The last 18 months have deepened the divide amongst people across the world. These divisions have been amplified by the worsening social and economic realities of a post pandemic society. As individuals the fissures mean that households/friends are often on different sides of the divide, neither side willing to concede or find middle ground. The ubiquitous social media platforms that have made our world shrink are often the battlegrounds to perpetuate ideologies along with a liberal doses of misinformation. What does this mean for all of us (not just comms practitioners)? 

To dig deeper into this phenomenon that threatens to tear asunder the world, I spoke with Laura Osborne and Alison Goldsworthy, two of the three authors of the book "Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other". We spoke about the inspiration for the book and the collaboration amongst the three authors

👉🏾 The essential premise behind the book

👉🏾 Affective polarisation and what it means

👉🏾 The role of misinformation and uncertainty in reinforcing divisions

👉🏾 Recognition of polarisation as a business risk and preparedness

👉🏾 What leaders can do to prepare for impact of polarisation

Want to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Memorable Passages from the interview

👉🏾 Thank you for having us. 

👉🏾 That is in essence true. So Alex, our co-author, and then Laura, who's on the podcast with me today and myself. We all used to work at the consumers association 'WHICH' in the UK and just really enjoyed working with each other. And really respected each other's knowledge and talents because we were good at things, that the other person wasn't, in general. And then I went out to Stanford and that was just in the year 2016. So Brexit had happened, Trump was going on and I realised that the way that we worked from different political backgrounds and reaching across divides was really very unusual. Particularly that we all enjoyed it. And then what really tripped me onto it was, I was sat in a room at Stanford, we helped put on a course on depolarisation in the aftermath of the election, and an audience member asked some people who'd voted for Trump who were on a panel. "Can you tell me about a time you've changed your mind and why?" And you could feel the entire sort of tenor of the room change as people answered that question. So Kat who's a friend who voted for Trump, talked about how she had been raised as a Roman Catholic to believe all gay marriage was wrong and then had gone to college or uni and had a roommate who was a lesbian and was really ashamed of her prior beliefs and couldn't believe she thought it and all of that kind of thing. And when she said that the amount of people who softened was significant because they could see that engaging was worthwhile. 

👉🏾 And I was telling this story to Laura and Alex, and it began to morph into a podcast that's we should ask people with our backgrounds and politics and business and behavioural science, about a time they changed their mind and why, and 'Open Democracy' leapt at the idea they absolutely leapt at it. And as a result, we went from there to then getting a book deal and quite unusually, you hear tales of people collaborating as authors and really not getting on. And the three of us are closer now than we were when we were at 'Which'. 

I was talking to Laura the other day and saying, can we have this as a monthly supper club for the rest of our lives. It's so much fun. And I get so much wisdom from these two women that it's really valuable. So I guess that's how the book came about. Laura might want to expand and answer the bit of the question I didn't about like what the essence of Poles Apart is

👉🏾 Thanks Ali. And I think that's absolutely right. We were, I think really pleasantly surprised about how we managed to work together all the way through this in a way that was really constructive and where we all made each other better at what we do. And I think when we started to write the book, what we really wanted to do, it might sound a bit hackneyed, was something that was quite solutions focused.

👉🏾 So I think there's a lot of work on polarisation, you know, excellent work on why it is such a difficult issue for society to grapple with. Not so much of it that's written in a way that a wide audience can interact with it. And perhaps not so much of it, that's written in a way that has a big focus on what you can do about it in your lives. You know, accepting that there are these kinds of system-level issues, what each of us can do to make a difference everywhere we interact with it. So I think, for us, the real premise behind the book was what can you do to bridge those divides? Not just accepting that they exist, but what might we do about it.

👉🏾 So if I pick up a bit there and Ali I might hand back to you as well. I think the central premise behind it, Sudha was that, the divides can be bridged, but it's not easy. You know that there is not one quick easy silver bullet for all of the divisions that we see around us, that it's a complex phenomenon, but that we can break it down.

👉🏾 And that actually, when we do that, each of us individually can start to pick some of our beliefs apart and especially our beliefs about other people and about other groups. And that we can learn a lot about how we try to persuade other people. You know, what we should really do if we genuinely want to have a conversation rather than an argument about something, you know, and the tools that can be applied to that. I think a bit for us as communicators as well, reflecting on where we might have in the past, inadvertently made some of that worse. You know, Ally I don't know if you want to talk a bit about your campaigning experienced there, but I think, you know, it was understanding where some of the divisions that you might deliberately create can backfire, become problematic.

