The Way Out Quotes

“Over time, reservoirs of emotional positivity that accumulate in relationships can act as a buffer during heated conversations, making it easier for people to hear, empathize, and learn from the other side. Conversely, reservoirs of negativity prepare us for a quick descent into battle.49”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Most people using the term are referring to debate or criticism or other forms of oppositional confrontation, which are more closed communication processes of persuasion and influence aimed at winning a disagreement. Dialogue, in fact, is completely the opposite. It is a process of open and reflective speaking, hearing, learning, and discovery that is unfamiliar to most of us. It is more like what you would hear at a Quaker meeting or an AA meeting. After another”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Learning-oriented individuals focus more on increasing their competence and self-improvement, and tend to persist more and exert more effort in the face of difficult challenges than performers. Studies suggest that learners experience more difficult tasks as an opportunity to push their limits and grow their competencies, whereas performers experience them as dead-ends, indicating the limits of their intelligence.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Attractors are not necessarily good nor bad, they are simply facts. Attractors are just as likely to result in robust, healthy, and functional patterns in our life (e.g., achieving a satisfying work-life balance) as they are to result in miserable and toxic patterns (desperate, exhausting workaholism) or even neutral and mundane patterns (work phases that feel inconsequential but tolerable).”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Attractors are simply patterns that form over time in some systems (such as in brains, bodies, relationships, groups, communities, nations, and galaxies) and resist change.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“When a group of very different cloudlike elements—such as a diverse group of people with divergent beliefs, attitudes, and preferences—align together and feed off one another to move the group in a consistent direction over time, an attractor is born.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Attractors operate according to a very different set of laws than the standard cause-and-effect change principles with which we are most familiar. Understanding these laws is the key to changing seemingly unchangeable patterns.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Psychologists refer to this process as confirmation bias, which is a form of motivated reasoning. We don’t process new information neutrally, instead we are motivated to make sense of it in ways that are consistent with our existing worldview.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“We all tend to favor our in-groups (to increase our self-esteem), and a close cousin of this is the tendency to disfavor and discriminate against out-groups.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Finally, differences in how we prioritize our core moral values lead to self-righteous divisions. All this adds up to a basic susceptibility to being split and divided into us versus them.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Third, we take many cognitive shortcuts, categorizing one another in overly simplified ways to help us reduce the cognitive load on our brains.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“First, we process information in fundamentally emotional ways.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Second, we are also highly threat sensitive and attend much more carefully to its perceived sources.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“We prefer to take in information that affirms our existing beliefs and values, both for consistency and so we can boost our feelings of self and group-based esteem.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“we process information in fundamentally emotional ways.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“We are devoting much more energy to obtaining a sense of belonging and comfort from our groups than to seeking accurate information about our increasingly complicated world.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Finally, data also show that our understanding of the major challenges our nation is facing is becoming much more superficial and simplistic.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“our feeling and our thinking about our national political landscape have become more simplistic, dichotomized, and tribal. Emotionally, Americans are feeling much colder toward and contemptuous of those on the other side of our political divide than in past decades, and they are feeling a much greater sense of warmth and loyalty for members of their own in-group.20 For instance, the proportion of people who hold “very unfavorable views” of the opposite party has more than doubled since 1994.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“perceptual polarization, the degree to which a gap exists between what Americans believe to be the attitudes of the opposing party on an issue and what their attitudes actually are.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“such as between affective polarization, the tendency of members of oppositional groups to feel negatively about the opposing group members and positively about members of their own group, and ideological polarization, the divergence of attitudes on substantive issues.10 Recall that the Boston leadership dialogue group was able to slowly disentangle these two forms, and their feelings and ideological beliefs eventually diverged. Political polarization is somewhat different from both affective and ideological polarity, referring instead to cases in which an individual’s stance on a given issue, policy, or person is more likely to be influenced by identification with a particular political party or ideology (e.g., progressive or conservative) than with understanding the issue or the person”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“When life gets particularly tense, unpredictable, or dangerous, we seek consistency and certainty even more desperately. So it follows that in more threatening times (like today) we find comfort and solace in moral certainty.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“cleaving of the world into good and evil feels particularly necessary and reassuring under conditions of high threat, anxiety, and uncertainty—when life feels scary and chaotic and unpredictable (like today).”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Social media is to polarization and violence what carbon is to climate change.”5 Namely, a basic accelerant.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Attractors are stable patterns that draw us in repeatedly and resist change—like a strong attitude, habit, or addiction.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Today we are all stuck in an us-versus-them attractor that is much larger and more powerful than any one of us.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Genuine, sustained change usually requires a concerted effort by leaders and citizens at various levels (particularly local, grassroots leaders) both to reduce the likelihood of additional violent, polarizing or otherwise destructive incidents and to increase the chances of more positive, prosocial types of language, encounters, and activities between members of the previously warring groups.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“All sides to these disputes also need to begin to sense that there might be a mutually enticing opportunity to exit. In other words, they need to begin to sense that there may be a way out in which they can get unstuck, change course, and move on with their lives without having to lose face or give up too much.”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“a mutually hurting stalemate arises between the groups and is coupled with a sense of a mutually enticing opportunity.30 A mutually hurting stalemate happens when disputants in a conflict (the reds, blues, and the independent “leaners” in our case) see the situation they are in as chronically stuck and unlikely to be unilaterally “won” by either side (in other words, a stalemate), and when the disputants are experiencing enough pain, regret, or dread right now to motivate them to find an alternative way”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Research on this type of change has found that significant shocks are often a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for bringing about an end to deep intergroup divisions28 and sustained, transformational change.29”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization

“Our perceptions are also way off. Today Democrats and Republicans imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side of the political fence hold more extreme views than really do.11 And the more media we consume, including newspapers, social media, talk radio, and local news, the more our views become divorced from reality. We are also paying less careful attention to the specifics of the issues that divide us—such as health care, immigration, and gun control—opting instead to blindly follow what we are told by our party leaders.12”
― Peter T Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization