Experiencing different cultures and backgrounds, and talking to people from all different walks of life has always been something I’ve enjoyed doing, and I find that as much as we celebrate diversity – and we should – I also find that it reveals hard work because you actually have to love and talk to people and engage and be in an open relationship with people who come from different walks of life. And eventually, if you’re going to have relationships with people, that involves hard work. It’s nice to just say, let’s talk to one another, as a tagline or something that feels good. But the actual work of diversity is challenging … yet worthwhile.
– Sean Campbell, dyad participant, 2024
The Waging Dialogue Model is a work in progress, an attempt to address a problem that may seem intractable, but which is becoming ever more critical to solve with advancements in technology. Humans attacking and ostracizing other humans is nothing new, but the systematic isolation of humans into echo chambers by social media algorithms is unique to this period of history. We have to create a model for radical understanding in order to break down these alienating categories. Otherwise we risk a dystopian future as artificial intelligence learns from our worst tendencies.
Many efforts to address political polarization have moved toward improving debate and discourse on the controversial issues, promoting better listening and more reasoned arguments in place of defensive impulses. It is critically important to provide demonstrations of and opportunities for idealized dialogue, but this approach is not sufficient to address the deeper aspects of polarization. We must recognize that, in many cases, we stake out our strongest positions not because they feel most rational to us but because they support our identities. When our identities are threatened, our fight, flight, or freeze instincts kick in. We either become increasingly aggressive, “freeze” the conversation with repetitive counters, or shut down the interaction completely.
It is enormously difficult to have open and honest dialogue with those whose beliefs we cannot rationalize because they come from different experiential foundations. People willing to invest the necessary time and energy to confront this obstacle must be given the space to struggle together to understand why it’s so hard, and Waging Dialogue will provide this space.
Developing our model
Since Dr Alice Maher conceived the Waging Dialogue Project in 2003, we have harnessed advances in technology and our own observational research:
- 2003-2011 Moderated online listservs revealed the power of our identities and the underlying aggression inevitable in dialogue with people of different perspectives.
- 2020 Our Zoom-based Dialogue with Dignity group discussions brought together individuals of different experiences and beliefs to discuss a specific political or social issue. Limited in scope and duration – not allowing sufficient time for personal storytelling – they tended to disband as conflicts arose.
- 2021 In partnership with Listen First we broadened our reach and created longer form dialogues alternating Zoom and text-based conversations via text, hoping this would allow “easier” conversations to flow online and more challenging ones to be bravely expressed with the distance of writing.
- 2022 We experimented with dyads between two people of differing backgrounds and perspectives. Emphasizing personal storytelling and deep listening, we encouraged the partners to “stay the course” and navigate inevitable impasses, over multiple meetings.
- 2022 In partnership with Braver Angels, we pioneered the “meta-dialogue,” in which participants look back at their own dyad engagements or videotaped group discussions to observe what worked and what didn’t, note where impasses occurred and how participants worked through them — or gave up. Our current model — Dyad + Meta-Dialogue — holds the most promise in our mission to create a methodology for communicating across divides.
Waging Dialogue in action
As part of Listen First’s National Week of Conversation in April 2024, we gathered several pairs of dyad “alumni” to demonstrate the meta-dialogue model by reflecting on their dyad experiences.
Dyad in action: In the following videos, a liberal and a conservative test the Waging Dialogue “dyad” model. They build on a friendly relationship established in initial meetings and proceed to challenge one another to understand where their positions originate. They are willing to listen to ideas, even offensive ones, without necessarily debating the ideas themselves. They don’t fight against, they dig around and underneath.
Get involved
We seek to partner with individuals and organizations with the human or financial resources to help us scale up these efforts, bring a larger number of people into this social experiment, and develop a data-driven methodology to measure the success of this initiative.