Depolarizing Within - My Self-Assessment

Darn it! That’s… barely any better than last time.

I sighed and called the workshop audience back to attention. They, and I, had just taken a six-question ‘Recognizing My Inner Polarizer’ self-assessment. It wasn’t their assessment scores I was lamenting; it was mine–the moderator of the Depolarizing Within Braver Angels workshop. I scored the equivalent of 75%. As in 75% _polarized. (1)

Wisely for us all – and fortunately for me – one of Braver Angels’ core values is humility. I announced my significant room for improvement to the audience. Then I broke them into groups to discuss what they had learned about their own polarizing tendencies.

As a moderator and incorrigible believer in getting-along-already, Depolarizing Within is one of my favorite Braver Angels workshops. That’s because the workshop recognizes that if we truly want to get-along-already, someone has to make an effort to stop the cycle of mistrust; a cycle fueled by stereotyping, dismissing, ridiculing, and contempt. That someone, it turns out, is not the person on the other side.

Oh, I’ve tried: sitting and shaking my fist because they started it or they’re behaving badly or they’re altogether worse. But no matter how long and hard my fist-shaking, they just won’t budge.

It takes two to tango, and either one can choose to step away at any time. My ability to control anything is most concentrated within myself and drops sharply from there. So the Depolarizing Within workshop starts at that locus of control: me.

Enter humility. Not only am I part of the problem, but despite the greater control I have over myself, it’s hard to exercise the self-reflection and skill to be the depolarization I want to see. It’s hard to be human, but it’s even harder to override the host of well-documented psychological tendencies that drive polarization. (2) The sheer weight of these all-too-human mental shortcuts, distortions, and self-flattery persistently drags down my self-assessment score.

It can feel overwhelming, even hopeless. And yet, my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Jordanian village had taught me it was possible to accept–and even make lifelong friends of–those with immensely different worldviews. And by practicing the Depolarizing Within workshop’s techniques for challenging my inner polarizer and better communicating with others, my self-assessment score had improved a tad. It takes time. It takes practice. And it takes a degree of faith in people. But progress is possible.

In short, depolarization can feel hopeless precisely because it’s hard. It’s so much easier to stereotype, dismiss, ridicule, and hold in contempt. But if we want any chance of ending the twisted tango of polarization, it starts with (Darn it!) me.

In all humility, I could be wrong about any or all of this. But given the consequences of no one making an effort, I have to try.

(1) The self-assessment includes questions such as “How often do I find myself thinking about ‘those people’ on the other political side without regard for the variation among them?” and “How often do I find myself focusing on the most extreme or outrageous ideas and people on the other side, making it hard to see how a reasonable person could remain in that group?”

(2) As a few examples of psychological drivers of polarization, we humans:
- seek out and uncritically accept evidence for our worldview and discount evidence against it.
- bolster our sense of identity by hitching it to certain groups that we then compare favorably to other groups.
- more consistently oppose the other political side than we adhere to coherent policy positions.
- believe we see the world more objectively than others do.
- cultivate more extreme opinions when we talk to like-minded people.