We know we don't agree, and we always have. I have friends who are Republicans, friends who served in Republican administrations, and friends whose political convictions differ a great deal from mine. I am not here to shock you, but I did work for Dan Quayle when I was in high school. I helped broker conversations involving Republican leaders in the Trump White House, and I have spent most of my life building relationships across institutions and political traditions.

When I worked for Dan Quayle, his speechwriter was John McConnell, and he was a legend. He grew up in Bayfield, Wisconsin, served as a Senate page under a Democrat, Senator William Proxmire, and went on to Carleton College and Yale Law School. After Quayle, he wrote for Bob Dole, and then spent all eight years of the Bush administration writing for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, including the President's address to Congress after September 11, 2001 (Harvard Institute of Politics). Years later he told students at Carleton that a person's politics tells you very little about their character (The Carletonian).

John taught me something I have carried for the rest of my life. He told me the whole point of having two sides is democracy. We are supposed to argue, disagree, and come to consensus, and every one of us belongs in that work. The arguing is how a free people decides things together, and when it works, nobody gets left outside the room.

The most important things my relationships across the aisle taught me had little to do with politics. They taught me to listen for our common humanity, the common life we share underneath the arguments. I learned in friendships far from any campaign that difference is something to celebrate, because the people who stand somewhere else are the ones who can show me what I have missed.

I wanted to know whether the research agrees with what those friendships taught me, so I went looking. It does, and in some places it says it more plainly than I ever have.

Summary of findings

Seventy years of research on people who disagree points the same way my friendships did. When people meet as equals, work toward a shared goal, and listen to each other's lived experience, their hostility drops, and some of that change lasts for weeks and months. Arguments by themselves move almost no one. Most of the fear we carry about the other side is bigger than the facts, and it shrinks when people learn what their neighbors actually think.

The research supports the joy I feel in learning from people who disagree with me. It also shows that warmth toward each other and loyalty to democracy are two different things, and both have to be built.

What I set out to learn

I asked three questions. The first was whether meeting people who think differently actually changes how we see them. The second was why we so often get each other wrong. The third was which kinds of conversation help people learn from each other, and which ones only harden what they already believe.

I read studies from psychology and political science, including large reviews, field experiments where canvassers knocked on real doors, and a national test of 25 different approaches published in the journal Science in 2024. I also went back to my own record in public life, including a Senate press release that carried my words. Every claim below carries one of three labels, the same way I labeled the evidence in "Pimping the Poor."

What John McConnell knew

John arrived at Carleton College as a Republican and a Reagan fan, which his professor Steven Schier called a rarity on that campus, and his very first class there was taught by Paul Wellstone, who later became a Democratic senator from Minnesota. For years afterward, whenever the two ran into each other, Wellstone would remind John that he had promised to vote for him even though he was a Republican. The chance to cast that vote never came, and John told Carleton students in 2009 that he would have voted for Wellstone anyway, because "friendship comes first and political affiliation later" (The Carletonian). Documented.

In that same talk, he said he was certain the line between good people and bad people has nothing to do with party. He also talked about losing. He worked on four national campaigns, and only once did his candidate get the most votes, yet he said the defeats were what kept him going, and that the real test is staying loyal to your ideals when they lose. Documented.

His career shows the same steadiness. After Quayle and Dole, he wrote for Paul Ryan when Ryan ran for vice president in 2012 (NYU Brademas Center). He has taught speechwriting at George Washington University, served as a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, and in 2023 led a student study group at the University of Southern California's Center for the Political Future, where he also recorded advice on how to have respectful political conversations (USC Dornsife). He has also sat on stage with Democratic speechwriters, including Michael Waldman, who ran speechwriting for President Clinton, to talk about the State of the Union (U.S. Capitol Historical Society). Today, the Federalist Society lists him as an executive speechwriter and public speaker (Federalist Society). Documented.

A young Republican who started out as a Senate page for a Democrat, who took his first college class from Paul Wellstone and kept the friendship, and who spent his life losing and winning arguments without losing people, is about the best teacher a person could have on what two sides are for. Interpretation.

A Republican, a Democrat, and a social worker from Indianapolis

Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, invited me to comment on policy and used my words in his press releases. The one I keep coming back to went out on July 1, 2021, just before the Fourth of July. Young and Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, introduced two bills together, the Volunteer Innovation Act and the Unity through Service Act, to modernize AmeriCorps and the country's national service programs (Senator Young). Documented.

I was Executive Director of Serve Indiana, the state's service commission, and the release carried my words beside the two senators. I said the two bills together would have a tremendous impact, that they would unite Americans as leaders, neighbors, and citizens, and that they would draw on the deep assets in the corporate and social sectors to bring out the best in each other and in our communities.