👉🏾 And I think it's sort of exactly what Laura said. So I made my name as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser. You know, at which I built a base of millions of people who I could get to take an action almost whenever I asked them to do. And as I realised sometimes some of those actions are like, from emailing your MP, to sharing something on social media, to signing friends up, you know some of them were extremely worthwhile. Occasionally I might, and comms professionals, who listen to this, might have known it was a slightly weaker requests that I was making. But I would still see hundreds of thousands of people doing it. And that was great, it made me feel really powerful and I thought we were bringing about change and often we were. And then when Trump started to happen and when Brexit happened, I realised that maybe I hadn't always been as responsible as I should have been, or that people could build these huge movements, which is much easier in 2021 than it was a hundred years ago because of tech and none of us ever really thought about, were we creating any damage with what we were doing.

👉🏾 And the answer was that we probably were, and that also started me thinking, cause I was a bit inclined to be like, oh God, these people, all these other people, it's everybody else's fault. And then I was like, actually, It's a bit my fault. In fact, the more I thought about it, It was really quite a lot my fault, what was going on and if you don't all have a really good, critical mass of people, respecting norms or rules of engagement, then things actually start to fray quite quickly. As people are seeing as polarisation is rising in general, around the world where you are in India, where Laura is in London and where I am in the US are, are all places where polarisation is rising to very dangerous levels. 

👉🏾 So, I think often when you think about polarisation, we think quite narrowly about our views on particular issues. And I think the question historically when talking about it's been focused very much on how far apart those views are, but actually as Ali touched on talking about those groups that were being created before, identity is also a really important part of that. And those issue-based differences, quite quickly become differences of social identity. And when that happens, there's obviously a kind of feelings, more than facts, aspect of that. And people increasingly dislike and distrust those from opposing sides, irrespective of whether they actually disagree on a specific issue.

👉🏾 And once we group in that way, those kind of labels that we adopt for the us and them groups come to act as proxies for all kinds of differences and beliefs and values and behaviour that actually go far beyond the groups themselves. And it's this that's known as affective polarisation. So it's that sense that it's moved into identity. It's very much moved into us and them and the us and them don't actually really have to disagree on very much, but there can still be very significant divisions. 

👉🏾 So it's a big question, isn't it? And I think maybe I'll answer it in two parts which you need, the first is given that how affective prioritisation operates, It's not particularly difficult, as Ali said to activate those divides. They are very emotional, they are much more present and palpable when we're in times of uncertainty or when we feel under threat.

👉🏾 So you know the sort of perfect storm of a pandemic and economic uncertainty. There's lots of things that make people vulnerable to the activation of those groupish divisions. And I think what misinformation does, is both obviously mislead people to think in some cases, you know, the divides are more explicit and worse than they are. But in others it worsens that sense. And so we know people respond much more strongly to negative news, to bad news, and it will trigger certain responses. And a lot of what that does is just reinforce those group identities. So there are real kind of risks there. I know Ali, you did some really good work on fake news for the book. I don't know if you want to give a couple of examples there.

👉🏾 On fake news, which is one it's really hard to up-to-date a position once you've taken it. And once you've taken it publicly, which was one of the challenges of misinformation, is often it's designed to be particularly triggering and not always by terribly genuine actors who want to do things. So one of the classic examples is, you know, foreign interference in elections, they could have a preferred candidate and people often think nowadays in terms of Surkov who is not quite as influential as he was, but in Russia and how he deliberately would fund extremes to try and get sort of misinformation out there. There's some evidence that, that happened in Scotland done, certainly in the U S. 

👉🏾 So that's one of the problems with misinformation, another thing actually is people they don't want to fall for misinformation. People find it really hard to believe that they have fallen for it and they particularly find it hard to believe people like them will fall for it. But the people from the other group all of them, I never fall for misinformation. It's all those other stupid people, for that other group that will fall for it. Almost all of us will fall for it in some way at some point and it can be a bit embarrassing when you do, because everyone likes to think that it doesn't affect us and it does. And that's one of the really big ways that it plays into polarisation and could be very challenging how it can amplify our existing beliefs. And suddenly you can end up down a spiral holding onto something very suddenly, which is really tricky to undo. There are some ways that Laura has talked a lot about solutions that you can help to reduce the effect of misinformation, which is one, partly to become better at spotting it and falling for it.

👉🏾 There's a very neat game that some guys at Cambridge uni did called the 'bad news quiz' which asks people to go through and try and spot fake news and in a sort of funny and humorous way.  And it sort of gets you to try and spot which might be a fake account or where, a message might've been taken over by someone else. And what's really neat about this game is that one acts as an inoculation against you doing it. So you start to get better at spotting things in the future, but also the role of humour that they play in it. And if you're able to laugh at yourself or find something funny, it's much easier to detach yourself from your prior belief and to generate a bit of empathy either for yourself or for others and go from there. And so that's how it goes with misinformation, of course, the concept of misinformation itself or disinformation, both of them slightly different things, but they're not new either. Again, they've been used for a very long time for often nefarious purposes. Let's put it that way.

