How Seeing Both Sides of an Issue Keeps Us Stubbornly Young

I was fascinated by the data being collected around polarized attitudes and immediately thought this could be interesting for you, the Stubbornly Young audience.

Stephen is an impressive guy. He consults for Harvard University, the Aspen Institute, and others, and has co-authored several reports that have been featured over a thousand times in media by presidential candidates on C-SPAN, even for a panel at the UN General Assembly.

He shares valuable and insightful notions regarding generational perspectives, and working towards the idea of keeping an open mind through effective exercises that bring people together and reduce prejudices between generations.

Stephen shares real life examples and the notion of increasing absence of building quality community and civic participation in the younger generation because of local and global events of the last 50 years. To have intergenerational interactions and applying intellectual humility to bridge the gap between the younger generation and those in their 50s and 60s and have natural interaction and learning about each other is something that is needed to improve mental health and building a stronger social fabric.   

Keep listening after the interview for a bonus conversation at the end of the show where Dave speaks further with Stephen where they discuss more on Stephen's own opinions and valuable insights of society and its future beyond the 21st Century and for generations to come.

Top Takeaways:

• Importance of intellectual humility, empathy, and open-mindedness in navigating societal divisions
• Impact of generational differences and the role of older generations in bridging the gap between different perspectives
• Value of open conversations with people holding different perspectives and listening with empathy
• Potential role of people in their 50s, 60s, and beyond in bringing people together and fostering unity
• Challenges faced by younger generations, such as lack of community and declining civic participation
• Significance of fostering open-mindedness, empathy, and community engagement in addressing societal divisions
• Media and political environments' cynical nature and systemic incentives leading to negative outcomes
• Need for leadership to construct both the potential for disaster and prosperity, urging for honesty and a focus on general wellbeing
• Importance of coordinating efforts to achieve a prosperous future and shift away from negativity

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“We have more division and fracturing in perspectives on society, not because things are going badly, but because a lot of different groups are acting in their interests very effectively.” –Stephen Hawkins

“If I could have a megaphone and speak to younger generations and the stubbornly young, the values that I am most eager to see in society today are curiosity, empathy, humility, personal responsibility. All of those things are related to having an open mind.” –Stephen Hawkins

“An open mind keeps us fresh, and it's better for the world.” –Dave Tabor

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Stephen Hawkins on LinkedIn
More in Com

Read my Blog called Rules For Being Stubbornly Young and let me know what you think!

Email your thoughts at dave@stubbornlyyoung.com

Check out where it’s all happening on the Stubbornly Young website

Thanks and looking forward to hearing how you’re remaining stubbornly young!

Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

Stephen Hawkins (00:00:00) - So the short answer is talk to strangers. Have open conversations with people who are different from you on these subjects that are difficult, and listen and loop, looping, meaning play back what you heard. You're not probably going to find easy areas of agreement, but you'll often find that the perspective that you have of how the other person thinks it's a little bit caricatured, a little bit exaggerated, probably more reasonable than it actually is.

[INTERVIEW]

Dave Tabor (00:00:32) - Welcome to the Stubbornly Young podcast. For people in their 50s, 60s and beyond, to remain engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. I'm Dave Tabor. I have nine rules for stubbornly young and rule number five is be open to the merit of both sides of an issue. An open mind keeps us fresh and it's better for the world. And I was recently listening to a Colorado Public Radio report by Ryan Warner and heard an interview with today's guest, Stephen Hawkins, global director of research for a nonprofit called More in Common. I was fascinated by the data being collected around polarized attitudes and immediately thought, this could be interesting for you, the stubbornly young audience.

Dave Tabor (00:01:12) - So Stephen is an impressive guy. He consults for Harvard University, the Aspen Institute, and others, and has co-authored a number of reports that have been featured over a thousand times in media by presidential candidates on C-Span, even for a panel at the UN General Assembly. Now, here on Stubbornly Young, we've got Stephen. Welcome.

