Understanding another person’s perspective can help burst your political bubble

There are certain resolutions that are easily made and easily broken: lose weight; drink less; be mindful. They all seem a cinch compared with the challenge of our age: think less tribally.

Try meeting people who disagree with you. Try to understand both sides of the argument. Most of us instinctively feel that this is desirable. Each of us has something to learn from others. And yet bursting our own bubbles is hard.

Here’s one approach: use social media to follow people with opposing opinions. If you see what they are saying, you can ponder their arguments and try to see the world from their point of view. At the very least, you can understand how best to convert them.

To investigate this idea, a group of social scientists — Christopher Bail, Lisa Argyle and others — recently recruited several hundred people in the US with Republican or Democrat leanings, and gave them a small financial incentive to follow a Twitter bot for a month that would expose them to the opposing point of view.

Republicans followed a liberal bot that retweeted 24 messages from elected Democrats, left-leaning media outlets and nonprofit groups; Democrats followed a conservative bot.

But the bot’s efforts at fostering understanding backfired. “Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post treatment,” write the researchers. Democrats moved further left, although their moves were not as large.

Some earlier research also found evidence of backfire effects in other contexts, perhaps because we find contrary views or inconvenient facts discomfiting and may immediately recall or invent reasons to demean or dismiss them. And

Twitter is hardly the venue for a deep meeting of minds.

Still, the conclusion is clear enough: if the aim is to find common ground or at least to foster understanding, being exposed to the comments of political opponents will not do it. It leads to aggravation, not understanding, and it is as counterproductive as it sometimes seems.

Cass Sunstein, an academic who has served in the administrations of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, makes an intriguing suggestion in his new book The

Cost-Benefit Revolution. He points out that we can protect ourselves from certain cognitive errors by translating arguments into an unfamiliar form, perhaps a second language, or perhaps a mathematical abstraction. When you see the argument thus rephrased, you are forced to stop and think. Your response is less emotional.

I am persuaded that this exercise would force me to think more with my brain and less with my gut. But it would not be easy to force myself to apply a cost-benefit framework as I ponder the appeal of a hard Brexit, say, the benefits of GM food or the winners and losers from restrictions on abortion. Alas, I doubt the prescription has broad appeal.

So we are back to trying to appreciate the other side’s point of view by talking to them, and that probably means talking to them respectfully, attentively and at some length. And they would need to spend proper, quality time with me.

Unless one of us had the patience of a saint (and it would not be me), that would require some other social glue. If we could first spend time together as friends, neighbours, colleagues or teammates, we might later have a chance to talk in depth about politics and values. Starting with politics is likely to lead nowhere.

Occasionally, rarely enough that each instance is memorable, I have sat and respectfully disagreed with someone for hours: listening to them, understanding their viewpoint, presenting my own ideas and searching for common ground.

Without exception, these heart-to-hearts have been preceded by months of friendship built on some other shared interest or experience. You can have a civil debate with a political enemy, but it really helps if the political enemy is a friend in real life.

It is sobering, then, to ponder the enthusiasm with which various activists on both sides are keen to make everything political. I do not object to anyone, on any side, who believes that there are deep political issues more important than entertainment, sport or music.

But the cumulative effect of the polarisation of everything is not healthy.

Paradoxically, a vibrant, thoughtful politics needs some parts of life that are free of politics, free of the idea of themand-us. Otherwise we stop listening to each other. We often stop thinking entirely.

IF WE COULD FIRST SPEND TIME TOGETHER AS FRIENDS … WE MIGHT HAVE A CHANCE TO TALK ABOUT POLITICS