Listening and Asking Good Questions

Martin Carcasson, the director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University, shares a debate about the value of, well, debate.  While debate at its best sharpens ideas and exposes misinformation, it can devolve into spectacle. Dialogue can foster understanding and trust but lacks rigor. Deliberation, he says, combines the strengths of both to help communities make better collective decisions.  Carcasson emphasizes the need to design spaces that tap into our abilities to listen and ask good questions, not our outrage, to tackle complex problems together.

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Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. If we're gonna have free expression and productive public debates, we need to be free from coercion. That at any rate, is one of the common themes among advocates for a healthier public sphere.

Michael Lee: A truly ideal public sphere is one where individuals engage in critical, rational debate without fear or force. Exchanging ideas reasonably rather than in response to pressure or manipulation. Think of the ideal jury deliberation room where the facts of the case have been laid out for everyone to assess, and everyone is free to engage in statements and counter statements while the collective jury arrives at a decision about guilt or innocence.

Michael Lee: If someone has been threatened ahead of time. Where someone fears the consequences of a guilty verdict, the process is pretty well subverted, [00:01:00] but coercion isn't just a political issue in our personal lives. The same principle applies. I. Imagine you and your spouse are deciding how to spend your tax refund.

Michael Lee: Ideally, you each explain your reasons and weigh the merits of both options and reach a compromise or choose one option. But what if one of you starts guilt tripping the other? You never do what I like, or if you really cared about how I feel, you'd be more persuaded to my side of the issue. These emotional tactics can be coercive as well, applying real pressure rather than engaging and open.

Michael Lee: Easy, respectful discussion. Emotional coercion can silence honest critique. Just like political coercion can stifle dissent. Recognizing coercion in public and in personal context can help us steer conversations towards genuine understanding. In politics, this means pushing it, pushing back against propaganda or intimidation in relationships.

Michael Lee: It means calmly acknowledging manipulative language and hopefully redirecting the [00:02:00] discussion back to the core issue. While achieving a completely coercion free dialogue might be unrealistic, striving for open respectful exchanges brings us closer to that ideal. And who knows, maybe we can all get a little bit better at arguing in both public and in private.

Michael Lee: Well, a boy can hope. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Martine Caron. Martine is a Professor of Communication Studies and the founder and director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University.

Michael Lee: The Center for Public Deliberation trains students to help citizens of Northern Colorado have better discussions. Martin, tell us an argument story. 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me on, Michael. Um, basically my argument story is kind of an argument I've been having with myself somewhat for the last 20 years about the work that I want to do and the work that our [00:03:00] community needs.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, my initial academic training similar to yours, I. Uh, was in rhetoric and argumentation, uh, uh, really focused on, you know, how do we have the tough conversations that we need to have? How do we deal with this inherent tension between kind of democracy and expertise? Um, and, and overall, my work is hoping to find ways for people to have the tough conversations they need to have, to address their shared problems better.

Martin Carcasson: My initial training was all about debate. Um, and I ran debate classes. I was never on a debate team, but I, but I taught those argumentation debate classes, um, and I started getting a little bit more and more frustrated because, you know, the better debaters always won. Not necessarily the best argument and, and going back and forth.

Martin Carcasson: Um, but then I, I was doing a lot of work with cl Clinton's race initiative at the beginning of his. Second term. Um, and part of that was they designed materials to help communities have better conversations about race. And that's actually what introduced me to dialogue and deliberation as these two kind of alternative tools to debate.

Martin Carcasson: [00:04:00] Uh, and for a while, I kind of, uh, uh, did what a lot of dialogue and deliberation people do is I kind of became very anti debate, right? Mm-hmm. Debate was bad. Dialogue and deliberation was good. Um, and I started kind of exploring that. Uh, for quite a bit. Uh, but one of the best organizations that do this work is NCDD, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation.

Martin Carcasson: And at their 2008 conference, uh, give a shout out to, uh, Pete Zumi from James Madison, university of Communication professor who was a debater. I. Uh, had a presentation there of like, it should be N-C-D-D-D Right. That you've thrown out debate. Right. Okay. Um, and he did this brilliant job of showing these, uh, charts and, and diagrams that dialogue deliberation, people would show of that basically had like the downside of debate compared to the upside of dialogue deliberation.

