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In this installment of a series on liberalism, Benjamin Klutsey, the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, talks with Daniel Stone, an associate professor of economics at Bowdoin College, about his new book, “Undue Hate: A Behavioral Economic Analysis of Hostile Polarization in U.S. Politics and Beyond [ [link removed] ].” They discuss how economics can measure our beliefs against reality, the concept of biased dislike, the dangers of overprecision and over-optimism, why government leaders should be working to fight polarization and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: Well, today we have Daniel Stone [ [link removed] ]. He’s an economist. He’s an associate professor of economics at Bowdoin College in Maine. His research focuses on belief formation, political media and polarization. His latest book is titled “Undue Hate: A Behavioral Economic Analysis of Hostile Polarization in U.S. Politics and Beyond [ [link removed] ].”
Daniel, thank you for joining us.
DANIEL STONE: Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to be here.
Economics and Polarization
KLUTSEY: Now, we’ll get right into it. When it comes to analyzing the issue of polarization, what do economists bring to the table in helping us understand the nature of polarization? What’s different that economics brings to the table that other disciplines don’t necessarily bring?
STONE: Sure. I think what we bring, and what I’ve tried to bring, is—obviously, we tend to focus on quantitative analysis, and we quantify things. For better or for worse, that’s the nature of our discipline. I think a benefit of this can be that it allows us to make certain statements with precision that we couldn’t otherwise.
What I try to do in the book is argue that something like even interpersonal feelings, which even behavioral economists [ [link removed] ] in the past haven’t really thought this is something that economics had much to say about, that it could really tackle. I argue that actually our feelings—I wouldn’t say that our feelings could be quantified, per se, but our feelings can actually be wrong in an objective sense because our feelings are ultimately, to a large extent, based on beliefs that we have about the type of people that we’re holding those feelings toward. Specifically, beliefs about who they are, meaning the actions that they take, that they’ve taken in the past, that they will take in the future; the opinions they hold. These are the things that result from the character traits that drive our feelings.
Because these beliefs can ultimately be right or wrong to different degrees. For example—an example I talk about in the book, a simple example might be a belief that I hold about, say, the amount of money you donate to charity or your probability of donating to charity if I were to ask you to donate. In terms of just actual amount of money, there’s a certain amount that you give. If I overestimate that and I like people that give a lot, I might actually like you more than I should. If I underestimate, I like you less than I should.
It goes well beyond charity. In general, our feelings are driven by our beliefs about various actions we think people are going to take. Even if I have no idea what actions are important to you or what actions you use as a basis for forming your feelings, whatever your criteria are for your feelings, your beliefs may or may not be accurate about the types of actions other people are going to take. Therefore, your feelings could actually be mistaken.
I think econ helps to clarify how feelings can be right or wrong to different degrees.
Biased Dislike
KLUTSEY: I think you’re touching on something that you spend a lot of time on in the book, talking about specifically “biased dislike.” I’d love for you to elaborate on what that is and how biased dislike relates to something like affective polarization bias.
STONE: Yes. The first point is that, OK, if I like people that donate to charity and I underestimate how much you give, I’ll dislike you too much. Then I acknowledge that it’s possible: What if I just happen to catch you on a bad day, and you didn’t donate the one day I happen to have an eye on you? Given that you didn’t donate once, it might be reasonable or rational for me to infer you’re not much of a donor.
If I don’t like you as a result of the very limited data I have, I wouldn’t be irrational per se; I would just have some misleading data. But it’s also possible that I overreacted to this very limited data. Maybe I saw you get the chance to donate once, and anyone can have a bad day and just say, “I don’t feel like donating”: I’m not in a good mood, or maybe I’m strapped for cash today, or for whatever reason you don’t donate.
How much is too much? Maybe I should bump you down in your generosity just a little bit. But if I was to jump to the conclusion that you’re just an all-around bad person who never gives or something like that, that would clearly be an excess, an irrational interpretation of information.
So biased dislike, as I define it, is overreaction to the negative information we have about others, causing us to dislike others more than we should, by our own standards. Again, I’m agnostic about why people should or shouldn’t like each other. Whatever your reason is—criteria are—if you overreact to the information you have or misinterpret it, causing you to dislike others too much, that’s biased dislike.
