How Not to Learn from Disagreement

I suspect even the well-intentioned people advising us to seek out opposing views already know, on some level, that it doesn’t work. We’ve all had the experience of receiving strongly worded disagreement on Facebook, maybe from an old classmate or a second cousin who has a totally different worldview from us. And when they explain to us how our views on abortion are immoral or why our political party is incompetent, we don’t usually come away from those interactions feeling enlightened.

Still, it’s so common for articles and books to decry the echo chambers and filter bubbles making us closed-minded that many people have taken that warning to heart and tried to listen to the “other side.” Usually, they find the experience frustrating.

Rachael Previti is a liberal journalist who in 2019 resolved to watch only Fox News for one week. Her postmortem is representative of most accounts I’ve seen: “I wanted to look for the bright side in some of the things conservatives had to say instead of being like, ‘Oh my god look at all of these things conservatives think!’” Previti said. “But honestly, it was hard to find what was really stood for besides bashing liberals.”1

In 2017, a Michigan magazine attempted a two-sided version of the “escape your echo chamber” experiment.2 It recruited one couple and one individual with very different views from each other who agreed to exchange media diets for one week. On the liberal side were Aric Knuth and Jim Leija, who live in Ann Arbor and who both work for the University of Michigan. They’re fans of NPR and avid readers of the New York Times and the feminist website Jezebel. On the conservative side was Tom Herbon, a retired engineer and enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump living in a suburb of Detroit. Herbon is a daily reader of the Drudge Report online, and keeps his radio tuned to The Patriot, a talk radio station featuring conservative personalities like Sean Hannity.

Knuth and Leija agreed to read the Drudge Report and listen to The Patriot. In exchange, Herbon agreed to read the New York Times and Jezebel, and leave his radio tuned to NPR while he was at home. After a week, the magazine checked in with its three guinea pigs. Had they learned anything?

Indeed they had: Everyone had learned that the “other side” was even more biased, inaccurate, and grating than they previously believed. Leija had never listened to The Patriot talk radio before, and found it shocking. He said, about Herbon, “It made me really sad that there is this person who listens to this radio station all day long that is filled with people who are exactly like him, that say exactly the things he wants to hear.” Herbon, meanwhile, had loathed Jezebel and the New York Times so much that he gave up on them halfway through the experiment (although he did manage to stick with NPR for the full week). He said, “I was immediately turned off by inaccuracies of what I know to be fact. If people don’t know what a fact is, we have a huge problem.”

If those experiments aren’t formal enough for you, there was also a large-scale study in 2018 on the effects of listening to the “other side.”3 Researchers offered people on Twitter eleven dollars to follow an automated Twitter account (a “bot”) that would expose them to tweets from the other side of the political spectrum. For liberals, the bot would show them twenty-four tweets per day from conservative figures such as politicians, media outlets, nonprofits, and pundits. For conservatives, the bot would show them twenty-four tweets per day from liberal figures. The researchers made sure participants were actually reading the bot’s tweets by giving everyone weekly quizzes on its content.

One month later, researchers measured the political attitudes of their participants. Had their views been moderated by the foray outside their echo chambers? Quite the contrary. Conservatives who spent a month reading liberal tweets became dramatically more conservative. Liberals who spent a month reading conservative tweets became slightly more liberal (though the effect wasn’t statistically significant).

Results like these might seem to repudiate the whole idea of listening to the other side. But the situation isn’t quite that grim. The right takeaway from these failed experiments isn’t that learning from disagreement is hopeless—it’s that we’re going about it all wrong.

Our mistake lies in how we select the sources we listen to. By default, we end up listening to people who initiate disagreements with us, as well as the public figures and media outlets who are the most popular representatives of the other side. Those are not very promising selection criteria. First of all, what kind of person is most likely to initiate a disagreement? A disagreeable person. (“This article you shared on Facebook is complete bullshit—let me educate you . . .”) Second, what kind of people or media are likely to become popular representatives of an ideology? The ones who do things like cheering for their side and mocking or caricaturing the other side—i.e., you.

To give yourself the best chance of learning from disagreement, you should be listening to people who make it easier to be open to their arguments, not harder. People you like or respect, even if you don’t agree with them. People with whom you have some common ground—intellectual premises, or a core value that you share—even though you disagree with them on other issues. People whom you consider reasonable, who acknowledge nuance and areas of uncertainty, and who argue in good faith.