Stephen Hawkins (00:01:32) - Thanks for having me on, Dave. Real pleasure to be here.

Dave Tabor (00:01:35) - And I'm glad you are. And, you know, as I started Stubbornly Young, rule number five is to be open to the merit of both sides of an issue, because an open mind keeps us fresh, and it's better for the world. That seems like a softball for you. It fits right into the core of More in Common. About right?

Stephen Hawkins (00:01:52) - Yeah, absolutely. I think we really believe in values of intellectual humility and of empathy, and those are really critical for us when as a society, we have to navigate complicated issues where there's a lot to take into account. So definitely at the core of our mission. Yeah.

Dave Tabor (00:02:08) - Your mission, to be clear, the way it's written on the website is to understand the forces driving us apart, find common ground, and bring people together to tackle shared challenges. So talk about how you do that.

Stephen Hawkins (00:02:20) - Yeah. Well, let me start with a little bit of the motivation for more coming, coming into existence, which is that back in 2016, for the first time in British history, there was a member of Parliament named Jo Cox, and she was murdered by a neo-Nazi, by a white nationalist. And she was murdered because she supported taking in refugees into the U.K. This was just a real low point for British society, but it was part of a broader trend in Western Europe and the United States, where politics is becoming really aggressive, violent, where there was a perception of an existential threat. And that's where the mission for More in Common was really born. More in Common actually comes from that member of parliament's first speech to parliament, where she said that her constituents had more in common than what divided them.

Stephen Hawkins (00:03:05) - That's the origin of the name. And so how we do that. Well, a lot of what happens in society is based on genuine differences, where we just don't see eye to eye on, for instance, a question like abortion, but a lot of divisions in the United States and more broadly around the world is based on misperceptions. We think that the other side all has an extreme view, when in fact, maybe just 5 or 10% of the other side has an extreme view. We often overlook a lot of commonality that we share, because it's not newsworthy to focus on what we have in common, and we often through our news feeds and social media and elsewhere, we see the most loud and partisan and ideologically extreme members of society, not the everyday people who represent a broader share of society. And so you asked, how do we go about addressing the underlying divisions of fracturing and polarization and build a more united society is a lot of it is by pointing to and drawing attention to those things, as often get overlooked because of these features of the way that information gets shared these days.

Dave Tabor (00:04:10) - Well, that's got to be hard to even get the mindshare people to do that, because it's almost like, you know, we're just attracted to the noisiest messages, right?

Stephen Hawkins (00:04:21) - We are. And with what social media algorithms do is they actually know with a huge amount of precision, exactly how much more attention things that are outrageous get than things that are positive. And they've calibrated their algorithms to make sure that the stuff that gets the most attention and most real estate on people's news feeds are those things that are negative, are those things that people want to share, etc. And so there's an underlying problem of humans being drawn towards conflict and not remembering things that they have in common, but that's compounded by being now built into our systems.

Dave Tabor (00:04:58) - Yeah. One of your methodologies is trying to draw people to pay attention to the things that make us that, that we have in common? 

Stephen Hawkins (00:05:07) - Yeah. So let me give an example from just a few months ago. So right now there's a big debate, as I'm sure you and your listeners will know, around how to teach American history.

Stephen Hawkins (00:05:17) - And there's this big, at the state level, especially in Florida and elsewhere, all of these debates around curriculum DENI. And so what we did in the fall was we asked Republicans to estimate what percentage of Democrats they think want to teach a history. I'm going to use caricature here for purposes of the conversation, but what percentage of Democrats do you think want to teach a version of American history that focuses on the negative, on all of the flaws in America's founding, the flaws of slavery, racism, and segregation, and that views the United States primarily through a critical lens. And Republicans said, well, probably most of most of them, probably almost all of them, probably very few Democrats want to teach the fact that, you know, say, the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution are things that we should be celebrating. And in reality, they had it completely flipped where a majority of Democrats do want to teach how America is exceptional, they just also want to teach alongside that, all of the raw ugliness of things that also happened in American history.

