Poles Apart Quotes

“We reserve special thanks for our husbands. Will, Doug and Jimmy; and our children Evie, Teddy, Tomos, Anna and Ellie. Mummy can finally put down the laptop!”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Debate is good. Disagreement is good. Entrenching in our own beliefs to the extent that we can’t tolerate either does us much harm.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“to negotiate you need to see the process as collaborative problem-solving rather than winner-takes-all.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“then [it’s about] finding the places where you have common ground and building from there, finding the things that benefit both of you, both of your values, where you both can start from, where you’re similar rather than you’re different.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think the key takeaway there is that if we continue to only speak to people who agree with us, we won’t make change. We won’t change people’s minds. So the first step is being comfortable with being uncomfortable: being willing to speak to people who don’t agree with you. The second is that we have to recognise that the people that we’re speaking to, that maybe we see as enemies or as adversaries, quite often have a lot more in common with us than we care to realise”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Leah and Craig were able to activate their other identities – as parents, as people who valued education, as people who cared about sharing the reality of the situation with a wider group of people – which meant they could treat each other with kindness, explore each other’s views in more depth and, in the process, move from a winning position to an understanding one in which they could establish a shared goal.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“there are common themes to many accounts of their journeys and those highlighted by academic studies: rethinking and/or getting to know the ‘enemy’ (in other words, who the ‘them’ is); seeking to establish a shared identity; moving from a winning to an understanding mindset; being presented with a route to change that made it less costly; rethinking a position in the face of kindness; identifying a common goal rather than a ‘winning’ position; listening to a trusted ‘messenger’; letting go of a belief if a mechanistic attempt to justify it failed or if presented with overwhelming contrary evidence.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“One final way to counter polarisation is to formulate a markedly different position from our usual one and come up with reasons for it. Can we understand why someone would hold such a view? It may be different from ours, but is it genuinely worse – or perhaps better”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“rather than thinking about negotiation as a battle, you should think about negotiation as collaborative problem-solving.’46 She argues that it is critical that you start by being prepared – and able – to frame your proposals as a solution to a problem your counterpart has.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“So instead, we started having conversations where we entered with the intention just to learn from the other side. And we found that in doing so, it made our own positions better, and our own views stronger, more reasoned and nuanced. Second, we realised that a lot of our assumptions about the other side turned out to be wrong.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Kindness involves a mindset of understanding, not winning. A zero-sum, winner-takes-all mentality makes both sides think that if the other side wins, they lose. An understanding mentality ensures that because neither side loses, neither side puts winning beyond everything else.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“The point is, though, that he did all this kindly, not critically or censoriously. Famke acknowledged that ‘she just needed that’: it was his kindness, it seems, that made the difference”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“it turned out that in one particular US training camp they had been taught that Koreans were ‘cruel and heartless’ and trained to hate them deeply. So when they were shown unexpected kindness and compassion36 by their Korean captors, which flew in the face of the barbarism they had been trained to expect, their prior beliefs crumbled.37 In fact, soldiers who had been trained in this particular US camp were far more likely to defect than POWs who had not been given any training on the North Koreans or had been given more neutral information.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Before you commit yourself to a position or a policy, ask yourself to explain mechanistically how you think it will bring about its intended outcome. Pick a topic you feel strongly about: climate change, immigration, taxation, gun laws, euthanasia. Then don’t simply justify it: write down or explain to someone else step-by-step how your thinking operates and why therefore it will succeed.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Researchers have found that when people are brought face-to-face with the fact that they don’t know as much as they thought they did in a mechanistic (step-by-step fashion), they tend to become less extreme.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Humans suffer from what is technically known as the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED).27 In other words, we tend to believe that we understand things far more precisely and coherently than we actually do.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“One approach which has been shown to work is to say, not that something isn’t true, but that its opposite is true.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“opinions come first, and facts are interpreted to support them. This points to a wider truth touched on in Chapter 1, that many of our attitudes are rooted in predispositions established early in life and reinforced by the groups we interact with, and that, consequently, mere information is often insufficient to shift the dial.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Having randomly assigned accurate and inaccurate information about immigration policy and levels of immigration to participants in their study, they found that the provision of accurate facts and figures did have an impact on people’s knowledge. But that new knowledge had no knock-on effect on attitudes, even among those who discovered that their previous assumptions were wildly out of kilter with reality.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Because we can’t change reality when things we dislike or that cause us harm come to pass, we instead change our minds about them, persuading ourselves that they’re not really that bad.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“If people are told that their views are outdated, they may double down. Messages that seek to include rather than reprimand them will be more effective.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“if we first think about our own positive attributes (attributes not connected with our group), the boost we receive in self-esteem neutralises the negativity we would usually experience from a dalliance with ‘them’. Self-affirmation, it seems, gives people the inner security they need to accept new ideas that they would otherwise reject, and to abandon old ideas to which they would otherwise cling.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Lab studies33 have shown that when people are asked to reflect on their own positive attributes – for example, by writing them down – they react more open-mindedly to information that goes against their partisan identity.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Jordan Blashek and Chris Haugh found that a good way to reduce tension was to ‘strip away the labels’. ‘We learned to identify each other not as Democrats or Republicans with beliefs motivated by partisan ideology, but instead as the deeper identities that we both carried that matter to us,’ said Jordan.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Manchester United fans were asked to talk not about their team but about what they liked about being a football supporter. When the fans primed in this way were then confronted by the fallen jogger, the help they offered was determined not by whether the jogger was a Manchester United supporter but by whether he was a football fan.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“With a relevant and tangible ‘superordinate’ goal in play, the animosity previously expressed by the two groups quickly began to dissipate.28 The insults dwindled. Aggression vanished. Cross-group friendships began to form. Pursuing a common goal highlighted what the boys had in common and averted focus from what was different.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Quintin Oliver, a conflict resolution specialist and the man behind the successful referendum for a ‘Yes’ vote on the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, told us that for deliberative democracy to work, three essential ingredients first have to be in place: a purpose; a promise; and a deadline.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“it does generally seem to be the case that contact-based approaches can only have a limited effect when it comes to reducing polarisation, not least because the people who become involved are not drawn from society as a whole but from those who chose to ‘opt in’.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, ‘I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“The conclusion of the American political philosopher John Rawls was that we need clearly defined ways to debate with one another, while protecting our political institutions, if we are each to remain free. We must find a way to disagree that does not ultimately undermine us all.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together