Why Following Your Dreams Isn’t Enough

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. The year was 1964. The legendary singer Frank Sinatra met Mia Farrow, an up-and-coming actress, on a sound stage at 20th Century Fox. Despite their 30-year age difference, the two began dating and fell madly in love. Frank Sinatra bought Mia Farrow a massive nine-carat pear-shaped diamond ring. He proposed at his home in Palm Springs. The wedding itself was a small civil ceremony, but the celebration was lavish. The groom gifted his bride an expensive double-row diamond bracelet. Not long after, Mia Farrow was on the set of Rosemary's Baby when she was issued divorce papers. Frank Sinatra didn't want her to work. He was just old-fashioned, Mia Farrow later explained. They divorced just two years after saying, I do. Did the couple not talk before they got married? Did they not discuss their values? How is it they failed to see they were not on the same page on such an important question? In 2014, two economics professors weighed in on the issue. They published a paper titled A Diamond is Forever and Other Fairy Tales. They looked at how much couples spent on their engagement rings and weddings and tracked how long their marriages lasted. They found that the more money couples spent on their weddings or engagement rings, the less likely they were to stay together over the long term. The opposite was also true. Spending less on the wedding and engagement ring predicted a longer marriage. Today, we explore the many ways in which our desire to focus on the beautiful keeps us from attending to the basics. We'll examine how this problem shapes not just individual lives, but organizations and businesses and even public policy. Why great ideas fail and how to keep them from failing? This week on Hidden Brain. There's a saying, big dreams start small. Bold visions are achieved when we have the tenacity and audacity to pursue them. But are great ideas enough to get something off the ground? At Stanford University, Huggy Rao studies this question. He has spent years studying the elements of successful entrepreneurship and innovation. Huggy Rao, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Huggy Rao: A pleasure, Shankar. Thank you for having me.

Shankar Vedantam: Huggy, I want to start with an example that in recent years has become synonymous with the definition of a public relations disaster, the FIRE Festival. Let's start at the beginning. In 2016, an American businessman named Billy McFarland had an app that he was looking to promote. It was called the FIRE app, F-Y-R-E. What was this app designed to do? Well, the idea behind the app, Shankar, was to connect artists with clients for performances, appearances and the like. Part of what they wanted to do was to have a luxury music festival, and initially the idea was to promote the app, if you will, for booking musical talent. But then what happened was the festival itself took on a momentum of its own, and swiftly overshadowed the app. So I understand they began selling tickets, and some VIP packages ran to $12,000. What were ticket buyers being promised for that kind of money?

Huggy Rao: Very exotic things, I might add. They were promised accommodation in geodesic domes that were eco-friendly and presumably modern, and celebrity chefs would provide them meals. That was the launch of the app, if you will.

Shankar Vedantam: So, I understand that this event was going to take place in the Bahamas, and Billy MacFarlane had heard rumors that the island on which they were going to host the event was associated with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and this becomes part of the marketing, the branding, the hype, right?

Huggy Rao: Completely. You know, the moment you say Escobar, I mean, you know, quickly, you know, you get notoriety, you get kind of visibility. For this one, they released material saying this festival was being organized on Pablo Escobar's private island. You know, the sad reality was it was a remote parking lot north of the Sandals Resort.

Shankar Vedantam: Oh my gosh. Wow. So the language used to describe this festival, it was called an immersive music festival, two transformative weekends. It was supposed to be on the boundaries of the impossible. I mean, this was really being pitched to the sky. But as the big day started to approach, major musical acts started to pull out. Why were they pulling out, Huggy?

Huggy Rao: Well, they had, if you will, aspirations of what this festival ought to be, but they completely overlooked the details. There wasn't enough dirt underneath the fingernails of people who were responsible for making this happen. So they didn't have expertise, they didn't have experience. You know, they were trying to do something within a period of six to eight weeks that takes about 12 months to accomplish.

Shankar Vedantam: Billy McFarland and the other organizers elected to house the guests in tents. The day before the festival was to start, heavy rains lashed the island.

Huggy Rao: By then, the first flights were already landing in. People were there, and these initial arrivals were brought to an, I guess, what can be described as an impromptu beach party that lasted for six hours. Basically, they were plied with alcohol, and they were just waiting, where people were scrambling to build the site.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, that's just horrifying. At some point now, the people need a place to sleep at night, what happens? Were there enough tents for everyone?

Huggy Rao: Not really, I mean, you had scattered disaster relief tents with dirty floors, with soaking wet mattresses and the like, and you can imagine and visualize that late arrivals were being brought to the festival by school bus, and as soon as they came in, the disarray and the lack of infrastructure was very, very clear to all of the incoming guests.

Huggy Rao: The gourmet food, of course, was nothing more than cheese sandwiches served in foam containers.

Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, so apparently, the problems included a lack of medical personnel on site, there wasn't running water. People were told that this was a cash-free festival, and so they hadn't brought money to the event, and they couldn't even figure out a way to make alternate arrangements.

Huggy Rao: That's right. Initially, as a matter of fact, I think there were about 500 or so people, they just didn't have enough tents. And you know what, they just stole them from others. And the attendees couldn't even go to the nearby Sandals Resort because it was actually peak season. And so, you can imagine people without food, without shelter, without money. You can imagine what kind of social disintegration quickly ensues.

Shankar Vedantam: So, eventually, apparently, only a small number of local musicians ever played at this festival for a few hours. And of course, people started to see that things were falling apart, they were scrambling to get home. But even here, it was difficult to get flights back. People were stuck at the airport for hours. So even the evacuation turned out to be something of a disaster.

Huggy Rao: Completely. First of all, I mean, there was an onrush of potential passengers to the airport. Even that was really delayed. And so you got people essentially in a trap.

Shankar Vedantam: What was the aftermath of all of this, Huggy? What happened to the organizers, Billy McFarland and his colleagues? Did they face any penalties for doing this?

Huggy Rao: They certainly did. You know, immediately, there was like a $100 million lawsuit in the state of California, and they wanted class action status, and they had 150 plaintiffs. And it was for breach of contract, covenant, misrepresentation, all of that. And in the end, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018, and he had to forfeit $26 million.

Shankar Vedantam: What went wrong with the fire festival? A better question might be, what didn't go wrong? When we come back, how visionaries fail by not taking into account the planning, preparation and precision that is needed for real success. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Vitamix. Ever notice the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel? Psychologists call this the paradox of choice. In today's world, we are faced with endless options and infinite noise. It's important to cut through to what's truly essential. Vitamix blenders are that rare essential. Engineered to deliver lasting performance and powerful versatility, so you can create with purpose. Visit vitamix.com for the blender you need. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe, 1.3%. It's a small number, but with context, it's a powerful one. Stripe processed just over $1.4 trillion last year. That works out to about 1.3% of global GDP. It's a lot, but also just 1.3%. And GDP isn't capped. Join leaders like Salesforce, OpenAI and Pepsi, who use Stripe to grow faster. Learn more at stripe.com. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all have big dreams. Launch a business, get a degree, start a family. What does it take to do those things? Passion, heart, vision? Sure, but at Stanford University, Huggy Rao says there are other elements that may matter more. When we overlook them, we can fail to do the great things we aspire to do. Huggy, I want to go back to the year 1987 in Pyongyang, North Korea. Construction begins on a new hotel, but it's not any old hotel. It's supposed to outdo a South Korean hotel that was at the time the tallest hotel in the world?

