Whether you’re on social media, at the water cooler at work, or at a neighborhood barbecue, it seems every American is sticking to their guns on gun control.
The 333 million people who live in the United States own 393 million firearms—more guns than the other top 25 countries combined. Perhaps as a result, nearly one-third of the world’s public mass shootings happen in the U.S. These opposing realities are backed by well-entrenched beliefs around guns and why “the other side” is wrong.
So, how do we break the cycle of partisan animosity around guns to actually end mass shootings? Scientists at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have an approach worth considering: balanced pragmatism.
How to sound reasonable
Computational social scientist Curtis Puryear and social psychologist Kurt Gray developed and tested a strategy for presenting political views that fosters cross-partisan respect. Based on research on wisdom and a real-world practitioner intervention, balanced pragmatism combines two aspects of “wise reasoning”: balancing multiple interests and seeking pragmatic solutions.
The paper includes a series of eight experiments with more than 3,500 participants. Several experiments found that participants respected political elites across the aisle more when they saw them deploying balanced pragmatism versus other forms of messaging (such as just reading their Wikipedia bio or a logical analysis). The rest of the experiments got into more specifics of how this plays out in divisive issues like guns and immigration.
Puryear and Gray’s research was instigated by a nonprofit organization that bridges divides on college campuses called BridgeUSA. They had a collection of videos of politicians called “Decision Point,” where politicians had the opportunity to think through hypothetical scenarios that were nonpartisan and often complicated. Gray explains:
We thought that there was something in those videos that would also reveal some kind of cue to how to have conversations and to couch your arguments in a way that might foster respect from the other side. And so that was the nucleus, that was the seed. And then we wondered, well, what is in it? And can we isolate that? Can we run a centrifuge on these videos, separate it out and figure out what that thing is? We eventually figured out that that thing was balanced pragmatism.
When the researchers viewed the videos, they saw links between the kind of reasoning used by politicians and emerging research on the psychology of wisdom. They thought that the Decision Point series nudged politicians to demonstrate “wise reasoning.”
Wisdom is rooted in motivations to make moral decisions that also require metacognitive processes—like perspective taking and attention to context—and recent work shows people who engage in wise reasoning also hold more positive attitudes toward ideological opposing groups. They thought that demonstrating wisdom in discussions about political issues could help Americans from the opposing party perceive politicians as more moral and rational, thereby fostering respect and willingness to engage.
Several experiments in Puryear and Gray’s paper were directly inspired by the Decision Point videos and focused on shifting perceptions of politicians known to be targeted with partisan hatred—Congress members of the opposing party. For example, in one video, politicians were told they have been selected for the president’s transition team and they just found out someone else on the team criticized the president in the past—what would they do? The researchers tested whether participants watching these politicians using balanced pragmatism to solve political dilemmas could build cross-partisan respect and engagement more than other typical presentations of politicians.
In fact, when the politicians responded to various scenarios on video using balanced pragmatism, participants reported seeing them as very thoughtful and reasonable, including those on the other side. Even watching political opponents balance multiple perspectives in hypothetical dilemmas—where being balanced does not entail being receptive to opposing views on contentious political conversations—helps them seem more moral, rational, intelligent, and authentic, according to Gray. This suggests that watching political elites employ balanced pragmatism to solve dilemmas can increase Americans’ willingness to respectfully engage with each other.
Another study moved beyond these videos to test whether political elites could signal balanced pragmatism and increase cross-partisan respect through short quotes. It found that simply having politicians endorse balanced pragmatism in short quotes still improved people’s willingness to engage with them among both partisans and independents—even compared to when politicians endorsed respect generally.
Yet another study tested whether balance and pragmatism predicted respect for politicians, using a sample of 120 posts on social media from current members of the U.S. Congress. This experiment found that in real-world tweets from political leaders discussing divisive issues, perceived balance is an especially strong predictor of cross-partisan respect.
For example, participants in the study gave the following tweet a high score for balance, pragmatism, respect, and willingness to engage with the politician across the aisle: “Over the past few months, I’ve been working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation that builds on the successes of the Inflation Reduction Act by further advancing innovative clean energy solutions.” Meanwhile, this tweet received the lowest score on respect and willingness to engage: “Proud to stand with everyone who came to Washington, DC today to march for life! Make no mistake: The new House Republican Majority is with you in this fight to protect innocent life.”
