That slippery, elusive quality of reasonableness is the topic of Lawlor’s new book, Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue.

In a comprehensive exploration of what it means to be reasonable, Lawlor argues that being reasonable is about being able to reliably see what matters in the greater scheme of things. This trait helps us to understand other points of view, communicate what we care about, and respond thoughtfully to others, whether in setting curfews with teenagers, resolving disputes with neighbors, or handling conflicts with a partner.

Reasonableness is also foundational to Anglo-American law. Juries determine negligence through the “reasonable person standard,” in which they consider whether a person acted with the level of care and caution that a “reasonable” person would exercise under similar circumstances. But as Lawlor found across her research, legal theorists themselves worry about what the standard means.

Lawlor draws on dozens of cases to show the real-world stakes of using reasonableness as a standard for evaluating behavior, including Hattori v. Peairs, a case about the tragic 1992 killing of the 16-year-old Japanese exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori, who mistakenly approached the wrong home for a Halloween party. He was fatally shot by property owner Rodney Peairs, who said he perceived his life was in danger. A jury had to decide whether his response was reasonable, given the circumstances. Peairs was acquitted of manslaughter, though a subsequent civil trial found him liable.

“Matters of tremendous importance are being decided every day in courtrooms around the country on the basis of the reasonable person standard, but legal theorists seem to be saying, ‘we don’t really know what it means,’” Lawlor says.

A misunderstood virtue

Lawlor argues that reasonableness gets misunderstood, partly because of its malleability: “‘Reasonable’ is a highly context-sensitive word that elicits different criteria in different settings,” Lawlor explains. “What makes a request reasonable is different than what makes a doubt reasonable. So, it can seem that what counts as ‘reasonable’ is up to the speaker.”

And, because most people think they’re being reasonable, it can seem there’s no real way to adjudicate differences among people. “But we know from our own experience there are people who are flat out being unreasonable,” Lawlor says.

Take the case of Rudy Stanko, who in the mid-1990s was pulled over for driving 85 miles per hour on a curvy and steep two-lane highway in freezing conditions. At the time, Montana law had no explicit speed limit; instead, limits were based on what was “reasonable and prudent.” But as the officer who cited Stanko explained, had there been an obstruction on the frosty road, there would have been no way for Stanko to stop in time.

Stanko appealed the ticket, claiming the law was unclear. His case was ultimately heard by Montana’s Supreme Court, which, in a 4-3 ruling, determined the law “void for vagueness.” The court was thinking along the lines of Lawlor’s teenage son, finding the term “reasonable” provided no real guidance. And yet when Montana rewrote its traffic laws, it saw fit to continue including a demand for “reasonable care.”

Reasonable vs. rational

Lawlor sees “reasonable” as different from “rational.” Rationality implies a detached, value-neutral calculation, independent of fairness or relationships. Reasonableness recognizes that these commitments can profoundly shape how we think, act, and behave.

Lawlor encountered the distinction when she had her students enact the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic thought experiment in which two accomplices are arrested and interrogated in separate rooms. While mutual silence ensures a light sentence for each, there’s a deal on the table: if one person confesses, they get to walk free.

Game theorists posit that, rationally, it is in the prisoner’s self-interest to betray the other person. But to some of Lawlor’s students, mutual cooperation felt like the reasonable thing to do.

Shaping their decision was their ability to identify what mattered most in the situation, which Lawlor claims is the foundational trait on which reasonableness is based.

“A reasonable person ​acts in a way that promotes what is important,” Lawlor says, noting how being reasonable is fundamentally a matter of how well a person understands and responds to the values at stake in a situation.

Reasonable people disagree

Throughout the book, Lawlor identifies other common aspects of a reasonable person. For example, a reasonable person grounds their belief in evidence because they want to get the facts right.

But reasonable people can interpret the same facts in strikingly different ways, even when presented with the same evidence—as demonstrated in the Stanford course Democracy and Disagreement, which features experts on opposing sides discussing a political topic.

The explanation, as Lawlor sees it, is that what feels “reasonable” depends on one’s beliefs about what is valuable. And it’s often when we come into conflict with another that those beliefs get sharpened.

“We only truly understand what we value when our beliefs are tested and challenged by perspectives diverging from our own,” Lawlor says.

On this point, Lawlor draws on John Stuart Mill, who, in his classic 1859 book On Liberty, argues that we need others to challenge and criticize our views. It is by defending our beliefs about value that we ultimately come to understand ourselves better. “We all have to learn from each other, because no one of us has a big enough brain to understand it all,” Lawlor says.

In our polarized times, Lawlor says, reasonableness is a much-needed tool for productive discussion that supports and strengthens what is important to us.

Tips for being reasonable

According to Lawlor, reasonableness helps us live cooperatively.

“If we’re reasonable, we can harness the power of our emotions when we deliberate together about what matters,” she says.

Lawlor outlines certain qualities that reasonable people possess. They are curious, flexible, and open-minded. They acknowledge the limits of their own perspective and remain open to learning from others. Here are some tips to cultivate reasonableness:

• Notice and manage your emotions: Emotions can help you see what matters to you, but they can also prevent you from seeing what matters to others.
• Engage with those you disagree with: Engaging with others helps you understand what matters to you, and why. By listening to critical perspectives, you actually sharpen your reasoning and deepen your understanding of why you value what you do, not just what you reflexively believe.
• Critically evaluate your own position, not just that of the person you disagree with. Instead of thinking defensively—anticipating objections so you can counter them—look for the strongest fair objections to your own view. “What would another person reasonably object to in my position?”

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

This dynamic becomes especially visible during periods of heightened immigration enforcement. Parents weigh whether it is safe to take their child to the doctor. Teenagers in a mixed-status family reconsider applying for college. Families avoid public spaces. Over time, these decisions accumulate, reshaping how families care for one another and imagine their futures.

For many immigrant families, separation—whether by force or by choice—is not a single moment. It becomes a psychological rupture that reshapes how they experience safety, belonging and identity.

For many, separation starts with the act of immigration itself, often forced by desperate circumstances. Diana Ortiz Giron, director of programming and education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is the youngest of three siblings raised by a single mother who had to make a difficult choice: In 1996, she left her children with their aunt and grandmother and moved across the border, from Tijuana to Azusa, a city in Southern California, in search of economic opportunities.

“I remember very little from my time in Mexico, but what I do remember is people telling me that I would hold onto my mom’s leg when she would leave back to the States,” she says.

If families are reunited in the United States, even legal immigrants today face intensified fears of family separation, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more and more lawful residents with no criminal records.

Researchers note the phenomenon is not new. For decades, U.S. immigration policy has created conditions in which physical, emotional, or anticipatory separation is a recurring part of life for many Latino families—and increasingly, all immigrants today. The current enforcement landscape builds on that history, amplifying pressures that continue to shape health, decision-making, and family relationships.

Studies show that experiences with immigration enforcement, from racial profiling to knowing someone who has been deported, are linked to delays in healthcare—such as postponing doctor visits, avoiding hospitals, or forgoing preventive care—and increased psychological distress. Each additional encounter increases the likelihood that individuals will postpone care or report worse health outcomes.

Gustavo Carlo, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies Latino youth and family relationships, says the effects of enforcement-related separation can be especially damaging for children and adolescents.

“This form of forced separation is powerful and potentially destructive to health and well-being,” Carlo said. “It’s not only involuntary, but it often violates basic human rights. When it happens at a large scale, it intensifies fear, anxiety, and stress in ways that can disrupt the lives of children, families, and entire communities.”

Together, these findings suggest that today’s enforcement tactics do more than create isolated fear; they shape how people navigate everyday decisions about their health and well-being. According to advocates, today’s immigration policies reflect broader choices about who is protected in American society—consequences that reach far beyond migrant communities. But those communities are not helpless in the face of these forces. Families, advocates, and local organizations are working to buffer their impact and reimagine systems of support.

A long history of separation

Family separation in the United States dates back to the 18th century.

From the forced separation of enslaved families to exclusionary immigration laws that limited entry and family reunification, these practices have disrupted family networks across generations. Early federal policies, including the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricted migration and, in many cases, prevented families from remaining together or reuniting. 

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, immigration enforcement became more formalized through expanded detention systems and increased coordination between federal and local authorities. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 reorganized immigration enforcement under a national security framework. Programs such as Secure Communities and 287(g) agreements enabled local law enforcement to work more closely with federal immigration agencies.

These changes broadened the scope of enforcement into routine settings. Encounters such as traffic stops or other local law enforcement interactions could lead to detention or deportation, increasing the risk of family separation beyond border crossings.

The Trump administration marked a significant increase in the scale and visibility of these practices. The 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy mandated criminal prosecution for unauthorized border crossings, resulting in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border. At the same time, expanded interior enforcement, workplace raids, and efforts to rescind programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) contributed to increased uncertainty for mixed-status families.

In recent years, tens of thousands of spouses and children have been separated due to immigration enforcement actions. Many more families live with the possibility of separation, and some make difficult decisions about whether to remain together or apart in response to enforcement risks. Family separation continues to be a recurring outcome of immigration policy in the United States.

Anxiety and anticipatory grief

Today, Ortiz Giron is a newly naturalized U.S. citizen who was once undocumented and later became a DACA recipient. She says she constantly worries about what might happen if her husband, a brown Latino man, were to encounter ICE.

These fears shape even ordinary moments. “We have conversations about what would happen if we were detained,” she says. “The baby’s in the car seat, I’m in the back, he’s driving—and if they ask him to get out, we’ve already said: don’t intervene. Let them take you. I’ll find a lawyer. I’ll find resources to get you out.”

Psychologists and family researchers increasingly ask: What happens when family separation is to be expected?

To investigate, researchers distinguish between three interconnected experiences. Forced separation occurs when a parent is detained or deported. Separation by constrained choice happens when families preemptively separate in response to danger or instability. Fear of separation, often overlooked, describes the chronic anxiety of living under the constant threat that family unity could be shattered at any time.

These experiences do not occur in isolation; they accumulate and are increasingly shaping the psychological lives and cultural experiences of Latinos in the United States.

Ortiz Giron’s childhood experience reflects separation by constrained choice—one shaped by survival and economic necessity. While difficult, she says separations caused by deportation feel more like an unexpected death.

“You don’t expect it. You’re not prepared for it,” she says. “There’s grief and a loss of that connection to that family member, and there is deep pain throughout the whole process. I cannot imagine the fear that parents carry, knowing this could happen and that they could be separated from their children.”

Living with constant uncertainty

Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young is an immigrant health scholar who studies how immigration policy shapes family well-being. Her research shows that uncertainty itself can become a powerful force, influencing how people assess risk and make decisions about care.

“One of the big challenges that communities are facing at this time is having the ability to plan and make plans for their own future,” she explains. That uncertainty reaches into daily life, influencing whether parents seek medical care for their children or whether young people pursue higher education.

Young emphasizes that this instability does not begin with high-profile enforcement actions. It’s built into the policy landscape.

“The baseline in this country…is one of exclusion,” she says. Federal and state policies often limit access to basic services such as healthcare, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Even before recent increases in enforcement, many families were already navigating a system where access to care, education, and work opportunities was uncertain.

That broader context matters. It means families are not just reacting to isolated events, but adapting to an environment where risk is constant.

Researchers have begun to describe this as more than a “chilling effect.” Rather than simply avoiding institutions out of fear, many immigrants experience repeated, direct contact with enforcement systems, from workplace raids to traffic stops or the detention of a family member. In some cases, a single deportation reverberates across an entire social network, affecting how neighbors, relatives, and friends assess risk.

Those encounters accumulate over time, shaping how people move through the world and how they make decisions about safety and health.

The psychological toll of separation on children

One longitudinal study followed more than 300 recently immigrated Latino adolescents in Los Angeles and Miami over the course of a year, surveying them at multiple points about their experiences of discrimination, depressive symptoms, and social behavior.

The researchers found that experiences of discrimination and chronic stress were linked to increases in depressive symptoms over the course of the year, which in turn were associated with lower engagement in helping and cooperative behaviors. Indeed, decades of research show that family separation is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and trauma, with effects that can persist into adulthood and shape educational attainment, social relationships, and long-term well-being.

In some communities, enforcement actions extend into spaces meant to provide stability, like schools and the courts. This disrupts school attendance, undermines feelings of safety, and disfigures the broader social fabric of schools and neighborhoods.

One reason family separation is so damaging is that it often creates what psychologists call ambiguous loss, a concept developed by family therapist Pauline Boss. She describes it as a uniquely stressful form of loss because it lacks clarity and closure, making it difficult for families to grieve or adapt.

Research on immigrant families has applied this framework to experiences of deportation and prolonged separation. Studies by Luis H. Zayas find that children in mixed-status households often experience persistent fear, anxiety, and disruptions to family roles when a parent is detained or deported.

As he explains in one paper, “The constant dread of the possible arrest, detention, and deportation of their parents sets the context that places citizen-children at risk for negative psychological effects and disruption of their developmental trajectories… [and] the actual arrest, detention, and deportation of parents serve only to complete the trauma.” This situation is shaped as much by uncertainty as by separation itself. In this context, a parent who has been deported may still be in contact, yet their absence remains unresolved and ongoing.

Ambiguous loss prevents closure. Families remain suspended between hope and grief, unsure whether reunification will ever occur. Over time, this unresolved stress can fracture family dynamics and isolate households from broader community support.

Exclusionary environments can intensify this isolation. Fear of immigration enforcement leads families to withdraw from social networks built through institutions such as schools and religious places of worship resulting in deepening loneliness and reinforcing vulnerability.

Familismo and the weight of separation

These effects extend beyond individual well-being. Gustavo Carlo points to the concept of familismo, which reflects the central role of family in many Latino children’s lives.

“Family is the training ground for children’s development,” he said. “It provides not just support, but shapes their sense of self and their sense of obligation to one another.”

These values can foster resilience, encouraging individuals to support one another even in the face of adversity. At the same time, they can heighten the emotional toll of separation, as disruptions to family unity strain entire support systems. This tension between resilience and strain defines many families’ experiences.

Carlo also emphasizes that these challenges do not define outcomes for all families.

“In spite of trauma and tremendous barriers, some individuals are able to overcome these risks,” he said. “There’s always the possibility not only to cope, but to contribute in positive ways, to support family members, strengthen communities, and advocate for future generations.”

In many immigrant communities facing the constant threat of deportation, separation is not an abstract possibility. It is a shared reality, an ongoing condition that shapes how families think about safety, belonging, and the future.

Supporting families and imagining humane enforcement

Despite the challenges of separation, Latino families and community organizations are finding ways to reduce harm and build resilience.

Legal aid, know‑your‑rights workshops, and case management help families stay together and access healthcare, education, and housing, while peer groups, faith communities, and culturally grounded mental health services provide emotional support and reduce isolation.

Inside the home, families are also developing strategies to navigate the possibility of separation. A recent study by Mahsa Rafieifar and Hui Huang examines how undocumented parents talk with their children about legal status and the risk of family separation. The researchers found that these conversations are often carefully planned and emotionally complex, with parents weighing how much to disclose and how to protect their children from fear.

Some parents frame these discussions through stories of migration, explaining why they came to the United States and emphasizing hope and opportunity. Others make deliberate efforts to avoid being perceived as “lawbreakers” by reassuring their children that their actions are rooted in care for the family’s future. In many cases, conversations about legal status are intertwined with discussions about long-term goals, helping children make sense of uncertainty within a broader narrative of sacrifice and aspiration.

Some of the most difficult conversations center on contingency planning, particularly the possibility that a child may need to live with another caregiver. The study finds that while some parents identify trusted guardians and prepare their children for that possibility, others avoid the topic altogether, reflecting the emotional weight and uncertainty surrounding these decisions.

These strategies highlight the quiet, often invisible work families do to maintain stability under conditions of chronic risk. They also underscore the limits of what families can manage on their own.

At the community level, organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS advocate for policies that prioritize family unity, reduce deportations, and invest in community services rather than detention. Advocates and service providers increasingly emphasize that reducing harm requires not only individual coping strategies, but systemic change.

How communities can buffer the effects

What would it take to ease the toll of family separation for families and the communities where it has become part of everyday life?

Researchers and practitioners point to a growing body of evidence showing that community-based support and policy changes can meaningfully buffer the effects of immigration enforcement on children and families.

Studies in public health and social work have found that access to stable legal representation, community health services, and school-based support systems can reduce psychological distress and improve long-term outcomes for children in mixed-status families. Programs that provide universal legal representation, for example, are associated with higher case success rates and greater family stability, allowing parents to remain with their children and maintain access to work, housing, and care.

Mental health researchers also emphasize the importance of culturally responsive, family-centered care. Interventions that include peer support, trauma-informed therapy, and community-based counseling have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression among children experiencing immigration-related stress. These approaches work in part because they rebuild trust and social connection, two factors that are often eroded in enforcement-heavy environments.

At the policy level, scholars argue that shifting away from detention-based systems is key. Community-based alternatives to detention, such as case-management programs, have been found to support high rates of compliance with immigration proceedings while allowing families to remain together. Limiting prolonged confinement and reducing the use of enforcement in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals can also help restore a sense of safety in the institutions families rely on most.

Advocates, including organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS, argue that humane enforcement must center family unity and child well-being. That includes investments not only in legal systems but also in education, healthcare, and economic opportunity, factors that shape whether families can remain stable in the face of uncertainty.

Research suggests that the harms of separation are not inevitable. They are shaped and can be reduced by the systems surrounding families. With the right support in place, communities can buffer the effects of enforcement, protect children’s development, and create conditions in which families are able not only to endure but to thrive.

These policies could help make life better for all Americans. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young emphasizes that immigration policy does not just affect immigrants.

“Even before 2025, in multiple studies I found that in states with many anti-immigrant policies, the health of U.S.-born citizens—regardless of whether they are white, Black, Latino, or Asian—is worse,” she says. “We need to understand that immigration policy is not just about immigrants; it reflects choices about how we treat people in society. Choosing to be anti-immigrant has implications for the well-being of everyone.”

Implicit is the idea that differences should not be entertained, that they are somehow threatening. To a growing extent, children are beginning to believe that differences should not be explored or embraced, but rather should be feared.

While there is no research examining these trends directly over time, there is no doubt that rates of anxiety are climbing in both American and U.K. youth and that contributing factors are the misinformation and social comparisons children encounter in mass media and social media. Children do not embrace cognitive complexity, so they try to construct a predictable and non-threatening reality. This reality can include the mindset that “difference” is a threat.

In 1994, Sally Smith, one of the most acclaimed educators of children with learning disabilities and the founder of the Lab School in Washington, DC, anticipated our current concerns with difference. She did not want children with learning “differences” to be regarded in any negative way, or to be excluded or shunned because of how they learned or expressed themselves. She wrote a book called Different Is Not Bad, Different Is the World targeted for children in grades two to six.

Because Smith was an innovator, her work was derived from case studies of the implementation of her methodologies, both her work with individual students and other people’s work with her Lab School model in other places. But subsequent research has supported her approaches to dealing directly with difference through supportive peer relationships and promoting an appreciation for varied students’ cultures and contexts.

Her book translates into a series of activities, all designed to illuminate the many meanings of the word “different,” and create a positive mindset toward it.

Definition of “different”

Begin by asking students to define the word “different.” Note that dictionary definitions have two foci—“not the same as” and “separate from.” 

The key point is to have students understand that difference is not “bad.” This can be emphasized by asking students, in small groups and then sharing with the whole class, to note all the things in the classroom that can be considered “different.” This would include things on the walls, books and other materials, and, of course, the students.

Follow up by asking students, with regard to what they have noticed as “different,” what are things about them that are alike. Using the earlier examples, “different” things on the wall, books, and students also share some qualities.

For example, if you focus students’ attention on where books are in the room, ask them what are all the things they notice about the books that are different. You can do this as a pair share or in small groups and have students report out. Then, ask them what is the same about the books. They will find that some of the things that are different also are commonalities (such as covers, binding, pages, author’s names, etc.). This helps them pay attention and, indeed, look for similarities alongside differences.

Things that are different

Then, ask students to generate examples of things within various categories that are different. For example, things that can be driven, favorite family foods, colors, ways to play, needing help, aspects of hair, things you are good at, hobbies, feelings. You also can add things relevant to curricular areas you are focusing on (e.g., people in certain historical periods, names of elements, types of clouds, poets).

The main point to communicate with this activity is that differences are not bad; they simply are “different.” In fact, “variety” can be an advantage. This leads to another activity.

Have small groups of students pick an area where they discussed differences and have them creatively generate new examples based on what they discussed—a new type of vehicle, new colors, a new way to play, new ways to give help, something new about hair, a different hobby, etc. With this activity, which brings about creativity and activates all of students’ social-emotional skills, you want to reinforce the value of variety.

People with differences

In her book, Smith identifies a number of individuals who made significant accomplishments despite differences in learning or particular abilities. Here is her list, but you should feel free to add people that would be more salient to your students. Better still, have your students do some research to find examples in various fields (e.g., science, entertainment, politics, sports, the arts, writing and poetry, computers, economics).

• Thomas Edison: invented electric light, had learning difficulties
• Auguste Rodin: sculptor who carved The Thinker, had learning difficulties
• Ludwig von Beethoven: composed many pieces of music while deaf
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: president of the United States with physical limitations due to polio
• Helen Keller: earned a master’s degree and became a writer while deaf and blind
• Nelson Rockefeller: governor of New York and vice president of the United States, had learning difficulties
• George Patton: general who helped win World War II, had learning difficulties

Here are some additional examples:

• Whoopi Goldberg: famous actress and Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award winner, had dyslexia
• Agatha Christie: wrote (or dictated) many mysteries despite dysgraphia
• Carly Simon: songwriter and performer, was affected by stuttering
• Keira Knightley: Academy Award–winning actress, had dyslexia

Create a quilt based on differences

Working in small groups, have your students generate a list of things they do well and things they have difficulty with, up to 30 in total. For example, students will mention hobbies they enjoy, subjects in school in which they do well or struggle, social situations they don’t feel comfortable in, and household tasks they do or don’t feel confident in, like cooking. Items students mention always stimulate additional ideas from classmates, either as things they also do well or things that are challenges.

Tell them they will be creating a quilt made up of both parts of this list, arranged as they wish. Give them 8.5” by 11” pieces of paper and have them put the name of one of these things on each piece of paper and, ideally, draw something on that paper to make the page colorful. Once completed, have each group arrange the pieces as they wish, in a six by five pattern, and share with the rest of the class, explaining how they chose to arrange the pieces as they did. Of course, if your circumstances allow and the students can use fabric instead of paper, you can strive to create a real quilt.

During the sharing, underscore how the collective quilts were all different, and yet all show how every group had a mix of things they did well and things they did not do so well. Help them see that this also is true of each person. Every student could make a quilt with things they are good at and not so good at. Everyone’s quilt would likely be different, but, to use Smith’s phrase, everyone’s quilt would be good.

Through these relatively innocuous activities, educators can set the stage for students to recognize differences, appreciate them, and not fear them or see them in a negative way. This will be of particularly great value to young students as they enter the middle and high school years, and encounter yet wider ranges of difference than they will have seen in their lives to that point.

In spite of these frustrations, I’ve come to accept that we have to collaborate if we want to build the greater good for the greatest number of people. Decades of facilitating group projects across the arts and media taught me that healthy conflict is a necessary part of collaboration. It’s only been in recent years, however, that I’ve learned it’s possible to intentionally develop my body’s capacity to engage in conflict without abandoning myself or my relationships. Apparently, I can build this skill systematically, not haphazardly over time through trial and error.

That’s why I wanted to talk with Jazmin Pichardo and Beth Douthirt-Cohen. They’re frequent collaborators at the University of Maryland, where they both help people strengthen their capacity to engage across differences of power and identity. Their goal, Pichardo says, is “shifting our culture so that we can talk, work, and be better humans together.”

Jazmin Pichardo is faculty of practice and director of intergroup dialogue collaborations and partnerships at the University of Maryland College of Education’s Intergroup Dialogue Training Hub. Beth Douthirt-Cohen is the director of strategic initiatives for undergraduate studies as well as political faculty at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, where they support processes of truth and reconciliation that were initiated in the wake of a murder that was committed on campus in 2017. (Beth is also an alum of our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Learning Fellowship and their work is featured in our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook.)

In this lightly edited conversation, Pichardo and Douthirt-Cohen take me step-by-step through their process of teaching folks concrete, embodied ways to face painful conversations and stay connected.

Kelly Rafferty: Over the course of a semester or a series of workshops, what is the primary skill you’re trying to help your students or participants develop? What are you training people to do?

Beth Douthirt-Cohen: Jazmin has a powerful way of saying it: “How do I choose relationship?”

“Choosing relationship” is not necessarily choosing you as my best friend. How do we choose to stay in relationship with each other and why would we make that choice? What is the groundwork we need to do in order to choose relationship when we come to a point where I’m like, No, it would be easier for me to peace out. Maybe that’s me leaving the room. Maybe it’s me leaving my body. Maybe it’s me pretending like I’m listening.

Jazmin Pichardo: It’s about facing the conflict rather than running away, freezing, feeling still, or even getting defensive and argumentative. Am I facing this situation with a desire to be right and shut this person down and prove them wrong? Or am I facing this situation with the intent to actually want to learn and understand their perspective, even if I don’t agree? Am I facing this conflict so that we can sit in it together and figure out where we have some shared understanding or some common ground?

BDC: Facing the conflict gives you more choice. You’re not just at reaction. Like, Can I have more choice in the way that I want to respond? And how do I build that capacity? It’s in micro-moments that we build that capacity. Our bodies are already practicing something. Can we try something new? There are more options for us than just seeing discomfort as danger.

KR: Very few people show up in the world, ready on day one to engage in deep, honest conversations about legacies of racist harm, or present-day experiences of ableism or gender-based violence. Your work is proof that we can learn how to do these things. How does capacity-building start? Are there specific things the group discusses or practices long before you ask anyone to jump into a challenging dialogue?

BDC: We name what is coming. Inevitably disagreement will happen, and inevitably there will be points where our bodies are feeling defensive, we’re uncertain, unsure. How do we prepare for that? How do we see those sensations as data, as information? How do you build the somatic awareness to be able to do that? Notice what happens in your body when you feel defensive, when you feel challenged, when you feel uncomfortable. What story do you tell yourself when that’s happening?

We also get clear on what the values are that will keep you in the room at that point. What matters to you? Is there an ancestor you want to call on or a value you want to call on that orients you in those moments?

JP: Yes, together we find a shared connection—a shared investment. We have some shared values, and that’s important enough that we’re going to work on not throwing each other away.

We also spend a lot of time being really clear with participants and our students about wanting to build a container. The classroom or the workshop space is a space where we can practice living into some different ways of being with one another. We know that out in the world, we can be conflict-avoidant and we can be judgmental and run with the stories we tell ourselves about other people.

With participants and students, we are deliberate and intentional in saying, “Let’s try to suspend that in this space and use it as a practice ground for different ways of being with one another.”

KR: When you’re teaching students how to develop self-awareness around their reactions to conflict, what are some of the things you ask them to pay attention to?

JP: Early on, I will often ask students and participants, “Who are you in conflict?” If we’re opening up the conversation by saying conflict is normal, and the work that we want to be able to do together is figure out how we navigate conflict together before we can even have that conversation, then there is a need for a level of self-awareness and reflection around who I am in conflict. What are the stories I tell myself about my relationship to conflict? Before we even have the conversation—whatever is the focus of our course or topic—we’re giving participants time to really think about how they get activated. What are their stress responses? Do you fight, flight, freeze, fawn?

We start with, what do you know about your responses? And then what do you need to feel grounded and secure enough to face conflict instead?

BDC: And how do I build the somatic awareness and skills to do that? It depends on the level of the stress response, but maybe I have a sense that I’m a “toward” person. In conflict, I’m more likely to be like, “No, Jazmin, I do agree with you.” That’s a “towards” shape. That’s very adaptive. That has kept you safe and alive and kept your ancestors safe and alive. And can I have more choices? Maybe I can say, “Actually, I really disagree with you here.” I’ll notice that when I say that, my body is going to freak out because it might not feel safe. But how do I stay in it and believe in the possibility of Jazmin staying in it with me, for example?

As much as we try to normalize strong feelings, students will still come out of a very difficult conversation and they’ll be like, “Why did I have such a strong reaction? I know that people say these dumb things.” As much as we can, we normalize. That’s your body protecting you, trying to keep you safe. And your brain-body doesn’t distinguish between a lion coming over the hill and this threat. They’re just both threats in the body. As much as we can increase that awareness, it tends to reduce shame.

KR: I know you encourage students to pause and breathe when they’re feeling activated in a conversation. What other practices, tools, or techniques do you teach them to help them respond instead of react?

JP: Early on, we start talking about emotions. Emotions are information. In the traditional academic classroom, you get taught that there is head and logic, and you separate that from your emotions or bodily reactions. In dialogue, we bring both in. We teach that head and heart, that thinking and understanding together actually support deeper learning and greater self-awareness. We model that for the students.

We provide them with emotion wheels. Sometimes they really struggle with naming emotions. They’ll say, “I feel like sometimes we need to rethink things.” And I’ll say, “That sounds like an ‘I think’ statement, not an ‘I feel’ statement.” We support students to identify the emotion, and if they’re not in a place where they can identify that emotion, we come back to sensations. Where are you feeling a sensation—a kind of tension—in your body around this topic? When a peer shared this comment, where did you feel the reaction in your body internally?

BDC: We’ll also say things like, “Feel your feet on the ground. Notice your breath.” One of the things that’s most important to me is the fact that we’re modeling it. We will lower our voices. We will get more in our bodies. We will name what’s going on for us. It’s almost like facilitator-as-tool or model. I’ll sometimes say, “I really feel my heart beating fast right now. That tells me my body’s feeling stuff, things are happening.”

Sometimes people think somatic work is supposed to calm people down, and that’s actually not our purpose. We also try to be really clear about that. It’s never about calming people down. You can be centered and grounded and full of rage and still in dialogue, still facing. The goal here is not harmony. Harmony might come, but that is not the purpose of this.

Whatever you’re feeling, you can be centered and grounded and have choice. Our goal is that you have more capacity, more choice in these moments so that you can turn towards or face the possibility of relationship in the midst of profound differences.

KR: In what you’re describing, I see the dance of patience and courage that the psychologist and neuroscientist Sarah Schnitker and her colleagues articulate in their work. They understand patience and courage to be complimentary virtues. Too much patience can be apathy, which is also the deficiency of courage. Conversely, too little patience is recklessness, which is also excessive courage. In a recent conversation Sarah said, “We find, empirically over time, that if someone has both of these virtues . . . they’re able to do what is needed to act in service of love and justice because patience allows them to take that space [to make a conscious choice] and courage allows them to act even when it’s really difficult.”

I’m curious if you’ve noticed this dynamic at play in your classrooms and workshops. Have you witnessed students drawing on their patience and their courage in complimentary ways during dialogues?

JP: I think a lot about our students who, in a moment where I’m noticing emotional elevation, take the deep breath and say, “Actually, I’m not OK with that. Actually, that feels really harmful.” Not in a way that is intended to be judgmental, but in a way that is intended to bring our awareness to the impact that our words can have.

Dialogue is a process that allows you to speak your truth while also being able to stay in relationship with folks during tension. Those are moments where I see our students leaning into some courage, holding that patience and that grace for others, particularly when they’re calling people in while not losing sight of the dignity they inherently hold and that they want us to be able to hold for them, as well.

BDC: Yes. The only thing that I’ll add is patience for self. I’m thinking about our dialogues that are more about race, and I’m thinking about myself, in particular, working with white students or white faculty and staff. I see people practice patience for self, for not already having arrived, for not being perfect, for not knowing what to say.

I also see participants—not just white participants—say, “I am feeling something and I need us to slow down,” which feels so brave. With the power dynamics of higher education classrooms, that rarely happens. It feels powerful to me because it says to me that they’re honoring where they are. Because we co-regulate, and we’re all doing it together, they’re honoring other people in the room by extension. Patience for self and patience with each other feels incredibly important. This is really brave work, to have conversations where you’re not pretending to get along.

KR: You bring a great deal of intention and skill to how you prepare students for dialogue and how you support them all the way through the conversation. What happens when it’s time to end? What do our bodies and relationships need at the end of a session or a semester?

JP: From the get-go, we are really clear with participants, whether they be students, faculty, or staff in a workshop or training. Expect and accept a lack of closure. That can be really unsettling and hard, in particular when we’re talking about identity and power differences and inequities. We close out by acknowledging that this can feel unfinished. We ask, “What parts of this feel unfinished for you in this moment? What do you want to take away from this space? What’s something that you want to leave here?”

Closure in this work isn’t always a neat bow. But we can acknowledge the ongoing work that we all have to do. We can acknowledge that some kind of progress was made in the time that we had together. I think adrienne maree brown says, “People are gonna have the conversation that they need to have in that space.”

BDC: Yes. Closing each dialogue session and closure at the end of a class is important, partially because there is a rhythm to all of this. We’re honoring our humanity. In this culture, you just run from one thing to another. You switch jobs. You finish a class and you’re on to the next one. Part of honoring the humanity of self and other is doing some kind of closing ritual practice. We have a few activities that we typically use. One of our colleagues, Dr. Carlton Green, does something that feels so humanizing to me. We stand in a circle and express gratitude. Gratitude as a somatic practice can shift mood and shift possibility—not to paint over difference, not for harmony, but actually to be in relationship and in connection with each other. We ground it always in the humanity of ourselves and each other.

For a firsthand experience of some of these techniques, listen to Beth Douthirt-Cohen guide us through a centering practice in a recent GGSC skill-sharing session.

I completely understand those concerns and recognize that it can be tempting to write off those with whom we disagree. On many days, I am tempted to do the same. Yet I firmly believe that now, perhaps more than ever, is the time when we need to build stronger connections across lines of difference in this country. And I believe it’s possible.

My optimism comes from more than a decade of work bringing together people on opposite sides of contentious issues: college students from liberal and conservative campuses; progressive leaders heading to Israel and the Palestinian Territories; formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform leaders and union leaders representing correctional officers; Trump and Harris supporters leading up to the 2024 election; and many others. Time and again, the people I engage with come away with a deeper understanding of one another, less hostility, and a greater likelihood of finding solutions to shared challenges—or at least of preventing their disagreements from spiraling into further rupture or even violence—without abandoning their values or beliefs. How does this happen?

My approach rests on four main principles—the four components of what I call The Invitation. When I invite people into dialogue, I do it with these four basic terms:

• My intention is to take seriously the things that others hold dear. If it matters to you, then it will matter to me;
• I am not here to convince anyone they are wrong or to try to change them. I am curious why people think the way they do;
• Rather than thinking I am diminished by listening carefully to ideas I might disagree with, I trust that I am enhanced by listening to them; and
• I believe there is more common ground and experience than I anticipate. And when there is not, I can fundamentally disagree with someone and still respect–even love–them.

While many of the stories shared in this piece come from the realm of organized “courageous conversations” that I facilitate as well as public programs I host, my experience is that as the toxic rhetoric increases and polarization drives us further and further into our camps, some of the most powerful rewards of practicing this invitation start personally and build out from there. From the dinner table to the classroom then on to our congregations and our workplaces and eventually into our local and even national politics, if we think differently about how we relate to those we disagree with, we can begin to transform not only our immediate relationships but also our broader culture.

This way of engaging is not going to solve all the challenges we face in our country. Conversations alone are not enough to reduce extreme polarization and partisan conflicts. We are in a very difficult time. I too would like to see greater economic opportunity, greater worker ownership, a primary system that doesn’t play to the extreme voices and an election system that incentivizes collaboration. I long for social media platforms that reward nuance rather than outrage and a rededication to national community service that would knit future generations together.

Those structural solutions to the crisis we have created seem like a far off fantasy today. And, I believe that we first need cultural shifts in how we see and talk to one another. That can start with how each of us relates to that uncle who voted differently, that colleague who posted something on Slack that rubbed us the wrong way, or a fellow congregant who spoke disparagingly about a point of view that we hold. If we weave these four principles into our everyday conversations, we can promote cultural shifts that build the foundation for broader movements for change.

1. Take seriously what matters to others

My intention is to take seriously the things that others hold dear. If it matters to you, then it will matter to me.

It’s tempting to overlook this step, but it’s crucial. If you share something important to you and I dismiss it—rushing to refute it or shift focus to my own priorities—why would you be interested in hearing from me? Taking your concerns seriously doesn’t mean agreeing; it means recognizing their importance to you. This is a key point that is often overlooked. If I can convey to you, honestly, that I hear the value, for you, of what you are saying and because of that I will pay attention to it, that earns trust.

This principle often arises in my work with Evangelical Christians. As a Jew, Jesus is not central to my life or theology, but for my Evangelical friends, he is the Christ—and nothing is more important. If I were to dismiss their discussions of their relationship with Jesus, it would quickly undermine our trust. Listening attentively and valuing their perspective, even if it isn’t mine, fosters trust, respect, and understanding. In turn, this openness encourages them to honor and acknowledge my deeply held beliefs.

Later, down the road, we can unpack our differences and be direct with each other about the tensions we might have, based on these deep differences, but that will go much better if we have acknowledged those things that we each hold dear.

2. Cultivate curiosity over convincing

I am not here to convince anyone they are wrong or to try to change them; I am curious why people think the way they do.

Initially, many of us who are committed to pushing back against the current political crisis might find this approach challenging. For those focused on changing hearts, minds, and behaviors to address perceived injustices, it can seem counterproductive to commit to conversations without the goal of at least pursuing change. I tried leading with persuasion for many years and learned that, instead, exhausting my capacity to understand others transforms the conversation’s potential.

When I enter a conversation with the sole aim to convince, discussions often become narrow and rigid. Approaching a conversation with curiosity instead opens space for it to evolve. Letting go of the belief that success requires winning someone over broadens possibilities. Adopting a posture of authentic openness—acknowledging my own blind spots and willingness to be changed—significantly shifts the conversation’s energy.

I’ve witnessed this repeatedly in my work with corrections officers. Those working in prisons and jails often feel so under siege that exploring new possibilities can seem impossible. However, when I invest time listening, show genuine curiosity about their experiences, and avoid pushing my own views about the terrible flaws in the system, I find that they don’t just open up to new ideas but also have plenty of them. If I focus on persuading a corrections officer about the need for more programming for people who are incarcerated, I’m likely to encounter arguments about staffing shortages and safety concerns.

But if I approach the conversation with sincere interest in understanding their work, the risks they face, their analysis of the problems and their definition of success, the tone shifts. They often share moments when they felt supported, safe, and able to help an incarcerated person transform their life. They actually long for those moments as well. Being truly curious about their challenges creates space for meaningful dialogue and the potential for new solutions.

I’ve seen a similar dynamic unfold in the wake of the 2024 election and the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. Many liberals find it hard to see common ground with those who support Trump, and when they talk with a Trump voter, are often quick to detail all of the crimes that they see the administration perpetrating.

But just as I’ve learned in other challenging conversations, curiosity goes further than trying to convince. If you approach this moment determined to change minds, you’re likely to meet, or even deepen, resistance. What’s important is to stay present with the specific individual who is in front of you. Remain curious about how this person came to this position and avoid lumping all Trump voters with all MAGA enthusiasts and with President Trump himself. This flattening of 75 million Americans into one narrow identity does them a disservice.

If you take time to understand the fears, frustrations, and hopes that influenced people’s votes, the conversation can expand. In that expanded conversation there is at least the possibility of getting beneath the headlines, understanding the deeper motivations and the underlying worldview that leads to their positions.

If nothing else, from there you are better positioned to engage meaningfully about the things that matter rather than exchange jabs over headlines based on a caricatured understanding of the other person. Maybe you will learn something that surprises you or maybe you will just be better equipped for more effective persuasion the next time around. Maybe they will surprise you and the very places where you thought the deepest divisions would show up are actually places with more common ground than expected.

3. Be enhanced by disagreeable ideas

Rather than thinking I am diminished by listening carefully to ideas I might disagree with, I trust that I am enhanced by listening to them.

A common perspective today views exposure to opposing opinions as harmful. Some people argue that allowing the expression of differing views can amount to platforming hateful ideas or threatening deeply held values. As a result, organizations—from college campuses to radio shows—often refrain from featuring unpopular perspectives, for fear of criticism, protests, or other social consequences. However, as research by Cass Sunstein and others has found, these kinds of ideological echo chambers exacerbate polarization: When groups wall themselves off from opposing views, their own beliefs tend to grow more extreme.

In this third element of The Invitation, I advocate a different approach to ideas that we find disagreeable, uncomfortable, or even insulting. Rather than viewing these ideas as threats to be shut down, we can see them as valuable sources of information. While some may fear that exposure to opposing ideas will spread them further, and do greater harm, my experience suggests the opposite in two important ways.

First, when the mean, inaccurate, or even hateful thing gets said, if I give it space, it often doesn’t gain momentum but rather peters out, reveals the cracks in its own internal logic, or leads to a qualification or seed of doubt shared by the very person who said it. That is not the case when I try to land a quick counter punch or turn away from the person.

Second, counter intuitive as it may be, engaging with deeply divergent ideas often clarifies and sharpens our own beliefs. It can help to refine our own thinking and allow us to explore our blind spots. While we may not always become more receptive to those with whom we disagree, at least we will know accurately where we, and they, stand.

Recently I met a colleague in the West Bank who over the course of a conversation said something about how “Jews here are a cancer in the West Bank.” Though painful and unsettling to hear in a living room in Ramallah, I still felt a strong sense of intrigue as her blunt perspective washed over me. It was raw and real and I felt my senses light up. But, more important than how I felt, this is her true viewpoint—one that is indeed quite widespread—so it is something we must engage with if we are to find security and peace in the region.

Some would say that I should have written her off. And with her, anyone else who feels that way.

But, I felt that I must meet her where she is, using this invitation to engage and then, based on some level of relationship, try to move forward constructively. Some would ask “why?” Can’t we just turn away from those who might say dehumanizing things or take what we believe to be extreme positions? What comes to mind is the line, “You don’t make peace with your friends, you make it with your enemies.” That starts with meeting them where they are; not where you wish they were. As I followed up with her, reflecting back what I heard and commenting on how it sounds like Nazi rhetoric to me, she opened up. Explaining how she didn’t mean to express hatred, but rather her feeling that the land is disappearing before her eyes. No, this did not entirely heal the wound I felt. And she and I do not see eye to eye on even what to call this land.

Still, one of the biggest questions facing us all isn’t just where can we find common ground, but how do we live together when our differences may indeed be irreconcilable. In this time of extreme partisanship, when it feels that the very foundations of our democracy are under attack, it can seem almost ludicrous that listening to ideas that seem antithetical to one’s values may be good or healthy. But it may well be that this apparently irrational move is the only way to find a path to lasting solutions, enter into constructive relationships with those where we have the deepest disagreements, and turn the tide away from hate and division.

The immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. point us in this direction: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And, in my experience of working very hard over the years to convince people to see things my way or to confront their blind spots, it was when I slowed down, listened more, and opened up that those I disagreed with actually became more open to examining their own blind spots, revealing nuance, and shifting their ground.

4. Love your neighbor

I believe there is more common ground and experience than I anticipate. And, when there is not, I can fundamentally disagree with someone and still respect—even love—them.

My approach to this work and The Invitation is not about seeking watered-down compromises or some vague kumbaya middle ground, but rather about managing deeply held, fundamental disagreements. While I am, of course, a fan of bipartisanship focusing on collaboration where we can find agreement, this invitation centers more on pluralism—the way we live together with our deep divides. In this fourth element, we are hopeful that we will find more common ground and agreement than expected. Research on moral foundations theory shows that people across ideological divides often share core values—such as care, fairness, and loyalty—but prioritize them differently. Recognizing these shared values can foster respect and rapport, even in the midst of disagreement.

Still there will be times when we have no common ground or shared experience and face fundamental disagreements. For example, my friend Elizabeth is Evangelical and believes I will not have eternal life because I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. My colleague Danielle believes we need to strongly defend the second amendment to keep our communities safe. My friend Lori works faithfully as an ultrasound technician in the pro-life movement.

In each case we have deep disagreements. The popular wisdom today is to walk away from these people, call them out, or cancel them. But I am of a different mindset. In these cases, I have actually learned from them and I believe they have from me as well. Our positions on the issues that divide us have not transformed, but our relationships have. By going further than simply respecting or tolerating those differing views, by committing to love those people, we rebuild our capacity to live together, lean into our differences, solve problems, and ultimately, change the culture.

I know this can be hard to imagine as it appears to many that the foundations of American democracy are being washed out to sea. But often, those who voted for and support these changes are not haters seeking our country’s destruction. Renowned civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson often says: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done” as he advocates for the humanity of those on death row. He challenges us to see one another not through the lens of our mistakes or disagreements, but through our shared humanity. Too often, we reduce people to a single belief, political stance, or moral conviction, allowing those differences to define the entire relationship. If we can remember that those convicted of murder are more than that heinous act, then can’t we conjure up the belief that those who vote differently than we do, who advocate for different policies, and who understand right and wrong differently are also more than what we view as their worst political deed?

This can serve as a reminder that each of us is a work in progress, not a static fixed figure. We are not each a voting block, but an individual. Given different inputs, experiences, and exposure, our positions and attitudes shift along with our hopes, fears, and dreams. This invitation asks us to have a little more faith in each other and trust that we can each do our part to still bring out the best in each other and together turn our country around.

In an age of polarization, it can feel naive to believe that listening, curiosity, and love can make a difference. But science tells us otherwise. Active listening builds trust. Curiosity reduces defensiveness. Exposure to diverse ideas counters confirmation bias. And there is nothing more powerful than love when it comes to stamping out hate, even amid intractable disagreement.

These principles are not just aspirational; they are practical tools rooted in decades of psychological and social science research. If we embrace them, now more than ever, we can begin to heal divides, build bridges, and create spaces where all people feel seen, heard, and valued. We can make sure that America lives up to its promise.

Techniques for practicing the invitation

Practice taking seriously what matters to others: A practical technique I call “The Footprint” draws people into sharing more deeply and revealing a bit more. Rooted in active listening, this approach can foster trust and reduce defensiveness. The technique is straightforward but challenging to master: The listener reflects only the speaker’s exact words without adding opinions or trying to steer the conversation. For example, recently I asked an Evangelical leader in higher education, “Are you a Christian nationalist?” He answered quickly, “I couldn’t be.” While I felt a tug to push him about the rising tide of Christian nationalism in our country, I caught myself and simply said, “You couldn’t be.” He carried on, “I am a Chistian and I am a proud patriot. But, my loyalty could never be to a single nation or anything else of this earth. I am ultimately loyal to Jesus Christ.” This is not what I expected. I hadn’t heard this point of view before. By staying true to the speaker’s words, I conveyed curiosity, attentiveness, and non-judgment—avoiding steering the conversation. He went in a direction I hadn’t expected and the learning grew from there.

Practice curiosity over convincing: A simple way to practice this second element of the invitation is by asking open-ended questions—those that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” These questions encourage the speaker to delve deeper and share more, rather than feeling defensive. Examples include: “What was that like for you?” “Can you tell me more about that?” “What would an example of that be?” “To what extent do you…?” “In what ways might you?” and “How did you come to see…?” These questions invite the speaker to move beyond their standard answers or headlines, to share something deeper. Curiosity can generate openness to nuance where there may have been none initially. Research by political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla suggests that open-ended questions foster connection, reduce polarization, and create space for nuance.

Practice strong back, soft front: Stay rooted in your beliefs while remaining open-hearted. Imagine standing tall with a “strong back,” firm in your values, while maintaining a “soft front”—a posture of curiosity and compassion. In your next challenging conversation, pause and breathe. Ask yourself: “Can I hold my ground while staying open to this person’s experience? If I know where I stand, then maybe I can be a little less rigid, a little less defensive. Maybe I don’t have to be so quick to throw my jab because I can rest assured in my values and remain curious.”

Practice loving your neighbor: When speaking with those interested in exploring bridge-building, I often ask them to recall a recent time when they learned something from a conversation with someone whose views differ greatly from their own. If they can’t recall such an example, I encourage them to seek out these opportunities—within their families, workplaces, congregations, or neighborhoods—and invest time in listening as a place to start. The 16th-century Persian poet Hafiz wrote, “How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my most revered teacher speaking to me their cherished last words.” By committing to spend time with those who see things differently and practicing this kind of deep listening even when it is really hard, we can begin to make meaningful progress toward solving the problems we face together.

In that book, Steele introduced the concept of stereotype threat—the idea that people can underperform when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their group. The research helped explain disparities in academic testing, workplace performance, and many other settings.

Steele is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University (and a former executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley). Over the past three decades, his work has influenced fields ranging from education to organizational leadership.

His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, serves as a kind of sequel to Whistling Vivaldi. While stereotype threat focuses on how stereotypes affect individual performance, Churn explores the broader tension that can arise when people from different backgrounds interact in situations that matter.

When the Commonwealth Club World Affairs, in San Francisco, invited me to interview Steele about the book, I jumped at the opportunity. Our conversation explored how identity, anxiety, and trust shape interactions in classrooms, workplaces, and everyday life. What follows is an edited version of that on-stage discussion.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Before we talk about your new book, I want to start with Whistling Vivaldi, which came out back in 2010.

Claude Steele: That book described the research journey that led me and my colleagues—Steve Spencer, Josh Aronson, and others—to the concept of stereotype threat.

That’s when someone faces a negative stereotype about one of their identities—such as race, age, or religion—in a situation that matters to them, like a job interview or a test. In those moments, the possibility of being judged through the lens of that stereotype can be distracting and upsetting. It interferes with your ability to perform in the moment. And if you expect to encounter that pressure repeatedly in a particular environment—say, a profession or a field of study—you might decide not to participate at all.

The research became widely known because it showed that stereotype threat could affect something as important as standardized test performance. For example, a highly motivated African American student taking a difficult exam might experience normal frustration and start wondering, Am I confirming that stereotype about my group? Will others see my performance that way? That extra pressure can undermine performance.

Over the years, researchers have seen this dynamic in many contexts—athletic performance, negotiations, academic settings, and more.

Eventually, I began to think people were missing the broader significance of the idea. The same kind of tension often appears in interactions between people of different identities. In diverse settings, people may worry about being seen through negative stereotypes. That concern can make them hyper-aware of how they’re behaving, what they’re saying, and how they’re being interpreted.

JAS: You’ve compared that experience to multitasking. A person under stereotype threat is juggling extra mental tasks while everyone else can focus on the main activity.

CS: Exactly. If I’m in a group composed entirely of people like me—say, a group of older men—I don’t feel much anxiety about ageist stereotypes. But if younger people join the group, I might start wondering: Do they think I have outdated ideas? Do they assume I’m not technologically savvy? I know what the stereotypes of older men are…and that I could be judged in terms of them.

Diversity brings us together with people of different identities. When that happens, we lose the security that we won’t be judged by outgroup stereotypes. That worry is experienced as tension. 

JAS: Your new book introduces the concept of “churn.” What does that mean?

CS: “Churn” is my term for exactly the tension I just described. To illustrate, let’s begin by imagining a seventh-grade parent-teacher conference. The parents and student are African American; the teacher is white.

The parents know the stereotypes about African Americans, about their intellectual abilities, about their aggressiveness, etc. So on the way to the meeting, they may worry: Will the teacher see our child’s real potential? Will ordinary mistakes be interpreted as signs of aggression or lack of ability?

As they walk into the meeting then, they’re in a state of churn—a kind of vigilant anxiety about how their and their son’s identity will shape their experience in the meeting and their son’s experience in the school.

Meanwhile, the teacher has her own form of stereotype threat. She knows the stereotypes about her racial identity. She may be deeply committed to fairness but nonetheless worried that anything she says—even constructive criticism—could be interpreted as racism.

Both parties enter this conversation in that state of tension I am calling churn—an agitated concern about how their identities will affect how they are judged and treated (and for the African American parents, how their son’s identity will affect his experience in the school). Both parties wonder: Will I be judged and treated fairly in this meeting? Is there some way I should behave, or not behave, to ensure this? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt? Etc.

Most approaches to diversity stress the need to reduce intergroup prejudices—something I heartedly endorse. But churn is different. It affects the prejudiced and non-prejudiced alike—arising as it does not from prejudice per se, but from the identity threat that all parties in a diverse setting can feel.

Churn is a form of social anxiety tied to identity.

JAS: And you argue that churn shows up especially in important situations.