Stephen Hawkins (00:06:18) - And the reverse was true for Republicans, where Democrats thought most Republicans only want to teach American pride, and a kind of whitewashed version of American history that only celebrates the good things. And we found, for instance, there was like a 50 percentage point difference between the number of Republicans that actually want to teach Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the number that Democrats thought. Such a huge, huge gap for me.

Dave Tabor (00:06:42) - Wow. A huge perception gap.

Stephen Hawkins (00:06:45) - A perception gap. Yeah, that's the term we often use to describe it.

Dave Tabor (00:06:49) - Yeah. It's funny that you bring up that example because I was reading your vision too, which sounds pretty utopian. It's in that it's, this is the vision, “More united and inclusive democratic societies in which people believe and feel that what they have in common is stronger than what divides them.” And I was, it struck me that you used, that you sort of said democratic societies. I mean, this is completely aside, but I was just curious about it. Is living in a democracy a prerequisite to living in harmony?

Stephen Hawkins (00:07:20) - It's not because democracy is relatively recent and our species goes back in, human societies go back thousands of years, and not all of them have been turbulent. But. Well, let me ask you this, because I know it sounds a bit utopian, but let me ask you, and in the vein of generational differences here. So for your, for your listeners, I'm 34. So one of the things that we often point to in the United States specifically is that in the era of the Cold War, so let's say roughly 1950 to 1990, for general purposes, the Soviet Union provided a strong outgroup threat. Their atheists, their communists, their dictators, their authoritarian, and the United States, by contrast, democratic capitalist Christian. There was so much turbulence in the United States, especially in the late 1960s. And yet there was a sense, this is my interpretation, not having lived through that era, that we had more in common than that which divides us. And we had this greater threat of the Soviet Union, a nuclear Armageddon that provided a sense of cohesion and some boundaries to the conflict. Okay, maybe we disagree, but you're not Stalin.

Dave Tabor (00:08:27) - Yeah, it is funny to me that the one thing we all seem to agree on is that we agree on less. Right? And I want to put that in the historical context because you just brought it up. And maybe I heard this from you. I don't know, but, you know, it seems like clearly, you know, social media is driving a lot of the fragmentation. And you go back to your point, a couple of generations, we all shared basically one perspective, and that was what Walter Cronkite said. Right? So we're all unified because there just weren't many ways to not be. And that seemed to get fragmented by cable TV and then really fragmented by internet news. So I mean, what is your thinking about the increasing fragmentation of our perspectives?

Stephen Hawkins (00:09:09) - I agree with that description completely, and in some ways, a way of framing it is that we have more division and fracturing in perspectives on society, not because things are going badly, but because a lot of different groups are acting in their interests very effectively.

Stephen Hawkins (00:09:26) - And so if you think about it that way, you talk about a polarization ecosystem, but it's really, as you said, traditional media having a model where conflict and affirmation of people's prior perspectives is the way to maintain an audience. Social media. You have also attention grabbing validation as the primary motive of holding an audience. And then you have the political environment where fundraising is so much more effective if you are combative and you stand out, than if you are agreeable and moderated and compromising. So you have the media and information system and the political system both working toward their interests and their interests involved in maintaining or even growing division. And then the rest of us in broader society going about their lives. We don't want that division, but we don't have the same coordination capabilities as you do in a newsroom or as you do as a political party. So we can't actually push back on that. And so, you know, we have these motivations and incentives within our systems that just keep the division pushing forward.

Dave Tabor (00:10:30) - That I agree with you. It's disheartening and cynical and real.

Stephen Hawkins (00:10:36) - There was a I think it was one of Amanda Ripley's recent articles in the Washington Post where she cited a statistic that Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York younger woman, decided to shift from being a compromising personality to being an acerbic personality and a combative one and she raised more money in a ten-day period in the latter format that she had in previous years.