The remaining studies by Puryear and Gray tested whether balanced pragmatism could also foster cross-partisan respect in discussions about contentious issues such as immigration. Comments employing balanced pragmatism (vs. logical analyses) that were crafted by the researchers and ordinary Americans increased opponents’ willingness to engage respectfully with commenters. As the researchers explain:
Strikingly, participants were as willing to have a hypothetical conversation with an opponent who employed balanced pragmatism as they were commenters who agreed with them. Though participants found it difficult to employ balanced pragmatism, doing so successfully substantially increased opponents’ willingness to respect and engage with them.
Balancing multiple points of view
Combined, these results suggested that both balance and pragmatism can play important roles in perceptions of political leaders. The paper explains how appearing moral, focusing on rational solutions over logical analysis, and sharing personal experiences of harm can often lead to respect and connection.
Some strategies to seem moral and rational are obvious, like avoiding personal attacks and not falsely caricaturing the other side. Drawing from existing studies on “wisdom” that involve considering others’ perspectives and focusing on pragmatic solutions, Puryear and Gray outlined a scalable strategy for presenting one’s views that encourages opponents to engage respectfully and can improve cross-partisan discussions.
In the paper, the researchers explain that logical analyses and strong arguments can make us see someone as competent, which is a trait we value in leaders and friends—but people also want leaders who understand their constituents, care about their concerns, and have the practical knowledge to find solutions. Those are the qualities the researchers believe balanced and pragmatic leaders have.
This paper provides some support for what many of us already believe—that America isn’t as divided as it seems, and most Americans want to come up with pragmatic solutions to live together. It concludes that presenting ourselves with “balanced pragmatism” can actually lead to respectful conversations across the aisle and eventually solutions.
“If I’m Republican and I’m watching a Democrat go through this, I’m thinking, this Democrat is pretty reasonable,” says Kurt Gray, who directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He continues:
Someone listening to me who is on the fence is going to be more likely to engage with me and see me as reasonable. Maybe we are too far away in terms of our assumptions about the world. Even then it models a kind of discourse; they are more likely to say, “Maybe I’ll vote for this person or have a conversation with this person.”
Gray explains that when it comes to morality, we’re often not thinking about pragmatic solutions to disagreements or challenges. “We just want to rail against the other side and their evilness. And so I think the good news is this can be taught,” says Gray.
The balance part involves acknowledging that there are other perspectives on the issue and that those other perspectives are valid. For example, if we’re talking about guns, recognizing that there are some valid arguments for gun ownership and gun rights. And then the pragmatism part is that regardless of our positions, we still need to work together to find a solution to a problem such as mass shootings.
Bridging deeply held beliefs
At the Deepest Beliefs Lab, Gray uses interdisciplinary methods to study how to bridge different moral divides. “I’m interested in the things that people care about and groups live and die for that are ultimately invisible.”
According to Gray, the most important things to humans are things you can’t see, such as justice, evil, and God.
The politicians we might deem “evil”—those who are most partisan or aggressive against opponents—“try not to do balanced pragmatism,” says Gray. He continues:
Because [balanced pragmatism] is inherently pluralistic, it brings people together. You need to be a pluralist to want to use this idea. Ultimately, some people do not see equal states, they see one as dominating, one as controlling, one is even destroying the other one. If you have that belief this is not a tool you want to use. That’ll just be toxic to America.
As the researchers explain in their paper, “Taking advantage of every opportunity to help people across the aisle see our own side’s capacity for wisdom may be vital to combating partisan animosity.”
Ultimately, balance is about recognizing that someone else can feel threatened or traumatized on issues like guns or abortion, and their concern stems from a desire to prevent further harm. As Gray explains:
The one thing we do know from our research is that sharing these stories of trauma or suffering as related to the issue are one way to build respect because they make you seem rational. Having a deep personal experience I can still recognize that someone else had a different deep experience. And we can all have a story, personally or otherwise, that’s about this kind of trauma on one side of the issue. And then the pragmatic issue is usually about preventing additional trauma.
This work shows how both political elites and ordinary Americans can employ this strategy to build cross-partisan respect and help reverse trends in partisan animosity. For people and organizations keen on conversing across the aisle or building solutions, building practices, strategies, and habits around balanced pragmatism can be key.
“Being balanced and pragmatic takes effort,” Puryear says. “But it is like building any other habit: changing how we approach politics takes commitment and practice. We can each take it upon ourselves to do that.”
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