Huggy Rao: Yes, absolutely. This was the Ryugyong Hotel, I think also called the capital of the willows, I believe, given the older name for Pyongyang. And indeed, it was a response to what the South Koreans were doing with the Olympics. So they wanted to build a hotel for a socialist version of the Olympics, the World Festival of Youth. And the idea was to build this massive hotel called the Ryugyong Hotel. And to me, Shankar, the rivalry between two nations and two leaders and all of that, it really makes me wonder about how leaders can easily be seduced by the edifice complex, as opposed to the edifice complex. And this is a stellar example of the edifice complex.

Shankar Vedantam: So the building was to have three wings, each sloped at a 75-degree angle that converged into what looked like a pyramid, 3,000 rooms, 1,000 feet tall. It was supposed to be an engineering marvel that would demonstrate that North Korea was superior to South Korea.

Huggy Rao: The only thing was the North Koreans didn't have expertise and experience with a variety of building materials. So typically, they built things with concrete. And to gain that 1,000 feet height and all of that, you truly had to have an enormous base. And that kind of made it for an even larger kind of footprint, if you will.

Shankar Vedantam: So almost right from the beginning, the construction project runs into problems. It was to be built in time for this major sporting event, but I understand it wasn't ready by the time the sporting event rolls around?

Huggy Rao: Yes. In fact, it wasn't, because of a variety of engineering issues. Even though the government had spent, you know, I assume billions of dollars, they'd also improved the airport, they kind of improved roads and everything. Unfortunately, at around this time, the Soviet Union was actually disintegrating, and aid and investment that the North Koreans were accustomed to from the Soviet Union, they actually kind of dwindled to a trickle. And, you know, North Korea was headed for an economic crisis. So it was this economic crisis that kind of led to the abandonment of this project.

Shankar Vedantam: I see. So in 1992, this is five years after construction begins, the project is halted, and in fact, a crane is abandoned on top of the building. It must now look like a very strange pyramid. And the building just simply sits there. It sits unoccupied, vacant for decades.

Huggy Rao: That's exactly right, Shankar. But by then, you know, you already had memes describing this hotel as the Hotel of Doom or the Tower of Failure and, you know, so on and so forth. And what this was, was really an architectural testament to the excesses of the Pyongyang regime.

Shankar Vedantam: So this massive structure sits today. It's basically a ghost hotel. It must look eerie, Huggy.

Huggy Rao: It truly is, because the problem is, the building was structurally unsound. Even though from the exterior, the building may look sound. The interior is the problem. And because it was built with concrete, it would take an enormous amount of time and expense to redo the ventilation systems and, you know, the air conditioning systems, all of which were created for 1980 specification.

Shankar Vedantam: So you say that the Fire Festival and this Hotel of Doom are examples of what researchers call poetry before plumbing. Unpack the term for me, Huggy.

Huggy Rao: Yeah, thank you. You know, I should immediately give credit to my wonderful colleague who sadly passed away several years ago, Jim March. He wrote a brilliant book, and that's kind of where he said, hey, leadership is a mix of poetry and plumbing, and he used poetry as a shorthand for purpose, if you will. Lofty goals, lofty visions and the like, and plumbing for operational details, efficiency, routines, and the like. And for him, you know, it was, how shall I put it? He saw this as part of like a perennial duality of leadership. The exuberant part of a leader's job, the poetry and the purpose, and the prosaic part of the job. And the prosaic part of the job had to do with simplicity, detail, and kind of making sure things kind of got done. And what the Fyre Festival and the Hotel of Doom are compelling examples of is how, if we get seduced only by the poetry and we forget the plumbing, we are going to be in the grip of frankly an illusion. Poetry can be really sometimes a doorway to disaster.

Shankar Vedantam: Huggy, I'm wondering, are there personal dimensions of this as well? Are there times in our personal lives when we can get caught up by the vision, by the poetry, by the passion of something, and forget about the prosaic, the mundane, the details?

Huggy Rao: Easy to do that. Very easy to do that. And very easy to stumble into a disaster. I prefer to think of the poet and the plumber as two selves that all of us have. And so what we've got to kind of ask ourselves is, which self is actually showing up? At home, if it's all plumbing and no poetry, my God, there's no laughter, there's no conversation, it's kind of boring. But at the same token, if it's all poetry and no plumbing, you know, who's going to fix the lights and who's going to fix the water system, you know, all of those things, you're going to run into difficulty. So in that sense, our life is a perennial effort to kind of balance and toggle between our plumber selves and our poet self.

Shankar Vedantam: Can you talk a little bit about this idea in an organizational setting, where we can get very enamored with the pleasure of brainstorming an idea or brainstorming a new startup, instead of thinking about the nitty gritty, the details that go into actually launching the startup?

Huggy Rao: Completely. You immediately fall prey to a bias called the addition bias. So very quickly, you add things for people to do. They're already overwhelmed because of time poverty. I mean, where are they going to find the resources to do all of this? So very little actually gets done.

Shankar Vedantam: I feel like everyone is familiar with the brainstorming session at a company where, you know, everyone puts up sticky notes on a wall, saying here are the ideas that we should do. And there is something deeply pleasurable in doing that and thinking about blue sky ideas of ways that you can change and things that you can transform. But that is a far cry from actually making those transformations real.

Huggy Rao: I love your description of the brainstorming experience, Shankar, because when people think of what brainstorming is, it's kind of putting fun ideas and often implausible ideas on the table. But brainstorming without constraints is a problem. How can you brainstorm without talking to a customer?

Shankar Vedantam: You suggested the launch some years ago of the healthcare.gov system, illustrates this idea. Tell me what happened there, Huggy.

Huggy Rao: Oh my God. This was after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Then there was a website that was to be launched, and it was called healthcare.gov. The hope was that the platform would enroll lots of uninsured Americans, but the rollout was an exercise in complete disaster. As a matter of fact, on the first day that healthcare.gov was launched, four million unique visitors visited the portal, but only six were able to successfully register themselves. Can you imagine that? And then over the next few days, their site had eight million visitors, but only 1% enrolled in that healthcare plan. And even those who enrolled encountered lots of errors and so on and so forth. Because, you know, it's like, healthcare.gov was not a simple app. It was very complicated because it needed to integrate data from different sources. You needed data on social security numbers, data on income, and then you needed what the states were doing. And all of that before matching people with private purveyors of insurance. You had to have ID verification. All of this is like pretty complex. And it's not just putting like an app out there. And that was why it actually ballooned into this tragic disaster. But subsequently, you know, it must be mentioned there was remarkable recovery. The CTO of the Obama presidency, Todd Park, I think they changed the leadership. They fired a bunch of people. So lots of other things happened in order to retrieve ground and eventually it did kind of do better, much better.

Shankar Vedantam: So you and your colleague, Bob Sutton, who's a former Hidden Brain guest, you both say that another reason we tend to prioritize poetry over plumbing is that the feedback mechanisms are broken and problems are not being reported to leaders. So people become silent and it creates the illusion that everything is working well?