Then I make this claim that, in general, when people disagree, especially when the disagreement is political but even when it’s not political, that this disagreement tends to lead to biased dislike. In other words, people interpret disagreements as negative signals about the other person’s character. In fact, we interpret these disagreements as more negative than they should be, rationally speaking. We overreact to these disagreements. These disagreements make us think the other person is worse, by our standards, than they really are.
This especially happens with political disagreements. But I argue that this is why disagreement so often leads to hostility and interpersonal animosity and people just disliking each other, because we infer—we misinterpret the disagreement to mean the other person is a worse person than they really are.
KLUTSEY: Which is what gets us to the affective polarization.
STONE: Exactly, yes. Affective polarization is when we dislike—it’s normally used to refer to political hostility, hostility toward those we disagree with politically or toward the other political party. I use the term to refer to polarization of feelings or hostility in disagreements in general.
So if you and I, we’re neighbors and I don’t like the way you mow your lawn or don’t mow your lawn, and I have a word with you about it: I say, “Can you mow your lawn a little more often?” You say, “Well, actually it’s better for my little backyard ecosystem if I let the grass grow up.”
If I think, “OK, this guy’s a jerk; he’s not paying attention to the neighborhood’s aesthetics; he’s actually making an excuse for his laziness,” or something like that—if I jump to the conclusion, if I over-infer from this disagreement, that would be what I call affective polarization bias or excessive affective polarization: excessive dislike as a result of the disagreement. Can happen with any type of disagreement.
How Polarized Are We, Really?
KLUTSEY: Right. Now let’s step back for a second and talk about polarization in general. Are our concerns about polarization overblown? In reality, is it that we’re not as polarized? Is it just people making too much of this issue? What is the reality of the situation?
STONE: Yes, that’s a huge, important question. That if I was to say that I knew the answer to that question with confidence, you should call me out for overconfidence. Nobody knows for sure.
It’s something that a lot of researchers and a lot of insiders are debating and trying to figure out. I think there are a lot of people who are very, very concerned about the degree of polarization. There are other people who think that actually it’s not polarization per se that is the cause of some of these other, bigger problems that our country faces, or that it’s overstated.
Based on what I know, based on years of trying to think about this and working on the topic, it sure seems like polarization of feelings has grown to an extreme level. There are some major threats to some important aspects of what make our country work to the extent that it does.
But I want to acknowledge that we’ve been muddling through, more or less, and we’ve had a number of minor crises and semi-major crises, but we are still the leading superpower and the economy is doing well and so on. So maybe we’ll keep muddling along, or maybe something else will shake us up and we’ll figure things out.
I and a lot of other researchers do think it’s a root cause of the threats to democracy (to the extent that we think there are threats to democracy), to gridlock in Congress and dysfunction in policymaking and other issues that the country has. I’m hesitant because the data is not unambiguous. There are people out there who argue that affective polarization is not that closely linked to anti-democratic attitudes, to people saying things like—willingness to, however you measure anti—there’s controversy there too. There are concerns about the state of democracy: Both sides are accusing the other of trying to steal elections and things like that.
There are some people who have argued that the link is unclear, but I think that’s mostly a function of this being a difficult-to-measure thing. There’s plenty of evidence consistent with the intuition. I think most insiders who have firsthand experience, or not even firsthand experience: anyone who keeps up with the media a bit and knows what’s—have the intuition that there are some serious, serious concerns. But we have to be careful not to overstate it because it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy where if you think that things are too much of a mess, that can actually lead people to . . .
If I think the other side really hates my guts, I’m not going to even try to work with them at all. I’m not going to ever give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m not going to want to—I think it is still possible to overstate the degree of the problem, so we have to be careful about that as well. There’s a lot of good news: The large majority of the country is still not—well, gosh. There’s a large chunk of the country, I think, that is not too polarized. Is it a large majority or not? I’m not sure.
There are a lot of people out there that just want everyone else to settle down. I think the super-polarized people, that’s still a fairly small fraction, but it’s an important fraction. They have a lot of power.
Effects of Meta Perceptions
KLUTSEY: Now, what happens with meta perceptions, how we feel others feel about us, when you inform people about true out-group judgments? I think that’s a major phenomenon that’s happening and fueling some of the polarization that we’re seeing.