Martin Carcasson: Um, and, and it was a great charge. 'cause it was basically your, your, uh. You know, deliberating really badly, right? By focusing on the downside of one side versus the upside, the other side. Mm-hmm. So that kind of, [00:05:00] uh, created a, a, a shift and kind of going back to, you know, the good debate can be really valuable, right?

Martin Carcasson: The problem, unfortunately is most of our debate's horrible. Right? Most our debates just a spectacle. Most of our debate is just, uh, you know, trying to find the, the, the five second clip that will go viral, uh, presidential debates, uh, as scholars in our field have said is just kind of dual press conferences are not actual debate.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, but that has led me to this point. Now the, uh, so a big project I'm working on of. Recognizing the importance of debate, dialogue, and deliberation as these key interactive communication tools that our campuses need, that our communities need. That don't happen naturally. Mm-hmm. And making the distinction between those three terms, uh, recognizing, you know, they each have a lot of upside, they each have some blind spots and some limits.

Martin Carcasson: Um, but how do we kind of work together since it's so clear? We need better conversations in our world. Yeah. Uh, how do we work better to kind of build capacity in our students, in our campuses and our [00:06:00] communities, uh, to have some, some better conversations. 

Michael Lee: The, the potential downsides of debate are, are well known.

Michael Lee: So much of our modern world, whether it's these simulated press conferences, has presidential debates as you talk about, or online debates that are heated or, uh, me debating with somebody who cut me off in traffic with one of my fingers or whatever that is. Yeah, but the potential downsides of of dialogue or deliberation are not as obvious because they're not as hot and they don't have, they don't trigger our negativity bias quite as loudly.

Michael Lee: But those can be places for manipulations, places for theater, places for simulation. The simulation that I understand you, but I'm really just fawning all over you to get you to shut up or trying to get something out of you. And so let's, let's back way up and talk about these three terms at their best.

Michael Lee: What is dialogue at its best? What is deliberation at its best? What is debate? 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah. So the way I've been exploring this, uh, and I can give you a link if people want to kinda look at this visually, but, so I have a Venn diagram, which I [00:07:00] literally, it's one of those things I drew first on a bared napkin.

Martin Carcasson: Okay. At that 2008 conference, huh? As someone was asking, Hey, how do you make distinctions between these three? So the Venn diagram with deliberation in the middle, and then debate and dialogue both overlap with deliberation. Uh, but they don't overlap each other. Right. And, and these are, you know, these are complex concepts.

Martin Carcasson: So these are my definitions. These aren't like the definitions, right? Gotcha. So I see debate as all three of them are interactive communication tools, which seems redundant, right? But, but so much of our political communications actually one way, right? It's, it's just people speaking out, giving talks or, you know, people aren't actually engaging and going back and forth.

Martin Carcasson: So all three of these are about people going back and forth. Debate is all about for me at its best, elevates good arguments and exposes bad arguments. So debate has rigor, debate has, uh, you know, expectations of quality. Uh, so when you have a really well designed debate, I. Uh, a, a audience member [00:08:00] should really kind of see where the best arguments lie, right?

Martin Carcasson: Uh, if you're, if you've got misinformation, a debate, hopefully it gets called out, right? Um, uh, but again, most debates don't do that. 'cause most debates are people kind of talking past each other and, you know, the audience of most debates are there more for like a sporting event, right? They're there to cheer on their side and boo the other side, uh, rather than think through, right?

Martin Carcasson: So that's one thing that we're doing is really thinking about how do we create better debates, uh, that model. Uh, the high quality weight that we need. And, and, and part of this is, you know, one of the biggest problems we're, we're dealing with right now, uh, scholars have called it information disorder, right?

Martin Carcasson: Like the amount of information we have now, our ability to create and share information has exponentially exploded. Our ability to make sense of information, to move from data and noise, to hopefully knowledge and insight, and ultimately wisdom, um, ha have not only not kept up, but in some ways has, has backtracked, right?

Martin Carcasson: Because we've. We've lost faith in journalism and expertise, the institutions that help us do that, right? Mm-hmm. [00:09:00] So debate becomes this really useful tool to h help us make sense of all the noise that we're getting when done well. 

Michael Lee: It's a great summation of, of debate at its finest. Can you do the same for dialogue?

Michael Lee: I. 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah, so for, for me, for dialogue, so I, I talk a lot about the key challenges that we face. One's information disorder. The other one is toxic polarization and the division and the fragmentation. Um, which, which is a huge problem, but it's also often exaggerated, right? We're not nearly as polarized as we think.