Huggy Rao: The reason you have illusion is 30 years of research shows us that people who are powerful and who feel they have power, they actually don't search much. It's people without power that search and figure out why are things happening the way they are. The other thing is, to your point, not only is there silence, people in power have an army of people making their life easy. So they also don't know how jobs, three levels beneath them are done. So illusion hardens into impatience, why couldn't we get it done yesterday and so on. And the moment you multiply illusion with impatience, what happens is the really competent doers, they go underground because they know this is a fast train ride to nowhere. So you have incompetent people who are available to help you proceed with whatever you are doing. And now you have incompetence multiplying impatience and illusion. So even when you tell people up the hierarchy, something wrong is happening, it's very difficult for them to register because they don't understand it. The canonical story is about the American automobile industry and the executives there. Any time they had a car with a problem, they never had to go to the mechanic. I mean, it was immediately replaced. So you've no idea what it means for a person to go to the mechanic. And so you can actually see the disconnection that immediately kind of derails a lot of these plans and projects and so on.

Shankar Vedantam: Another reason we don't do enough plumbing is that we don't increase the amount of plumbing we will need as we grow and expand from our initial visions. Talk about the challenge of scaling, Huggy, and how that presents a problem for plumbing.

Huggy Rao: Yeah, you know, scaling for me is reinvention. The simplest way in which I can telegraph this is Bob and I wrote a case study about the former CTO of Uber, and we asked him a simple question. We said, hey, how long have you worked at Uber? And he looks at us and said, four years. But it feels as though I work for 16 different companies. And what does he mean by that? Four years? How can you feel like you're working for 16 different companies? And the answer is every quarter Uber is a different company. And the problem is changing the plumbing involves two things. It's not putting in plumbing, but it's taking out the old plumbing too, because it's the old code, old specs, an old size distribution, you know, all of those things.

Shankar Vedantam: Can you talk a bit about how when problems are not addressed, when there are plumbing problems that are not addressed, those don't just stay small problems, but they can cascade and become bigger problems over time?

Huggy Rao: Absolutely. The key thing is fixing plumbing is an orphan problem, and not only is that an orphan problem, plumbing is under value. Because what do plumbers do? When you fix the plumbing, well, you're averting problems. It's not as dramatic as an outcome as overcoming a crisis or something like that, where poetry matters. You know, they rallied the troops, they did this and they did that. And so those people get compensated a lot. The poets are able to mobilize the troops after, you know, a crisis, but the plumbers who avoid problems, people don't know what they did. It's not visible. And there's also some evidence that good plumbing work in organizations is also gendered. That women tend to do more of this, and which is one reason it gets kind of undercompensated again, tragically.

Shankar Vedantam: But if you don't fix a problem, you know, let's say even in my, in a home setting, let's say there is a knob on your stove that is basically not working properly, and you can't be bothered to fix it, day after tomorrow, you might have a fire in your house because you haven't fixed the knob. And so it's not just that the plumbing problems have a way of escalating and becoming bigger over time.

Huggy Rao: I think this snowballing characteristic is exactly why we have to nip it early in the bud. You know, which is the point, you know, an ounce of prevention, of course, is worth a pound of cure. But a lot of the plumbing problems are, how shall I put it, they're very, very easy to kind of overlook.

Shankar Vedantam: So, we've talked about how we can fail to prioritize the plumbing because we're enamored of the poetry. I'm wondering, is it ever possible that sometimes the poetry itself, the passions that we have, can keep us from attending to the plumbing?

Huggy Rao: Yes. Let me give you a simple kind of example. This actually happened to Carrefour in Japan.

Shankar Vedantam: Carrefour is a big box retailer based in France. It combines a supermarket with a department store, similar to many Target or Walmart stores in the US.

Huggy Rao: So Carrefour entered Japan, and they established a bunch of stores. And the poetic imagination was Japanese tourists love visiting Paris. They love visiting the stores and so on. And so they don't need to go to Paris necessarily. We'll come there and do that. But ironically, when they actually began to build out the stores, the products that were on display were pretty much what a Japanese consumer could get from the regular 7-Eleven. So there was initial interest and people kind of said, hey, I don't need to buy Japanese stuff from, you know, a French purveyor, even though it's Carrefour, and so they actually had to withdraw. You see the difficulty of attending to the plumbing.

Shankar Vedantam: There are many things that can keep us from reaching our goals, but sometimes the thing that gets in the way when we follow our passion is the passion itself. When we come back, how we can get the plumbing right? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: Do you have questions or comments about the mechanics of getting ideas off the ground? If you're willing to share your thoughts and questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Two or three minutes is plenty. Use the subject line plumbing. Again, that's ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Think about your favorite song. It makes your heart and soul feel electric. It's like a little dose of magic, lightning in a bottle. But listen harder. Do you hear the individual instruments and the work that went into each of them? The pianist didn't just set up a pretty arrangement. He spent years perfecting each note. Do you see the grueling days the guitarist spent strumming her fingers to the bone to perfect your favorite riff in the song? At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Huggy Rao says that in order to achieve great things, we need to get the plumbing right. We need the magic, but we also need to focus on the mundane. Huggy, let's talk about some instances of organizations that are successful because they embrace the plumbing. You see that good plumbers look under the hood and collect lots of information before they start to fix things. You tell a story about how the California Department of Motor Vehicles once did just that. Can you tell me that story?

Huggy Rao: Yeah. Bob and I had the pleasure of writing a story about the transformation of the DMV in California. There were two people from the outside, Steve Gordon being one of them. What kind of fascinated me and Bob as well is, Steve visited all 90 field offices. I was a little surprised by that. I sort of wondered whether sampling might have helped. I mean, maybe one could have sampled 40 out of the 90 field offices or whatever. But Steve said something interesting and he said, look, each field office feels it's unique. And so when we asked him, what was your big aha after you visited all of these field offices, he actually came back with something that was simple and profound. And his realization was, people don't need to come to the DMV, the DMV can go to them. So you don't have long queues and people waiting and so on. So how can the DMV go to them? One answer is through the web. You can renew your tags, your driver's licenses, pay the registration fees, all of that online. What if you don't have access to computers and tablets and so on? Well, they actually thought of a very cool thing. Look at the plumbing. People go to Safeway to buy groceries. Let's actually have kiosks where people can do all of that. What did they do? They concentrated immediately on reducing queue length by going to the users of the DMV. The moment they reduced queue length, the employees of the DMV also had more breathing room. It's not easy to come to work when you sit down and you just see the line snaking and people don't know what they're here for and so on. Part of what they did is they also realized that the people still coming to the DMV could be ill-informed. They don't know whether you can get a passport at the DMV. So they put in this very cool thing that we call a trail guide. So you stand in line, there's a guy who comes and says, hey, what brings you here? And you say passport, he says, I'm sorry, this is the wrong place and you can't go to the Secretary of State and so on and so forth. So very quickly, what they're doing is they're actually making sure that demands on the staff are reduced and also demands on the users, the consumers are reduced. And now, most importantly, what have they done? They've restored goodwill. Plumbing gives confidence. The analogy I often think of, Shankar is, and you've hinted at it earlier, is poetry to me is planning the wedding. All the fun, the music, all of those things. Plumbing is planning the marriage. In America, the kind of conversations we would have is, hey, are we going to have one bank account or two? And who's going to pay for what? And those kinds of things. And if you don't have that kind of conversation, you can easily imagine the range of problems we'd encounter. And so, what employees in an organization, they don't care too much, frankly, about the poetry. Or let me put it this way, the more loftier the poetry, the greater their tendency to discount it. Because what they experience is the contradiction. You're saying it could be all of this, like, look at what I'm seeing, it's like night and day, you know? So, if I can recruit the wedding analogy, employees don't care about weddings because the bridegroom eloped with somebody else or the bride never showed up. They're always interested in what's the marriage going to be. And that's what you got to help people do all the time, get them to think about the marriage, not just the wedding.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if one way to do this in organizations is to carve out specific times for the poetry, and then to carve out specific time for the plumbing.

Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, you might spend one session brainstorming, but you spend another session saying, let's think about mechanics, let's think about execution.

Shankar Vedantam: Is it possible that in some ways, carving out specific times for each of these activities can help us not forget about the plumbing?

Huggy Rao: Absolutely. Because when you set aside time, you're signaling the importance of some activity. It's not only setting aside time, but providing people with a scaffold. A scaffold that helps them do the plumbing. The kinds of scaffolds I'd recommend are, hey, let's assume you have half the resources. Let's assume you have quarter the resources. What would you do differently? What would change? What would you stop doing? I think that's what you want to orient people to do. So, another way to think of plumbing and poetry, at least in the context that you've alluded to, Shankar, is poetry, if you're not careful, can result in a lot of addition. Attention to plumbing, make sure that whatever you're adding is balanced by whatever you're subtracting.

Shankar Vedantam: You say that good plumbers also anticipate problems before they arise, and one way to do this is with something called a premortem. What is a premortem, Huggy?

Huggy Rao: The idea behind the premortem is, as the name itself implies, it's the opposite of a post mortem. So we're not doing this after the event occurred to assign blame. We're doing this even before we've spent any money. You know, so the premortem is actually an exercise in time travel and story telling. We have a brilliant dean of the medical school at Stanford, Lloyd Minor, and he came here at roughly the same time I did. And he reached out to me and he said, you know, you study scaling. And he said, I want to scale Stanford medicine. And he had like a compelling idea. He said, hey, we have two hospitals on campus at Stanford and we have lots of molecular biologists. Wouldn't it be cool if we put them into teams, they develop new drugs, the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA gives us approval, and we can run clinical trials here. But he said, I want to do a pre-mortem. I said, okay. And so I said, we need roughly 10 people. I said, let's randomly choose a couple of molecular biologists, a couple of MDs, a couple of nurses, a couple of pharmacists and a couple of medical administrators. I took these 10 people, I randomly assigned them into two groups. So in one group, they were in the pre-mortem of failure. The other group was in the pre-mortem of success. The dean hasn't raised a dime of money. He hasn't hired anybody. Now, to the five people in the pre-mortem of failure, I gave them a made up headline in a major newspaper, dated six months out. And the headline read, Debacle at Stanford Medicine. And the first two lines of the story were, Patients are dying in clinical trials. Of course, nothing like this has happened. It's all time travel and exercise and imagination. So I told these five people, you write a one page story of the four or five key events that culminated in the headline. Conversely, to the people in the success condition, I gave them a different headline. And the headline said, Stanford Drugs Save Lives. And the first two lines were, New drugs from Stanford University are saving the lives of the very young and the very old. And they had to write a story, one page, of the four or five events that led to the headline. I got ten stories.

Shankar Vedantam: So to recap, the pre-mortem that Huggy organized for the Dean of Stanford's Medical School included about ten people. There were a mix of biologists, physicians, nurses and hospital administrators. Half the people were assigned to imagine a failed expansion of the medical school, and half were tasked to imagine a successful expansion. What did the volunteers assigned to the failure group think would be the reasons the plan went astray? What did the volunteers assigned to the success group think would be the reasons the plan succeeded? Huggy assigned them their writing task and waited to see what would come back.

Huggy Rao: Interestingly, whenever I've done the pre-mortem for hiring a CEO acquisition, pre-mortems of failure arrive first in your inbox. That tells you immediately, Shankar, that people in the organization find it far more easier to imagine failure than success. The molecular biologists said, look, people die in clinical trials because there's a lag in the transfer of knowledge to doctors. The MD said, we'll tell you why this is happening. They said, the molecular biologists, sometimes they think the patient is only consuming the drug they've come up with, but patients take 10 other, 12 other drugs, and interactions matter, and if you don't pay attention to that, that would be a problem. The third thing was people wrote and said, we're doing lots of low-power trials, taking notes on patients basically, symptoms and the like, and providing them to various organizations that want this to be done. They said, we do so many of them, on top of them, if you have big trials, that would be a huge problem. On the success side, pretty much everybody wrote and said, Stanford succeeded because we subordinated our ego to the lives of patients. A number of people wrote and said, Stanford succeeded because the molecular biologists consulted the statisticians early on in the design of the trial. The third thing that people wrote which surprised the dean and the others was, Stanford succeeded because they hired very capable nurses who knew how to manage large scale trials. Until then, I don't think there was any budgetary provision to hire nurses. And I remember asking the dean, what did this premortem do? And he put it beautifully. And he said, you know, when I came in, he said, I fell in love in the poetry of my job. He said, raising money, hiring world class talent. And I said, now? And he looked at me and he said, I gotta fix the plumbing here. It's part of my responsibility. So as you can see, the dean knew that he had the plumber self in him and he had the poet self. Coming in, he had activated the poet self to the exclusion of the plumber self. What the premortem did was, it activated the plumber self. It made them realize, if they didn't fix this problem, stacking complex trials on an overstretched system would lead to a lot of problem. So it's an example of getting people to slow down and reflect. So that's kind of what the premortem does.

Shankar Vedantam: You say that another thing that good plumbers do is that they don't focus on hiring superstars, but they hire sherpas. What do you mean by sherpas, Huggy?

Huggy Rao: Yeah, we shouldn't always think of the stars, the two people who ascend Everest, because without the 50 sherpas, they couldn't have done very much. So their performance, it's the outcome of a team, in this case, a very large team. And so it's the sherpas that matter. It's the sherpas that need to get rewarded. So what I always ask people is, if you want to really hire good sherpas, look at two things. One is, how generous are they? Because without generosity, it's very hard to do much in organizations. So that's one thing you've got to do. The other is, how much energy do they have? Positive energy. How much do they bring in? And in a lot of organizations, quite honestly, people don't know who their best sherpas are. I've actually had to go to organizations and tell them, if you really want to find your best sherpas, come through their LinkedIn pages, you'll see them doing a lot for the community. They're volunteering for the church, the little league, and they're doing all these things. They have so much energy. How come that's not being channeled inside the organization? And I think those are the people who have contact with ground reality. They're observing interactions, they're having the interactions themselves. They do things above and beyond the call of duty.

Shankar Vedantam: You make a point about good plumbers, they're not afraid to get their hands dirty. They don't just notice the bad stuff or anticipate it, they actively go looking for it. Tell me the story of Matthew Ridgway, Huggy.

Huggy Rao: Matthew Ridgway, for me, arguably was the best US general in the 20th century.