STONE: Right. So I make this claim that we’re too affectively polarized, that we dislike the other side more than we should—and by our own standards—and how can you show that? In one way, one type of evidence that demonstrates this is this evidence of overly negative meta perceptions, or this idea that we overestimate—yes, there is real hostility between the two sides, but each side overestimates it.
I think if we’re on opposite sides of a debate, if I’m on the right and you’re on the left, I might think that on a scale of 0 and 100, where 100 is the warmest feeling and 0 is the coldest, I think you would give me a 1 out of 100, and actually you’d give me a 20. So 20 is pretty cold, but if I think you give me a 1, I’m way too pessimistic. That is going to make me dislike you more, right? Because I think I’m a decent guy . . .
In general, people think they should be liked and they shouldn’t be disliked. So if I overestimate how much you dislike me, that’s going to make me think you’re worse of a person than you really are, because if you dislike me that much, there must be something wrong with you.
These overly negative meta perceptions are evidence of excessive dislike. There is evidence that when these are corrected, this reduces the hostility that we feel toward each other.
It’s a little hard to show in an experiment. People are always on guard to some extent, so there can be—the realism of things like this is always, if I say, “How much do you hate me, 0 to 100?” or, “How much do you like or dislike—and how much do you think I dislike you?” and you guess, and you guess 1. And I say, “Guess what? The truth is 20. So now how much do you hate me?”
There is a little bit of artificiality to the context, but I think we can be confident that if we spread the word that, yes, polarization is significant now, but it’s actually still overestimated, and that is a cause of why the polarization is so high now—we think the other side hates us more than they really do. If we can spread the word about that, that would be a way to cut down on the actual hostility. There is evidence for that, and I think it’s common sense too.
KLUTSEY: We think the other side hates us more. We also think that the other side is more extreme in their policy views.
Educating People About Meta Perceptions
KLUTSEY: I saw this really wonderful presentation by Nour Kteily [ [link removed] ] at Northwestern University. He shows these interesting experiments where they would ask Democrats what they think Republicans will do in this scenario. They say, “Hey, they have the opportunity to release the vaccines maybe six weeks prior to the 2020 election. If they knew for sure it was going to help Donald Trump to win the 2020 election, what would they do?”
There’s a huge estimation of Democrats saying that—I’m forgetting the numbers, but they estimate somewhere around 90% or so of Republicans will absolutely go for this. If you actually ask Republicans, it’s only maybe 10% or even less. Then when you reveal the numbers in real time, you see the surprise and all of that.
I think that that’s interesting. Are we to infer from that that we should engage in these educational efforts to show more of these meta perceptions and how they affect our ability to correctly assess how the other side thinks?
STONE: Yes, yes. We overestimate how much they dislike us, and we overestimate how different our opinions are on policies and on values. This is sometimes called “false polarization,” and there’s a ton of evidence for it. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense because it’s the extremists that get most of the attention in the media and so on. We see these representatives of each side that are not actually representatives. The loudest voices are the most extreme, not the most representative.
It’s very human to just take the examples that are featured in the media, not because they’re accurate representations, but because they’re interesting. And they’re interesting because they are so extreme. It’s human to take those at face value and to not say, “Well, the media’s just grabbing a distorted example.”
Again, this is another thing that education could help a ton with: Let people know the tweet that goes viral from the other side, that’s probably more extreme than the average person on the other side. The congressperson who gets the most attention is probably more extreme. The media personality gets more attention. And on actual policy issues to show how much agreement . . .
I mean, there is a lot of disagreement on a lot of issues, but there’s a lot more agreement than we realize. That defuses affective polarization as well.
Overprecision Bias
KLUTSEY: Now, in the book you talk about “overprecision” and how that is the most widespread or ubiquitous bias in the context of affective polarization. Why is that?
STONE: Polarization has been written about a ton. But we have yet to figure it out, that’s for sure. Besides arguing that, in the first place, even affective polarization can be right or wrong (it can be excessive), then there’s this big question of what causes it. In behavioral economics—it’s not just behavioral, in psychology as well. I think this is especially common in behavioral econ: There’s a distinction between two types of overconfidence.
