ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 3:50 pm-4:30 pm | The Forum
Speakers
- Julia Minson, Harvard
- Olivia Eve Gross, Studium
- Liz Willen, Hechinger Report
Key Takeaways
- Harvard Kennedy School professor Julia Minson presented the core ideas from her new book "How to Disagree Better," arguing that persuasion fundamentally does not work and that the real goal of constructive disagreement should be getting the other person to want to come back and talk to you again.
- She introduced the concept of "receptiveness to opposing views" -- a measurable personality trait -- and the HEAR framework (Hedge, Emphasize agreement, Acknowledge, Reframe to positive) as concrete linguistic tools for better disagreement.
- Minson made a strong case for AI as a practice tool for disagreement skills, noting that AI counterparts allow learners to experiment without fear of social repercussions.
- She announced that Harvard College will roll out a mandatory disagreement curriculum for all incoming freshmen, and that a free high school version is being developed with philanthropic funding.
- Olivia Gross of Studium added a complementary perspective, describing how constitutional law and Supreme Court dissents serve as powerful models for teaching students to disagree productively, with programs now operating in over 22 states.
Notable Quotes
"Persuasion does not work. If you're going in with the idea of changing somebody's mind, you're setting yourself up for failure."
— Julia Minson (Harvard)
"The goal of a constructive disagreement is to get the other person to want to come back and talk to you again. You want to be the person that other people want to talk to about difficult topics. That is real influence."
— Julia Minson (Harvard)
"We need to replace cancel culture with curiosity culture -- this idea of leaning into asking questions, being curious about stakes that people are making, rather than looking to attack them or cancel them."
— Olivia Gross (Studium)
"Most of the time when we're telling people how to have better disagreements, we're telling them how to change their thoughts and how to change their feelings. I'm arguing for let's tell them how to change their words."
— Julia Minson (Harvard)
"College is way too late to meet a Democrat or Republican for the first time."
— Olivia Gross (Studium)
Full Transcript
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Julia Minson. I am a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I am a social psychologist by training.
So in case you have no idea what that is, I am not a therapist. I don't see clients. I use the experimental method to try to understand why and how people do everyday decision-making. And the kind of decision-making I'm the most interested in is conflict and disagreement.
How do we have thoughtful, productive, engaged conversations when we dramatically disagree with each other's beliefs and with each other's values? Of course, most of the time when we think about that stuff, we think about political disagreement. But, you know, folks disagree with their friends, they disagree with their families, and, of course, we disagree in the workplace. Now, as an academic, when I see an issue that's sort of, you know, tearing the world apart, I have a simple solution.
I write a book about it. So this is my brand-new book, How to Disagree Better. It came out just a couple weeks ago, and I'm incredibly proud of the reception it has gotten. It got really sort of wonderful reviews from both the right and the left side of the political spectrum.
What I want to do today before we begin the panel is just give you a couple of the key ideas from the book that I think are really useful and I just want to get out into the world. So incredibly controversial idea number one, persuasion does not work, okay? If you're encountering a person who you strongly disagree with and you're trying to convince them that they're wrong and that you're right and that they need to sort of, you know, get in line with the facts and change everything they've ever believed, you're much more likely to start a conflict than you are to change their mind. We have this lay theory that we have somehow come to believe that people are threatened and insecure about their beliefs and that they don't listen to us and don't change their mind because they're afraid that our good arguments are going to fully overturn everything that they have ever stood for.
That's just not true, okay? People are deeply confident in what they believe. Their confidence comes from years of personal experience, the beliefs of their peer groups, the experts they trust, the upbringing they've had, the ideology that they espouse. And so no one conversation is going to change a lifetime of belief.
So if you're going in with the idea of changing somebody's mind, you're setting yourself up for failure. But that raises the question of what should we be doing instead? And so in the book, I make a case for the idea that the goal of a constructive disagreement is to get the other person to want to come back and talk to you again. You want to be the person that other people want to talk to about difficult topics.