Dave Tabor (00:11:01) - That's quite disturbing. And it's a fact. I wanted you as a guest on Stubbornly Young, because my premise is that as people reach their 50s and 60s, you know, we may start to get more locked into a particular view of the world. In your research and in your observation. I mean, what's your sense for that? Is there any evidence for that?

Stephen Hawkins (00:11:23) - There is evidence for that, but it's a hard question and there's not a definitive answer from the academic literature, but I would think about it in terms of investments. So one type of investment is in your own personal story and in your own personal identity.

Stephen Hawkins (00:11:38) - And if you get to age 50 or 60 and you've lived out your whole life, maybe you raised some kids, you found a partner, you developed friendships, and you've lived out this story with one set of values. You're open minded. You believe in tolerance. You believe in considering other cultures to then shift to a different perspective in your 50s and 60s is in some way to negate and reject the person that you've been. The second type of investment is social. Maybe you've built a whole friendship, maybe you joined a church community, etc. and so you now have a lot of relationships where those people probably share a lot of your values. And then the third is actually biological. And this would be one reason why there could be a causal relationship, which is that we have something called neuroplasticity, which is about how much your brain can evolve and adapt and take in new concepts and reconsider things from different angles. And it declines over time. And so your actual hardware becomes more rigid over time. So those would be three reasons that I could see a lot of explanation for why people become sort of more calcified into perspectives over time.

Dave Tabor (00:12:43) - Yeah. In that context, a recent study that you mentioned in that Colorado Public Radio interview cited that not only did negative emotions about our world remain high, but that positive emotions have dropped as part of the mix. And now fewer people report feeling hopeful. And obviously, this isn't reserved for my audience in their 50s and 60s and beyond. But do you sense any interesting distributions around age?

Stephen Hawkins (00:13:10) - Oh yeah. I mean, this is. It's what's really striking right now in looking over the data. So I study American identity a lot because obviously if you're trying to build a shared identity, our shared national identity is an obvious one. Yeah. And Gen Z. So this is people sort of in their mid 20s and younger. They have really negative views about American identity, about the country in general, about the Constitution. There's of course a conservative to progressive difference on how people view America, with conservatives being far more proud of being American. Liberals were ashamed, but it's just as striking, if not worse, along generational lines.

Stephen Hawkins (00:13:52) - And if you think about what Gen Z has lived through, their earliest memories are financial crisis of 2008, divisive election of Donald Trump, endless war in Afghanistan, failures of war in Iraq, polarization and division, Covid 19. And so their lived experience has been one where the United States hasn't had a positive chapter, really. They're coming in to the workforce and into adulthood with pretty pessimistic views. Also about climate change. Certainly climate change is top of mind for them.

Dave Tabor (00:14:29) - I want to shift gears back to sort of the thematic approach of the Stubbornly Young podcast. And based on your research, conversations, observations, I mean, do you agree, do you disagree? And to what extent with my premise that exhibiting an open mind towards others perspectives make someone more engaging and relevant to younger people in their lives?

Stephen Hawkins (00:14:50) - Well, definitely. And I think it makes them more relevant and more interesting for conversation with anybody really. I think it's difficult sometimes to talk to younger generations because they can feel like they lack perspective, lack gratitude, they can be zealous and self-righteous. Any of this sounding right? 

Dave Tabor (00:15:08) - Yes. I mean, does that fit into what you were saying in the prior comments about the experience of, say, millennials or Gen X?

Stephen Hawkins (00:15:13) - It does. I mean, we see a lot more activism among younger generations and less kind of ideological flexibility among some younger generations, less knowledge about American history and global history, which would mean they have less perspective. So I can understand the challenges in relating to younger people. But younger people are facing challenges which older generations didn't have to face. And I think the most crucial one here is that income and income mobility is much, much lower now for Gen Z than it was for previous generations. And while the United States has a pretty unbroken record of the children being much more like being very likely to outearn their parents, and this goes throughout the 20th century, as you know now, Gen Z has about a 50/50 shot of outrunning their parents, and so half of Gen Z will likely have lower incomes than mom and dad.