Martin Carcasson: I. There's a lot of bad faith actors that, that, uh, profit from our polarization are kind of feeding us the outrage. Uh, so dialogue, whereas debate kind of deals with the information disorder dialogue, deals with this polarization, fragmentation dialogue is I. Interactive communication to connect with each other, to understand each other, hopefully to develop some mutual understanding, to develop some trust.

Martin Carcasson: But a key aspect of dialogue, particularly distinct from debate for me is dialogue is nonjudgmental. I. Right In a dialogue. I'm not supposed to say no, actually [00:10:00] you're wrong. Right? Because, you know, you're sharing your perspective, your lived experience. This is what's important to me. So, so dialogue is more about just understanding each other, right?

Martin Carcasson: It's kinda like brainstorming, right? We don't wanna judge ideas, we just wanna listen to each other. Uh, so dialogue is critical to undo some of the false polarization and to kind of heal ourselves and, and often to kind of rehumanize people, right? When we have these horrible caricatures on the other side.

Martin Carcasson: But dialogue isn't, by my definition, a decision making model, right? If dialogue is nonjudgmental, um, it, it kind of ends with the agreeing to disagree, um, which can be powerful for a conversation. But in a democracy, at some point we can't just always agree to disagree. We have to make decisions together about how to face the problems that we face, right?

Martin Carcasson: Um, so that, that takes us to deliberation, which kind of at its best deliberation brings the best of dialogue and debate. It brings the connection and the process and the, the, the social aspects of, of [00:11:00] helping, helping people come together across perspectives, but also has the rigor and the quality, uh, and, and the mechanism hopefully to elevate good arguments and expose bad arguments.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, so deliberation for me is this interactive communication about us. Having a conversation about what should we do, right? How do we act together, uh, to, to address the problems we're facing or to, you know, create something that we want to kind of create. Um, and, and those conversations both need the trust and connection we can get from dialogue and the rigor and quality that we can get.

Martin Carcasson: Debate. Uh, a couple outside deliberation though is it's resource heavy like crazy, right? Right. It takes a lot of time, whereas debate and dialogue are pretty easy to spark. Deliberation needs a lot of resources to do well. A 

Michael Lee: couple follow ups on Yeah, on these, and I appreciate that distinction. Um, one addresses debate addresses, as you say, information disorder.

Michael Lee: The other particularly addresses toxic polarization. Those two problems to me seem to work hand in [00:12:00] hand. Toxic polarization creates, is created by an information disorder and then has made all the more worse by each other. And so they're sort of mutually reinforcing. And so in that context, how do we. It seems pretty neat to say, well, if we're in a toxic polarization environment, then we recommend dialogue.

Michael Lee: If we're in an information disorder situation, we recommend debate, but those are always and everywhere the same in a hyper online world. So how do we parse out when one method is appropriate and when another is appropriate? 

Martin Carcasson: No, that's a great point. They're, they're very much, it's, it's a, it's a vicious cycle, right?

Martin Carcasson: They each kind of lead to each other. Yeah. Um, and that's why, I mean, again, my, my center to center for public deliberation, I focus on deliberation because I certainly see the need for both. Right. Uhhuh. Um, and, and I see sometimes, you know, my friends in dialogue, uh, and there's, you know, so much out there right now in the dialogue world and, and, you know, trying to kind of heal these divides.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, but one of the problems is when we overemphasize dialogue. Right. We then we don't, we still need to make distinctions, [00:13:00] right? That this issue, uh, you know, a lot of glorification of open-mindedness, um, yeah. And even kinda going into free speech, right? We need free speech at the beginning. We need, you know, not, not, not censor things.

Martin Carcasson: We need to kind of have a really big funnel. Um, but the payoff of free speech is later on. When we actually make distinctions between good arguments and bad arguments and, and make better decisions together. So if we focus so much on open-mindedness and we're saying, Hey, everyone's perspective is just as good as everyone else's, right?

Martin Carcasson: Uh, that doesn't lead to very good decisions, right? So that's where we need to bring debate. But on the flip side, if we oversize debate, um, debate doesn't work when we have no trust and connection with each other, right? Facts. Don't work. Actually some scary research that shows when we're polarized, facts can act often backfire, right?

Martin Carcasson: Uh, the backfire effect kind of teaches us that in some situations where the better, my argument when I'm trying to convince someone who disagrees with me that we're polarized, the more they actually backfire, right? So debate doesn't work unless we have connections. That connections aren't [00:14:00] enough for us to make decisions together.