That is real influence. If you have people coming back to talk to you, then you have some ability to change their thinking, to shape their behavior, to influence them, okay? Now some folks are better at this than others. So early in my career, we developed a personality scale to measure something we call receptiveness to opposing views.
Receptiveness is our willingness to access, consider, and evaluate supporting and opposing views in an impartial manner. So the idea is that some people are really interested in why other folks believe what they believe, right? They want to think about it. They want to hear arguments on both sides.
And it turns out that we can measure this. So we initially developed the personality scale. We put it in an academic journal. We then realized that literally nobody reads academic journals.
And so instead we put it on this website. So this is disagreeingbetter.com. If you're slightly more tech savvy, you can do the QR code instead of the URL. But the idea is that you can take the online survey and get individualized feedback in terms of how receptive you are to opposing views and what factors of receptiveness are easy for you versus more challenging for you.
It's a really good way to start conversations about how do we get folks to engage with opposing perspectives, right? If you understand what gets in the way, then you can sort of start fixing it. And it's free and open to the public. Use it with your teams.
Use it with your families. If you want to have a completely wild evening, try to do it with your teenagers. Which brings me to my third extremely controversial point. It turns out that in conversation, and disagreement is just a type of conversation, people can't read your mind.
And so try as we might to engage thoughtfully with opposing perspectives. Try as we might to be curious, to take each other's perspective seriously, to be empathetic. Our counterpart can only tell if we demonstrate that with our behavior. And so the question for us as educators becomes how do we get people to behaviorally demonstrate receptiveness, not simply like feel it in their hearts, okay?
And the argument I make in the book is that the easiest to interpret, the most salient behavior in conversation is language, okay? The words we use are how other people can understand what we intend. Which sounds not terribly controversial when I say it like that, right? But most of the time when we're telling people how to have better disagreements, we're telling them how to change their thoughts and how to change their feelings.
I'm arguing for let's tell them how to change their words, okay? So a lot of what we talk about in the book are tools that rely on language to express your willingness to receptively engage with opposing perspectives. Receptive language is, you know, was developed through natural language processing. So, you know, we're all like in this world of generative AI now, but back in the day five years ago, this was new.
And it's literally words and phrases that help people make those around them feel heard. What we now know from our experimental work is that using receptive language strongly predicts conflict outcomes. In other words, we can take transcripts of conversations, we can analyze them algorithmically, and we can show that when one person in a conversation is very receptive, their counterpart is going to evaluate them as more trustworthy, as more objective, as more reasonable, and most importantly will want to talk to them again. We also know that receptive language is relatively easy to train, right?
I'm not asking you to undergo decades of therapy, right? Like therapy is good for you, but it's hard and it's expensive. This is a little bit of a scaffold that allows us to get the gains faster. And finally, one of my favorite features of this research is that we have found that receptive language is effortlessly reciprocated.
In other words, if I am receptive to you, you are naturally going to become more receptive to me, right? And this is sort of not magical. Humans reciprocate all sorts of behavior, right? We mimic each other's body language, we mimic each other's facial expressions, we mimic each other's tone.
Receptiveness is just one of the many things that we pretty consistently mimic. So what I do in the book is I offer folks sort of a variety of tools to teach receptive language. One example that I really like is what we call the HEAR framework. So the HEAR framework is an acronym, H-E-A-R, and the idea is that if you want to express your point of view, but you also want to keep your counterpart's perspective in mind and show them that you're being receptive, you can use the HEAR framework.
So the H, for example, stands for hedging your claims. It's phrases like, I think it's possible that, or this might happen because, or some people tend to think, okay? So I might want to say, COVID boosters are safe and effective, okay? Or I could say, most physicians tend to believe that COVID boosters are likely safe and effective, okay?
