Depolarization in Disagreements through high-quality listening

The world is more polarized than ever, and conversations occurring daily between acquaintances, co-workers, family members, decision-makers, politicians, and others drive the nature of these conversations and their impact on our polarized societies. These conversations can help people find common ground, but they can also polarize. The proposed project will test the expectation that high-quality listening can fundamentally shift the social and personal space so that conversations can depolarize attitudes. By providing attention, support, and understanding, despite different perspectives, it will model high-quality listening as a depolarizing agent in discussions centering around social causes. We will furthermore explore this model across four cultures {Israel, the UK, Hong Kong, and Pero) to test for generalizability and to examine similarities in processes in collectivist and individualist cultures. Ultimately, this work will build a foundation for understanding how social and individual factors interact so that we can guide constructive communication between people who disagree on certain topics. We test two primary hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that high-quality listening will act to depolarize speakers after they discuss a topic on which they disagree. Second, we explore the role that challenging speakers on their views, a potentially threatening tactic that is known to backfire, can have additive (positive) effects when it follows high-quality listening. We hypothesize that high­quality listening paired with a challenge can be a particularly powerful combination for depolarizing attitudes. Furthermore, across both of these hypotheses, we will explore differences across collectivist and individualist cultures. We target this work towards academics in psychology and related fields interested in understanding depolarization and practitioners and others in the community who benefit from understanding the nature of constructive conversations (e.g., inclusion trainers, educators, leaders within organizations, and clinicians). To reach these groups, we will produce two primary research papers presenting findings of the experimental research developed in four countries and describe our work in strategic (practitioner and researcher) conferences and in well-read online blogs and media articles. We believe this work will contribute to a robust, theory-driven, and data-supported model of how conversations serve to depolarize, which will lay the groundwork for developing future interventions that bridge conversing partners who disagree.