👉🏾 And that's where this question about people by the time they changed their mind its so important right? And because people find it so hard to remember a time that they'd done so, or that they might've been taken in by misinformation or something like that, because this is slightly simplifying it, but it activates the same parts of your brain that can feel pain almost. And so that can be physically painful almost to admit that you've got things wrong and to change your mind if you're not very careful about things, and then also we're quite programmed to forget that we do do it because we don't like to hold that dissonance in our heads. And that can be very challenging for people as individuals and for leaders and for how. 

👉🏾 Children are great bonder across divides. So one of the things you might want to talk about in a second is, you know, how do you try and solve things, people you might disagree with? And one of them is to find out something you have in common with them that you don't otherwise and talk about that first so you kind of fool your brain into thinking you share a group and kids and motherhood. And suddenly you bond across divides and it can be really powerful. So yes big up for the kids, though not necessarily at 3 am when they are keeping me up. 

👉🏾 So I'll kick off and I'll bring Ali in, in a second, I'm sure. But I think probably the first key thing to say with the work on genetics is that, there is no specific gene that exists for a particular political leaning, you know, socialism or conservative or more liberalism. It doesn't really work like that, but what our genes do, do is dictate our sensitivity to things. And so our genetic makeup and the way it interacts with our environments does shape the way that we, both perceive the world and respond to it. So there is some really interesting work as you mentioned there, Sudha about epigenetics and how all of those processes work together. And I think one thing that really stuck with me was the role of our regulator genes in this process. So, for those who don't know much about genetics, which included me before we did the book, the differences in our structural genes or what it explains, the differences in how we look and the difference in our regulator genes partially explain the differences in how we behave. So it's really the way that the two of them interact. And so the interaction of those genes can influence how we respond to the environment around us. And, obviously, all of this stuff comes from when we were living as prehistoric creatures, trying to survive in the wild and forming groups and a lot of this stems back from those kinds of early days of humanity, but it does help to help to explain some of why we can be more or less prone to engaging in different types of groups. Why we can be more or less sort of small C conservative, and how that interacts with our environment.

👉🏾 And, I think if Alex our co-author were here, that's the other point she would probably make is that how critical that wider environment is in terms of those interactions. Because what you experienced and how you are raised and the people that you grow up around, they will all shape some of how you think. And there's a really interesting statistic actually on how increasingly focused we are on wanting our children to marry people who have a similar political outlook to ourselves. So, 30 years ago only 5% of Americans cared whether their child married someone of a different political.......... may be difficult is the one different.

👉🏾 But today that's nearly half and about a third of Democrats who say they'd be actively displeased if their child married, outside the sort of preferred, political party, which I think shows you how strong some of these kinds of political partisan in groups are becoming. Ali I don't know if you want to add to that.

👉🏾 I think this was one of the bits of the book that as we were researching, it made me more uncomfortable if I'm honest. And I just had to learn to live with that discomfort because I very much wanted to be like, of course, I'm in charge of my own views. My genetics doesn't shape my politics. I'm my own woman, I'm really independent. And actually all the evidence is that's not the case. It's an interaction as Laura said of the environment and the genes that you have. And one of the example that we use in the book a sort of a classic one, though a slightly more extreme one is, if any of your listeners have seen the film Free Solo, which is about a guy called Alex Honnold, who's a climber and he climbed El Capitan, which is a 3000 foot or a 1000 meterish climb in a slab of granite rock in Yosemite national park here without ropes. He just went straight up it and it's an astonishingly brilliant film. But, Alex doesn't have a normal response to risk as you might imagine in that thing, a bit of the brain called the amygdala for him, it just doesn't really activate from the environment. But the amygdala, which you know, is like, oh, I'm feeling a bit threatened by this, or I want to try and conserve things or do things differently. That can be activated very differently in different people.

👉🏾 And of course then if you're more conservative and you feel more threatened, the clue is in the name, you also tend to vote more conservative and go from that, and that will interact with your viewpoint and that makes perfect sense to me. But is also, as I say, slightly uncomfortable for someone who had previously been like no, free wills how we do things. What it is, is that you might be someone who is naturally more inclined maybe to collaborate or to like say to respond to risk and to threat differently And you can see that in children or in other people, and in the differences in how they behave already.

👉🏾 Well, well, that's a great question. So uncertainty can generally, it's not always the case, but uncertainty generally amplifies divides. And if people think about it, as you know,...