‘We must find a way to disagree that does not ultimately undermine us all’

The best-selling book Poles Apart arose out of the successful podcast from The Depolarization Project, Changed My Mind. I spoke with two of the three authors, Ali Goldsworthy (now teaching at Stanford University) and Laura Osborne (Managing Director of WPI Economics), to discuss why people turn against each other and how to bring them together.

Tell me about how this book idea started.

[Laura] Okay, so we started the podcast because of Ali. We were interested in why people were polarising so much. Why was it taking over all aspects of people's lives? Alex [Alexander Chesterfield, the third author] is a real social psychology, behavioral science specialist, I've worked in business and economics and Ali has a long history in politics and in foundations. We thought actually, maybe we can take an interesting and slightly broader view of what's going on here. We're all women under 40, maybe we have a different perspective to some of the other books written on this.

[Ali] My background is, as Laura says, as a political advisor. Depending on the audience, I describe myself as a troublemaker or a shit-stirrer. I used to persuade millions of people, often business people, to take action, to change their behaviour. It was incredible, like applied versions of a lot of the experiments that we read about now, to try and help make people feel more powerful.

I got out and came to Stanford thinking, I'll try and persuade more people to do political giving in the UK. And the thing about being a Lib Dem is you always have to collaborate and work across party lines.

We put on one of the busiest courses at Stanford, and we did a panel. Stanford had swung, at least publicly, to very supportive of Hillary Clinton and anti-Trump. We were like, 'a bunch of you guys have never met Trump supporters… we'll bring a few in and ask some questions'.

Someone in the audience asked. 'Can you tell me about a time you've changed your mind and why?' What had been quite a hostile environment changed almost instantly. One person said, 'I went to uni, and I thought all homosexuality was wrong. And then my roommate was a lesbian. And I realised, I was what I've been brought up with. Everybody deserves love, and it was fine. I completely changed my view.'

Suddenly, everyone in the room thought, 'engagement is worth it. There are points and ways where we could agree and we could work together. These people don't fit all the lazy stereotypes I have created for my outgroup. Suddenly, I can see nuance in them.'

That question was so powerful. I came back and I spoke with Alex, the third wheel, a former Tory politician. I'd always felt that I'd been better when I'd worked with Laura and Alex, because they brought different perspectives. So that is how three women in their 30s ended up with a big global podcast, a big global book deal.

Let me ask you about quite a British expression – the idea that you should never discuss religion and politics at the table. Where do you think that expression came from?

[Laura] It's something about politeness. I think of my grandparents in that context, and what was acceptable dinner table conversation for people who had essentially flowed out of a Victorian era. It certainly wasn't any kind of disagreement or debate… there was a very clear familial hierarchy that dictated what you would talk about, and who would do the talking.

That crosses over into what we explored with the book – true debate can be really uncomfortable. How do you get to a place where you can have debates, you can be in opposition to someone else, and do it in such a fashion that is respectful, tolerant, open, not closed, competitive and focused on winning an argument?

It goes much wider than the dinner table. What gets talked about between friends, what gets talked about at work? One of the things we talked about with our publisher initially was why Brexit was dominating every conversation? Why was it disrupting family meal times? Why was it spilling over into all these different avenues of life? 

Maybe that comes on to the whole idea of affective polarisation [where individuals' feelings and emotions towards members of their own political party or group become more positive, while their feelings towards members of the opposing party or group become more negative]. It's not just about issues, it's about groups.

[Ali] I largely agree with Laura, but the rider I put on that is that in working life, I deal with a lot of leaders who would see their business as to produce whatever good or service. How much of a role should politics have at that table, and at the boardroom table? How central should their statements on political stuff be to what they're doing within the business community? People are trying to navigate a good and consistent answer to that question. And they're really struggling because it's exceptionally choppy waters, not because they're doing a difficult job badly.

So there are different tables. You draw on social psychology, in particular group psychology, and intergroup logic starting with Sherif's Robbers Cave, and then extending into minimal groups, the idea that we're in a hurry, we're using heuristics, we make decisions quickly. If you hold that kind of social psychology to be true, are we not then destined to always be polarised?