Huggy Rao: Ridgway was actually a divisional commander in World War II. And Ridgway actually shot into the national limelight when Truman fired MacArthur and appointed Ridgway as the commander in chief of all forces in Korea, South Korea. By then, the Chinese offensive had already pushed the US troops back. And there was even a talk of like a Dunkirk-like scenario unfolding. Can you imagine your Ridgway? I mean, you've got like thousands of demotivated, demoralized, tired troops. You can't ask your boss for more fresh troops from the US. That will take six months to come there. By then, it'll all be decided. And the marvel behind what Ridgway did was the same overwhelmed, demoralized group of people. Ridgway actually got them to move and push the Chinese and the others. And how did he do it? You know, there are lots of things he did. I just want to give our listeners a couple of things he did. One of the very first things Ridgway realizes is, I've never fought in Korea. I don't even know how the land looks like. Where are mountains, where are rivers, where are lakes? So he actually pursues a bomber pilot to take him on as a navigator and says, I'll help you navigate. I just want to see what's ahead. And you know, there he is. And he actually now understands, oh my God, there's this complicated landscape. Now what he does then is fascinating. He calls all of these commanders, commanding troops, and he asks them questions about their understanding of the landscape. Hey, what do you think is ahead 25 miles from us? If the guy said, you know, I don't know, or I don't know that there's a river there that needs to be crossed or a lake or a mountain or whatever it is, he'd fire them on the spot. And he'd say, you're jeopardizing my men. And the most interesting thing about example of plumbing was he didn't stand there and give great speeches like Patton might have done or somebody else might have done. Ridgway always drove in a jeep without fighter escort. And they would say, you know, you need fighter escort. And he'd say, you know, my men are being shot at. I think I can do okay. But anytime he would meet an American soldier, many of whom were young kids, 19, 20, 21, the first thing he realized is, man, they're working in bitter cold in Korea. They can't even hold the carbine up. It's so cold. The hands are frozen. So at the back of his jeep, he would always have gloves. And anytime he saw a young soldier with bare hands clutching a carbine, he would always give them gloves. And you can imagine symbolically what giving gloves to a cold 1920 year old soldier meant.

Shankar Vedantam: Good plumbers take the time to think about the dirty work involved in running their ventures. They don't just have their heads in the clouds, they roll up their sleeves and dig into the muck. In other words, they don't get so caught up in the poetry that they forget about the plumbing. However, sometimes the reverse can also happen. It's possible to get so granular, so stuck in the details, that you forget the reason behind what you are doing. You no longer see the poetry. The challenge, of course, is not to replace poetry with plumbing, but to combine poetry and plumbing. That's the topic of a special episode we have on Hidden Brain Plus. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, Finding the Poetry in Plumbing. If you're not yet signed up, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, please go to apple.co.hiddenbrain. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co.hiddenbrain. Huggy Rao is the co-author with Bob Sutton of The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, and Scaling Up Excellence, Getting to More Without Settling for Less. Huggy Rao, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Huggy Rao: Thank you so very much.

Shankar Vedantam: Do you have questions or comments about the mechanics of getting big ideas off the ground? If you're willing to share your thoughts and questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Two or three minutes is plenty. Use the subject line, plumbing. Again, that's ideas at hiddenbrain.org. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Defender.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's a narrative that we hear over and over again in news reporting and on social media. People are more divided than ever, by class, by education and especially by political beliefs. We see evidence for this narrative in lots of places. People ignore those who disagree with them, or gaze upon their political opponents with a mixture of bewilderment, contempt and anger. What we hear less often are ideas for how to change this narrative. Is it possible to actually find common ground with someone whose world view is the polar opposite of your own? How can we actually persuade someone else of our point of view? What would it take for us to be persuaded by theirs? We pondered these questions some time ago with Robb Willer. He's a sociologist at Stanford University, and he joined us for an episode titled, Win Hearts, Then Minds. Today, he returns to the show to answer listener questions about engaging with people who are different from us. Robb Willer, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Rob Willer: Thanks for having me.

Shankar Vedantam: Robb, in our earlier conversation, we talked about how when you were a kid, you moved from Kansas to South Carolina. The community you moved to was politically speaking, very different from the one you'd left, and it was something of a culture shock. What were some of the things that stood out to you when you first arrived in South Carolina? Well, when I moved from Kansas to South Carolina, a key thing was that I was moving from this small college town, Lawrence, Kansas, that was very politically, culturally progressive, not that religious, fairly secular. And I moved to South Carolina in 1988, and found myself in just a very different political, cultural environment. And a place that was characterized as much as anything by deep scars from racial segregation, Jim Crow, and even the Civil War, even the wounds of the Civil War were still healing on the surface. And it was for me just really striking to start to be interacting every day with people who might have racial prejudices, hearing the N word on the playground, just was really, really shocking. And also just the degree of racial segregation that just happened spontaneously, even amongst 10, 11, 12-year-old kids. People were getting signals about who was supposed to interact with whom, and they were following them. Our teachers had, you know, at least half of them had taught in racially segregated schools. Schools had integrated less than 20 years earlier. All the kids I was going to school with, basically their parents had gone to all-black or all-white schools. And so it was really striking to me, coming from a progressive community where the kind of moral battle of the 60s around civil rights was fairly settled. And if you expressed racial prejudice in public, you were a moral or social pariah in that community. And it just wasn't the same way in the place I'd moved to.

Shankar Vedantam: Did you find yourself getting into arguments with people, Robb?

Rob Willer: I did, yeah. As much as anything about race and religion, you know, the things that we had the starkest differences on, there were also and still are deeply held beliefs that I would encounter about how the poor were responsible for their own fate and didn't deserve sympathy and just a lot of cultural beliefs that were very new to me and for me, very objectionable. And my first reaction on this was to debate. You know, I've been raised in this very intellectual household and I came right back at a lot of these views to the extent that I could without becoming like an outcast in my community. And that was a really intense and rich experience because I didn't find I was changing a lot of folks' minds.

Shankar Vedantam: So I think many of us approach disagreements and disputes the way you did, as if they're a debate that we can either win or lose. And so we believe that if we can just present our case clearly and have the best argument and the clearest facts, we're going to persuade the other person of our point of view. You've learned over the years, not just when you moved to South Carolina, but later on when you became a researcher, that this does not tend to work. Why not, Robb?

Rob Willer: Well, for one, just coming right back at somebody with another set of facts and an alternate way to reason about some issue is a recipe for competition, for making somebody mad and defensive in the face of your arguments. And that might play in a high school debate round where there's a judge who's paying attention to the quality of the arguments. And I was a high school debater and, you know, refined those skills, if you'll call them that, in debate tournaments weekend after weekend for years. But that's not really, as it turns out, a great way to change a person's mind. It just puts them off generally and maybe makes them mad, could even entrench their views. And for me, the more helpful experience in terms of learning something about persuasion and how it can really work in the real world, was my experience working as a union organizer. So in graduate school, I went to graduate school at Cornell University and was very involved in a union organizing drive for graduate students there. And I got exposed to what I think of as the dominant culture of organizing in the US and I assume elsewhere, which is not one of, oh, you disagree with me, let's debate. But instead, you kind of show up and you say, hey, we're organizing a union and we need to engage you. So what are your questions? Let's do this. We'd really like to sign you up. And it's a very positive, big tent, inclusive approach to political engagement that almost suggests just from the beginning, like we're on the same side, and I'm just hopeful we can line up on this as well. Really the opposite of debating where you're like, I'm on my side, you're on your side, and I'm going to try to embarrass you with the quality of my arguments.

Shankar Vedantam: I think many people struggle to listen and put themselves in the shoes of someone whose views they find either factually wrong or morally wrong. We received an email about this from a listener named Scott who writes, I find myself not engaging with the opposite side in political debates with certain friends. It sounds easy to certainly reframe the logical argument in an effort to engage more effectively, but what if they are arguing from the point of view of someone who is okay with lying, cheating, stealing, or admitted racism? In other words, they find those vices okay in their logic and frankly, admit to the vices. Is it better not to engage, call them out, or try to understand their point of view? What do you think, Robb?