The bills themselves were built for people who disagree. The Unity through Service Act would create a council to coordinate military, national, and public service, and a single online platform where any American could find a way to serve. The Volunteer Innovation Act would let community groups get paid by AmeriCorps when they reached clearly measured results. The release also named the problem the senators were trying to solve. Over 24 million Americans serve through the military or in national or public service, and the national volunteer rate had not gone above 28.8 percent since 2005, falling to 24.9 percent in 2015. Documented.

Service matters to this essay because it is one of the few places in American life where people from different backgrounds work side by side for a year on the same task. AmeriCorps asks its members about this when they leave. Across surveys of departing members from 2016 to 2020, most said they had learned to work with people unlike themselves, and members who worked on teams more often reported this more strongly (AmeriCorps). Estimate, since the agency is measuring its own program and the members answer for themselves.

A Republican and a Democrat wrote those bills together, and a social worker from Indianapolis got to say why they mattered. That is the work John McConnell described to me long before. People who disagree meet on common ground, argue it out, and build something that belongs to all of them.

Meeting as equals

In 1954, a Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport published The Nature of Prejudice, and he made a careful claim. Contact between groups could reduce prejudice, he said, when four things were true: the people met with equal status, they worked toward common goals, they cooperated instead of competing, and the people in charge, the law, or local custom supported the meeting (Pettigrew, Annual Review of Psychology). He also warned that contact under bad conditions could backfire and make prejudice worse (FORRT). Documented.

Fifty years later, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp gathered every study they could find that tested Allport's idea. They found 515 studies covering about a quarter of a million people in 38 nations, and 94 percent of them tied more contact with less prejudice (Pettigrew). The studies ranged from 1940 to 2000 and covered six continents (SPARQ). Documented.

Two of their findings delight me. Contact helped even when Allport's four conditions were not all present, though the conditions made it work better. And the good feeling spread, so that people who came to know one group grew warmer toward other groups they had never met (SPARQ). Pettigrew also named how the change happens. People learn about each other, they act differently around each other, they form real emotional ties, and they start to see their own group with fresh eyes (Pettigrew, Annual Review of Psychology). Documented.

Allport's four conditions read like a description of a good service year, a good neighborhood association, or a Senate office that calls a social worker for advice. Equal standing, a shared job, real cooperation, and someone in authority who says this meeting matters. Interpretation.

We guess wrong about each other

In 2019, a research group called More in Common asked Democrats and Republicans what they believed, and then asked each side to guess what the other side believed. Each side imagined almost twice as many of its opponents held extreme views as really did (Washington Examiner). Democrats guessed that about half of Republicans believe racism still exists in America, and about 80 percent actually do. Republicans guessed that more than half of Democrats think most police are bad people, and fewer than 20 percent actually do. Documented from a national survey by a group that works to reduce polarization.

Two details from that study stay with me. People who followed the most news and shared the most political content on social media had the widest gaps. And people whose friends all thought alike guessed worse about the other side than people with mixed friendships (Christian Post). A friendship across the aisle works like a correction built into ordinary life. Interpretation.

We also guess wrong about how the other side sees us. Samantha Moore-Berg and her colleagues surveyed more than a thousand Americans and found that Democrats and Republicans each believed the other side disliked and dehumanized them about twice as much as it really did (Behavioral Scientist). The people with the most mistaken beliefs were also the most willing to bend democratic rules to hurt their opponents. Documented.

The most hopeful finding is how easy the mistake is to fix. Joseph Mernyk, Robb Willer, and colleagues asked partisans how much the other side supported political violence, and the guesses ran 245 to 442 percent higher than the real numbers. When people were simply shown the real numbers, their own support for violence fell by 34 percent, and their willingness to take part in violence fell by 44 percent. A follow-up about a month later found the drop was still there (SSRC MediaWell). In a separate set of three studies with 4,154 people, telling partisans the truth about how the other side saw them made them less likely to dehumanize the other side, and the change held a week later (Social Psychological and Personality Science). Documented.

Even elected officials get it wrong. State legislators supported undemocratic practices far less than the public did, but they badly overestimated how undemocratic the other party's voters were, and accurate information brought their guesses back down (Northwestern Institute for Policy Research). Documented.

Much of what we fear about each other lives in our own heads. A real conversation with a real person is one of the fastest ways to bring that fear down to its true size. Interpretation.

Stories move people

Joshua Kalla at Yale and David Broockman at Berkeley wanted to know what actually changes a mind at a front door. They worked with community groups, and 230 canvassers talked with 6,869 voters in seven places across the country about immigration and transgender rights (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality). Documented.

In the first experiment, on immigration, some canvassers made arguments face to face. Those conversations had no effect on the voters' views. Other canvassers made the same arguments and also traded personal stories with the voter, listening to the voter's views without judging them. Those conversations reduced exclusionary attitudes, and the change lasted at least four months. Two more experiments on attitudes toward transgender people found the same result. Documented.