I just show...
of three hedges into one sentence, but I've actually made a sentence that's more true because it incorporates sort of the complexity of the real world. The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So the idea is that in any disagreement, there's something we can agree on, right? There's some higher level value or goal that we're both pursuing.
That's why we're having this conversation in the first place. So it's phrases like, I think we both want to, or I agree with some of what you're saying, or we are both concerned with, right? We both agree that the last five years have been really difficult on our educators, right? Hard to disagree with that, no matter what the disagreement actually is about.
The A stands for acknowledgement. So acknowledgement is the thing people are probably the most familiar with. It's phrases like, I understand that, I see your point, or what I think you are saying is. It's basically just taking a few seconds or a couple minutes to restate your counterpart's point of view before you start talking.
Now, I see in my work plenty of lazy acknowledgement. It's things like, I hear what you're saying, but here's why we can't do it, right? You can't just say, I hear what you're saying, and not demonstrate that you heard what I'm saying, okay? You have to use your words to show your counterpart that you actually heard them.
And then finally, the R stands for reframing to the positive. So any statement can be made with a more positive or more negative valence. Phrases like, I think it's great when, I really appreciate it when, and it would be so wonderful if, right? So I can say what I don't want, or I can find an alternative that I do want.
So the idea behind the HERE framework is, you can say whatever it is you need to say, but you can do it in a way that shows your counterpart that you are being receptive to their point of view, okay? Now, here is the way that all of this connects to the theme of this conference. I think AI and technology more broadly can be phenomenally helpful in getting these skills into young brains, okay? Language needs to be practiced, okay?
You need reps on task. And this is where AI can help because it's scalable, because it allows us to practice infinitely, because it gives people freedom to experiment, right? Most of the time in disagreement, learners are very concerned with the fact that how they're being judged by their counterparts, right? Did I say something wrong?
Should I have said it differently? Should I have not said this thing at all? Having an AI counterpart allows you to experiment without that fear of social repercussions. Of course, any AI training can be gamified.
And what we're doing in our work is we are using AI to not just practice disagreement, but also to provide evidence-based feedback, right? So are you executing on the skills that research has shown to be effective? We've done a couple different things. So through my company, Disagreeing Better, we have an online training that's targeted at professional adult learners, right?
So there is video content that is then reinforced with AI-based practice. In my role at the Harvard Kennedy School, we're partnering with Harvard College to roll out a mandatory curriculum for all incoming Harvard freshmen that's based on this content. So again, video instruction reinforced through reflection exercises and lots of practice and feedback through AI. And then finally, there is a high school version of all of this that we're rolling out.
And this is going to be something we're creating with a philanthropic gift. So by the time we're done with it, we are going to give it away to anybody who wants it. So if you're interested in trying to bring this work into your schools, please be in touch with me because we are trying to get as many kids onto this as we can. So that is the kind of work I do.
And that is what is in the book that is being very generously provided to everyone in attendance. And I would like to invite Liz and Olivia to come have a conversation about their reactions to all of this. Thank you, guys. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Liz Willen. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of the Hechinger Report.
We are a nonprofit news outlet. You can sign up for our newsletters. And if we're doing our job right, you will see many points of view. And you can respectfully agree or disagree.
And I really appreciate our two, I heard Olivia speak earlier. And she runs, she'll tell you a little bit more about her work later. And we all listened to some of what you had to say, Julia, and I read your book. But one of the things that I'm really confused about is that we're here at this conference where everything on this agenda, it's seemingly, is about AI.
And I think it took me until page 236 of your book, to be specific, to see you discuss the possibility that AI could help all of us agree or disagree better. Which is absolutely what Olivia does in her work. And she'll tell you much more about that later. But how is that supposed to work?
What does that look like? So, I think of constructive disagreement as a skill, right? And a skill takes repetition. So if you're like learning to ride a bike, if you're learning to play the piano, you gotta do it over and over and over again.