CS: Yes. In low-stakes settings—riding the subway, sitting in a crowd—it usually isn’t a factor.

But when the stakes are high, the threat of being negatively stereotyped increases. That’s when churn becomes more powerful.

Churn isn’t inherently bad. It is simply the effort to cope with identity threat in a situation. It reflects the existence of that threat—and that the person can’t yet trust the situation enough to feel safe from it.

JAS: Another way of putting it might be that churn prevents people from entering a state of flow, where they’re fully immersed in the task.

CS: Exactly. Let me describe an experiment that illustrates this.

My colleagues and I asked white and Black Stanford students to write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that strong essays might be published in a campus magazine. Two days later, they returned to receive feedback from a white evaluator.

When feedback was delivered in a straightforward way—or preceded by generic praise—white students trusted it. But Black students trusted it much less.

Why? Because they couldn’t be sure whether the criticism reflected the essay itself or stereotypes about their group’s abilities.

But when the evaluator said, “I’m applying high standards to these essays, and I believe you can meet those standards,” Black students’ trust changed dramatically. They trusted that feedback more than anyone else and were far more likely to revise their essays using it.

Why did that work? Because it signaled clearly: I’m not judging you through those stereotypes of your group. I believe in your ability.

That kind of communication builds trust—and trust is the antidote to churn.

JAS: So how do individuals build that trust?

CS: At the individual level, it often comes down to conveying that you see someone’s full humanity.

There’s a term in the research literature—“wise.” It originally came from an ethnography of gay communities in the 1950s. A “wise” person was someone outside the group who understood their humanity and didn’t reduce them to stereotypes.

When people feel that recognition, they begin to trust you. Often the simplest way to show that is through genuine curiosity—listening, asking questions, taking an interest in someone’s experience.

JAS: So curiosity helps create trust.

CS: Yes. When you feel churn, it can be a signal to adopt a learning mindset. Instead of defending oneself, or retreating, ask questions. Be polite. But be curious. People can sense genuine interest, and that can transform the interaction.

JAS: Some people might say that sounds like a lot of work.

CS: Remember, I’m talking about important settings in our lives—classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, athletic teams, and so on. In those places, showing respect and interest in others can be far less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing these things.

Moreover, in these settings, I think many people really want to have ways of reducing churn and feeling more comfortable with and connected to others across identity divides. The chief mission of this book is to give people concrete ways of doing that, of feeling more comfortable in diverse settings, and better able to enjoy their great benefits.

JAS: Let’s talk about how power differences might affect churn and trust.

CS: Sure. I think it’s a lot to expect the groups that have historically been the most disempowered to be the first to trust. That’s a big ask.

And in the current divisive era—when we have leaders who don’t even bother with dog whistles in preference for openly racist messaging—it becomes even harder. For African Americans, for example, but for other groups, too, this kind of behavior and rhetoric makes it difficult to trust that their full humanity is appreciated or even recognized.

I don’t want to diminish that troubling reality in any way. But I don’t want to lose hope either. I still have to get up every day and go to work, and so does everyone else. So the question becomes: What do we do in our everyday lives?

That’s really what this book is about. It’s not about somehow directly fixing the political climate, for example. It’s about what we can do within the diverse settings and relationships in which we actually live our lives, to feel more comfortable and able to engage the riches that our differences can offer us. That’s what motivated me to write the book.

JAS: Do you experience churn? When?

CS: Of course. I’m older, and I work in a world full of young people. Sometimes the question is, “Does he even know how to use a computer?” There are moments like that.

JAS: One of the things I appreciated about the book is that it really made me reflect on my own experiences with churn. As I read it, I found myself developing a sort of taxonomy of churn in my own life. Some of it was trivial, some of it more significant—but I realized I hadn’t thought about it very consciously before. It feels like you’ve put your finger on something we all live with.

CS: I’m glad to hear that. In many ways, this is the American experiment. We’re trying to build a democracy that integrates people from many different backgrounds. That’s inherently challenging.

JAS: There’s something a little neurotic about it. From the outside, people sometimes look at the United States and think, “You people are obsessed with diversity”—and they have a point. Many Americans want a very diverse society, but at the same time we’re afraid of what that diversity means, and we must fight against feeling threatened by people who are different from us. Those two impulses are constantly in tension within the American mind. And the truth is, as a people, we seem to want two contradictory things at once. We want the comfort of sameness and we want the vitality offered by living with many different kinds of people. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now in the United States.

CS: Exactly. And that’s why I keep emphasizing the importance of focusing on the worlds we actually inhabit—the classrooms we teach in, the workplaces we’re part of, the systems of hiring and promotion we help shape.

When you talk only about the larger society, the conversation can start to feel abstract or utopian. But when you focus on concrete settings, that’s where real progress can happen. That’s where the strategies I talk about—practical forms of wisdom about trust—can actually make a difference.

The United States made a legal commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the 1960s when we dismantled the laws that upheld segregation. When I was a child, the system was so rigid it could fairly be called apartheid. Legally, we changed that—one of our society’s greatest achievements. Now the challenge is making equality of opportunity real in everyday life.

And that happens in relationships—through the small things people do that make it easier to trust each other and work together. Some of the examples I describe in the book involve university programs that created conditions where students could genuinely trust their institutions. In those environments, diversity became a treasured feature of their experience, not a problem.

One reason I’m hopeful is that building trust may actually be more manageable than trying to directly eliminate prejudice. Changing someone’s beliefs is incredibly hard. As a social psychologist, I know how difficult that is.

But trust is different. Many of us have done that in our lives. We have fairly good intuitions about how to do it and what’s required. And then, as the trust between us builds, our attitudes and beliefs begin to change naturally. Prejudices start to loosen their grip when there’s a genuine human connection.

JAS: It also seems like there’s an ask here—especially for white people—to try to be trustworthy.

CS: Right. And to understand that the issue isn’t all personal—it’s largely historical. The question is: Can I trust you? Do I carry the memory of the past into this interaction, or can I begin to set it aside with you?

When trust starts to form, the door opens to a very different kind of relationship.

JAS: Whistling Vivaldi spurred years of research about stereotype threat. What would you like to see researchers study about churn?

CS: I’d love to see research testing whether a focus on building trust is an effective way of reducing prejudice. I’ve suspected this for a long time now. It could be the focus of a whole research program.

My intuition is that trust-building has been an under-appreciated factor in bridging identity differences. I heard colleagues say, “I explained everything clearly to my students—why don’t they listen?” But if the students are wary about trusting you, information alone won’t help. If we really talk to them and listen, we may see, as in the experiment I mentioned above, that they are in a situation that makes trust difficult. Before they can fully absorb the information we’re trying to pass on, they need some evidence or signal that their full humanity is appreciated—that they’re not being reduced to those stereotypes that they know exist, and that they know you know.

Once a foundation of trust is there, the road to learning becomes easier. My hope is that this book encourages researchers, and the rest of us as well, to explore that road more seriously in the settings where we live our lives.

And that’s just with people we know. What about strangers, people across the political divide, or even those with very different backgrounds and cultures than your own?

My field, philosophy, offers a tried-and-true answer to what we need to do in order to understand people and texts from very different backgrounds and cultural assumptions than our own. We need to be charitable.

Charity in this sense isn’t a matter of giving money to those who need it more. Instead, it’s seeing others in a favorable light—of seeing the best in them. In my work, I think of this as seeing other people as protagonists: characters who “do their best” with the predicament in which they find themselves. Interpreting someone charitably doesn’t require agreeing with them. But it does require doing our best to find merit in their point of view.

Of course, people and ideas don’t have unlimited merit. We can err by failing to see the merit of someone’s point of view—or we can err by finding merit that isn’t really there.

But the idea of charity is that it’s worse to make the first kind of error because it prevents us from getting along and learning from one another. By seeing the best in someone else and in their ideas, we can learn productively from engaging with them. Protagonists are people we can learn from and cooperate with.

Taking them seriously

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that we are all better at seeing the best in the people we agree with—and worse with those across the political divide. Political discussions on social media are often dominated by competing attributions of more and more insidious motives to people on the other side. We see them not as protagonists, but as antagonists.

By seeing the worst in someone else’s ideas, we let ourselves off easy. We dismiss them when instead we need to be taking them seriously.

So why, if charity requires seeing the best in others, are we so often tempted to see the worst in them?

A better understanding of charity provides the answer. Seeing the best and the worst in others are not opposite ways of interpreting someone, but simply two sides of the same coin. Here’s why:

Interpretation trade-offs

Interpreting someone isn’t all about figuring out their motives. Sometimes it’s about sorting out what is signal and what is noise. If I snap at you, you could spend a lot of time fixating over whether to be angry or embarrassed. But sometimes the right move is just to pass me a Snickers bar and move on. Our moods and actions are influenced by hunger, hormones, alcohol, and lack of sleep, just to name a few. Overinterpreting a snap after I missed breakfast treats as signal what is really just noise.

Overlooking a thing or two when I am hangry can be the best way to see the best in me. When you interpret my snap as merely the result of missing a meal, you don’t really see it as coming from me, the protagonist; but as the result of my predicament. You will judge me, not by whether I am hangry, but by how I overcome that. Your interpretation sees me in a more positive light, by taking away some of my agency.

By “agency,” I mean the extent to which someone gets credit for what they do. You have greater agency over something that you do on purpose, and less if it was a foreseen but accepted side effect of your plan. You have less agency if it was an accident, but more if the accident was negligent; less agency if you just snapped because you’re hangry, but more if you know you get hangry and chose to skip lunch anyway.

A perfect agent wouldn’t be affected by hormones and hunger. They would simply make rational choices that advance their goals. But humans aren’t like that. We are imperfectly embodied agents, at best. So interpreting one another well sometimes requires seeing the good in one another, at the cost of agency. In other words, it has to balance agency against the good, as I have argued in my recent work.

But you can’t find the best in someone by just ignoring more and more until all the bad things are trimmed away and only something good is left. Your interpretation has to fit with the facts of what they do and say.

And sometimes the trade-offs between agency and the good go the other way—we interpret each other in ways that attribute more agency but less good. If passing me a Snickers bar seems to calm me down, you might try it again the next time I snap. But one day you realize that you have started carrying extra Snickers bars everywhere you go in case you run into me, and a different interpretation presents itself: Maybe instead of being a decent but mood-challenged friend, I have just been using you for your candy bars.

This creates tipping points for charitable interpretation. When we cross the tipping point, you switch from seeing someone as an imperfectly embodied protagonist to seeing them as an antagonist.

Charity without a cost

All of this is a way of arguing that it is sometimes right to see the worst in others. Sometimes other people really are the worst, and understanding them requires understanding their agency, not what is good about them. Protagonists and antagonists are just two sides of the same coin: The very same interpretive process can lead us in either direction.

Unfortunately, this means there is no simple test for when you are doing well enough at seeing the best in others. In particular, there is no test that we can agree about across our political differences. Interpreting someone charitably requires looking hard enough for good in them, but part of what we disagree with one another about is precisely what is good. So we are bound to disagree with one another about who is being sufficiently charitable.

But as a personal aspiration, a little more charity can go a long way. We can be generous not just with money, but in how we interpret others. But unlike giving money away, we don’t lose anything when we try harder to see the best in someone else.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”

Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emeritus of Spelman College and author of the enormously influential book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. In her new book, Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, she offers real-life examples of education leaders who successfully faced these challenges and in the process transformed their institutions.

Drawing from her years as a college psychology professor, trustee, and president, Dr. Tatum brings a breadth of experience to her analysis of the current state of higher education—covering everything from defending free speech campus protests during the War on Gaza to reallocating Spelman’s resources in 2012 to create a broad wellness initiative that swapped varsity sports for campus-wide fitness.

We talked about her new book and how leaders can help chart a path through today’s turmoil. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: In 1997, you published Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria. More than a quarter decade later, where are we with the public conversations around race?

Beverly Tatum: Since 1997, our population has gotten a lot more diverse—a lot of immigrants from places like India and China—and the Hispanic population is growing fast. Today, the population in the United States is maybe 50% white, a little bit less, and children of color are the majority in the school-age population.

In 2001, we had the 9/11 attack. There were the wars that came after that and in 2008 the economy tanked. All of the anxieties associated with a challenged economy and a nation in conflict with other nations made it a hard time to have a conversation about race.

Fast-forward to the election of Barack Obama. Many people saw that as really a culmination of the civil rights movement. But the pushback against the Obama election was quite dramatic— the Tea Party movement and the racialization of him and his wife and the family, all of that. And of course he was followed by Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric, from his announcement of his candidacy, evoked racialized images. The conversation has gotten a lot harder. And it has been symbolic of the nation’s polarization.

HR: Amid these changes in leadership and wars, we faced the murder of George Floyd, too.

BT: Yes–on the one hand, after Donald Trump’s first election, there was a rapid decline in talk about race. Even in his first term, Donald Trump was saying at the federal level, “You can’t talk about race; shouldn’t talk about privilege.” There was a list of words that weren’t supposed to be used in Trump’s first term. But when the George Floyd murder happened, it was so horrible and dramatic—on everybody’s phones, right, in their social media—and there was a great awakening of racial awareness, racial consciousness.

HR: Trump has attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus. What are the effects we can see?