Stephen Hawkins (00:16:07) - And those are, that's a difficult reality to grapple with. And it's not just about lack of perspective or self-righteousness. There genuinely has been a lack of necessary changes in society to ensure socioeconomic mobility for this generation.

Dave Tabor (00:16:22) - Wow. Okay. We're not going to unpack that. That's too big. But I, you know, you're an insightful guy and you've got lots of data that informs probably your personal opinion. So this is a personal opinion question, which is, do you think an open mind, probably driven by authenticity or authentic curiosity, really could close the chasm between, you know, how young people and the stubbornly young relate when you think about divisiveness and so forth?

Stephen Hawkins (00:16:52) - Yeah I do, and if I to be answered in a personal way, if I could have a megaphone and speak to younger generations and the stubbornly young, the values that I am most eager to see in society today are curiosity, empathy, humility, personal responsibility. All of those things are related to having an open mind. And then let me just give a couple of reasons for that.

Stephen Hawkins (00:17:18) - One is that the complexity of society right now is very high in a way that's dynamic. So there's a lot of change happening in society, and the pace of change is accelerating. And that means your probability of having the right answer is lower than it otherwise would be, because there's a lot of change, and it's hard to keep up with pace. And because there's a lot of aggressive combat happening in the information space where it's very hard to be sure what's right and what's wrong. Yeah, let's just take the last month as an example here. It seems quite likely that the dismissive attitudes towards the lab leak hypothesis are going to need to be retracted, not because they have definitively proven there's a lab leak, but the dismissive attitude that people had towards that was wrong, because the evidence for a lab leak looks very clear. And so to prematurely rule that out was a mistake. And it was the mistake by groups like the New York Times. On the right, Fox news called it wrong on Dominion Systems and voting.

Stephen Hawkins (00:18:18) - That's now very clear. And so kind of regardless of whether you leaned left or the right, people's teams are calling or calling it wrong and calling it wrong on the big questions. Big questions. I mean, what's bigger than the origin of the pandemic or the outcome of an election? And so, open mind is just necessary because the alternative to an open mind is a rigid confidence in one's perspective. And it's very hard to justify that because people are getting it wrong all the time, in every direction.

Dave Tabor (00:18:46) - Some of those questions the fundamental, for example, the lens through which people look to come to those conclusions which were wrong, right? Those are locked into how people already into a belief system. Right? So what have you found is effective when cracking that code at having somebody who's looking through a filtered lens have an open mind.

Stephen Hawkins (00:19:07) - So the most effective thing we have found for this is actually intergroup contact. And there was a study that was done in 2019 called Americans in One Room. I think I've had that wrong, but that looked at bringing together thousands of Americans, and they had interactions over several days, and they had socialists and they had far right wingers, etc., and they measured attitudes before and after their interactions with people of just positive conversations, productive conversations with people of different types.

Stephen Hawkins (00:19:39) - And there was a convergence towards more commonality. And a lot of edges came off of people's perspectives. That's at the grand level. But even just in the last few months, More in Common has been experimenting with videos where we have Republicans and Democrats describe what their expectations are of what the other side is going to be. Then we show them a video of how Republicans and Democrats actually talked about an issue. And then we show a kind of after viewing reaction from both sides. And that helps to reduce a lot of the anxiety, the hostility that people feel towards the other side. So the short answer is talk to strangers. Have open conversations with people who are different from you on these subjects that are difficult, and listen and loop, looping, meaning play back what you have heard. You're not probably going to find easy areas of agreement, but you'll often find that the perspective that you have of how the other person thinks is a little bit caricatured, a little bit exaggerated, probably more reasonable than it actually is.

