‘It’s Hard to Hate Up Close': Philanthropy, Polarization, and the Art of Conversation

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Every Friday, NPR pauses its broadcast of news — about wars, disasters, political bickering — to give listeners a moment of quiet intimacy.

StoryCorps, which airs on public radio stations across the country, features conversations between people who typically know and love each other — a mother and daughter, siblings, longtime friends. They sit down for a chance to record their life stories for an audience of millions.

It’s a concept that leans into the public-service value of public media, says Dave Isay, a documentary radio producer who helped launch StoryCorps more than 20 years ago from a recording booth in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. “It’s kind of a gift to the people who are being interviewed.”

Today, Isay deploys the StoryCorps format as an antidote to toxic polarization — division that features a visceral dislike, even dehumanization, of an opposing group. Since 2021, One Small Step program has paired more than 4,900 individuals for 50-minute in-person or virtual conversations. “The idea was to put strangers together across the political divide, not to talk about politics but just to get to know each other as human beings under the premise that it’s hard to hate up close,” he says.

The movie Civil War is making news delivering antipolarization messages via the big screen, but One Small Step is one of a growing number of efforts that aim to harness small-scale conversations to bridge America’s divides — whether they are grounded in differences of race, faith, geography, political beliefs, or other fault lines. By some estimates, more than 500 nonprofits offer programs that see conversation as key to finding common ground.

Courtesy of StoryCorps

College campuses across the country are partnering with organizations like Unify America to match students for online discussions. The nonprofit Braver Angels brings everyday citizens as well as lawmakers together across red and blue lines.

In May, the Council on Foundations will devote its annual conference to bridge-building, enlisting groups like Interfaith America and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative to lead dialogue-based workshops. (John Wood Jr., a national leader of Better Angels, is a Chronicle board member.)

But does the simple act of conversation really tamp down the country’s big, frightening tendencies toward polarization, prejudice, and violence? And can nonprofits organize effective one-on-one conversations on a scale to repair the country’s torn social fabric? That’s the hope, but so far, the evidence is mixed.

‘What Are We Afraid Of?’

Structured dialogue programs come in many flavors. Advocates debate whether to target average Americans or elites who set the tone for our politics. Virtual conversations, while potentially less powerful at shifting attitudes, can quickly multiply the number of conversations.

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But there are through lines across the approaches, says Kristin Hansen, executive director of the Civic Health Project, which funds a number of dialogue-based, bridge-building projects.

Almost all of them preface a dialogue by trying to build trust and rapport. Next comes the conversation, which may be more open-ended or focus on a particular topic. Most conclude with some kind of reflection — what did participants learn or how did the experience make them feel? — to solidify gains.

Going into a One Small Step interview, participants receive a short bio of their conversation partners identified only by their first name and city. They know they have significant differences and are usually quite nervous. Facilitators lay out basic rules of engagement: Share the time, no interrupting, speak only from your own experience, respect differences without trying to persuade. They then ask why the pair decided to participate.

“It’s almost always some version of the same thing,” says Stephanie Glaros, who started facilitating One Small Step conversations in 2022. “People are exhausted and fed up with the extreme narratives on both sides. They’re frustrated by both parties and feel that nobody really represents them. A lot of people talk about divisions within their families and feeling like this is giving them an opportunity to do something concrete, to change things for the better.”

Glaros suggests topics for discussion but tends to remain hands-off, a trusted referee to intervene only on the rare occasion that things go off the rails. (As One Small Step expands, it’s experimenting with A.I. facilitators in lieu of real people.)

“What we don’t tell them to do is find common ground,” she says, “and yet it’s the first thing that they do every single time.”

“People tend to feel extremely close to each other after they’re done,” Isay says. Many exchange phone numbers. “It’s probably kind of an overcompensation based on the fact that people are so scared going into these things that they’re going to hate the person.”

One Small Step offers evidence of these benefits in a series of conversation excerpts posted on its website.

In one, Alton Russell, former chair of the Republican Party in Columbus, Ga., sits down with Wane Hailes, president of the local NAACP chapter. The men, meeting for the first time, discuss experiences with racism, their work, and how they ended up in the same town.

“I’ve got a whole different view of you,” Hailes says at the end of their conversation, adding that he didn’t think they’d ever have a chance to connect, despite their involvement in the same community. “But this has been eye-opening for me.”

“It’s been fun, and I’m really glad to have met you, I sure am,” Russell replies.

When Cassandra Adams meets David Wilson through One Small Step in Birmingham, Ala., she confesses that the conservative leanings evident in his bio led her to think he was white. She immediately recognizes her default to stereotype — “Oops, oops, oops,” she says — and by the end, they’ve come to a new understanding.

“Once we leave this conversation, I hope, I believe, we’ll have other conversations with others,” Adams says, suggesting that they get their families together. “My point is that: What are we afraid of?”