Overconfidence: Everyone’s familiar with the—it’s not a technical term, per se, but it is something studied extensively in the social sciences. I think there are two major types, and most economists, I think, would agree. One is overconfidence in what we wish to be true, and that’s certainly important. So “wishful thinking”—it’s sometimes called “motivated reasoning” or sometimes “over-optimism.”
Another type is overconfidence in what we know or overconfidence in our knowledge. That could even be something we don’t wish to be true. I might think, like, maybe I’m a student who’s struggling in math, and I might think, “I’ll never get better at math, even if I work really hard and try hard.” Those beliefs are probably not accurate. I’m probably actually overly certain in my own inability to improve in math. That would be an example of what I call overprecision. Well, not just me: It’s what is often called overprecision now; it refers to overly precise beliefs.
I think just about all the other biases that contribute to affective polarization bias contribute to overprecision, make us think we know more than we really do. Wishful thinking will make us think we know more than we really do.
But sometimes—we love to hate the other side, and we think they’re terrible and evil, and we get a little kick out of that. Maybe that is related to motivated reasoning. But sometimes we are truly terrified and fearful and angry and so on at something we hear about what the other side of the spectrum has done. It’s not something we wish to be true, but we still believe it. We believe it even when it’s more complicated than it seems.
It’s almost trite. Everyone knows to say, “Things are more complicated than you realize.” It’s cliche; it’s trite. We’ve all heard it a million times, and yet we still so often think we understand things better than—we forget that it’s more complicated than we realize. We jump to the conclusion. Whatever opinion comes to mind, if it makes sense to us, we just assume it’s true.
I try to push back against my own tendency to overprecision. I would have loved to answer your question, “Is polarization really that big a deal?” I’d love to say, “Yes, it definitely is. Polarization is the heart, the cause of all of our country’s problems. If we don’t do something about it, we’re totally screwed.” But I’m trying to take some lessons from my own work and recognize that things are . . .
Basically, how do you know when things are more complex? Sometimes we can really know the truth with a high degree of certainty, with a lot of precision. You ask me two plus two: I can be pretty darn sure that is four. How should we know when to question our judgment? Well, when there are a lot of people out there who have a different point of view and those people are reasonably educated and thoughtful, doesn’t mean they’re right all the time, but if they think about things differently, that’s a good sign that I’m not seeing the whole picture and that things are more complicated than I realize.
Of course, that’s the case in politics today. On both sides, there are a lot of people on the other side who think about things very differently, which means neither side should be very confident about much. Yet the fact that they are so confident suggests that there’s a lot of overprecision in beliefs.
Over-Optimism
KLUTSEY: It’s interesting you were a little self-reflective or introspective there, because I was going to ask you which bias you think you’re most susceptible to.
[laughter]
Because you do say that our biases are driven by misunderstandings and mistaken beliefs, but once we understand how mistaken we are, we can reduce affective polarization. I’m wondering, is that a bias of over-optimism, perhaps?
[laughter]
STONE: I think I might be overly optimistic about the degree to which depolarization is—I am optimistic about depolarization potential with most people. I think you get most people who disagree together, and they talk and they get to know each other a bit, they’re going to get depolarized. I think there’s a lot of evidence. There’s just a ton of research. This is consistent with what’s sometimes called contact theory: the idea that contact with those we have prejudice toward or disagree with reduces negative feelings toward those people.
It’s not just wishful thinking on my part, but you might—sometimes you just got to fight, you got to go to war. There are certain situations where you can’t really negotiate, and you just got to stand up for yourself. And the bully, if you give the bully too much of the benefit of the doubt and keep being nice to the bully, they’re just going to keep punching you in the face and taking your lunch money.
I lean toward thinking the bully can be reasoned with more than most people, but maybe I overdo that due to my own optimism or motivated reasoning. I’m thinking that, wanting to believe that most people really are pretty decent. Again, I’m aware of bias maybe making me believe that, but I believe it because there’s a lot of evidence supporting it as well.
Most people are pretty decent. There’s a chunk of the population that does have some true, deeply ingrained negative characteristics. A lot of the people in politics have these, they call it the “dark triad” personality [ [link removed] ]: Machiavellianism and selfishness and things like that. Especially among politicians, these characteristics are very common. I don’t know that they’re more common on one side of politics than the other.
But most people don’t have these things, but there are some people that do, and maybe I underestimate it due to wishful thinking.