Martin Carcasson: So how do we figure out how to, to build all three of these? Um, so we have more capacity in our communities and in our, uh, you know, to have the, the, the deliberative, uh, conversations that we need to address our issues better. 

Michael Lee: Dialogue at its worst is perhaps overly permissive, uh, overly forgiving and incapable of making distinctions and, exactly, yeah.

Michael Lee: And then debate at its worst is overly exclusive, punitive, even repolarization. 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah, it's like even, you know, I talk a lot about toxic polarization as an issue and how we deal with it. And you know, part of the response is, well, no, no, polarization isn't the issue. The issue is the other side in a way.

Martin Carcasson: Right. And that's where when we focus completely on polarization, uh, we're unable to make some distinctions. Some of the hardest things I'm really trying to work on now is, I'm calling it the Bad Faith Actor Paradox. Right, right, right. But it's as an impartial facilitator, I'm trying to bring people together, but I also, you know, care about things like good arguments and, and, and reality.

Martin Carcasson: Um, you know, so how do you deal with bad faith actors that [00:15:00] are purposely, you know, passing on misinformation, undermining things, um, you know, calling them out in a polarized environment doesn't tend to work, right? They're, it's kind of like a conspiracy theory, right? They're self-sealing, right? Uhhuh attacking the other side in a polarized environment just kind of fuels that narrative.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, but we still, we can't just not call them out, right? So we're, we're struggling with this tension between, um, you know, wanting kind of debate to matter and quality to matter. While also realizing when we're polarized, uh, it's really hard to kind of take those things on. Well, 

Michael Lee: and talk a little bit, if you don't mind, about your work in Northern Colorado specifically with this question of you come into communities having difficult fights, difficult conversations about all sorts of matters, the environment policing, you name it, and.

Michael Lee: You sort of have to train students and, and you do this work yourself to suss out is the issue in this environment a kind of lack of consensus? Is this issue, a lack of trust? Is the, is a need for greater connection, greater understanding, a greater ability to parse out [00:16:00] what is better information or a better way forward again, so you have to kind of like implement a dialogue approach or a debate approach.

Michael Lee: I, I imagine, how do you do that? 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah. So I mean, a, a lot of my work is, and, and you've touched on this a couple times already, is really informed by social psychology and brain science and this basic how we're wired, right? Yeah. My initial training was in argumentation, which is like how we should argue. Uh, but I've also taken a lot of that persuasion classes and taught those classes and social movement classes and Yeah.

Martin Carcasson: And recognize, you know what, what actually. Changes our minds are, are is rarely facts and logic, right? It's, it's gonna be even more emotions and there's these kind of negative quirks to human nature. Uh, so a lot of my work now, the heart of the CBD, is how do we design processes that avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into our best?

Martin Carcasson: The problem is, you know, as humans, we're, we're not wired to deliberate. We're not wired to have the tough conversations. We need to have to engage the, you know, the inherent [00:17:00] tensions and paradoxes that are relevant to, to all issues. Uh, we're, we're susceptible to outrage, right? We, we love simple stories.

Martin Carcasson: We love our heroes and our victims and our villains. Uh, and then there's a lot of, you know, especially a two party system. But the media and social media are all very much kind of designed to more to divide us than bring us together. Right? More to feed the simple narrative rather than to help us kind of deal with nuance.

Martin Carcasson: So my work is how do we design processes that flip that script, at least in a local community. Mm-hmm. So, yeah. One of the classes I teach every semester, I train students as facilitators. Um, going back to the downfall of deliberation is it's high re it's resource heavy. You, you need a lot of. Um, so my program, we've got 30 facilitators that are in a year long program that I can show up.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, you know, the city hires us, the county school district, community organizations. We get written into grants. I. Uh, so we can turn a, a group of a hundred people showing up to talk about an issue, and instead of them just one at a time in a microphone, kind of bad debate, talking [00:18:00] past each other, uh, you know, we can develop some background material, research the issue, um, have some, some good important, you know, baseline of facts at the table.

Martin Carcasson: And then have someone trained to help people, you know, bring out the best in dialogue and debate and, and actually have these tough conversations. 

Michael Lee: What do you think the most important skill that a facilitator can have is? Hmm. 

Martin Carcasson: Ah, that's a great question. Uh, we just actually had our all day training on Saturday for, for our new students.

