How to Build Empathy Across the Urban–Rural Divide

When Thomas Schnaubelt arrived at Stanford in the early 2000s to lead the Haas Center for Public Service, he noticed something small but telling. He’d mention he grew up on a tree farm in southeastern Wisconsin—driving a tractor long before a car—and almost no one replied, “Me too.” Rural childhoods weren’t a common point of connection on campus.

After sitting with this realization for some time, Schnaubelt asked the university to identify students who hailed from rural zip codes (as defined by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy). He got 320 names—and then he invited all of them to come eat pizza and talk. Ninety of the students showed up, a bigger turnout than Schnaubelt was expecting.

“And what I realized is that many of the Stanford students that hailed from rural places were having experiences of disconnection where they lacked a sense of belonging to this place, which, ironically, is called The Farm,” Schnaubelt says, using Stanford’s nickname. Courses, internships, and research rarely touched rural life. He began asking a bigger question: How might we bridge this gap?

Years later, Schnaubelt moved to Stanford’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution, and he launched the People, Politics, and Places Fellowship. It sends undergraduates and graduate students—many with little or no rural experience—to Alaska and Wisconsin for hands-on work in remote field schools and local communities. It’s a program designed to help students engage across the urban–rural divide, a divide often discussed abstractly but less often navigated in real life.

There was just one problem. How do you get a bunch of Stanford city slickers to sign up for summer in the sticks? Schnaubelt used a tactic that’s both backed by science and applicable across any kind of difference—not just the urban-rural divide. When people are introduced to information that runs counter to an unconscious bias, it helps them enter a process called stereotype replacement. If they’re humble and curious enough to stay in the process, they’ll eventually seek more counter-sterotypical information and drop the bias like a bad habit.

The science-based practice behind the story

We first met Schnaubelt through the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Learning Fellowship (which he credits for inspiring the quiz). You can find his story in our new Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, a practical guide that distills 16 research-based practices to help campus communities connect across lines of race, faith, ideology, geography, and more.

At an on-campus internship recruitment fair, Schnaubelt offered students a quiz that included seven questions about rural America. He asked students questions like “What percentage of people living in rural America are people of color?,” and “Can you point to Missouri on this map?”

The point wasn’t to “gotcha” students, and Schnaubelt was pleased to see that the students responded with humility and curiosity when they discovered that they didn’t know as much as they thought they should. Interest spiked, and applications quadrupled relative to available spots in the inaugural year.

Schnaubelt’s quiz is a vivid example of our Playbook practice “Seek and Promote Counter-Stereotypical Information.” Stereotypes shape interactions, often outside our awareness. But when we’re exposed to information that challenges those stereotypes, our views can shift, opening the door to empathy.

Research by Patricia Devine and William Cox suggests that reducing implicit bias functions like breaking a habit. One core strategy—sometimes called stereotype replacement—asks us to notice a stereotypic thought, interrupt it, and replace it with more accurate, counter-stereotypical information gathered from data, stories, and direct contact.

• Try this: Seek & Promote Counter-Stereotypical Information

  Name the assumption. Catch and label the stereotype (“I’m assuming X about rural voters”). Labeling the stereotype makes an automatic habit conscious so you can choose a different response.

  Ask: “What would disconfirm this?” Go look: data, first-person stories, site visits. Actively searching for counter-evidence creates cognitive conflict with the stereotype, which weakens it over time.

  Surface and share. Bring counter-examples into class, meetings, or publications. Model it explicitly: “I caught myself assuming X. Here’s what I learned that complicates that story.” Showing intellectual humility invites others to reflect on themselves and normalizes nuance.

We call these techniques “practices” because, rather than offering quick fixes, they invite readers into an ongoing practice of bridging. Over time, practicing them helps students and educators build the character strengths that sustain dialogue, nurture belonging, and help diverse communities live and learn together.

According to character scientist Elise M. Dykhuis, this practice builds three key strengths:

• Intellectual humility—recognizing that our knowledge is limited and our views may be wrong—is the quality that helps us admit that there might be more to learn about other people. We need intellectual humility to notice and name the need. 
• Curiosity—a desire to understand others and explore perspectives different from our own, guided by respect for the other person’s dignity—is the motivating force that pushes us to seek something new. We might acknowledge gaps in our information or experience, but without curiosity, we won’t initiate the next step—seeking out new information.
• Patience—the capacity to hold tension, tolerate discomfort, and trust that growth is possible—helps us get through the process of countering our own perspective with new information. We need patience with ourselves and the emotional process of incorporating a counterstereotypical perspective.