Kalla and Broockman then took those conversations apart to see which piece did the work. The canvassers had been using three kinds of storytelling at once, so the researchers tested them one at a time. Conversations built only on perspective-getting, where the voter hears and takes in another person's real experience, worked just as well as the full package (Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies). Documented.

This is the plainest answer I found to my own question. When I ask a Republican friend what he has lived that I haven't, I am doing the one thing the experiments say works. When I try to win the argument, I am doing the thing that changed nothing in their first experiment. Interpretation.

The largest test yet

In 2024, the journal Science published the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, the biggest single test of ways to ease partisan hostility. Researchers led by Jan Voelkel, Michael Stagnaro, James Chu, and Robb Willer gathered 252 ideas from academics, practitioners, and civic leaders, chose the 25 most promising, and tested them with more than 32,000 Americans (Stanford Sociology). The approaches included short videos, written prompts, chatbots, quizzes, and stories. Documented.

Twenty-three of the 25 lowered partisan hostility, and some lowered it by an amount equal to undoing eight years of growing polarization. Many of the effects were still there two weeks later. The approaches that worked best were the plainest ones. Hostility fell most when people met sympathetic, relatable individuals who held different political beliefs, or when they were reminded of identities they share with the other side (University of Vienna colloquium abstract). A University of Utah scholar discussing the study said a Heineken beer commercial was among the most effective of all of them (University of Utah). Documented.

The study also found something I did not expect. Feeling warmer toward the other side did not reliably make people more loyal to democratic rules. The approaches that best reduced support for undemocratic practices were different ones, especially correcting false beliefs about what the other side wants and showing people how close a democracy can come to collapse. Four of the approaches actually raised support for undemocratic practices, and three of those had lowered hostility at the same time (UCLA Anderson Review). Documented.

John McConnell would have understood that finding right away. Liking each other is good, and it is a different thing from agreeing to keep arguing under fair rules when you lose. A democracy needs both. Interpretation.

A learner's heart, measured

Psychologists have a name for what I have been calling a learner's heart. They call it intellectual humility, which means knowing that your own beliefs might be wrong. Matthew Stanley, Alyssa Sinclair, and Paul Seli at Duke ran six studies with 2,494 Americans and found that people low in intellectual humility were more likely to look down on the intelligence and moral character of their political opponents. They were also less willing to become friends with those opponents, or even to follow them on social media (Duke University; PsyPost). Documented. The study left open how a person becomes more humble.

One group has tried to teach it anyway. Braver Angels brings Republicans and Democrats into the same room for a structured workshop modeled on marriage counseling, where each group reflects out loud on itself and on the other side, and each listens to the other do the same. A team of nine political scientists randomly assigned college students at four universities either to a Braver Angels workshop or to a survey-only group. The workshops reduced polarization on both stated and hidden measures, and participants became more willing to give money to programs that bring people together. The effects held for both parties, and some faded over time (EGAP; University of Georgia). Documented.

The researchers drew a lesson from watching the workshops up close. People changed most when the workshop moved them emotionally and gave them new information at the same time. Once someone felt for a person on the other side, they were more ready to believe what that person told them. Documented, as the researchers' own theory.

That is the order in which most of us learn from each other. We come to know a person first, and then what they tell us has somewhere to land. Interpretation.

Where this lives in my own work

The research in this essay runs through four projects I have been building for years, and it gives each of them a firmer floor. Interpretation, drawing on my own work and the studies above.

What goes against my argument

The research supports me in most places, and it pushes back in five.

What holds up is still a lot. People who meet as equals, work on something together, and listen to each other's lives come away less afraid and less hostile, and they guess more accurately about the other side. That is the floor democracy stands on, and the rest of democracy, fair rules and the willingness to lose an argument and keep going, has to be built on top of it. Interpretation.

What a learner's heart looks like in practice

Each finding above points to something people already do in neighborhoods, classrooms, and public offices, and could do more often. The table sets the research beside the places I have worked. Interpretation, built on the studies cited above.

This is the slow, ordinary work that Public Allies, the Zawadi Exchange, and Serve Indiana were built to do. People find each other's gifts by spending time together on something that matters to all of them.

The joy in it

We already know where we disagree. What interests me is why. What experiences brought you to believe what you believe? What have you lived that I haven't? What can you see from where you stand that I can't see from where I stand?

I want to come to those questions with a learner's heart, open to the possibility that another person, even someone whose conclusions I profoundly reject, knows something about being alive that I have yet to discover. There is joy in that discovery, and there always has been.

The science and my friendships tell the same story. Arguments by themselves move almost no one, and a real question followed by real listening moves a great deal. John McConnell had it right a long time ago. We are supposed to argue, disagree, and come to consensus, and every one of us belongs in that work.

We have spent so much time teaching people to defend their positions that we may have forgotten how to delight in learning from one another. The evidence says we can learn it again, one conversation, one service year, and one friendship at a time.