Rob Willer: I mean, I think it's an excellent question and it's really hard. My first thought is the last thing that Scott highlights here, try to draw them out, try to get a better sense of why they have the views that they have, as much as possible, without debating at first. And so if they say they don't care about someone they voted for, openly lying and that being more or less objectively proven, like ask them why they don't care about that, or like, what is it that outweighs that for them, that leads them to vote the way they do? This has a few functions, like the most obvious function is you're showing some sort of interest in their perspective. So you're setting a decent kind of foundation for an interaction that could go somewhere. You're showing some, you know, basic respect, but you're also getting a lot of really valuable information. You're figuring out where they're coming from and why they think the way they do, how they're balancing things in their head, or maybe there's some, something sacred involved related to religion or something like that, that really matters to them. You know, you can figure out like why, you know, they have the views that they do, and you're going to need that if you're going to move them at all, or even tolerate them, you know. If somebody has expressed tolerance for racism, that's a hard thing to accept.

Shankar Vedantam: One of the things that you've come to realize over the years is that when we develop our views on a topic, the information that we're working with is often very different than the information that other people have. Talk about this idea that beneath the surface of some of our disagreements, we actually just simply have different sources of information.

Rob Willer: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think this is a hugely overlooked aspect of empathy and connecting. We tend to think of empathy in terms of compassion and sympathy for other people, and then also perspective taking. Like, am I trying to think from your perspective? But one thing that gets, I think, overlooked there, that's maybe more structural, that adheres in the structure of the situation and people having just fundamentally different experiences of their lives, is that there are also these big information gaps. Try as I might to take your perspective. There are fundamental things I don't know about your life that get in the way of me doing so authentically or accurately and well. And so this is a huge barrier. And so you can even have people that are fairly motivated to consider one another's perspective, but they just have such different lived experiences that they can't construct a narrative to understand how this person they disagree with is saying something that sounds so vile and objectionable.

Shankar Vedantam: One of the interesting paradoxes here is that I think all of us who have ever been in a political debate can see how we feel like we are under threat. So to us, it feels as if our opponents are trying to do us harm, want to do us harm, and we feel vulnerable and in a position of threat. It's much harder to see that our opponents feel exactly the same.

Rob Willer: I totally agree, and this is part of why my first piece of advice I often give folks who ask me about how do you handle these long-staying disagreements that adhere in families or in friendships that you want to maintain. One of my first pieces of advice is think about your physiological reaction to the situation and deal with that maybe first. And so if somebody is saying something that seems offensive to you, take a beat, take a pause, ask them an open-ended question, draw them out, have them fill the space with some more information you can take in. And in that time, see if you can settle yourself well enough to make the argument you're going to, you know, tomorrow wish you had made rather than the one that feels like the one you need to say in that moment. Because when we're sensing like a really significant disagreement that's freighted with all this moral baggage, when we see that coming, I mean, most of us, we start to get short of breath, our heart rate quickens, our diaphragm is up higher, you know, inside of our chest, and we're breathing shallowly and we're just not calm. You know, we're ready to fight or to flee or what have you. And if you can take that beat and try to relax the diaphragm, take a deeper breath, listen and think about what you really would like to say to the person, and you'll do better. It'll be better for really all involved, but for you and achieving your goals.

Shankar Vedantam: We received a message from a listener named Kevin that I think speaks to the emotional aspect of engaging with other people. Here he is.

Kevin: I've been an activist for over 50 years. And one of the things that I try to do is, in a conversation with somebody, is actually make physical contact in a respectful, you know, shake hands, hand on the shoulder, you know, proximity touching kind of thing. And I find that it helps establish and defuse almost like an electrical charge release, making friends and say, we're really on the same side here, we're both human. Let's see if we can find some place that we agree.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you make of Kevin's approach, Robb?

Rob Willer: Well, I think Kevin's exactly right. And I can kind of sense that he's an experienced organizer, that he's foregrounding this idea of making a human to human connection prior to getting into the issues at hand. It's very true. Of course, this is something we see skilled politicians do a lot. You know, Bill Clinton famously had different levels. He put his supporting hand on your on your arm when he was doing a handshake. And God forbid you got the one hand handshake from Bill Clinton. That means you were just beneath reproach, I gather. But if he's coming up with the left hand like high on your your right shoulder, that means like he's really trying to affiliate with you and you're going to feel it. Of course, one has to be very careful with this to be appropriate. You can't initiate this in door to door canvassing necessarily. Maybe a handshake you can you can do. But, you know, like it would be bad, for example, to start off a conversation where you're giving your appeal while gently rubbing the temples of the person you're speaking. I wouldn't advise that. Kevin wouldn't advise that.

Shankar Vedantam: It's interesting when we think about just the ways in which humans interact with each other, we do some of this naturally. When we're talking with people, we invite friends over to our home, for example, and they come into our home, we shake hands with them, we give them a hug, where basically we demonstrate through touch that we are affiliated with one another. And I think Kevin's insight is that perhaps we don't feel that moment of affiliation right up front, but in some ways going through the actions can get us in a mind state where we feel like we have more affiliation.

Rob Willer: Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't actually even thought of that, that part of why you might do this would be for yourself, that put yourself in the right mindset of curiosity, openness, an interest in the other person as a person. It reminds me a little bit of this research on deep canvassing, a technique of door to door canvassing that's been studied by the political scientists Josh Kala and David Brockman. They find that when people do deep canvassing, that they wind up having less partisan animosity towards rival partisans themselves afterwards. So there's this kind of depolarizing effect of being a canvasser. You're less likely to view a whole category of people with antipathy because you see, well, they can actually be listened to, connected with and moved on important issues in my direction sometimes.

Shankar Vedantam: When we care about a friend or a neighbor or a family member, it can be frustrating and painful to be at odds with them. The same holds true for nations. When people care deeply about the state of their country, the alienation they feel from people who disagree with them can lead to despair and rage. When we come back, strategies for grappling with those feelings and ideas from Robb Willer and listeners about how to move forward through our disagreements. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Your Questions Answered, our segment in which we bring back past guests of the show to engage with questions and ideas shared by listeners. Today, we're talking with Stanford University sociologist Robb Willer about how to engage with people who disagree with us, and even perhaps persuade them of our point of view. Robb, I'd like to talk about the power of role models in helping us to develop good techniques for engaging with other people. It feels increasingly rare to have role models who engage with people who have very different views. Did you have any such role models in your own life when you were growing up?

Rob Willer: Yeah, I did. I did. Growing up, my mother was a really good role model for how to connect with people, with warmth. She directed international programs for students at University of Kansas and University of South Carolina, and every day was interacting with people just from anywhere on the earth. And as even a little kid, I was seeing like, oh, yeah, you can just talk. People are people. And they tend to put their best foot forward, especially across lines of difference, if you reciprocate or lead with that yourself. And that was just a really rich experience to have as a kid. Then later, when I was training as a union organizer, I was working with Christian Sweeney, who was a more experienced union organizer and was really teaching me how to do it. And I wasn't as good of a union organizer as he was and is or than most are. But I learned so much about leading with positivity and inclusion and signaling to someone, I already think I'm in a group with you. I want you in my group. I'm coming to you with warmth and inclusion. And I want to answer your questions and talk to you about why I think this is such a good idea. And that posture is so different from one of debate or competition or judgment. It's much more, much more attractive and winning.