The Role of Media
KLUTSEY: Really interesting.
Now, you spend some time in the book on the information ecosystem and the extent to which that contributes to affective polarization bias. Can you unpack that a little bit?
STONE: That’s another big topic of debate among researchers, is this question of how have media and information contributed to polarization. Again, the commonsense intuition is that a lot of people are in echo chambers and this has contributed to polarization, that social media especially has contributed. The contrarian academic take is that echo chambers are not so common and that it’s more complicated.
Again, I lean more toward the commonsense intuition side. I think the data and the measurement are just catching up with common sense. The media ecosystem has changed a lot over not just the last 10, 20 years but the last few decades in the U.S. First of all, there was the advent of partisan talk radio in the ’80s, especially on the right. Then, in the ’90s, we got partisan cable news. Then, in the 2000s, online news developed: blogs and websites and then social media after that.
It’s not just social media, but people have had more and more opportunities to get news that doesn’t make an attempt to truly be fair and balanced and adhere to the norm of objectivity and instead really acts as an advocate for one side of the spectrum.
It’s human. People like this. People like being told that their political leaning is correct. People like hearing the other side bad-mouthed. People like—this is why this has been successful in the market, in the sense the media market has become—it was dominated by a few major broadcast networks, TV networks, from the ’50s through the ’80s. These were far from perfect, but they were relatively moderate, of course. And dominated by newspapers, which also, for a variety of reasons, adhere to this norm of objectivity. And we don’t have that anymore. In general, people get the news that tells them what they want to hear.
But then online, we do have a lot of evidence that on platforms like Twitter, X, people do encounter the other side to a fair degree, but they’re encountering almost the worst of the other side. This is what the sociologist Chris Bail calls the social media prism [ [link removed] ]. It’s the idea that we’re not necessarily in an echo chamber on Twitter where we just only get information consistent with our own—we only hear voices from our own tribe or from our own party. We do hear some voices on the other side, but they’re distorted. They’re a distorted representation of the other side. They’re the angriest. They’re the meanest. They’re the most hateful.
We see the other side and we see the worst of the other side, which is maybe even worse than not seeing the other side at all.
So that’s contributed. And then the other major aspect of the information ecosystem that’s changed is that outside of media, we interact with people with different political views less than we used to because we’re less likely to live next to people with different political views. Our neighbors used to be more politically diverse. Our towns used to be more politically diverse, our counties, our states.
We’ve become more politically homogeneous geographically. We don’t encounter people—our workplaces have become more politically segregated. Certain firms are known to be liberal firms; there’s conservative firms. Our friends and family are more politically one-sided because we use politics to determine who to date more often and even to determine who to be friends with: Friendships end over political disagreements and things like that.
KLUTSEY: I’m sure you’ve come across the data on how negative attitudes toward interparty marriages [ [link removed] ] are higher than interfaith and interracial and other things.
STONE: Yes, yes. The good news is people are more tolerant in some ways, but our intolerance for different political views has grown. That’s led us to be less likely to get a diverse array of information. We’re less likely to hear about the best arguments for why the other side does what they do. It’s amazing what people don’t hear about. You can pick up snippets here and there.
Echo chambers are real and are a big part of the story, in my mind.
The Role of the Two-Party System
KLUTSEY: Now, would America benefit from a multiparty system? I’m thinking that the case is made that because we have more of a binary system, you only have two options. If the options are very, very polarized, it fosters more and more polarization.
STONE: I do. I think so. I think it’s a good question. I think the answer is yes, probably, but here’s where I don’t have too much to say because I’m not a political scientist. I’m a behavioral economist, which means I’m a wannabe psychologist who does psychology with a bit of math. I quantify psychology. Figuring out the political structures and institutions which are best is truly a topic of political science.
I talk a little bit about this in my book, and I very much respect the opinion of political scientist Lee Drutman, who is pushing very hard for this particular reform [ [link removed] ] or doing whatever we can to enable more parties to be viable. It makes sense to me.
I think there is also evidence that even in countries with multiparty systems, affective polarization is still a problem and even a growing problem, probably partly due to social media and things like that. It’s not a panacea, but it makes a lot of sense.