Martin Carcasson: Right? Oh. Uh, and, and a big part, you know, my, my work uses this concept of wicked problems, which is this idea of shifting from the easy story. Our brain wants to tell us that problems are caused by wicked people, bad people, bad values, to putting the wickedness in the problem. And what that means is recognizing that most of the tough issues we deal with inherently involve lots of underlining values that people care about.

Martin Carcasson: And what makes them hard is that. Different people rank those values differently, uh, and prioritize them differently. Um, and, and trying to honor, you know, one [00:19:00] value, like freedom, uh, inherently kind of pushes back on some other values, right? Um, so when we, when we. The way we, from an outside facilitation perspective, we identify those values, put them on the table, and then help people have that tough conversation, uh, of how do we prioritize, how do we balance, ideally, how do we transcend and get creative and, and, and deal with these values differently.

Martin Carcasson: So that art of as you're talking to someone, particularly if you disagree with them, to really figure out, uh. What's the positive motive here? Right? Uhhuh? What's the thing that they care about that's really motivating their perspective? It actually ties, one of the famous conflict resolution books is getting to Yes.

Martin Carcasson: By Fisher and Yuri from the Harvard Negotiation School, right? And they talk about moving from positions to interests. When people have positions I want X, those are inherently zero sum, right? And it kind of, you know, taps brings out the worst in human nature We wanna win. It's us versus them. But when you really ask people why is that important to you?

Martin Carcasson: And you figure out the underlining motives, the underlining interests, there's always a lot more flexibility [00:20:00] there to kind of work, right? So that's where my students are kind of trained to how do we ask these questions, both to help people understand their own perspective, but then also open up space at that table.

Martin Carcasson: Um, so, so we're, we're, you know, we're engaging those tensions in a much more productive way. 

Michael Lee: So for going back to the kind of essential characteristics of excellence in facilitation, it sounds like, just to summarize, two of the most important suggestions you would make would be, one, a charity about the other person, and then second, an ability or perspective taking to see the world as they see it or perhaps see the values that they are pushing for.

Martin Carcasson: Yeah. Yeah. We, we talk often that, uh, you know, two of the most important skills for problem solving, particularly collaborative problem solving and just democracy, is listening and asking good questions. Yeah. Uh, and it's sad how we, we often don't explicitly teach those, right. Uh, who we teach a lot of speaking classes and writing classes and, you know, expressing yourself, but.

Martin Carcasson: How often do we actually have, you know, really [00:21:00] dedicated coursework on here's how to listen and here's how to ask good questions. Because, you know, a lot of this is pragmatic. If I really want to change people's mind, we know from the research that attacking them, demeaning them, telling them that they're evil, doesn't work.

Martin Carcasson: It often backfires, right, but actually listening to them, taking them seriously. Um, if anything gives you a better insight of what to what they believe while also creating a reciprocal relationship. You know, if you take interest in what they actually believe and take them seriously, they're gonna reciprocate that.

Martin Carcasson: Uh, and that's where we actually see in the research where people have their shifts, where they kind of change their mind, right. With someone actually listening to them versus someone attacking them. 

Michael Lee: Right. As we close, I'd like to return to the initial debate, the 20 year debate as you called it. That you've had with yourself.

Michael Lee: If I'm hearing you correctly, the kind of steps in this debate, and I'm curious about the resolution as you would characterize it. The steps seem to be, debate is good, followed by, I don't know, maybe [00:22:00] debate is not so good, followed by debate is good, but not by itself. 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah, I mean, I think it went, it went from debate to go debate, bad dialogue and deliberation.

Martin Carcasson: Good. Mm. To wait a second. Debate me, did a little comeback. Right? And then I'm recognizing, no, no, we need all three of these have a, have strengths and weaknesses and we need capacity for each. Uh, and how do we build that up? And, and a big part of this, the work that I do with students is the world needs facilitators.

Martin Carcasson: We need bridge builders, right? Um, if everyone's an advocate, if everyone is. Is, you know, fighting to, to win. Uh, our brains aren't working and we just kind of talk past each other. Uh, so how do we, with our communities, build more of these bridging institutions? How do we get students with more facilitation skills across debate, dialogue, and deliberation?

Martin Carcasson: So then we, we have this sort of communication we need to address our problems more productively. 

Michael Lee: Martine, thanks so much for being on when we disagree. 

Martin Carcasson: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for all the work you do[00:23:00] 

Michael Lee: when We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Ks and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at when we disagree@gmail.com.