BT: In his first early days in office, Trump issued an anti-DEI executive order. One of the really unfortunate things has been the overreaction of colleges and universities to comply. Nobody wants to be a target. And so people have been scraping their websites and changing the names of their programs—or eliminating programs. Maybe there was an office for diversity, equity and inclusion, and that office has just been eliminated. In some cases it’s been renamed or reorganized. But there are lots of places where they just said, “You know what, we’re just gonna eliminate this.”

That’s really unfortunate. Even if you are a staff person working in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and you’ve now been reassigned to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies Office, and you’re still trying to work with students who are experiencing marginalization on your campus, they may not know how to find you. Programs like the Black Student Union that might have been supported by the division of student affairs, maybe they have a small budget for programming. And now those funds have been completely cut off and the students have to do them on their own—which is an added burden for those students, yet important to their sense of belonging.

So there’s a way in which the structural changes and the fear of being targeted—forced to pay a big fine, or even threatened with loss of accreditation—those things have, particularly at public institutions, really put a damper on the student experience.

HR: What about at the classroom level?

BT: One major thing that has changed is the fear for faculty members. Now you’re not supposed to talk about certain things—free speech and academic freedom are under attack. If you’re working in, say, Georgia, there’s a law that says you’re not supposed to talk about “divisive” concepts. What is a divisive concept? If I’m talking about American history, I am challenging conceptions of the Confederacy and what it meant. Is that a divisive concept? Can a student report me as having broken the law? There are cases like that where faculty members are being removed from classrooms because a student was upset about something they said and felt it was “against the law.” This is a really crazy time for classrooms. I don’t know if I would be able to teach today my “psychology of race” class in some states.

HR: Why is there so much resistance to D.E.I, and what can colleges do to promote these values?

BT: There’s a need for courageous leadership. We need to reframe the conversation. On the face of it, some people are unhappy with those letters, D.E.I. With “diversity,” some people feel left out. If you’re white and male and heterosexual, where do you fit in when someone’s talking about diversity? But of course, diversity includes everyone. I fault the users, us, for how the language has evolved. Some people use “diversity” as a substitute for more racialized terms, like when someone says, “There was a diverse job candidate”—what do they really mean? There was a Black candidate, maybe. Well, just say so.

Inclusion is so important. When you see a photo, you look for yourself. But what happens when you can’t find yourself in it? You say, “What’s wrong with me?” This is the experience of marginalized people on campus.

We need to ask: Who’s missing from our picture? Institutional leaders can foster inclusive communities by their own example (what they talk about, the language and examples they use), through their hiring decisions, and through the use of budgetary resources within their control.

For example, if increasing STEM participation among students of color is a goal, investing in professional development for faculty to learn from experts in inclusive pedagogy could be worthwhile. Launching a speaker series and inviting prominent STEM scholars of diverse backgrounds to campus is another tangible action. Lending support to faculty who are successful mentors of underrepresented students through campus recognition and the allocation of resources signal that those activities are valued. Strengthening connections between alumni and current students through campus programming can also give visibility to underrepresented groups.

HR: How should colleges handle the extreme polarization, which may take form in campus protests against the war on Gaza, for instance?

BT: Dialogue helps. We must create a community, a climate where the expectation of respectful dialogue is our way of being. With the Gaza protests, some campuses were more successful at this—I’m thinking about an example of two students, on Jewish and one Palestinian American, who formed Atidna [a reference to “our future” in Hebrew]. They really wanted to create a space where Palestinian-supporting students and Jewish-identified students could come together and have conversations. They did so without much help from the university, but it’s a model that universities can use.

Presidents can offer support. They can sponsor all kinds of things; they can show up to the talks. Cultivating leadership is not just about the exercise of your own leadership but helping people on your senior team, students, and faculty. To show faculty that it’s possible to disagree with the president. To model it, to give other people space. Students have a right to express their concerns, and we’re not just going to panic when that happens.

HR: In 2012, you reallocated Spelman College’s NCAA budget into a wellness initiative to campus. How did that go, and what lessons did you come away with?

BT: Intercollegiate athletics was not a big part of the Spelman experience, which was one reason it seemed like, “Why are we spending money on this?” Students weren’t coming to game; there weren’t many students playing. But it was not without controversy. Student athletes were not happy with me. Many people didn’t understand that there are no NCAA scholarships.

The main thing was framing it; that led to the success. We talked about not what was going away, but what would come instead. With the same resources, we could create a program to benefit all students. It was a population that really needed to move more, to be more active, to counteract the health trends that were plaguing Black women. We also offered yoga and meditation and sound healing. The big lesson was how to communicate.

HR: Artificial intelligence has entered college campuses. What do you think about this?

BT: It’s amazing how fast this has unfolded. In the spring of ‘23, the conversation the faculty were having was focused around cheating behavior. Fast forward to today, it’s about how we teach students to use AI responsibly. It’s important for us to all get up to speed. We must invest in faculty development so they can do the work with AI that is helpful to students.

A bigger question is what does artificial intelligence mean for work? How do we, as a society, accommodate people whose work has been taken over by machines? It speaks to the importance of colleges as the place where that question is explored, and the exploration of what it means to be human in an AI-dominated world. What are the things that humans most need to know? What are the enduring conversations, critical thinking, problem solving? Where are the empathy and compassion?

The skill of dialog is so important because you develop empathy, you develop mutual understanding. And it seems to me those are the capacities that at least to date AI doesn’t have. I can’t think of a better place to be than a college or university at such a difficult and potentially challenging time.

In fact, a recent Rand Corporation survey found that even in states without formal curricular bans, two-thirds of K-12 teachers have chosen to limit classroom instruction on social issues. In essence, the presence of state-specific restrictions has silenced even teachers who are not subject to them, limiting students’ access to learning about race, gender, historical events, and social movements nationwide.

In our own work, we have spoken with many educators who are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or discouraged in this moment. Yet, as James Baldwin argued in 1963—a year marked by both profound struggle and collective resilience—moments of social crisis are precisely when educational justice work becomes most essential. In a speech to teachers in New York City, Baldwin challenged educators to remember that the obligation of anyone who considers themselves responsible is to examine society and to work to advance justice.

If we take Baldwin seriously and understand the present moment as one in which examining society and advancing justice are especially urgent, the question becomes how educators and students can engage in this work amid intensifying social, political, and legal constraints.

We have spent years researching and writing about how educators across grade levels, from elementary school through college, can nurture students’ capacities to examine society and work toward its transformation. Through this sustained study, we have learned that even in moments when schools and educators are prohibited from explicitly drawing on justice-oriented curricula, pathways still exist to cultivate students’ motivation and foundational skills to recognize, analyze, and challenge injustice and to create spaces that value all human beings.

As teachers, we retain meaningful agency and power in our classrooms. Beyond teaching content, educators are responsible for shaping interactions, relationships, and critical skills—domains through which we can continue to prepare young people to analyze and engage the world around them with clarity and purpose. Here are suggestions for cultivating critical thinking in a challenging time.

1. Use your classroom to model community and practice connected living.

In dozens of ways, through the news, social media, their own communities, and perhaps even in their own lives, young people right now are witnessing people treat other humans with callousness and cruelty.

The ability to truly see one another as human beings and recognize each other’s humanity is the foundation of a just world. Equally important is the ability—and the will—to treat one another as human beings. We likely wish this came as second nature to everyone, yet the world around us, both historically and today, shows us that it does not. Or if it does, we submerge that nature in favor of other things.

Educators have the power and space every day to offer young people relational tools and help them practice the basic skills of communal human living. Even as specific content in curriculum is being sidelined, we can insist that students learn and speak each other’s names, create space for students to meaningfully hear pieces of each other’s histories and stories, and set expectations/norms for how students listen to each other, disagree, and engage with each other.

These small practices strengthen students’ ability to build just relationships and communities outside of school—and each models what connected human engagement can look and feel like. We should not underestimate the power of this skill and desire; relationships are the foundation of a transformed future.

2. Teach analysis skills and frameworks that students can apply to exploring and understanding justice issues.

Most teachers are guided by state standards that call on them to support students’ development of strong analytical skills, whether they are examining literary texts, historical events, scientific hypotheses, or mathematical approaches.

Within these expectations, teachers often have flexibility in choosing the analytic tools and lenses they introduce to students. Educators can make use of that flexibility to introduce students to analytic tools relevant to academic tasks that students can also apply to making sense of the wider world and the social and political forces shaping our lives and communities.

For example, political scientist Iris Marion Young offers a framework in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, with several key questions (see streamlined version below) that can be applied to any number of ideas, histories, or academic concepts:

• Who benefits?
• Who is excluded?
• Who has less power?
• Whose experiences are being discounted or attacked, or who is harmed?

History teachers might introduce this framework to their students to support their rigorous analyses of historical events not currently omitted from the curriculum, ranging from the Industrial Revolution to westward expansion to women’s suffrage.

Science teachers might draw on Young’s framework to ask students to analyze environmental issues (e.g., air or water pollution) by examining who benefits from industrial practices, which communities bear the most significant health risks, whose voices are excluded from decision-making, and whose lives are the most harmed.
Educators can also remind students that these frameworks can be used to analyze any event, including events happening in the present day. As educators, we need to remember that critical questions about power, voice, fairness, and justice are not bound to particular content; they are intellectual habits that can be practiced across texts, disciplines, and genres.

3. Leverage schools themselves as sites for practicing critical social analysis skills.

Our own classrooms and schools can also serve as sites for this kind of analysis, offering students meaningful opportunities to explore fundamental concepts and levers in creating and sustaining injustice, such as power.

For example, teachers can invite students to explore who sets classroom rules, who enforces them, and whose voices shaped the rules in the first place. Students can be invited to analyze a school dress code, asking whose forms of expression are policed or excluded. This practice of noticing and observing power in the everyday spaces they inhabit helps students see power at work in tangible ways and supports their understanding of a fundamental principle of justice. 

Some teachers may have the opportunity to engage students in applying these same questions to events shaping their local or neighborhood communities, but even teachers who cannot have access to ecosystems within schools themselves that provide ample opportunities for critical questioning and reflection. These opportunities build students’ muscles to do this critical questioning in other domains.

4. Teach something you can teach and make it matter.

Almost anything we are charged with teaching can be grounded in concepts related to civic engagement, social change, or justice, even without using commonly associated justice language. No text, theory, or equation exists outside of time, place, and power. Literary canons, scientific paradigms, and mathematical methods reflect decisions about whose knowledge is preserved, valued, and taught.

In conversations about chemistry, we can discuss quantification and precision as epistemic power, or explore how foundational concepts such as yield, waste minimization, and optimization may harbor hidden values. We can teach a Shakespeare play or a Robert Frost poem and invite students to consider: whose interior life is being explored, and whose is not? In history, humanities, or anything that involves text, we can employ resistant reading strategies, documented practices that develop students’ critical thinking. Resistant reading consists of asking students to interpret a text from a different perspective or to scrutinize a text for pre-existing beliefs. This can be done in any text across a wide range of content and perspectives.

Any canon or content can be taught in a way that offers students an entry to deep criticality and consideration of the fundamental questions of civic and just life. This may require some creativity on our end or collaboration with other educators to think outside the box, but we can use anything we teach to build students’ habit of asking questions as they encounter information in the world around them.

5. Leverage schools and classrooms as sites for practicing social action.

To truly advance justice, students also need chances to use the relationship-building and critical thinking skills they are developing, not just talk about them. Shifting from thinking to doing helps students see that their voices matter and that they have infinitely more power when collaborating.

For some of us, the opportunity for students to practice doing already exists in the curriculum. For example, in Massachusetts, all eighth graders complete a student-led civics project focused on real-world topics. The goal is simple: students learn how change happens by actually trying to create it. And for many other educators, current restrictions limit or prohibit this kind of student-led civic work.

Yet, we don’t actually need state-sanctioned curricular projects to provide opportunities for students to practice acting on something they care about or to give students places and spaces to exercise their power.

Fortunately, we have learned from our two decades of research in schools that civic action within the school community or even in the classroom can be as real and meaningful to students as civic action out in the “real world” (because school communities are students’ real worlds). Importantly, civic action within the school or classroom can help students develop the real-life skills they need to engage in social action more broadly.

In a high school in Rhode Island, for example, a history teacher provided her students the opportunity to go through the school handbook to identify a policy they believed was unjust or unfair, and then come up with a plan to change that policy. The students collectively decided to try to change their school’s technology policy governing when they were allowed to use phones, iPads, and laptops, and then set about researching the topic, developing a presentation proposing a new policy, and lobbying their school’s administration to consider these changes. When the school leadership team ultimately agreed to enact the students’ proposed technology policy on a trial basis for the remainder of the school year, the students described surges in their confidence in their ability to effect change.

They also learned essential skills for social change: how to use research to make a compelling argument, how to make a pitch to various stakeholders, and how to write a policy that meets the needs of a wide range of community members. Importantly, they will bring these skills into other communities they are part of, now and in the future.

In times of consistent constraints and change, it can be easy to focus on the power we feel we are losing and to lose sight of the power we continue to have. Alongside the real reasons for concern that educators have, there are also enduring reasons for hope.

As classroom teachers and school leaders, it may be that some of the familiar ways we have supported students in critically analyzing society or preparing for civic and social engagement are no longer available to us.

