Maybe We Should Talk About Politics During Thanksgiving

For most of my adult life, at least once I (mostly) outgrew the need to prove the superiority of my belief system to others, I tried to follow conventional wisdom and avoid talking about politics with my extended family.

I think it mostly backfired.

The more I leaned into avoiding the hard conversations, the more I felt increasingly disconnected from those family members and the less hope I had of ever being understood. Moreover, all the suppression and avoidance increased my anxiety and resentment, which in turn resulted in emotional explosions in precisely the worst moments possible—during the holiday celebrations.

After studying conflict and dialogue for nearly 20 years, I have become convinced that the conventional wisdom has it backwards. We need to talk more about contentious topics, not less.

Can dialogue be constructive?

Our fear is that such conversations will be unpredictable, messy, and even dangerous—leaving relationships that already feel fragile in complete and permanent disrepair. The fear is rational; many of us have seen it happen. But just because it can happen doesn't mean it has to. Dialogue can leave us feeling closer to those on the other side, even when they seem unfathomably far away. Rather than sowing hopelessness and despair, when done right, dialogue can build trust and respect.

This "Worlds Apart" Heineken ad (unscripted and filmed in a documentary style) understands this. Unlike social media, which seems to bring out the worst in us, Worlds Apart shows us at our best.

It might be tempting to dismiss Worlds Apart as marketing manipulation. I suppose that's partly what it is. Certainly, it has a product it's trying to sell, and I, myself, wonder how many pairs of participants were filmed before the filmmakers had enough footage to make the video they clearly wanted to make. At the same time, effective advertising often taps into something true and real. Worlds Apart doesn't leave these encounters to chance. Rather, it sets up its "social experiment" by creating the very conditions that decades of psychological research on contact theory have shown to reduce prejudice and hostility.

1. Equal status contact: There is an equal number of people (one) on each side, and neither has more structural power in this particular context.
2. Superordinate goal: Each pair of people in the film is assigned a task (separate from dialogue), which they can only accomplish by working together.
3. Acquaintance potential: Before they talk about their differences, each pair has an opportunity to learn about each other ("What three adjectives describe you?").
4. Commonalities before differences: In addition to having each person speak briefly about themselves, the instructions also ask each pair to identify some things they have in common. Notably, this comes before the video reveal of their differences.
5. Dialogue and cooperation are endorsed by the authority: Although there is no script, the participants knew they were being filmed and could likely guess what the filmmakers wanted. Not everyone, but many of us want to please or at least look good to those in charge.

For those interested in learning more, the full-length documentary Undivide Us is more transparent about how such dialogue is organized, including the different "rules of engagement" set up by the organizers. Apart from the superordinate goal, the methods in this film also mostly follow the research described above, especially #1, #3, and #4.

Organizing group dialogue can be complicated and intimidating. It's not easy to create any of these conditions in a family gathering, much less all five. Fortunately, even a single guiding principle can be transformative. The one below is the one I recommend the most.

Understanding without agreement

When I teach classes about dialogue, the first thing I tell my students is to separate understanding from agreeing. "Our goal," I tell them, "is understanding without agreement." It's not that we don't want agreement—it's fun (and connecting!) to find common ground—but it's not wise to approach a contentious topic expecting to persuade the other party.

When agreement is the goal, we tend to fall into the trap of seeing the conversation as something that is either won or lost (i.e., either you convince me to agree with you, in which case I lose, or I convince you to agree with me, in which case I win). When we confuse dialogue with debate, we not only try to win but also engage in a variety of destructive psychological practices (like dehumanizing the other person) to justify this approach.

So, rather than agreeing, the goal is understanding, by which I mean understanding others the way they want to be understood. Such perspective-taking isn't compatible with winning. But if we reject the idea of dialogue having winners and losers, we can focus on hearing and seeing others the way they want to be seen and heard. And they, in turn, can do the same for us. It might not feel comfortable (few unfamiliar things are), but if it's established as a shared goal prior to the conversation, it has the potential to transform the interaction and be the building block for a healthier relationship.