that slow, steady practice. And even on something that’s not a high-stakes issue, maybe you start with a lower stakes issue and then move up to the more difficult stuff. 

Julia Minson: Yeah, I think this question of what do we do with the people who are just completely out to lunch and how can you possibly have a conversation with them? I think it’s a question that comes up often. And in my experience, there are very, very few people who are actually that far out to lunch. And I’​​ll give you an example. I have done a lot of work recently on COVID vaccines. And in that work we recruited online participants who are either very strongly pro-vaccine, everybody should be vaccinated, everybody should get all the booster doses, and then a group of people who are under vaccinated by whatever definition, either not at all or they’ve gotten one or they’ve gotten two, but not all the ones you're supposed to get. And they had to exchange messages. And, so, as a result of that, I have read hundreds if not thousands of messages written by people who are vaccine hesitant. 

And I mean, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many of those talk about what we would consider truly crazy conspiracy theories. The vast majority of them are bad understanding of science, some bad math, and then some truly legitimate concerns about things we don't know and how they might affect a particular person, a particular life situation. And so if you take a person who is on the fence about something and sort of hesitant and then you shame them and say, “I can't believe you would listen to this crazy stuff,” then I think it’s not surprising when they fully embrace the other side because we have just sort of kicked them out of civil society and made them feel bad for saying anything. So I think rather than worrying about are we giving too much airtime to the tiny percent of people who truly think the earth is flat, I think we should be worrying about being more inclusive of the other 30% of the population who might disagree with us, but for reasons that might make perfect sense to them and other people with their experience. 

Ralph Ranalli: So, we’ve talked a lot about changing individual behavior and individual perspective. And it’s interesting because I'm writing a piece right now for the Harvard Kennedy School Magazine on the clean energy transition and the climate crisis—another huge societal issue. And there’s a tension in that problem just that I see here as well, between how much of it comes down to the choices of individuals versus how much is systemic. You can convince people to go buy an electric car, but if the government isn’t incentivizing the creation of chargers for those cars, you’re just spinning your wheels. Oh, geez, sorry for the pun. So how much of this do you think is about changing individual behavior and how much is about making necessary changes in systemic structures? 

Julia Minson: So, I think when you’re talking about behavior change, it is always easier when there is a systemic structure that’s supporting the behavioral change you want. So, I mean, there’s a ton of policy research in different areas that says, “If you want people to save for retirement, default them into saving for retirement.” “If you want babies to get vaccinated, just assume that the parents are going to vaccinate them and vaccinate them at the well baby visits and don’t sort of make them make a special appointment.” So having structures and incentives and a general culture that supports a change you’re hoping to make, makes it dramatically easier for people to then take on the individual behaviors that you're hoping they’ll take on. So, I think if we're serious about this, we want to take it at every level, the institutional level and the group level and the individual level. 

Erica Chenoweth: And I would add that the behavior of public leaders is really important. It’s much harder to get ground up grassroots culture change if there's no willingness among the most visible and powerful people in society to go along with it. So our colleagues Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have written a couple of books, the most recent of which reiterates the point that punishing politicians who indulge in toxic discourse is the best way to end it. And when they say punishing, they mean at the polls. So, making sure they don’t hold office to make sure that it doesn’t reward that type of behavior. And I think that the other way to think about this is in terms of how we organize civil society. So American civil society right now is pretty fragmented, and our colleague Bob Putnam, wrote a book a number of years ago, the popular version of which was called Bowling Alone. 

In that book, he makes this argument for social capital and the need to rebuild associational life in the United States. Well, we have a lot of associational life in the United States; it’s just fragmented into what you might call highly bonded civil society. So, people are very engaged and in some measures more engaged than they’ve been in my lifetime, at least in political life. But it’s very much along this line of very polarized politics and where people engage only with those who are like them or think like them. So, what we need in the sort of macro sense is we don’t just need bonded civil society, we also need bridged civil society. So, we need, it’s sort of the version of the low-stakes argument. I don’t know for how many people, the question about whether Taylor Swift should be as popular as she is low stakes. I think for some people it’s extremely high stakes, but for me it’s a low stakes debate to have. So this is the- 

Ralph Ranalli: I know a number of teenagers who might disagree. 

Julia Minson: Not just teenagers. 

Erica Chenoweth: Exactly, exactly. But we need that version of civil society where you have low-stakes types of interactions where actually you’re not really talking about politics, you're not talking about the things that make us really angry at each other. We're talking about is there a way to make such-and-such park less trashed together so that our kids can all play? Something like that. And where it’s about some kind of common purpose, it’s like a free of controversy, but a way for people to engage in some kind of common purpose and develop some community trust and some community spirit. We need that too. And I'm not saying we don't need bonded civil society, we do, but we need both kinds, and we don't really have much of the latter right now. 

Ralph Ranalli: So we’ve reached the point in the episode where we put the policy in PolicyCast, and I’m going to ask both of you for some specific actionable policy recommendations. I would love it if they could cover both the individual and the systemic areas that we talked about. What are some practical things in terms of policy changes that can be done to foster more and better candid and constructive dialogue? 

Julia Minson: So, my pet project for a few years now has been trying to figure out how we can create a curriculum for teenagers to learn skills of constructive conversation. So, we have a lot of work that we do in schools for dealing with bullying, for example, which I think is very important. But we don’t teach all kids how to use words effectively to engage with disagreement. And I think every parent of teenagers right now is probably cheering me quietly because imagine if all of our teenagers were good at productive disagreement and then could take that skillset into their adult life. That’s what I would love to see. 

Erica Chenoweth: That’s awesome. I think I'll speak more to the systemic side maybe, which is I think much like our finding with regard to small groups and peer-to-peer contacts being the safest spaces for people to engage in difficult conversations, in politics, the local is really a place where much more can be done to create this bridging civil society. And that’s because where people live determines so much about the course of their day-to-day life, and people become really engaged in and questions about quality of life, et cetera. 

So, I think mayors and city councils and such should really invest in more opportunities for bridging civil society. And then at the more macro level, if there was one thing that could be done at the sort of national level, I think to create a real bridging experience in American politics anyway, it would be making election day a national holiday and actually supporting activities that are about participating in the political process and making it feel like something that we all do together as opposed to, you’re doing it over here and I’m doing it over here, and I don’t think your way actually is legitimate and we’re going to try to make it impossible for you to do it. So I think that’s a good policy, and a lot of our colleagues have been proposing it for a while, but I think it actually fits into this conversation as well. 

Julia Minson: And a new national holiday sounds like a great idea. I'm all for it. 

Ralph Ranalli: Well, I want to thank you both for being here. I really enjoyed this conversation and I look forward to seeing what’s ahead with this effort. 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. 

Julia Minson: Thanks for having us. 

Erica Chenoweth: Thank you. Ralph. 

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. By now you’re probably used to me signing off this podcast by encouraging you to “speak bravely and listen generously.” Well, we’re proud that our PolicyCast motto—which was adapted from a quote by former Harvard President Drew Faust—will become part of the ongoing Candid and Constructive Conversations effort here at ����vlog����. Please join us for our next episode, when I’ll discuss the ongoing conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip with former U.S. ambassador to Israel Edward Djerejian, who is currently a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. PolicyCast is produced with design help from Laura King, editorial support from Nora Delaney, and digital and social media support from Natalie Montaner of the ����vlog���� Office of Public Affairs and Communications. See you next time.