Sharing an interesting article… Originally posted at YesMagazine.org by Yasmeen Wafai on Jul 10, 2019 Research suggests that structured engagement with someone who holds divergent views can be transformative, even without a concrete resolution. Putting two people with diametrically opposed viewpoints in a room together may seem frightening to most, but one research lab has been doing it for nearly 20 years. The Difficult Conversations Lab was founded in the early 2000s by Peter Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. He said the lab was created to study deeply rooted, complicated, and hard-to-solve conflicts. He wanted to understand why conflicts in families, communities, and in the international arena get stuck in a destructive pattern. He based his idea for the lab on other projects like the Gottman Institute’s Love Lab for couples therapy. Coleman said researchers at the lab measure people’s attitudes on a series of issues through surveys, then find people who are on opposite sides of a particular issue and invite them to the lab for a conversation. They choose currently relevant topics like abortion, free speech, race relations, and politics. Researchers study the conditions under which the conversations go well, or well enough, whether the participants continue to speak with each other, and where they stop the conversations out of frustration, he said. Contrary to expectation, these conversations do not always go sour and are sometimes constructive, Coleman said. It is not that participants are solving the issues themselves, but they are creating the space to learn something about themselves, the issue, and other viewpoints. “What we’re doing is not some sort of magical experience that transforms people,” Coleman said. The lab has conducted several hundred conversations, and the research is ongoing, he said. The conclusions the team have reached so far depend on…
Continue Reading
