Two leading scholars of conflict and polarization want to help us have more productive conversations By Martin Wilson
“Our nation is threatened today by the politics of identity and persistent divisions based on geography, class, religion and educational attainment. We increasingly lack the capacity to understand each other and to empathize with people who seem to be not like us. Solving such problems is what higher education institutions should be about.” — President Michael H. Schill
Reducing the amount of virulent animosity in the world today can seem like an insurmountable challenge. But there may be nobody better equipped to try than professors Eli Finkel ’97 and Nour Kteily.
They have spent years working to understand — and find solutions to — polarization, misperception and conflict. In February 2024 they co-founded the Center for Enlightened Disagreement, an innovative University-wide research hub housed in the Kellogg School of Management, to bring together leading thinkers, conduct research and help us all have healthier conversations.
Northwestern Magazine invited these two scholars to discuss how we can regain the ability to communicate effectively while harnessing the power of our differences.
Eli Finkel: Well, I wasn’t always studying this stuff. For the first two-thirds of my career I mostly studied intimate relationships. I looked at romantic attraction and examined marriage over time to figure out how people manage conflict or sustain passion.
Then in the last few years I became concerned, as an American, about whether our political system is going to make it for the longer term. At first, I thought, “That’s not my expertise.” The moment that got me to take seriously the idea of investing my own professional life in trying to address ... intergroup political conflict was when I realized that our political system has become a toxic marriage.
This was my thought experiment: If I wanted to design in a lab the most toxic marriage I could imagine, what characteristics would it have? Like: Hold your spouse in as much contempt as you can. Anytime your spouse does a thing, interpret it in the least generous way possible. Associate yourself only with people who hate your spouse.
I superimposed those ingredients on our body politic, on the Left and the Right, and the fit was perfect. I started to wonder: Are there lessons from the world of helping improve marriages that we might apply to our society?
Nour Kteily: And one of the cool things about you and me partnering together on this work is that I came at it from a different angle.
A lot of my work starts from the recognition that one of the foundational features of being human is that we organize into groups, and those groups are organized into social systems that are often hierarchical, with groups competing for power and status and influence.
I began from there, thinking about group conflict all over the world, between Democrat and Republican or Black and white.
So one of our strengths is that we come at the problem from very different perspectives.
EF: Nour, have you noticed that there seems to be some disagreement in American politics?
NK: Well, more than just disagreement; one of the interesting things is the changing nature of relative “in-group love” versus “out-group hate.” I know that’s something that you’ve been tracking.
EF: Yeah, people talk about “polarization” — the assumption is that means we love our in-group a lot more than we love the out-group. If I’m a Democrat, I love Democrats and I dislike Republicans. But for better or for worse, that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a general trend: People don’t like their own party any more than they used to, but they really dislike the opposition.
NK: And that dislike for the opposition ends up mattering quite a bit when it comes to things like attitudes about democracy or the tactics that you want your political party to pursue.
EF: Yeah, we’ve looked at the effects of the extent to which people hold the out-party in contempt. What are you willing to tolerate from your side to make sure that those “monsters on the other side” don’t hold the levers of power?
Actually, some of my favorite work in this space builds on your work on dehumanization, where you look at not just “We dislike them,” but literally “Are they subhuman?”
NK: Yeah, we’ve looked at how human or subhuman people perceive the out-group to be. It’s not that people think that people on the other side are complete animals, but if you’re imagining a zero to 100 scale, we tend to see our own group in the 100 range or thereabouts.
But when you look at how Democrats view Republicans or how Republicans view Democrats, you see something like a 20-point gap between how they perceive their own group and the other group.
And we know that high levels of dehumanization can be even more impactful than high levels of dislike.
EF: As we veer away from ... viewing other people as fully human, what sorts of effects do you anticipate?
NK: A lack of empathy, a lack of willingness to engage in conversation, a willingness to endorse tactics that we might think of as antidemocratic or that people would otherwise not be willing to countenance.
It’s one thing to disagree with someone but still keep them broadly within your social circle or moral circle. When you start to see another group as lower animals who are outside that circle of moral concern, it starts to trigger a desire to exclude and create distance.
CALL YOUR DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
When you’re feeling heated about an issue, call a person in your life whom you trust to be your devil’s advocate. We all have friends who will agree with us to make us feel better. Instead, talk to someone who will give you an honest perspective, to help you see past your own biases.
REPEAT IT BACK
To be a “disagreeing superhero,” repeat back to the other person what you think they said. This not only shows them that you’re listening carefully — it also provides an opportunity to correct any misunderstandings.
BE A FLY ON THE WALL
Try to distance yourself from the conversation for a moment and observe yourself from afar, like a fly on the wall. Self-distancing can give you a less biased view of the issue.