Dave Tabor (00:20:42) - It struck me as, as we kind of wind down in this conversation that that perhaps people in their 50s, 60s beyond could almost play like a special role in bringing people together in this More In Common theme, because it seems like you use the term early intellectual humility. And it seems like if people in the 50s and 60s would bring forward sort of the wisdom that they inherently have, but they put it into this intellectual humility bucket that maybe we can role model.

Stephen Hawkins (00:21:13) - I think that would be great. And I think along the way, if you can build a little community, that would help so much because the younger generations really lack community. And that's a problem. The decline in civic participation is one of the big changes over the last 50 or 60 years, whether it's Kiwanis clubs, whether it's Boy Scouts, whether it's going to church, and it embodying intellectual humility and providing a place for people to have natural interactions with people across generations to learn about each other, to develop relationships where people are invested in each other.

Stephen Hawkins (00:21:48) - It's something we need for a lot of reasons. As someone who's interested in defusing political conflict, it would be great for that, but it would be great for mental health, and it would be great for building a stronger social fabric, which is just something that the country clearly needs.

Dave Tabor (00:22:02) - Well, let's wrap up on that note. I'm your host, Dave Tabor. And today on the Stubbornly Young Podcast, you've been listening to my conversation with Stephen Hawkins, Global Director of Research for More in Common, a nonprofit created to understand the forces driving us apart, find common ground and bring people together to tackle shared challenges. That's consistent with stubbornly young rule number five. As I said earlier, be open to the merit of both sides of an issue. Stephen, so glad you could join me. What a great conversation.

Stephen Hawkins (00:22:31) - Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it too. 

Dave Tabor (00:22:33) - Listeners, normally I'd end right here, but Stephen and I kept talking after the official part of the interview, and he shared some further thoughts that are his views, not those of More in Common. And with his permission, here they are. And then I'll wrap things up.

Dave Tabor (00:22:50) - You know, I think we all have this, this deep desire to not be so fractioned, you know, or fractionated. What's the word? Well, divided. Yeah. Fractured. Yeah. Thank you. And we have this need. But yet boy the world is fighting against us on that.

Stephen Hawkins (00:23:03) - Yeah, yeah. It's funny, you know, you said that what I, how I described the media and political environments is cynical, but I just, I consider myself a pretty idealistic and hopeful person, but I don't know how else to see it. I've been looking at these issues for a long time and, you know, it's people are doing their jobs and they're doing their jobs well and they're following their incentives, and it just leads to this outcome.

Dave Tabor (00:23:26) - Yeah. I think you mentioned I mean, the media is incentive to sell ads and the better they can target them, the more they can charge. And there's nobody selling ads to Kum Ba Yah circles.

Stephen Hawkins (00:23:39) - Yeah. Well, you know, I think my hope would be the, so this is big picture, big picture here. We are on a kind of we’re on this trajectory, where there's a lot of ways that society can go sideways into climate change, disaster and many other reasons for disaster. Incorporating artificial intelligence into our economy is going to be really hard to do without massive unemployment, in my opinion, for instance. And then we have tensions with China, tensions with Russia. There's a lot of ways the 21st century can end really badly or become miserable, but it's also a period of incredible possibility and exciting technology and potential for human prosperity beyond anything we've had before. And what our leadership needs to do is, I think, vividly construct those two images at the same time. Things can go really bad here. We need to be on the same page. We can't fuck around and lie about elections and lie about, you know, conspiracy theories and just make money because it's what we're paid to do at the expense of the general well-being, because there's a lot at stake.

Stephen Hawkins (00:24:50) - And at the same time, there's a lot of reasons for us to coordinate, because things could get really, really great. And the level of human prosperity around the corner is something that should be very exciting. And we need to get people excited about the future, too. I think we're only on this kind of negativity track, and we need to sort of hold the tension between those two. 

Dave Tabor (00:25:10) - Listeners, this has been episode four of the Stubbornly Young podcast for those in their 50s, 60s and beyond, remaining engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. Please do me a favor. Help the podcast spread by submitting a review and by sharing. Catch you next time on Stubbornly Young.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]