[Ali] We are extremely grateful to psychologists, because you're right, quite a bit of the book was taking complex academic research and creating a thread between different things. We have popularised it, our audience was the airport book reader. People have put years of their time into publishing some of those papers… I hope they think we've done them justice. We went to great lengths to check they were comfortable with how we were saying things or how we were interpreting their work. The most common response was, 'I hadn't thought of putting that spin on it'.

I do think some polarisation is a natural and normal thing. That's very much the position that we take in the book – that it's healthy and it's good and you should not try and eliminate it. You should try and work with it and manage it and understand it. I suppose if we were to do a second edition of the book, I would like us to pull out some threads about times when people collaborate more. Because although there is inevitability to the group-based stuff, it's not the only way people think.

[Laura] There will always be some degree, but the problem is when it spills over into all these different areas of your lives, which means you can't see other people's perspectives, you can't debate things properly. It is a very tribal discussion. How do you start to think about things differently, to help to be able to engage? What are some of the possibilities for creating space, finding commonality? What are some of those things that help you not grip quite so tightly to that identity at the beginning, that give you a chance to talk about it?

In the book you bring in the consumer, and then you talk about the partisan consumer. What did you mean by that?

[Laura] What we had started to notice, as Ali mentioned earlier, was businesses were being much more political in some of their stances. And we wondered, how much have they really thought that through? How connected was that to their core sense of purpose? How much work had they done on where were the right issues for them to engage on or not? 

And were they – to borrow a phrase from Helen Lewis at The Atlantic – just optically fading the problem by creating more noise? And then the flip of that is, how do consumers respond? There's some really fascinating research that was coming out from the US where people decide to buy more from brands they thought were aligned with their political ideology.

[Ali] There's a point when politics is done to you, and you can't ignore it. It becomes a position to not take a position. When politics become so present in people's lives, you can't avoid it. In fact, in the workplace, you can't avoid it impacting how you segment your audience. When I was campaigning, it was really easy for me to predict how people responded by identifying their political preferences. 

At times of heightened political tension, I could get extremely good engagement and response rates. I could boost membership rates, donations, all kinds of things. I never for one second thought, 'I'm dividing people, maybe I should think about that', let alone 'Do I have any responsibility to bring them back together?' And I think you probably do… it should be viewed in a Corporate Social Responsibility type way.

One of the strengths of your book is it shows the way that the political is in all the spheres. There is one section where you're talking about the triggers of division, and you foreground economic factors. Psychologists are sometimes accused of psychologising or individualising something that is actually a socio-economic phenomenon. What advice would you give psychologists about the economic factors identified in your book?

[Laura] One of our lessons, as a self-declared multidisciplinary team was that there are lots of angles to look at this from. Inequality is such a huge part of what's underlying some of those patterns of heightened affective polarisation around the world. It's not just a UK thing, it's not just a US thing, this is happening in all different places for lots of different reasons. But one of the big triggers are those moments where something hits the middle really hard. 

We talk in the book around the American Dream and Benedict Anderson's idea of 'imagined communities': when everyone can see that they put something in, and they get something quite clear back out. When that breaks down when there are huge economic shocks to the system, you get a lurch to the extremes – left or right, but it's always an extreme. 

There are lots of things happening at once, the economic aspects, the group psychology aspects, the aspects affecting us as consumers and businesses and political beings. If you like trying to look at them all together, it's hard, but it gives you a much richer picture of what might be done about it.

At the end of the book, you have recommendations about what people can do to overcome polarisation. You propose that people are inclined to take the winning position. Why shouldn't they?

[Laura] I've read a lot of books where there's a huge problem, and you get to the last two pages, and there's maybe a quick solution. So we did try hard to think about this – if you held a position of power, what might you do? What are your behaviors that you could change, if you don't hold a position of power, but you're operating in a workplace or educational institution, or anywhere else? 