EF: I was shocked to learn that throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, the concern in political science was that America wasn’t polarized enough — that you really couldn’t tell the two parties apart.
And what we’ve seen in this century is the worst-case scenario: We haven’t really polarized on the substantive issues; we’ve polarized on the emotion. So even though we don’t necessarily disagree more in the 21st century than we did, say, 30 or 40 years ago, we have a huge difference in how much we dislike the other side, which is the opposite of what we’d want. I want us to have big differences on substantive issues but ideally without hating the people on the other side.
NK: It’s interesting that you say that. Because this gets back to the whole essence of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement.
EF: We need disagreement.
NK: Yeah. And I’m actually going to take a small opportunity to disagree with you ...
EF: Excellent!
NK: ... because I would say that there is divergence on the substance of the issues, but that divergence might be swamped by our feelings of how much disagreement there actually is. So when you actually look at policy preferences, people on the Left and Right don’t perfectly agree on climate policy or immigration ...
EF: Oh, sure. That’s right.
NK: ... but the ... perception of the gap vastly outweighs the reality of the difference.
EF: Yeah.
NK: As a society, we want that disagreement. We just want it to be accurate as much as possible. We want to understand the substance of our disagreements and to have heated discourse and passion about the issues. But we need to be, as we say, “hard on the issues and soft on the person.”
It’s important to note that one of the foundational aims of the center and one of the things that distinguishes it from other efforts is the fact that we’re not looking to tamp down disagreement. Lots of efforts have just focused on “How can we get people to get along?” — but we know that can actually be problematic. ...
There’s a lot of insight in difference. We don’t want people to stop disagreeing but rather to harness the power of disagreement.
Lots of smart people have opinions about how to mitigate disagreement or address political polarization, but until you subject those ideas to the scientific method, you can never actually determine empirically what is accurate and effective.
NK: With the Center for Enlightened Disagreement we’re trying to generate an evidence base — rooted in fundamental science — for what strategies and interventions really do work and then spread those insights as broadly as possible.
EF: It’s been exciting. The amount of enthusiasm from the highest levels of the University administration has been enormous, and we’ve heard from dozens of different organizations around campus saying, “How can we help?”
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s no accident that we founded the center here at Northwestern. Kellogg helped revolutionize business education with this idea of teamwork and collaboration, and we’re known as leading experts on negotiation.
NK: And Northwestern, even more broadly, is fundamentally an interdisciplinary place. There are so many initiatives on campus that bring together people from different backgrounds and experiences. We have a very diverse student body that’s passionate about issues. And we want them to be passionate about those issues.
EF: Totally, yeah. It’s been fun serving as the nexus ... to bring the campus together but also to bring people in from the outside so that Northwestern is both harnessing its inherent power but also interfacing broadly with businesses, governments, other universities and so forth.
NK: These are issues of global concern, and they’re becoming more important over time because as the world has gotten more interconnected and as people from different backgrounds have come into additional contact with one another, you’re seeing the wonderful things that can occur as a result, but you’re also seeing some of the tensions that can exist as a result.
We’re seeing widespread conversations around the world about challenges like immigration. We’re having to coordinate as a global society on difficult, vexing problems like climate change. With the variety of perspectives about how best to tackle all of these challenges, you’re going to need to be able to both surface disagreement and then work through it effectively. The moment is ripe for the work that we’re doing.
EF: Yeah, I mean ... the urgency to solve these problems has just never been greater.
NK: That’s right. And that’s why it’s so exciting to be doing this work at Northwestern, because it’s an institution that fundamentally cares about different perspectives and has students and scholars who understand the importance of the stakes and are committed to doing the work to bring solutions to life.
EF: People here know that the solution isn’t to silence the people who have views that we don’t necessarily love. ... There needs to be a more inclusive way of engaging. This is a time when we could make a real difference on significant national and global issues.
Martin Wilson ’10 MS is senior director of creative production in Northwestern’s Office of Global Marketing and Communications.
Northwestern’s Center for Enlightened Disagreement supports the University priority to defend free expression and promote engagement across differences. Learn more at northwestern.edu/priorities.
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Reader Responses
Thanks so much for your "Enlightened Disagreement" cover story. I wish I had disagreed and debated more when I was at Northwestern doing research in biomedical engineering in the 1960s.
Debates can motivate and enrich our lives and our relationships enormously. But we often feel isolated and bored when we do not engage.
I participated in the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic Convention while at Northwestern. But after that intense confrontation, I distanced myself from disagreements, as I struggled in my personal and professional life. But I now realize that there is hope if we agree to disagree more.
—Harry S. Pearle '71 PhD, Rochester, N.Y.
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