At the Blog | June 20, 2025
From High Conflict to Democratic Dialogue: Skills for a Polarized Age
By Norman W. Spaulding
On April 3, 2025 Joint Venture, in partnership with the Stanford Office of Government Affairs, hosted a workshop for mayors and city managers on fostering civic engagement. Led by Stanford Law Professor Norman W. Spaulding, the session focused on essential skills — such as active listening — that are key to bridging divides.
This blog post, adapted from that workshop, perfectly responds to David Brooks’ call at State of the Valley, urging Americans to learn to "see others across differences and make them feel seen, heard, respected, and understood."
We’re here to talk about polarization, especially affective polarization, and how it’s affecting democratic deliberation. Evidence can be found at every level of government, from school board meetings to town halls and in the halls of Congress. The question is how political scientists, psychologists, and others who are studying the problem can shed light on solutions.
Polarization in Public Life
First, although we have more information now than ever, and our communication is instantaneous, most of us, including public officials, are afraid to speak.
For all the speech that is taking place, nuances and complexities rarely surface in public debate. Even within groups that have a strong sense of shared identity, people risk alienation for not toeing the line, for raising a dissenting voice, or for suggesting a different approach to a shared goal.
In many settings, this allows the loudest, most provocative voices to dominate or distort decisions. As conflict escalates, many who are directly affected tend to withdraw from public forums, unwilling to engage on these terms or feeling concerned about being doxed.
Polarization is also a residential phenomenon, as Bill Bishop has documented in his book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. When Americans move, we tend to move to neighborhoods that are even more red or even more blue, or even more similar in terms of socio-economic class, race, and religion. In many regions, public primary and secondary schools are approaching the same levels of racial segregation that existed before the Supreme Court got serious about desegregation in the late 1960s.
Perhaps most troublingly, on important public policy issues, our divergent factions no longer agree on the relevant facts. Part of this is cognitive dissonance, but part of it is that we increasingly inhabit online echo chambers where feed algorithms reinforce information silos, bias, and demonization of the other side.
Moving from High Conflict to Good Conflict
Political polarization — the ideological gap between liberal and conservative voters — has increased measurably over the last 30 years. But affective polarization has risen even more. This form of polarization goes beyond mere policy disagreement to the view that people on the other side are not just wrong, but undeserving of equal moral regard.
At its worst, this can lead to what Amanda Ripley calls high conflict. A journalist who spent her career in war zones and domestic conflict situations, Ripley distinguishes high conflict from good conflict — the kind that fosters learning, democratic deliberation, and problem solving.
High conflict, by contrast, is marked by incendiary cycles of mistrust, demonization, and escalation. As Ripley writes, “High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear.”
What can we do to avoid or de-escalate high conflict?
Research shows that while homogeneous groups are more vulnerable to groupthink — confirmation bias, stereotyping, radical drift, silencing dissent — heterogeneous groups with strong deliberation practices make better decisions and fewer mistakes.
The key is knowing and practicing the skills that ensure both free expression and sound deliberation.
What are these skills? They include active listening, awareness of cognitive biases that distort individual and group deliberation, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate and de-escalate tough conversations.
Today, I’ll talk a little about active listening, de-escalation, and how these fit into supporting democratic deliberation.
Active Listening: Paying Attention, Withholding Judgment, Reflecting
Active listening is the first and most essential skill — listening closely and attentively, without distraction or judgment.
This is harder than it sounds. Most of us are reactive, especially in public settings. If we’re not distracted — planning what to say next, checking our phones, or worrying about time — we’re often judging: focusing on what we think is right and wrong, and preparing our response.
How do we learn to withhold judgment?
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains that fast, instinctive thinking — what he calls System 1 — is where bias, stereotypes, and snap judgments flourish. System 1 is useful for everyday tasks like reading and walking, but it’s prone to error. To think clearly, we need to engage System 2 — our slower, more deliberate mode of thinking. This is where we reason with evidence, recognize bias, and grapple with complex questions such as managing budget cuts or balancing constitutional rights.
One way to activate System 2 is to cultivate curiosity. In her book, I Never Thought of It That Way, journalist Monica Guzman calls for “fearlessly curious conversations in dangerously divided times.” Living in deep-blue Seattle and reporting on nearby red communities, she’s found that the higher the stakes, the more we’re convinced the other side is wrong, and the more we must ask the all-important question: “What am I missing?”
In a pluralistic society, this simple question is one of our most powerful tools.
Active Listening: Clarifying, Summarizing, Sharing
Note that it’s not until step four — until after paying attention, withholding judgment, and reflecting — that an active listener begins to speak. Only after these steps do we proceed to the more vocal stages of clarifying, summarizing, and sharing. So there is a lot of work to do before we even begin to speak — and when we do speak, our first words should demonstrate curiosity.
Instead of imposing our own meaning or moving to solutions, constructive dialogue starts with a question to elicit more information, or with a technique called charitable reframing — a way of clarifying what’s been said that shows genuine effort to understand. One of the most effective techniques for this is called “looping,” a term coined by conflict mediator Gary Friedman and explained in the book Challenging Conflict. When we loop someone, we paraphrase what they’ve said in terms we’d expect them to embrace as accurate and ask if we got it right.
This critical step assures the speaker that they have been heard, that the listener cares about reaching understanding. The feeling of being heard, writes Michael Nichols in The Lost Art of Listening, meets a basic human need — the desire to be understood. Feeling heard is important in democratic terms, as well. It is deeply tied to Americans’ sense of justice and procedural fairness. People are more likely to trust a process as legitimate when they’ve had a meaningful opportunity to be heard.
Preserving Good Conflict: Active Listening in Public Settings
Active listening facilitates good conflict and deliberative processes that are essential to democracy. As public servants, your willingness to listen — and to create space for meaningful dialogue — is critical.
In public or committee meetings, you might practice charitably reframing what someone else has shared. Done correctly, this can promote trust and help ensure that people are deliberating from common understandings of the range of facts, interests, and perspectives.
Genuine Engagement
Active listening can’t be mastered overnight — it requires deliberate, repeated practice in lower-stakes settings. But at its highest level, this kind of listening supports what psychologists call integrative complexity — the ability to hold and examine conflicting ideas at the same time, and to enter a space where we can make connections that appear only when we work beyond superficial assumptions toward meaningful engagement.
This is the kind of wisdom that Nelson Mandela summoned to promote justice. As his biographer Richard Stengel wrote:
Some people will choose a categorical yes or no simply because it appears strong. But if we cultivate the habit of considering both — or even several — sides of a question, as Mandela did, of holding both good and bad in our minds, we may see solutions that would not have otherwise occurred to us. This way of thinking is demanding. Even if we remain wedded to our point of view, it requires us to put ourselves in the shoes of those with whom we disagree. That takes an effort of will, and it requires empathy and imagination. But the reward, as we can see in the case of Mandela, is something that can be fairly described as wisdom.
We can all cultivate this wisdom. The need is great. The means are available. The moment is ripe.
About the Author
Norman W. Spaulding is the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law at Stanford University. In 2021, he launched the ePluribus Project at Stanford Law School, which expanded into ePluribus Stanford, a university-wide initiative focused on reducing polarization and promoting discussion across differences. A nationally recognized scholar in the areas of professional responsibility, civil procedure, and federal courts, Professor Spaulding concentrates his research in the history of the American legal profession and theories of adjudication.