By character, we mean the moral qualities (virtues) that guide our identity and behavior, especially in how we treat others. These virtues—such as curiosity, compassion, courage, and patience—are not fixed traits; they grow over time, shaped by our environments, our actions, daily practices, and experiences with others.

The practice “Seek and Promote Counter-Stereotypical Information” draws on the practitioner’s existing character strengths—but it also provides the means to develop more empathy. “By actively pursuing and promoting information that is counter to a held stereotype,” Dykhuis explains, “it is likely that you will increase understanding of the lived experiences of others, and better communicate those experiences to others that might lack familiarity as well.” 

When we practice bridging differences, we cultivate the very qualities that enable us to connect more deeply with people whose views or backgrounds differ from our own. In doing so, bridging doesn’t just shift what we do—it shapes who we are. In other words, character virtues help us bridge differences—and bridging differences helps to build character virtues.

We can see the dynamics that Dykhuis names documented in a growing body of research on character development coming from scholars across psychology and communications, but we can also see them at play in one student’s story.

A courageous student

Jeannette Wang is a Stanford undergrad from Palo Alto, California. As she approached the summer between her junior and senior year, she was thinking about doing what a lot of her friends were thinking about doing—landing a summer internship at a prestigious company that would yield a job offer post-graduation.

But then she found out about Schnaubelt’s People, Politics, and Places Fellowship. The quiz piqued her curiosity, and she found herself reconsidering her summer plans. “I had to remind myself,” Jeannette says, “that being in college is the best time to just get a different perspective and do something that’s totally out of my comfort zone.”

She applied and spent six weeks in Viroqua, Wisconsin, working on a farm every morning. When the gardening, hay-bailing, and sheep-herding were done, she and the other members of her cohort attended classes, conversations, and community events. In fact, the fellowship involved more community celebrations and potlucks than Jeannette expected. “Every other week there was a community celebration. I was like, wait, we just celebrated like the community two weeks ago.”

• What campuses can replicate

  Make curiosity easy. Low-friction prompts (Schnaubelt's quiz, short “myth or fact” boards, five-minute polls) spark humility and interest.

  Add real contact. Pair practices with structured, supported cross-context experiences (courses with rural partners, short residencies, shared projects).

  Normalize sharing corrections. Celebrate “changed my mind” moments in classes and staff meetings; treat them as wins for intellectual humility.

  Map virtues to practices. Label which virtues each activity cultivates or draws on (e.g., empathy, curiosity, patience), and invite reflection on how they’re growing.

  Close the loop. Ask students to teach back—write reflections, host panels, or recruit the next cohort—so learning multiplies.

It was surprisingly uncomfortable at first. The gatherings in Viroqua helped Jeannette notice that when she’s at Stanford, it feels like things move quickly and are often focused on the future and on personal progress. “At Stanford, I’m always planning the next thing,” she recalls. But these events became a kind of laboratory for experimenting with a slower pace and different values.

“One of the other people in the cohort said this, but I feel like when I was there, I had to really learn that it’s about showing up and showing up imperfectly,” she explains. “People would bring, like, half a pack of hot dogs to this potluck, you know.” That felt different from the expectations she put on herself. Jeannette was used to feeling like in order to show up, “I need to have a full pack of hot dogs and also bring the buns!”

Jeannette’s hot-dog mindset shifted, and since she’s been back at school this semester, she’s been trying to hold on to what she learned in Viroqua. “I get wrapped up in the feeling like I need to be doing a million things all the time and I’ve got to do it by myself,” she says. Reconnecting with other people definitely helps her resist the pull to perfectionism and individualism. She offers a reminder that we might need to hear, too:

“A lot of the time, the things I actually want to get done happen in community. And a lot of the things that I want to get done get done better if I’m talking to people while doing them. Maybe it gets done less fast, but it gets done in a way that is more inclusive of different ideas and is actually in touch with what a broader community of people are interested in.”

Jeannette’s willingness to bridge the urban-rural divide not only offered her opportunities to challenge stereotypes about rural communities, it has shaped who she is and how she understands her values. The intellectual humility and curiosity she engaged allowed her to learn from her community in Viroqua, and courage got her through awkward moments along the way. The time in Viroqua was, according to Jeannette, “frequently very awkward!”

Courage also stoked Jeannette’s willingness to share her story with us—mistakes, assumptions, and all. It’s yet another way she has amplified the counter-stereotypical information she has sought throughout her time at Stanford.