But educators have always been masters of creativity and adaptation. History reminds us, again and again, that when the outside world closes in and places deep constraints on our work, educators remember the creative power that they have; they innovate, reimagine, and persist. In remembering and reclaiming our power, we help our students recognize the power they inherently hold and can harness to shape the world around them.

This apparent contradiction is at the heart of How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, a new book by happiness scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis.

The pair surveyed a representative sample of 1,998 American adults and found that two-thirds yearned to feel more loved or loved more often by the people in their lives, and 40 percent wanted to feel more loved by their romantic partner. The authors noted a strong negative correlation between loneliness and feeling loved, expressed qualitatively in comments like, “I have plenty of friends, and I spend a lot of time socializing. But honestly? I don’t know if anyone deeply loves me.”

How to Feel Loved vividly expresses the disconnect between people in our lives expressing love and our experience of feeling that love, and puts the power back in our hands. Lyubomirsky and Reis make a powerful case that by approaching our relationships with vulnerability, curiosity, self-acceptance, and optimism, we can get the love we need. They outline specific strategies for shifting our mindsets and interpersonal interactions to achieve more rewarding outcomes.

I spoke with Lyubomirsky and Reis about the research underlying their book and their recommendations for readers.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: The collaboration at the heart of this book–a happiness scholar teaming up with a relationship scientist–seems long overdue. What are you trying to achieve with How to Feel Loved?

Sonja Lyubomirsky: A lot of people are loved, but they don’t feel loved. And if you don’t feel loved, it’s as though it’s not there. What I have discovered in my research is that feeling loved and feeling connected is really the key to happiness. Almost all of the interventions shown to make us happier, the reason they work is they make us feel more connected to and loved by others. We know relationships are so important to happiness; the Harvard Adult Development Study is very famous for showing that. Then Harry and I started talking and we realized happiness researchers and love researchers don’t really talk as much as they should.

KRL: Your book has such potential to make a difference because people have relationships, they have social connections, but they don’t feel loved, and that often leads to despair and spiraling. How does this connect to our epidemic of loneliness?

SL: Loneliness is such a huge problem, especially among young people, and really, a lonely moment is a moment where you don’t feel loved. So they’re very, very connected, very, very relevant to each other.

Harry Reis: Most people, when they go about trying to get more love, they do it in a way that not only is wrong, but may actually be counterproductive. And so what we’re trying to do is give people a new approach that we believe will be more effective.

One of the ironies in this is that when people are in unsatisfying relationships, that may actually be a more devastating feeling than not being in relationships. When you’re alone, when you’re isolated, you can engage in self-fulfilling activities. But when people are in an unhappy relationship, they begin to question: “Why is this unsatisfying? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not doing things right?” And that can actually be a more powerful negative feeling than being isolated.

SL: We also had this realization that for a lot of problems in relationships, often the source is a sense of not feeling loved, or not loved enough. Take the show Couples Therapy. You see the couple fighting and it’s so obvious that at the root of it is that no matter what he does, she’s not feeling loved; no matter what she does, he’s not feeling loved enough.

KL: In the book, you write about the relationship saesaw, which you intentionally misspell using the word “sea” to align with your metaphor that many of our personal attributes are hidden underwater. Can you explain what you mean by that, and how it functions when it’s done well?

HR: The relationship seasaw is the idea that there’s a reciprocal process of lifting and being lifted in this dynamic interaction. When you lift somebody up, meaning you support them, you encourage them, you show curiosity about what makes them tick, it makes them feel good, it makes them feel loved, but it also encourages them to reciprocate that feeling, and so then they can lift you up. There is this dynamic back and forth between opening up and then listening and encouraging the other. That gives people a sense of connection, a sense of chemistry.

SL: Another way to think about it is that the key to feeling loved is to be truly known to the other person, and also to truly know the other person. It’s like an underwater seasaw. Most of us are kind of underwater. We’re not really showing most of ourselves to the other person. We’re only showing the tip, maybe only the positive sides of us. By pressing down on the seasaw with curiosity and warmth and acceptance and listening, we’re helping the other person reveal more of themselves and to share more. Otherwise, it’s actually kind of hard to take down those walls we keep around ourselves. Fortunately, reciprocity is a really powerful norm of social behavior–it’s evolutionarily adaptive, obviously–and the other persons will reciprocate by showing curiosity and warmth and acceptance toward us, as well as encouragement and support, and by really listening to our story. That doesn’t actually happen that often.

KL: It really is a powerful revelation that feeling more loved is within our control. It has the potential to truly change lives through the new mindsets and the actions that you outline. So you can’t explain everything that took you 300-plus pages in the book, but can you give a brief overview of the five mindsets–Sharing, Listening to Learn, Radical Curiosity, Open Heart, and Multiplicity–and pull out one or two of them to discuss in more depth?

SL: I feel like our book has an empowering message, because most people, when they think about feeling more loved, they think, “I need to make myself more lovable, more desirable, more appealing, show off to the other person how wonderful I am.” But it’s not about changing yourself; it’s not about changing the other person; it’s about changing the conversation. Because a relationship really is a series of conversations.

The mindsets are five different perspectives that we encourage people to embrace as they approach their next conversation with their romantic partner, or their neighbor, or their mom, or their colleague.

I’ll start with the sharing mindset. I might feel that maybe you wouldn’t love me if you really got to know me, all my messy, complicated sides and contradictions and my negative qualities. Sharing allows us to take down our walls a little bit. But you have to share at the right pace. We’re not talking about revealing your deepest secret or trauma right away.

It might be starting small, like, you might ask me, “How are you?” And instead of saying, “Fine,” which is what we almost always do, I say, “Oh, well, I actually had kind of a rough morning,” or “I’m struggling a little today.” Or, it could just be saying something real, your true opinion about something that’s going on.

HR: When people don’t feel loved, often what they think is, “You need to make me feel more loved.” Of course, that kind of thing usually doesn’t work very well. It’s externalizing the problem. It’s putting pressure on the other person. It’s better to change the conversation in a way that can allow a loving conversation to happen, rather than waiting for the other person to do something, because that can often be more like waiting for Godot.

When we listen to another person, we’re often preparing our response. That distances you from the other person. It doesn’t allow you to connect with them. The listening-to-learn mindset is the idea that you need to really pay attention so that you can actually learn something about the other person. You need to be curious about what they’re saying. And then—and this is the important part—you need to encourage them to go deeper. One of the most powerful things you can say is a simple three-word phrase: “Tell me more.”

SL: The first step in helping yourself to feel more loved is to try to make the other person feel more loved, by listening to them, helping them open up, showing curiosity in them, and showing warmth and acceptance. But one thing that surprised us is when we wrote our first draft, we sent it to a few friends and colleagues. Two friends of mine wrote to me: they’re not psychologists, but they’re writers and smart people. They told us that our book led them to break up with their girlfriends. One guy said, “Your book made me realize that she’s not really sharing.” The other guy said, “I realized my girlfriend has stopped showing curiosity about my work,” which was very important to him.

So we created a diagnostic quiz. It’s on howtofeelloved.com, our book website. It will tell you what your strongest mindset is, and what’s the mindset that’s in most need of improvement, and then we give some tips on how to do that.

HR: If both people are committed to the relationship and want to work on it, this can be a powerful stimulus to improving the relationship.

SL: We have this sort of inner chatter. As I’m talking to you, even now, I’m thinking what I’m going to say next. I’m thinking what I’m going to have for lunch. To quiet that inner chatter and truly be present, we all can do that, but we just need practice. All of these mindsets are totally accessible.

KL: Finally, could you talk about the multiplicity mindset, Sonja?

SL: Actually, the word comes from trauma research. The idea is that when you have a trauma, it doesn’t define you. You are a person with many, many, many facets. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. We are like a quilt of both positive and negative qualities.

Sometimes I’m kind, and sometimes I’m selfish, and sometimes I’m loyal, and sometimes I’m narcissistic. We’re all of those things; they’re all a spectrum. Try to recognize that in other people. Sometimes they might reveal something a little bit uncomfortable, or a little bit negative. Try to look at that with this lens of multiplicity. Again, the idea is that one bad action doesn’t define us. We have these messy insides; we have a lot of contradictions. Embracing the multiplicity mindset really helps us feel more loved—not just by others but by ourselves, too.

KL: You are challenging people to grow and be their best selves. Even though many of these steps are simple, at heart, to accept your own self and be comfortable revealing, and then accept others is demanding a lot from folks.

SL: It takes a lot of effort. All of our mindsets take effort, they take intention, and they sometimes are challenging, but so worthwhile.

At a time when the country feels more fractured than ever, this camaraderie among Americans is rare. It’s worth paying attention to the parts of American life where people still come together—where, at least for a few hours, they set aside the divisions that so often define our politics, because politics couldn’t be further from their minds. Sports fandom is one such phenomenon, one that’s baked into the habits of millions of Americans.

What’s striking is that this sense of connection extends well beyond the game itself. The biggest sports fans tend to be deeply engaged in their communities and civic life, and most open to connecting with people across political divides. Fans don’t just set aside political divisions for a few hours every Sunday, they tend not to let these divisions define them at all.

Research conducted by More in Common and FOX Sports in June 2025 found that the most dedicated fans—those who follow sports most closely and participate most actively—are also more likely to be registered to vote, to vote in local elections, and to follow politics regularly. They are also more likely to give to charity, attend political meetings, donate blood, and contribute to their communities.

What’s especially notable is that this engagement doesn’t come at the cost of openness. In much of American life, the people who are most politically engaged are also the most likely to misunderstand and distrust members of the opposing political party. Typically, the higher the political engagement, the deeper the partisan divide.

Sports fans are an exception. Despite their high levels of political participation, the biggest fans are more open to engaging across political differences, not less. And the more invested the fan, the more open they are to connect. Among the most passionate fans, nearly 7 in 10 say they’d be interested in a conversation with someone who holds opposing views, compared to just 46% of non-fans. And more than 8 in 10 say they’d be willing to work with someone from across the aisle to improve their community (compared to 65% of non-fans).

Crucially, these patterns appear across the political spectrum. Republican and Democratic fans alike have warmer feelings towards members of the opposing political party and are more open to collaboration than their non-fan counterparts.

This willingness to connect across divides is unusual in today’s political climate. And it points to a broader truth: sports are more than entertainment. In an era of polarization, it stands out as one of the few large-scale cultural arenas where people of different backgrounds regularly share space, build trust, and find connection. As one respondent said, “I live in a community where following our sports team brings us together and my parents were just huge on watching it.”

That spirit of connection matters even more when we consider who shows up most in these spaces. The most dedicated fans are disproportionately men, and in an era of rising male isolation, sports fandom offers a place where connection, conversation, and community are already happening.

According to Gallup, 25% of American men aged 15 to 34 reported feeling lonely “a lot” in their day‑to‑day lives, compared to 18% of women in the same age group and just 15% in peer democratic countries. Men are also less likely than women to turn to friends or family for emotional support and report having fewer close friendships.

In this landscape, sports fandom offers a rare pathway for connection. Sports remain one of the most culturally acceptable spaces for emotional expression among men, with three in four avid fans, male and female alike, agreeing that sports are a healthy way for men to express themselves.

Most men don’t proactively spend their time “thinking about healthy ways to connect.” They’re more likely to just sit next to a couple of buddies enjoying a game. Sports create the conditions for connection—offering structure, shared interest, and a sense of ease that makes openness feel more natural. And our data suggest sports fans may experience less loneliness. Specifically, fans are more likely to disagree with the statement, “There is no community where I feel a strong sense of belonging,” and fans are more likely than non-fans to see sports as a healthy outlet for male expression.

While sports fandom may not solve polarization or loneliness on its own, it shows us that there are still spaces where people of different backgrounds show up, engage, and build trust—even if they’re just cheering for the same team.

If we want to strengthen civic life, we should take seriously the places where Americans are already finding common ground. Sports fandom isn’t just entertainment—it’s one of our largest, most diverse, and most consistent shared rituals. And that makes it worth noticing, understanding, and cherishing as more than just a game.

This Sunday’s Super Bowl won’t fix all that’s broken in America. But for a few hours, it may remind more than 100 million Americans that coming together is still possible.

Dorriene’s partner, Diane, passed away in 2020. They’d been together for 40 years, and Dorriene was devastated. She couldn’t bear to stay in the house where Diane had died. She called her sister and asked, “Can you come get me?” The two retirees now live in Jo’s house with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn and great granddaughter Soulann (a.k.a. baby Soso).

These days, Dorriene spends most of her time alone in her bedroom. When she emerges to interact with Jo and the rest of the family, the house fills with bickering and what Breelyn describes as “bad energy.” While Jo and Dorriene are physically closer than ever, they’re struggling to bridge the emotional distance. They recognize the impact they’re having on the household, but they don’t know what to do.

That’s where Queer Eye’s Fab Five come in. They’ve arrived in Washington D.C., ready to help Jo and Dorriene find their way back to each other or, at the very least, to create a more peaceful environment for baby Soso. Certainly, over the course of ten seasons, the show hasn’t always gotten it right on set or on screen. But in this episode, as the Queer Eye team works to help Jo and Dorriene reconnect, they demonstrate how transformative (and fun!) bridging practices can be when they’re implemented skillfully. Here are four research-backed best practices for bridging differences, all beautifully modeled in this episode.