But it also really helps if you're in an environment that reinforces that skill. And so by the time I get to chapter, whatever it is, 10 or 11, and it's page 238, I'm talking about all the ways in which organizations can create environments that help people acquire the skill. And so I think AI is sort of like one arrow in that quiver. I think there's a lot of other things that we can be doing.
But I think AI just solves a lot of problems for us that are unique to learning to disagree. Olivia, tell us a little bit about your work, getting students to disagree using AI. You have said that it's really an effective tool for many, many reasons. And it's possibly because people are afraid of getting their viewpoints out there, they're nervous at a young age, they don't wanna be canceled.
But a little bit about how you're trying to get into some schools and make this part of what everyone does, this discourse. Yeah, amazing. Thanks so much, Liz and Julia. It's such a pleasure to be in conversation with you and hopefully disagreement with you.
But I first wanted to just start off by saying that when I think of the work that we're doing at Studium, it's really- Can you tell people what Studium is? Yeah, it's really about teaching students what it looks like and how it feels to agreeably disagree. And I'm a huge believer in that when we talk about what that value and what that skill is, we need to give students vehicles for what it feels like. And so essentially, we've found that a really extraordinary vehicle for doing that work is something that's been in plain sight this entire time, which is the United States Supreme Court and constitutional law, right?
For every majority decision, there is a dissent. We have had an extraordinary model in plain sight. And the first two programs we've brought to schools in over 22 states is high school law review and middle school law review. So what does it look like for students as the culminating form of assessment within their classrooms to be able to see how students in rural North Dakota, New York, Los Angeles are thinking surprisingly differently or similarly than them?
But I think one of the areas I'm excited to dive into is what it looks like, what's the difference between telling students it's important to agreeably disagree, right, versus throwing them into the activity and showing them what it feels like. So yeah. Do you agree with this idea that she has? Yeah, no, I think it's a great idea.
I think that part of our failure, and let's be honest about it, part of our failure in getting people to disagree constructively is that we have relegated that skillset to one particular area of life or one particular area of the curriculum, right? So it used to be like, and it still is in most cases, if you're on the debate.
team, you know how to disagree, right? But it's such a daily activity that I think it should be woven into every aspect of your classroom and your social experience, right? So a lot of, I often think of disagreement as fitting into the socio-emotional curriculum, right?
Like how do you talk to your friends about the way you behave? How do you talk to your parents? Certainly how do you talk in civics classes and in social studies classes, but if you're doing a lab in a biology class and one person wants to approach the lab this way and another person in the group wants to approach the lab that way, that's a huge learning opportunity that will replicate for students when they're in college and then when they go into the workforce. So I think there's like every, every classroom is an opportunity where these types of activities can be used.
Yeah, absolutely, and also in regards to the notion, you know, when you look at state standards, when we talk about what real-life skills students need, whether they're headed into, you know, higher ed, the military, their career, Thanksgiving dinner table, right? Like it is an essential real-life skill that I couldn't agree more in which we've sort of siloed it in a way that it needs to be spread out. I think beginning with seeing all of these different subject areas as vehicles for that work is a lot of the way that we think about it. So sorry, I don't disagree.
But you're closer to being a student than some of us and you've had some in your own experience at the University of Chicago had some real disagreements with your classmates. Did you disagree amicably or were there some blow-ups that led you think that we need some work in this area? Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone hears agreeable disagreement and thinks, boy, do we have that figured out, right? And so I think that, you know, one of the things that I'm also really interested to hear from Julia about is sort of the question around when we think about AI and technology as this idea of being reps and giving us practice, there's a difference between us disagreeing, right, and what it looks like to authentically practice for that task.
And I think a lot of, you know, what I experienced when I was on a college campus, a college campus, by the way, that prides itself for being really good at this thing, is that, you know, young people in particular need to see more models and experience concretely what it actually feels like to do the thing right. There's a lot of conversation happening out there around how bad of a problem this is, how desperately we need to solve for it, but there's not enough concrete examples. And so I think providing that experience. Also, college is way too late to meet a Democrat or Republican for the first time, right?