So there are some very practical takeaways at an individual level. But it's also really important to say those things are going to be much more impactful if you control certain levers in a system. If you are the CEO of a business, or the Prime Minister, or an elected politician, you will have a chance to put those into practice in a societal way that each of us on our own are going to struggle to do.

This was one of my questions: do your recommendations put this all into the hands of the citizens? What would you say about the role being played by political actors? By media actors? Leaders like Elon Musk?

[Ali] That institutional stuff is important, but there are a lot of excellent political scientists doing work in that space. We want to be additive, rather than duplicate what they were doing.

I suppose if I was critiquing our own work on this is there is a point where being a winner matters. Being seen to align yourself to winning causes – not just for legitimacy and democratic reasons but for career progression. Trying not to take a winning mindset as you are deciding something, who you align yourself with, can be tricky. How do you get the people at the top who could depolarise, or who would value that in leadership terms, if to get there you have to be very polarising? That's still an area of ongoing research that needs to happen. And those challenges are undoubtedly harder for people of colour, and probably for women, and people from lower class backgrounds.

You just inspired me to think of a black female Machiavelli that's going to arrive somewhere along in the 21st century.

[Ali] You have to be very tough, right on the top in those circumstances. But there's a tension there that still requires considerable research, about what works in different circumstances, recognising the real politik of the situation. How to lead in non-polarising times, as opposed to how to lead in polarising times.

I think one of the reasons why we won funding for the OppAttune project is we didn't say 'meet in the middle': we said oppositional thinking is political thinking. The answer is not to get a shared position or a consensus position, or the sorts of things you might try and do around the board table.  Stay oppositional or stay partisan, but maintain attunement, so that you don't seek to kind of annihilate the other. How would your work respond to that argument?

[Ali] I spent quite a lot of time talking to campaigning groups about where they might be polarising force. And one of my core messages to them is please don't stop believing… normally accompanied with picture of the band Journey! Life would be fundamentally dull if we all agreed all the time. There will be less innovation, less good scrutiny, less provocation. The aim of the game here should not be to all get along. It's to all agree on the general rules of the game within which you can operate, rules that sustain things. I think there's quite a profound difference.

If that is true, is the book Poles Apart and the podcast Changed My Mind, essentially a civil project rather than a political project?

[Ali] I think it's both. When you're in polarised times, it becomes a position in itself to be, 'you should do things in a civil way'. Because there are also times when people can be complete arseholes, but do it in quite a civil fashion. That also needs to be exposed. But there are ways you expose that, and procedural fairness that keeps people bought into a system. 

But yes, of course, civility is an important thing. And I would say actually rewarding civility at times when it looks like polarisation might be about to hold sway, is particularly important. At what point is it more important to focus on civility and less important focus on opposition, and how do you do that? I have hunches, but I've not seen it tested in real life.

Classic final question – what is the take-home of the book?

[Laura] That framework for finding ways to disagree. One of my favourite lines in the book is that the key thing is we must find a way to disagree that does not ultimately undermine us all. This isn't about everybody getting on, it's not about all having the same view. It's about the ways – at all different levels and institutions and groups and as individuals – we can have a proper debate about the things we disagree on, without essentially destroying our institutions and our society.

[Ali] I think that there's an extra layer, when you build your life, particularly if you're a leader, and that's what this book is aimed at – people who are building teams. To think about diversity in a much broader context and to welcome it and to know when they are going to find it particularly hard to hear it, and when that is most important.

[Laura] Yeah, and where you need that friction, and where friction in those decision-making processes, from different views and different perspectives, is at its most valuable.

Laura Osborne is an author, communicator and people-focused leader, whose curiosity about the evolving role of business in society is the thread that runs through her professional life - and what led her to co-author Poles Apart. Laura is the Managing Director at WPI Economics.

Ali Goldsworthy is President of Accord, supporting organisations and leaders to navigate polarisation. She is also a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business and The Intellectual Forum at Jesus College Cambridge. She did a mid-career Master at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB), devising their first polarisation course, adapting the ideas into Poles Apart.