1. Focus on common goals and keep trying

Jo and Dorriene disagree on a stunning array of topics–what to watch on TV, how to clean, and what kind of childhood they had growing up in a family with 18 kids. Queer Eye’s resident food and wine expert Antoni Porowski notices one thing the sisters can agree on: their mom’s pineapple upside down cake was delicious.

This rare moment of consensus sparks a fruitful idea (pun intended). Antoni surprises Jo and Dorriene with an outing to a restaurant where, in the kitchen, he has assembled all of the supplies one needs to bake a pineapple upside down cake. The sisters jump to it, explaining how much brown sugar to use (more than you think!) and whether to use milk or pineapple juice in the recipe (juice!).

The sisters work together seamlessly. There’s laughter. The jokes are gentler than the sharp barbs they exchanged in earlier scenes. Antoni notices the growing warmth between them and he casually floats a more meaningful question: When did you used to eat this cake growing up? Stories emerge. The conversation gets deeper.

In this scene, Antoni, Jo, and Dorriene show us the power of a common goal. Dorriene and Jo both wanted to make a pineapple upside down cake, and that common goal was enough to get them working together. As we explain in the Bridging Differences Playbook, a shared objective can help move us away from disagreements and toward collective action. We don’t need to agree on everything in order to make something happen. And actively engaging in making something happen can help warm us up to one another. It can also result in a delicious cake!

One of the other key aspects of the experience that Antoni facilitated is its repeatability. As social psychologists Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone note in Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups, research shows it takes time and repeated interaction for members of different groups to build trust.

Antoni directly acknowledges that reality. With the sisters out of earshot, he tells the camera that he’s not trying to change a decades-old dynamic in one afternoon. If Jo and Dorriene keep cooking and baking together on a regular basis, their relationship will continue to shift. Before Antony’s time with Jo and Dorriene ends, the sisters decide what they’ll bake next–a quiche.

2. Give your perspective

Dorriene and Jo were born and raised in D.C. and they have a lot of family around. Jo is close with the family. Dorriene is not and hasn’t been for many years. Dorriene’s not up for something as simple as watching TV in the living room with Jo, Breelyn, and Soso, and she’s certainly not interested in attending larger family functions. Jo can see that Dorriene is lonely, and doesn’t understand why she won’t just leave the past in the past and come be part of the family again.

The Fab Five get it, though. They know it’s possible to grow up in the same house with someone and feel like your hearts are a million miles apart. For many of us queer folks, the feeling is all too familiar. We can share geography, skin color, faith, even the same parents and still not share a sense of belonging.

In an effort to build more understanding between the two sisters, Karamo Brown, the show’s culture expert, facilitates an experience that we at the GGSC call perspective-giving.

Karamo brings Dorriene and Jo to the D.C. History Center where they’re greeted by Ashley Bamfo, treasurer of the Rainbow History Project. As part of their mission to collect, preserve, and promote D.C.’s LGBTQ+ history, the Rainbow History Project maintains an archive of oral histories. Karamo reveals that he has brought Dorriene here to have her oral history recorded. He has brought Jo here to witness. He explains:

Dorriene, your story touched me because–to hear you say that you were in a relationship for 40 years–as younger queer people, the only reason I knew that I could find love and I could have somebody is because I see models like you. I want to make sure you have a chance to tell your story. I want us to document it because it’s important. As long as this country is around, they know Dorriene’s story.

While this episode’s primary focus is helping Jo and Dorriene build a stronger connection with one another, Karamo is also making it clear that he wants Dorriene to feel a sense of belonging to the queer community. Dorriene and her partner Diane belong to D.C. queer history. They are part of this long, storied tradition of love and resistance, and it’s important that this truth is preserved in the archives.

With all of this context set, Dorriene starts talking. We only see portions of what was surely a much longer experience, but even in excerpts, her stories do big work.

Dorriene tearfully opens up about “the things you had to do just to be loved.” How it felt to sneak around and keep secrets. How it felt to be treated poorly by their parents when she saw how much love and care her siblings got. She says: 


I remember my mom looking at me with such hatred. Like I did something wrong, you know. That she was ashamed of me. That I wasn’t part of the family. That I wasn’t her daughter. That hurt. [...] That’s why when I left home at 14, I never looked back. And I moved in with a drag queen!

She recounts the day she met Diane in their apartment building’s laundry room and the day, less than three weeks later, when she moved in with her! (They lived in the same building. No U-Haul required.) She even talks about the time she married David, one of her gay male friends, to protect him from getting kicked out of the military.

Dorriene shares her perspective, and Jo listens. Boy, does she listen.…

3. Listen with empathy

Throughout the oral history interview, Karamo and Ashley model a bridging practice that we call listening with empathy. Karamo and Ashley ask thoughtful, open-ended questions, but never interrupt. They affirm Dorriene’s experiences and feelings. They let themselves be moved, expressing empathy.

In this artfully edited scene, we get to watch Jo learning from Karamo and Ashley’s example. Instead of lecturing or offering solutions, as we’ve watched her do in the past, Jo stays curious. She listens. She opens herself up to Dorriene’s pain. When she does eventually speak, she expresses empathy. She says, wiping tears from her cheeks, “It hurts. I’m not saying it to take from you. I’m hurting for you.”

Dorriene has a strong response to receiving empathetic listening. She softens towards Jo and she’s willing to engage in deeper perspective-giving. She even shares information about her childhood that she had never revealed to Jo before. Dorriene’s reaction to being listened to is a response that’s reflected in the research. Studies show that when we listen to someone with empathy, it increases trust between us and helps them feel less guarded. They’re more likely to want to take the risk of connecting with us across our differences when they feel that we’ve listened to them and understand them. 

Everyone responds to different expressions of empathetic listening, but some combination of the following actions often helps people feel listened to:

• Be curious: Are you asking questions to encourage the other person to elaborate on his thoughts or feelings? Curiosity shows that you’re interested in what the person has to say and that you care.
• Be present: Are you actively engaged in the conversation, refraining from passing judgment, preventing interruptions, staying mentally focused, and avoiding the urge to give advice? 
• Affirm feelings/intentions: How are you affirming the feelings or opinions of the speaker? Do your best to try to find what you are able to affirm, so it doesn’t come across as insincere. 
• Express empathy: Why does the speaker feel or think the way they do? Think less about how you would feel or think in their situation, and more about them. 
• Use engaged body language: Are you using your body language and gestures to convey active listening?

It’s the pairing of perspective-giving and empathetic listening that prepares Dorriene to make a big leap at the end of the episode. 

4. Shift power imbalances

As even the most casual Queer Eye viewer knows, each episode ends with a big community celebration. Everyone gets to ooh and ahh over the makeover and the home renovations, but the real purpose is for the episode’s hero to be loved on and appreciated by their people. This episode’s final celebration certainly doesn’t disappoint. Karamo works with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn to throw a family reunion at a gay bar, complete with a drag show.

When Karamo and Breelyn tell Jo and Dorriene what they’ve arranged, the sisters are delighted. Karamo is sure to clarify that they’ve only invited family members who affirm Dorriene’s humanity. He says, “The family members that love you and support you are there waiting for you.” We don’t see any of the pushback we might have expected from Dorriene. She’s surprised, but excited. At the bar, she and Jo seem to have a fantastic time with their given and chosen family.

In selecting this location and this form of entertainment, the show does something that researchers Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone characterize as a best practice for facilitating effective contact between groups. They shifted a power imbalance. In Tropp and Dehrone’s discussion of how organizations can design opportunities for contact between members of different groups, they write:

[W]e want to make sure that we envision and structure contact programs in ways that allow people from all groups to contribute as equal partners. [...] We can reinforce the equalizing nature of contact programs further by acknowledging and addressing ways in which broader societal inequalities might shape people’s participation in contact programs. [...] Rather than ignoring these differences, try to envision how you can address them directly as you consider what it will take for people from different groups to participate in your program.

It’s long been Jo’s dream to reunite Dorriene with their extended family, to bring her into the community that Jo treasures. It appears as though, with all of the progress they make over the course of the week, Dorriene might be ready to connect with more people. But it’s likely still a stretch for her. With an awareness of that reality, the Queer Eye team chooses a physical location and an activity that feel like home to Dorriene. She gets to regain some social power by being in that setting. By hosting the reunion at a gay bar and featuring drag performers, the crew addressed the impact that a broader social inequity had on Dorriene.

The Queer Eye team recognized the need to address this power imbalance because they understand that while the rift between Jo and Dorriene is personal, it’s also situated within a larger cultural context that includes systems of power.

One of the most noteworthy elements of the episode is the way the show invites the viewer to grow this understanding, as well. The episode is edited in such a way that interpersonal scenes are always connected to one another with references to the structural forces at play. Archival footage cut throughout the episode, paired with short, direct-to-camera interstitial commentary from the hosts, situate Jo and Dorriene’s personal stories within the contexts of D.C.’s civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, and feminism.

By the time we get to the final party, the viewer has had an opportunity to repeatedly see and hear how Jo and Dorriene’s stories (and the differences that divided them) have both interpersonal and structural elements.

Healing can also happen in our connections to individuals and to movements. Being connected to histories and movements can help us feel less alone. It can connect us to resources that foster bridging, as well. As Don Martin notes in his book, Where Did Everybody Go?: Why We’re Lonely but Not Alone, the sites that nurtured movements of collective liberation–like gay bars and Black barber shops–can be powerful, effective locations for cultivating belonging more broadly. That’s not to say that every queer or Black space should be compelled to become a site for bridging work. Bridging is not everyone’s responsibility or calling. But for communities who are interested in connecting across differences, it’s nice to remember that these sites have a lot to offer, not least of which is FUN.

Practicing bridging differences can certainly make us more patient, curious, and courageous people. It can help us create a more loving and just world. The Diggs sisters and the Fab Five remind us that it can also bring more joy into our lives. As Dorriene says before going to the family reunion, “We had so much fun this week.”

His book opens with a scene from “The Waiter’s Wife,” a short story published in 1999 by acclaimed writer Zadie Smith.

In the story, friends have a heated political discussion. As Fischer summarizes: “[T]he sudden quarreling…foreshadows the pessimistic feeling of many people today that sharp political differences are not only unresolvable, but they are inescapable, like a spreading wildfire burning out of control.” But in the story, the subtle empathy of a passerby changes everything, and “instead of consigning the other person to hell or false consciousness, [the women] become more willing to share the world with each other even as they disagree.”

Of course, our American story is not as simple as longtime friends who have hit a snag. But Fisher suggests that perhaps fostering that perspective would bring us round again towards the shared emotional journey of a nation of neighbors, if not necessarily friends. Perhaps that perspective could even help us forge friendship out of our clannish feud.

Drawing on the 2018 book How Democracies Die, Fischer highlights “two norms especially important to democracy: mutual toleration, which motivates competing political parties to accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, which encourages elected leaders to regard the holding of political office as a temporary privilege, not an opportunity to seize power once and for all.” In other words, just as in relationships, democracies founder on zero-sum, win-lose biases.

Fischer calls on distinguished Harvard professor and political theorist Danielle Allen to remind us of “practices of political friendship,” and what de Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart”: “the attitudes toward one another that citizens must cultivate in their daily lives to sustain democratic institutions.” In her 2004 book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, Allen invokes the nurture of trust, which is psychologist Erik Erikson’s earliest developmental stage — critical for any relationship. As Allen writes:

Trust is not something that politicians alone can create. It grows only among citizens as they rub shoulders in daily life—in supermarkets, at movie theaters, on buses, at amusement parks, and in airports – and wherever they participate in maintaining an institution, whether a school, a church, or a business.

Allen also chaired an American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission, whose 2020 report recommended significant democratic reforms that would advance the practice of democracy that “is not a battle whose purpose is annihilation of the enemy; it is, if it works, a game of infinite repeat play that includes ever-more participants.”

Advancing this case for a vision of democracy that works, Fischer turns to Robert Mnookin’s Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight. Mnookin, former chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, notes three core democratic values exemplified by Nelson Mandela: receptivity to compromise, readiness to ask for and extend forgiveness, and empathy.

Fischer also draws on Charles Dickens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and others to underscore the importance of “nurturing the underlying relationships, values, and attitudes that sustain democracies.” The most important: becoming a person “on whom nothing is lost,” and cultivating attentiveness to relationships.

As I read these as a psychiatrist, these could be summed up as cultivating love, empathy, and compassion for both self and others, not as a panacea, but as a pathway, to our wellness and the wellness of the whole.

Wholeness must come out of our split, divided consciousnesses. In “The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned,” the novelist Rachel Kadish writes that she “asks her students to write down a phrase they find abhorrent”–and then “spend ten minutes writing a monologue in the first person spoken by a fictitious character that includes the offensive statement they have just written.” Fischer writes:

The exercise sparks an unexpected moment of empathy, as the students experience something they previously thought impossible: “repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.”

Kadish’s observations recall an influential 2013 study that suggests empathy increased when readers were emotionally transported by a short story. Emotional transportation is defined as “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative.” Losing ourselves in a story helps us identify with the story’s characters, feel for their journeys, and amplify connection to a bigger, more inclusive picture.

Surely, literature, both fiction and non-fiction, can help us feel for our own shared journeys, grow our ability to mindfully observe unfolding narrative, and help us see that our enemies are not so much people as they are qualities of mind.

Fischer concludes, “If hatred can gather momentum and spread, so can compassion and understanding. The future of our democracy depends on it.”