Like, that's really late to be able to engage different ideas for the first time, and so how we can bring that sooner is critical. But we've had some really heated debates on college campuses. My office is attached to Columbia University, which in the last few years has been something of an armed camp, and I did not see a lot of agreeable disagreement among students around several issues there. In fact, they practically had to close down the campus, and that's been the case lots of places, including the campus where you work.
So what lessons can college students and younger people learn from, in the heat of the moment, and these passionate debates that we're having about everything from the Middle East crisis to our current administration? So I think when you think about a college campus, and this is true for a high school campus, and this is true for our country, there is sort of a distribution, if you will, of preferences for conflict. There are some people who say, I am passionate about this, this is my mission, I have an incredibly strong view, and I'm going to, you know, argue, I'm going to protest, I'm going to get arrested, this is my cause, and I am going all in on it. Then there's other people on the fully opposite side of the spectrum who say, absolutely, no how, no way am I getting involved in this, in fact, I'm not even, like, I'm doing absolutely nothing that will label me as one side or another, because I've realized how ugly some of these things can get, right?
And then there's everybody else in the middle who is sort of like, well, I kind of like to have the conversation, and I kind of have an opinion, and I would like to enter this discourse if it didn't feel so toxic, if I felt like I could get away with having a conversation without destroying half my friendships, right? And so it goes back to the idea that we really need to create an environment and a culture where the people who are ready to sort of cancel each other and dox each other are toned down a little bit, so that the people who have an opinion but are terrified of saying it out loud feel a little bit more comfortable entering the conversation, right? So I think you have to kind of bring in both sides, because there's modeling that's happening, and, you know, young people are very, very sensitive to what's appropriate in the environment and what will keep their friends versus destroy their relationships, and so you need to make it normative that, like, engaging in a civil manner is what we do here, and it's appropriate, and it's okay. Is that a reasonable expectation, given the times that we live in, Olivia?
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the jokes that I like to say and I've written about is that, you know, we need to replace cancel culture with curiosity culture, right? Like, this idea of leaning into asking questions, being curious about stakes that people are making, rather than looking to attack them or cancel them. I think, you know, one of my, you know, concerns with AI and the way that we talk about it as a tool for, you know, practice for being better at this thing, particularly for young people, is, and, you know, an aspect of the conversation that in my mind has really been missing, is you take the fact that we didn't even, we haven't figured out what to do with screens or the internet during the school day, and now here's AI, right? And so when we think about what that means, so much of what LLMs are doing for young people is discerning and considering different viewpoints for them, right?
The fact that you have young people asking AI questions and getting used to this conditioning that knowledge is something that happens instantly is doubling down on a lot of the problems that we're talking about. And so I think, for me, when we think about cancellation and being a binary as opposed to leaning into curiosity culture, there's a similar sort of doubling down we're seeing with how AI is literally structured in that young people are not being included in what it looks like to consider multiple viewpoints, but the AI is doing that thinking for them, right? And so I would just be curious. Is that a good thing?
I think definitely not, right? And so I think one of the things that I'm curious when we think about what we can use this technology for in ways that are, you know, positive for young people in developing their autonomy is how you think about that in the sorts of practicing and, you know, tools that you were describing. I mean, I think everything, you know, you're right. With all technology, we need to be thoughtful about what is actually happening, right?
And if we wait to sort of figure out what exactly AI is doing before we tell kids how they can use it, you know, those kids are going to be adults and then probably grandparents by the rate at which social science is done, right? But there is a lot of research coming out on the benefits of AI in these spaces, right? So there's work by Dave Rand at MIT that shows that AI is better at working with people who have been influenced by disinformation because it just has like an endless cache of arguments and it never loses its temper and it never runs out of time, right? And so AI has been great for combating disinformation.
Now, obviously, AI has also created a lot of disinformation. It hallucinates all the time and creates more, right? Not all the time. Not anymore, right?
Sometimes. Yeah, I mean, they've gotten a lot better. So I think we have to be thoughtful about how we engineer these systems that we put in front of kids. People also trust AI more in disagreement because they don't think that AI has a persuasive intent, which, of course, whoever programmed the AI has persuasive intent, but people don't have the sense that AI has persuasive intent, so it makes them a little bit more open to these arguments.
So there's pros and cons to a lot of this, but I don't think we can sort of like not use it. Do you want to respond? Yeah, I think, you know, it's a concept as old as time. You can find it from Aristotle or Plato, right?
Often in the mean is where there's a pretty good answer, and so I think, you know, one of the jokes that comes to mind for me with this conversation of getting it right is growing up, my household was the pantry filled with Oreos, donuts, candy, you named it. My mom got me cool for that, right? And so at the same time, there were all these other kids my age who grew up in households where they weren't allowed to have candy, were hyper-restricted. What do you think they did when they got to my house and saw my pantry?
They ate everything in sight, and in one end, there's real fear in making AI and technology that form of candy, right? Which is what you're describing, that when you restrict it, when you tell kids it's really bad, boy, are they gonna want to double down. At the other end, there's this fear that if you
How do you cultivate and raise a generation on AI? How do you discern for yourself?
How do you consider multiple viewpoints? I'm curious where you think of the practice makes, not perfect, but improvement approach lying on that spectrum. How do you make sense of it? So the way I think about it and the program that we have designed for Harvard College, I think of it as if you want to become a runner, you're never going to run a marathon on your treadmill.
But you can certainly run on the treadmill a lot and you're gonna be much better prepared to run a marathon than if you never use it. Life is gonna be easier if you have a treadmill if you're getting ready to be a marathoner. And so there is a set of skills and set of activities you do to essentially get stronger before you go out and you run the real marathon. And the way we put that into practice is that we have a program that students have to do online before they show up to campus.
You know. Is this for all students? So this is at the Kennedy School, it's already been required for all students. And this coming summer is going to be, there's a similar program that we're designing for incoming freshmen of Harvard College.
And so they have to do it online, right? It has all the sort of expected downsides of online learning, but also we tried to make much, much better than traditional online learning. You know, we have very sort of high quality video, we have these reflection activities and we have the AI. And then when they show up on campus, we're going to work with them in small groups to then go from AI to in-person disagreement but still supervised, right?
So you're now doing exercises that are being facilitated. And then the hope is that you now have some reps so that when you're arguing with your roommate or you're disagreeing with somebody in section, you have at least a minimal sense of confidence that I know how to do this because I've practiced it before. So there's like an off ramp. You're trying to do something similar in high schools, correct?
Yeah, so I, you know, the model that we've been putting forward is that, you know, Studium as an organization has been deploying high school law review and middle school law review in classrooms at scale. And what we've found is that, you know, students really remember that essay or that presentation or that final project. Like I can tell you, I'm sure people in the audience remember things they worked really hard at at some point in their middle school or high school career where that teacher pushed them, right? And so when we think about the model that we're putting forward, it's having students be organically exposed to a variety of contentious topics that they might be particularly passionate about, grounded in primary sources, whether that's the second amendment, the 14th, the first, right?
These topics they're learning about through that organic exposure, getting to pick what are you most excited about, right? Giving them appropriate autonomy in their learning to then have the confidence building activity of publishing and orally defending their own legal note, right? And I think for me, when I think about sort of what it is, you know, one of the potential challenges to what I hear and what you're describing is how are we making it meaningful for young people, right? Like how are we making those reps that they're getting with AI to disagree be something that they can viscerally connect to their day to day?
