Ask how,  not why

More ways to save democracy by talking about it…

Ask people to explain “how” their ideas would work, rather than asking “why” they believe in them:

Curiosity is contagious. There’s a “mirroring effect” in which the inquisitiveness is reciprocated: “Because you were curious, now they’ll want to be curious back.” If we avoid challenging people with “why” and instead ask for more information, he says, “Eventually you’re going to find that I might disagree with 80 percent of what you’re saying, but here’s the 20 percent where we see that there are connection points.” – Spencer Harrison

Recognize that people in your own “party” likely have more diverse beliefs than you might expect, and consider how you’d advise others to have a conversation with someone who holds a different view:

“One of the many problems with extreme partisanship is that you assume that your group is more homogenous than it actually is, and because of that we come rigid…This is about allowing people to be black sheep in their groups where they can think differently.” Todd Kashdan

Challenging these efforts are the ways media and recommendation algorithms polarize groups of people, to the extent they don’t even talk to each other anymore:

Not only are young people growing up very native to screens, to social media, and to these algorithmic impulses that push them into completely different worlds…[but also] COVID did a massive disruption for this younger generation that actually created for them an inability to even talk to each other in the normal ways…

When you have young [people] who not only don’t live together, but don’t consume the same media, don’t get the same algorithmic feeds…they’re not talking and therefore not converging. – Sarah Longwell

Time to touch grass!