A Tool to Reduce Prejudice

Conversation-based programs are grounded in what’s called the intergroup contact theory, a half-century-old social-science concept given fresh life by social psychologists Linda Tropp and Thomas Pettigrew.

In a 2006 meta analysis that reviewed 515 studies, the two scholars found that personal interaction between groups can reduce prejudice, and not just across red and blue lines. Studies found that contact between racial and ethnic groups, heterosexual and gay individuals, the young and the elderly, and people with physical and mental disabilities, for example, can both help people to recognize their shared humanity and increase trust across difference.

Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.

But Tropp and Pettigrew’s analysis also found such impact isn’t guaranteed. Conversations are more likely to succeed if the participants are roughly equal in society, share common goals, and are willing to cooperate.

There’s also evidence that benefits are short-lived. Erik Santoro, a postdoc at Columbia Business School, and David Brockman, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, measured the effects of two experiments in which strangers with opposing political views discussed randomly assigned topics over video calls. They found that even one conversation can reduce toxic polarization, but follow-up surveys showed the effects had faded three months later.

Still, scholars like Rob Willer, a Stanford sociology professor who directs the university’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, see that project as promising. Willer’s lab is drafting a report about a similar experiment that paired Democrats with Republicans to talk about three preselected topics of disagreement. “We found substantial reductions in animosity towards rival partisans in general, less dehumanization of rival partisans, and greater intellectual humility,” he says.

With this experiment, the positive effects persisted for several months.

Other research explores the potential indirect benefits of simply watching or listening to conversations across difference. More in Common, a research organization that works to address polarization and division, measured reactions to snippets of One Small Step conversations shared on social media or in public-service announcements. After listening to excerpts, people were nearly 50 percent more willing to engage directly with those with opposing political beliefs.

“The importance of that vicarious benefit shouldn’t be overlooked because a lot of people never will join a conversation like this,” says Hansen with Civic Health Project. “If you can model a constructive dialogue between two people across the divide, the folks who passively consume that also get a measurable benefit.”

That finding — key for a field looking to expand exponentially — is echoed in 2022 research by Willer’s Stanford lab. It tested 25 ideas to reduce polarization or build support for democracy crowdsourced from social scientists and nonprofit practitioners. None of the interventions involved conversations, but the most effective one had people watch such interactions — in this case, a Heineken ad in which people who disagree on issues like climate change or feminism assemble furniture together, bond, and decide to sit down for a beer.

‘A Moral Obligation’

Still, advocates say that if the goal is to reduce support for antidemocratic attitudes or political violence, conversation-based bridge-building programs alone are not enough.

Nealin Parker, executive director of Search for Common Ground USA, part of an international peacekeeping group, says conversation across division is fundamental to its work. But participants need opportunities to turn the trust built through dialogue into tangible outcomes — a piece of legislation, for instance. “That step of moving into action and activity and then resulting in that larger scale change is a really important part of the way that we view the efficacy of these programs.”

Parker worries the programs can create unrealistic expectations for change in the lives of participants. If their most troublesome problems don’t improve, feelings of hopelessness can deepen, she says. “You can get disillusionment or a sense that, well, now we’ve had a conversation. What do we do from here?”

Critics of conversation-based bridging programs worry that selection bias is at work: Only people already concerned about divides may opt to participate. Some efforts aim to get around this: In Unify America’s college programming, for example, professors make participation mandatory in their classes.

One Small Step’s Isay counters that the number of people who want to cross divides is quite large, pointing to an “exhausted majority” fed up with polarization. “It’s not just highly emotional intelligent people and former therapists who are open to having these conversations,” he says. “They’re just real, everyday people who care about the country and are worried about our democracy.”

Other critics of bridging programs say they can paper over fundamental class or racial inequalities that are root causes of America’s divides. Chris Bullivant, a senior fellow with the Social Capital Campaign, says many of America’s divides are a product of a loss of social capital — think of ex-coal miners who feel economically imperiled and culturally despised. People who are poor or feel disenfranchised aren’t going to react well when agreement is forced. “People still have to be able to disagree,” says Bullivant.

Bridging advocates say they are not trying to stamp out disagreement, which they maintain is vital for a healthy democracy. Rather, they aim to rid political debates of the intense emotions that make compromise impossible and spark violence.

Argument doesn’t need to come at the expense of recognizing our shared humanity, Isay says. He does a regular segment on the radio program hosted by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, recognizing that his antidote to polarization won’t work unless Reds and Blues both participate.

One Small Step has big plans to help facilitate conversations on a broader scale before this fall’s elections, an endeavor he calls the ultimate David versus Goliath effort, given the $10 billion expected to be spent on the 2024 political cycle.

The organization is trying to raise $10 million, building on support it has received from donors including Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus’s foundation, and the Walmart Foundation.

A public-service ad campaign will help spread the message. As Isay sees it, there’s a moral obligation to expand this kind of work. “We just feel like there’s no choice but to go at this gloves off.”

Senior editor Drew Lindsay contributed reporting.

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