Yeah, so I think that's a great question and it goes back to this idea of not relegating it to one space. So a lot of what we, you know, what I think about a lot is what are we disagreeing about, right? And I think, you know, disagreeing about the Second Amendment is incredibly important for, you know, the world, for Americans. But I think most 14 year olds care a lot more about disagreeing with their parents about their curfew, right, or about like, you know, their coach about, you know, whether you have to run laps when you're late to practice, right?
So a lot of the examples we use, and I think this is actually where AI is quite helpful, is that you can create disagreement scenarios about everyday life that is very, very relevant to students. So when we like, when we pilot this with high school kids, they get really, really into it when it's something from their daily life, right? And then you kind of like escalated to these more, you know, policy related issues. Just quickly in regards to education, I would piggyback that off to just make the point that we need to be connecting the subject areas.
It's not just, you know, the First Amendment. It's picking cases related to online speech and its First Amendment implications and connecting that learning to their everyday life in a way to get them to think about it in the way that's the same as their curfew, right? And I would, in my experience and view, disagree about the fact that I think young people now have been conditioned to the second they think an argument is about something like the Second Amendment or the First Amendment or anything related to their, you know, civics, education, these sorts of subject areas are much less likely to be open to engaging in disagreement than if it's about their curfew or whether or not they should be able to get permission for something at home. Well, I just wanted to say this is such a perfect segue to invite you all to tomorrow.
My colleagues here from Retro Report, we worked together on a big project called Lessons in Civics and they're gonna be showing part of a PBS series that they produced on students who are arguing kind of before a mock Supreme Court with the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute. If you wanna see students, they're not using AI but they are passionately preparing and getting ready to agree. I felt like listening to that was a real hopeful sign that we can agree disagreeably and it's very interesting that you brought up the Supreme Court because the disagreement there has never been so sharp and so real. But listening to this generation of students tomorrow, it's at 410, I believe, in the foyer here, I think will be a great way of thinking about whether students can respectfully disagree.
And you have a whole framework on that, both of you do, right, have frameworks to help us with that. Can you just kind of briefly summarize what they would be? Yeah, so I think, you know, one, I think about everything in very behavioral terms, right? As a social scientist, I'm like behavior, behavior, behavior.
And I think if you think about conversational behavior, you know, there's two parts to conversation, right? There is trying to learn information from the other person and then there's trying to convey information to the other person. On average, most of us spend way too much time conveying information and not enough time trying to learn information, right? So part of it is like shifting that balance, right?
And then throughout the entire conversation, whether you're conveying or informing, the question is how do you keep your counterpart believing that you are really thinking hard about their point of view even as you're talking, right? And so a lot of my book and a lot of the research that we do is what are the like very concrete tools that we can experimentally test that help people show that they're engaging with their opposing perspective. Yeah, and I think that's also the reason why we, with our, you know, first programs that we've brought to states and districts and schools have doubled down on constitutional law being this extraordinary model for the exact dynamic you're describing, right? If young people are seeing that Justice Kagan or Chief Justice Roberts is taking the time to write a passionate dissenting opinion, why are they doing that?
What's the point? Maybe I should listen to Johnny who I don't like or don't really agree with because maybe there's something that can be, you know, learned from that lesson. And so I think it's about giving and having young people experience this conditioning of when I learn a fact, when I learn a truth, how am I thinking about how I can be disagreeing with what information is being presented in front of me? I feel like you're both trying to do something really hopeful in this very highly polarized society.
Do you have faith that we can get there or is it through the youngest generation that's gonna take us into a better place? I mean, I think we're in a place where we recognize that this is a problem and we're in a place where we're devoting resources to it. And so usually we get places when we do that. I have hope.
I also think that there's a real assumption and attitude that young people are not interested in agreeably disagreeing. And I would urge us all to ask what opportunities we're giving them in their lives and in their school days at a younger age prior to entering college campuses to see what it looks like for it to be done well and to be done right. Thank you very much. I believe we're out of time now.
That was a great segue and hope to see some of you tomorrow. Thank you so much to Julia and to Olivia. I believe we're out of time now.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.