It also just makes sense that in a two-party system, the parties are not going to do a great job of representing the views of many voters whose opinions and values aren’t going to neatly fall into one side of a binary. Most people are going to have some opinions that go with one party and some with the other. Whereas with multiple parties, we’re going to have a better chance of mapping—coming up with—parties that people are comfortable identifying with and feeling like those parties represent their bundle of social and economic beliefs and opinions.
It just seems better for representative democracy’s sake. I think it is likely to help with affective polarization because it would reduce the zero-sum binary competition where the two sides are truly—each side has an incentive or an interest in demonizing the other.
If it’s Coke against Pepsi, the more evil Pepsi is, the better choice Coke is going to look. When it comes to the cola market, if you demonize Pepsi too much, people will just say, “I don’t want to buy either of your products; you’re both jerks.” In politics, some voters will say, “I don’t want to buy either of your products” and not vote, but one of those products is going to win.
They don’t have to worry too much about losing people from the market altogether. They just need to look good compared to the competition. Often, bad-mouthing the competition is the most effective strategy in a two-party system, whereas in a multiparty system, I think it is negative. The negative politics is going to be a little bit less effective in that sense.
Teaching Intellectual Humility
KLUTSEY: Right.
Now, in the book, you touch on civic education briefly and ways in which we can improve upon it to help foster depolarization. But I’m wondering—and I think there are quite a few professors who are part of our audience here—how do you teach intellectual humility in your classroom? Do you outline for them a lot of these biases and train them in seeing the biases? Is that how to do it?
STONE: Yes, this is another subject of debate. To what extent can we teach these biases? Can we de-bias people? Can we depolarize through education? Again, I’m optimistic based on what I know, but I might be overly optimistic.
I haven’t taught a class just on intellectual humility. Those classes do exist. I do talk about it in my behavioral economics teaching.
I think awareness helps, and you can model it, but you can also call people out for it. It’s funny and instructive when a student—or anyone; it’s especially fun to pick on people online or something, get a good video clip from Twitter of someone being completely certain about something that maybe they’re wrong about—and noting how easy it is to be overconfident.
I do an exercise where—there’s a cool website. (I can send you the link [ [link removed] ] later if you’re interested.) It’s a bunch of general-knowledge questions. They’re all true/false, A or B answers. In addition to asking for the answer, it asks the participant to state their level of confidence in the answer between 50—the lowest level is 50%. (Since it’s a coin flip, even if you’re clueless, you should think you have a 50% chance of being right.) And the highest is 100%. I created a little game where students are incentivized to both answer as many questions correctly as they can but also to report their confidence levels as accurately as possible.
If they—in their minds, they think they have an 80% chance of getting a question right—if I’ve done it as well as I think I have—so that they say their confidence is 80%. Then, at the end, we look at how many questions did you get right and what was your average confidence score. If your confidence levels were accurate, then those numbers should be the same. If you got 80% right, you should have had 80% confidence on average.
People, of course, generally, even when they’re incentivized to report the confidence accurately and they’re not doing it to show off—it’s anonymous and so on—their confidence levels tend to be higher than their accuracy levels. Not tremendously higher, but this is a behavioral econ class, so people are on guard a little bit: so something like 5%. People will have an average confidence of 75%, average accuracy of 70%.
I think if people hadn’t been trained in behavioral econ and so on, the average confidence would be 80% or 85%, and they’d only get 70% right.
Even with all this discussion, there are students who say they got questions wrong that they reported having 100% confidence about. Of course, if you say you’re 100% sure and you got it wrong, you must have been overconfident. That inevitably happens.
Exercises like that—hey, I used to be more overconfident than I am now. Maybe I’m still overconfident. You can go too far the other direction. That’s a tricky thing, too. You can be annoyingly underconfident or annoyingly uncertain because no one wants to hear, “Oh gosh, I’m not sure about anything.” Finding the sweet spot is hard.
KLUTSEY: Was it Harry Truman who said, “Please give me a one-armed economist [ [link removed] ],” because every economist presented said, “Hey, on the one hand, he can do this; on the other hand, he can do this”? He just wanted someone to give him an option.
STONE: Well, maybe too many of us have just one hand now—or two.
You can make a mistake either way, it’s true. It’s not easy, but in general, the more common mistake is overconfidence, and so pushing against it: It’d be a better world if everyone said, “On the one hand; on the other hand.” I would love to hear our leading politicians refer to their two hands so often.
