The presidential inauguration is when our nation has traditionally moved past the intense us-versus-them mindset of an election. It’s a moment for us to come together and start finding compromise. But for the past decade—and especially today—compromise feels impossible between our warring political parties.
But there’s hope. Even if politicians seem impossibly divided, many everyday Americans want less division. They want to better understand the other side, especially their friends and family members they disagree with. But there’s a problem for all of us trying to have conversations across differences: we have the wrong intuitions about how best to foster respect.
As social psychologists interested in how to best bridge divides, we first wanted to know how people thought they should connect across political divides. We asked a representative sample of Americans to imagine they were having a conversation with a political opponent about a contentious issue. We posed this question: “What would make you respect them?”
The majority (56%) of people said they would respect a political opponent’s conversation who grounded their views in facts. Americans want the raw statistics surrounding an issue, without any editorializing, because facts seem like the basis of a rational, respectful conversation.
Unfortunately, our studies show that people’s confidence in facts bridging divides is misguided. Facts do not provide common ground because the facts of “the other side” do not seem like facts—they seem fake.
Society convinces us that the way to create respect is by throwing facts at your opponent until they submit to your overwhelming rationality, as if their political convictions could be bludgeoned away by statistics. Congressional representatives, political commentators, and social media influencers all treat data like artillery, trying to smash through the enemy’s defenses. Viral videos of one side “owning” the other side focus on winning the war of…