Shankar Vedantam: You and your colleagues recently published a study where you looked at how elected officials can sometimes serve as role models for bipartisan engagement. Tell me what you did and what you found, Robb.

Rob Willer: So we got very interested in this project as a result of the Disagree Better initiative that Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, spearheaded starting about two years ago when he became the chair of the National Governors Association. He said, I want to do something that would role model civil engagement across lines of political disagreement, something that seems so scarce right now. Without those lines of connection, real respect being shown, we're not going to be able to cooperate where we do agree, and we're not going to be able to tolerate each other when we disagree, but we need to be able to inhabit the same space, the same country, the same Congress, and so on. So he organized pairs of governors to film public service announcements where they broke bread together, talked about, kind of kidded each other a little bit, some friendly jabs here and there, and talked then very openly about how they agree on a lot of things, they disagree on a lot of really important things, but that they are respectful of one another and willing to engage across these lines of difference. We found this to be really inspiring and maybe even more than that, really unusual in the current climate. We were interested in whether that sort of message can have influence on other people because it's unusual, because it supports basic decorum and civility and respect across lines, and because it involves leaders. If you're an American Democrat or Republican, you're going to see someone who's a legitimate elite leader of your group in that ad. We ran a large survey and field experiment testing the effects of these ads and found that they're quite effective. They increase people's receptiveness to having conversations across lines of political difference. They increase everyday Americans intellectual humility. They reduced everyday Americans animosity towards rival partisans. It also increased approval for the governors that took part in the public service announcements. They show increased approval and respect and interest in voting for them, seeing them there. I think when people see that kind of leadership across lines of difference, it's attractive.

Shankar Vedantam: When it comes to role models, it seems that there may be a special opportunity for people who've embraced one worldview and then moved to another. Here's an e-mail we received on that from listener Emily who writes, I wonder if we might be able to help bridge divisions by specifically locating folks who have changed their political views independently. These folks, of which I am one, have an inherent understanding of the other side's beliefs. They can speak to those beliefs, having held them themselves. They can also speak to what moved them, what influenced them and why. For myself, I find I hold greater compassion and understanding, having come from one ideology and moved to another than others within my new group. The fact that I can be more understanding of the opposition seems to flummox my current group, but I see my position as a strength rather than a betrayal. What do you make of Emily's comment, Robb?

Rob Willer: Well, I think Emily is spot on. In fact, systematic social psychological research on exactly this phenomenon confirms her intuition that people who are known to have converted from one view to the other can then be more persuasive. There's probably a lot of reasons why this is the case in everyday life. On the one hand, that converted person just knows more about what would be a persuasive appeal, maybe what was the persuasive appeal or line of argumentation that changed their mind. They also have some raw material to draw a common identity connection. I find myself, even if I have very strong political beliefs, if I'm engaging with someone from the south, we've got a lot of common ground and common experience to draw upon, and we can build a relationship that we then can have a political conversation on top of with a greater respect and empathy and kindness and warmth than the average pair of strangers would. And so that raw material for drawing a connection can be used by someone who's socially skilled to build that foundation for a constructive dialogue.

Shankar Vedantam: I'd like to share a message that we received that is a good example of modeling constructive engagement across political divides. This example comes from listener Lucia, and it unfolded on social media.

Lucia: And in this situation, this was around the time that there was this big debate about critical race theory and whether or not she'd be in classrooms. And there was a lot of misinformation floating around, and I kind of just disregarded anybody who was on the other side of the political spectrum, that they just didn't know what it was, and they didn't want to take the time to understand. And so on a TikTok live, I was debating back and forth with some other individuals on this live about critical race theory, and one gentleman came up, and instead of just going back and forth with him on the facts, I kind of just stopped and asked him, like, okay, you share with me what you believe critical race theory is and what you think is happening in the schools. And so when he explained to me what he thought it was, and then I explained to him, I said, well, the thing that people are labeling as critical race theory is simply just, for example, talking about the impacts of slave labor on the US economics as part of its history. Something as simple as talking about the export of cotton and sugar and where that's coming from, the fact that it came from slave labor, they're labeling that as critical race theory. And they want us to take that out and not teach the whole history. And when I explained that to him, he actually understood and understood that his idea of critical race theory was misinformed. And so when we were able to kind of start a conversation from that point and I met him where he was at, it was actually a lot easier to bring him to my side. And at the end of the conversation, he actually said, yeah, it makes total sense that critical race theory be taught as an elective in college. And so that's again, it's something that it sounds so simple, but yeah, just meeting people where they're at and starting a conversation there.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you make of Lucia's story, Robb?

Rob Willer: Well, I think Lucia's engagement here is really wise of, you know, stop for a second before it turns into a really intense argument and let's establish common definitions of terms. You know, like if we're going to be centrally arguing about the worth of critical race theory, let's be sure we're defining it the same way and even meaning the same thing when we use the term. Otherwise, the whole debate is just pointless. We don't even know if we really disagree or how much we really disagree or where we disagree. So it's a great first step to be like, okay, well, just so I understand, what do you mean by misogyny or what do you mean by reproductive rights or clean energy or racism or trans rights? Because it's very often the case that people, because of the information environment they're in, which might be very partisan, they've been getting certain kinds of information about what the other side thinks that is very, very distorted or exaggerated or is based on real people, but they're at a sort of extreme fringe of that rival group. And then when you define these terms and clarify, oh, I shouldn't just import the assumption about what you think and the meaning you have for terms that comes from these representations I'm getting from social media or partisan media, I actually need to ask you and it turns out what you say is much more reasonable than what I assumed and much closer to what I think. I mean, it can really set the table for a much better conversation where you're coming to each other from a much shorter distance.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, listeners share more ideas and resources for bridging divides with other people.

Shankar Vedantam: Plus, we talk with Robb Willer about techniques that have been found to create an enduring reduction and partisan rancor. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In many countries around the world, people find themselves divided. The folks who are on the winning side of recent elections often feel everything is going great and that their leaders are wonderful. The people on the losing side don't just feel that misguided policies are being enacted. They feel their country is being taken from them and turned into something they do not recognize. Robb Willer is a sociologist at Stanford University. He's been studying anti-democratic attitudes and various interventions to change these views. Robb, you recently published what's known as a mega study that looked at both attitudes toward democracy as well as partisan animosity toward people of different political views. Tell me about that study and what you found.