A Top-Down Solution?
KLUTSEY: Now, toward the end of the book, you talk about—very briefly, you mentioned this: that maybe we need a depolarization Manhattan Project. I wanted to ask you about that. What would that look like?
STONE: I’m afraid this is just not going to happen, right? But who knows. You might be familiar with a guy named Zach Elwood [ [link removed] ]. He’s a former professional poker player. (Or some of your listeners.) He’s also written a book on depolarization, and he’s a poker player, which—poker players, the successful ones, tend to be very psychologically savvy. In order to be a very good poker player, you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them, and understand people. You have to be a good intuitive statistician and not be overconfident.
He’s good about this stuff. We tried writing a piece [ [link removed] ] where we pushed for a depolarization Manhattan Project, meaning asking the leader—it’s great to say we should all talk about depolarization more and we should all try to be a little more intellectually humble, but that’s not going to save the country in the near term. Grassroots stuff helps, but I think we need top-down, centralized action to achieve major change in a short period of time.
Why aren’t we talking about that? The reason is, of course, that politicians have stronger incentives to demonize the other side than to say, “We’re both at some fault here,” that it’s the system and polarization, which both sides have contributed to, is the big issue. Politicians probably don’t think that that’s a political winner. But I think they might be wrong.
This could go either way, and maybe we just need a politician to take one for the team, to say, “This is not a political winner, but we’re going to address this.”
How could they possibly address it? That’s another big question, but they could at least try. How would they try? They would say—they do what they do, which is executive orders (if you’re the president) and task forces and allocating chunks of money, which would seem huge to people like us, like billions of dollars, but it’s chump change in the context of the national budget, federal budgets. They could allocate $10 billion to depolarization, I’m sure, very, very easily if they wanted to.
Who knows what they’d come up with? I’m not suggesting that I would be involved in this endeavor—truly. There are a lot of people out there working on this stuff that could come up with a lot of great ideas, come up with people on both sides, come up with a system where you get both sides to buy in.
Is it impossible? Maybe, but you don’t know until you try. They haven’t tried.
KLUTSEY: But I think there’s some of this stuff going on at the political level. Governors Cox and Polis, I think they have this—what do you call it—Disagree Better initiative [ [link removed] ], going around the country and having conversations with each other.
STONE: Yes, that, but times 100 or times 1,000, scaled up big-time. Why isn’t Biden talking about that? It’s getting late for him to do it, but Biden could do it: Disagree Better at the federal level.
I don’t know what form it would take, but we have the resources as a country. We can mobilize major resources. It’s a big problem, and yet we’re not even attempting to mobilize resources. We think we should.
A Call to Action
KLUTSEY: So, short of that, as we come to a close on this conversation, what would be your call to action? If you can’t get the depolarization Manhattan Project going, what would be your call to action to folks who are listening or folks who would read the transcript?
STONE: What can we do? We can all attempt to depolarize a little bit in our daily lives. We can try. I’m hesitant to say that we should try to discuss and debate political issues with those we disagree with. I do think one thing we can and should do is maintain good interpersonal relationships with people who have different political views. If you’ve got an uncle who’s on the other side of the spectrum, be kind; don’t blow them off. If you’ve got someone in your office with different politics, just be decent, because I do think the cold feelings are such a big problem.
Now, if we can show the other side that actually there’s no need to hate each other, we can get along: that could potentially be helpful. It could add up; it could snowball. Anyone who has a different political view from you, who might be inclined to dislike you as a result: Do what you can. You don’t need to kill them with kindness, but don’t avoid them. Be decent to them, and certainly don’t be overly negative online and don’t be a polarizer.
Try to be someone who—be willing to criticize your own side when you make mistakes and be someone who’s a complexifier, who lets people know that things are more complicated than they think, who gently points out, “What does the other side think about this?” when you can, without being annoying and alienating.
That’s the tricky balance, but we can all make some efforts. We can all play that role to different degrees. Who knows? Maybe it’ll add up.
KLUTSEY: I think that’s a great place to wrap up. Thank you very much, Professor Stone, for taking the time to talk to us. Really appreciate it.
STONE: Thank you so much, Ben. It was really nice to talk to you.

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