Rob Willer: Yeah, so this research started a couple of years ago when we were trying to find interventions that would be effective for reducing American partisans' dislike of rival partisans or their animosity towards rival partisans. And we were also interested in seeing if we could find interventions that would reduce people's tolerance for undemocratic actions by the leaders on their own side. And what we found was really, really interesting. So the interventions that were most effective in reducing Americans' partisan animosity were ones that drew a common identity connection such as we are all Americans. Or another strategy that was very effective was one where people were presented with vivid examples of people they disagree with actually being respectful and curious in their engagement. So sympathetic, relatable people that kind of disabuse them of their stereotypes of rival partisans. Then for anti-democratic attitudes, it was a different set of strategies that were most effective. So one was the strategy of disabusing people of their inaccurate stereotypes of rival partisans as themselves big fans of anti-democratic actions. And another strategy that was very effective here was actually a video that was submitted by a PhD student here at Stanford, Katie Clayton and her advisor, Mike Toms, which highlighted how bad democratic collapse looks in countries that have had to deal with it. Like Russia, Venezuela, Turkey, places where democratic backsliding has accelerated and gone into full on autocracy or what have you. It gets really bad and there's social unrest in the streets, there's violent police repression, it's really scary. And then that video culminated with footage from the January 6th Capitol riot as if to say, well, if you think, you know, America is immune to this with its longest standing constitutional democracy in the world, we'll look at this. This actually looks a lot like the footage you're seeing in these other countries. And that I think shocked a lot of folks out of complacency around the health of democracy and made them think, oh, wow, I need to enforce these norms on my leaders as well as rival leaders. I need to take this more seriously.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering what ordinary people who are not politicians or policy makers can do with the study, Robb. For people who care about democracy and care about the effect of partisanship and polarization, can individuals actually do anything that can make a meaningful impact on the problem?

Rob Willer: I mean, I think when you're having an interaction across political lines, one lesson you can take from this is be sure to disabuse someone of stereotypes they might have of the folks on your side. Like make sure they understand there isn't an active preference for undemocratic action. Make sure that they don't think there's an active preference for political violence. And again, this goes for the left and the right. You know, like if you're a Democrat and you're engaging with a Republican, you know, disabuse their specific stereotypes about how Democrats are censorious or dying to morally judge people for falling short of a very specific set of set of moral standards. That is seen as undemocratic by many Republicans because it, you know, it's seen as suppressing free expression. So disabuse them of that notion to the extent you can, you know, and definitely disabuse them of the notion that Democrats like political violence. You know, remember that, you know, a lot of Republican voters just saw their political candidate, you know, subjected to two attempted assassinations in the last presidential race, one that was, you know, a couple inches from being successful. So they also think about political violence and think that it's meaningful and it's coming from their rivals. So think about, and you know, and likewise, if you're a Republican, you know, you can tell Democrats about how you're supportive of democracy and that there's other reasons that they voted for Donald Trump. These are the kinds of stereotype-busting interactions that could be effective at actually de-escalating that what support for undemocratic actions does really exist on each side.

Shankar Vedantam: It can often feel like people who disagree with us politically have nothing in common with us. We've been talking a bit today about creating empathy across political divides, and we got this message from listener, Cary.

Cary: I watch a lot of futuristic, dystopian type movies to where, when aliens come down and destroy most of Earths or whatever the case may be, or there's some sort of pandemic or shortage or something, it always ends up with people trying to work together and race and culture and all these things don't matter at all. It's basically survival and trying to raise their kids and have happy lives and success in their employment, just to survive. So that's the way I connect with people is the bare bones of human beings, just happiness, survival, taking care of your family, spending time with them, and humor.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you make of Cary's strategy, Robb? Can focusing on the essentials remind us of what we have in common?

Rob Willer: Yeah, I think Cary's analysis is really good. I have to admit I'm kind of biased because I'm also obsessed with films and literature of this nature. Anything involving the destruction of society, for some reason, I'm just like a moth to the flame. But I think he's spot on. A lot of the historical analysis of political division in the United States highlights that there used to be this unifying force during the Cold War that brought a lot of Americans together in opposition to the Soviet menace or what have you, or whatever you want to call it. And then before that, in World War II. And so there was this period in the mid 20th century that was unifying in a lot of ways for a lot of voters. I mean, there's a lot of lack of democratic access in the US that made the voting population more artificially homogenous as well. But even if we just look at white voteage Americans, the post World War II era, there was this experience of unity in defense of the country against outside enemies, perceived as real. And I think that we don't have that now. Worse yet, we thought things like COVID maybe were going to amount to that, and then they didn't, and they descended into an even worsened polarization for a complex set of reasons. So I think that we can take some of those same tools in conversation and the way Carey is talking about, and draw out some of that same effect. So one thing is finding common threats or commonly recognized problems that unify us. Like maybe we all think inflation is a problem, let's say, or high prices are a problem, and that actually is a connective tissue that brings us together in pursuit of the best possible solutions. Can we use that to unify rather than divide? Similarly, finding commonalities and common ground with another person. This has been shown robustly to be as good as anything at reducing animosity across political and other divides. And then finally, Kerry's last point is really good, that remembering the fundamental thing, whoever you're talking to is concerned with is probably their safety, security, the economic stability of their household, and their community for them, the people they love. And that's something that you're going to share, and connecting at that level of like, how do we take care of our basic needs together? That can help you connect, I think.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to share one last idea for building empathy across division. It comes from listener Emily, whom we heard from earlier. She writes, I had this idea for a reality TV show, bring folks of opposite ideologies together without telling them they are on different ends of the spectrum, and ask them to work together to solve a problem, physical or intellectual, although physical might be better. Only thereafter, once they've had a chance to build a relationship and appreciate one another, would the political differences be raised. Then possibly by asking questions of each, they might be able to find one another's humanity. What do you think of Emily's reality TV idea, Robb?

Rob Willer: I think Emily should produce this show. We need it. It's a great idea. It really reminds me of Civity, this civil society organization that seeks to bridge political and other divides. Their approach is really, really similar to her idea, Tamley's idea. They bring pairs of people into what they call heavy touch interactions where they're really going to just get two people in a room that they need. They want to try to get these folks to bridge whatever divided is, religious, racial or ethnic, political, obviously. But they want to start way before you get into the politics, let's start as human beings. And they go to person A and say, Scott, why don't you tell us the story of your life? And Scott explains who he is and where he's coming from. And then Janet, why don't you tell us the story of your life? Janet explains where she's coming from, who she is, what she's about. And they kind of scaffold off of that. Like that goes on for 15 minutes, people sharing who they are. And who people really are is usually something that's pretty sympathetic to hear and pretty relatable. And so they start from this kind of position of vulnerability and build a kind of trust and commitment where by the end of that, when they get into the divisiveness and the political problems, they've got something to build on. And these two people often really can care about each other a lot in just 15 minutes with this guided interaction. One way that you can also use this same general approach to connecting despite political difference and potentially being persuasive is to share your own position on something in terms of a story or a narrative of how you came to it. So maybe the reason you have the attitudes that you do on gun rights is because of where you grew up and the people in your community and what guns were used for and what they were about. And that's the context that led you to have the view you have. That's helpful information for somebody who disagrees with you to know of, like, oh, this isn't somebody that's supportive of violence. Like this is somebody who has a very different reference group, set of experiences, influencers and all this. Similarly, you can also humanize your position. You know, like you're sort of conveyed like, hey, I came to this because of my own reasons, my own experiences. And you can relate to that. And you can see where if you were in my shoes, maybe you'd have the views that I do. And if I was in your shoes, maybe I'd have the views that you do. And we're subject to some major social forces and experiences that are leading us to disagree. But we've established we're human here, you know, in this interaction, if we're doing it the way Emily advises. And so we know we have a lot in common despite these understandable differences of opinion. Now, what are we going to do with those differences? Let's hash it out. Let's talk about it.

Shankar Vedantam: Robb Willer is a sociologist at Stanford University. Robb, thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Rob Willer: It's always a pleasure and an honor. Thanks for having me on.

Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. It's where you'll find conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, your subscription helps to fund the research, writing and audio production that go into every episode of the show. You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free 7-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, you can find us at apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.