Alison Goldsworthy > Quotes

“If you find yourself put at random in a group of green sock wearers, you will naturally favour other green sock wearers, whether or not you have ever previously expressed a view on socks.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“in those countries where the average income is over $6,000 per annum, democracy can survive ‘come hell or high water’, but that where the average per capita income is below $1,000, the life expectancy of a democracy is a mere eight years.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“If you find yourself put at random in a group of green sock wearers, you will naturally favour other green sock wearers, whether or not you have ever previously expressed a view on socks. In the process, you will come to regard yellow sock wearers less favourably.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“research has shown that when delegates from opposing groups are seated next to each other, they are actually more likely to vote with their own party.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Because we can’t change reality when things we dislike or that cause us harm come to pass, we instead change our minds about them, persuading ourselves that they’re not really that bad.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Leah and Craig were able to activate their other identities – as parents, as people who valued education, as people who cared about sharing the reality of the situation with a wider group of people – which meant they could treat each other with kindness, explore each other’s views in more depth and, in the process, move from a winning position to an understanding one in which they could establish a shared goal.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“there are common themes to many accounts of their journeys and those highlighted by academic studies: rethinking and/or getting to know the ‘enemy’ (in other words, who the ‘them’ is); seeking to establish a shared identity; moving from a winning to an understanding mindset; being presented with a route to change that made it less costly; rethinking a position in the face of kindness; identifying a common goal rather than a ‘winning’ position; listening to a trusted ‘messenger’; letting go of a belief if a mechanistic attempt to justify it failed or if presented with overwhelming contrary evidence.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Quintin Oliver, a conflict resolution specialist and the man behind the successful referendum for a ‘Yes’ vote on the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, told us that for deliberative democracy to work, three essential ingredients first have to be in place: a purpose; a promise; and a deadline.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Debate is good. Disagreement is good. Entrenching in our own beliefs to the extent that we can’t tolerate either does us much harm.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Ironically, as the economist Raj Chetty has shown, these days you are twice as likely to achieve the American Dream if you live in Canada than if you are a US citizen.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“it turned out that in one particular US training camp they had been taught that Koreans were ‘cruel and heartless’ and trained to hate them deeply. So when they were shown unexpected kindness and compassion36 by their Korean captors, which flew in the face of the barbarism they had been trained to expect, their prior beliefs crumbled.37 In fact, soldiers who had been trained in this particular US camp were far more likely to defect than POWs who had not been given any training on the North Koreans or had been given more neutral information.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“People will often express more strongly how they feel about another group than what they think of the issues that divide them. Indeed, it can be quite possible for them to dislike each other strongly while not disagreeing much on specific issues.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“So instead, we started having conversations where we entered with the intention just to learn from the other side. And we found that in doing so, it made our own positions better, and our own views stronger, more reasoned and nuanced. Second, we realised that a lot of our assumptions about the other side turned out to be wrong.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Before you commit yourself to a position or a policy, ask yourself to explain mechanistically how you think it will bring about its intended outcome. Pick a topic you feel strongly about: climate change, immigration, taxation, gun laws, euthanasia. Then don’t simply justify it: write down or explain to someone else step-by-step how your thinking operates and why therefore it will succeed.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Manchester United fans were asked to talk not about their team but about what they liked about being a football supporter. When the fans primed in this way were then confronted by the fallen jogger, the help they offered was determined not by whether the jogger was a Manchester United supporter but by whether he was a football fan.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“it does generally seem to be the case that contact-based approaches can only have a limited effect when it comes to reducing polarisation, not least because the people who become involved are not drawn from society as a whole but from those who chose to ‘opt in’.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“When people are worried or frightened, the wrong answer is better than no answer. Ignorant confidence is better received than informed uncertainty. Leaders who are trying to do the right thing can fall by the wayside. Leaders who say that they are doing the right thing are popular.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“But a close study of the Obama camp’s TV advertising has revealed that it actually spent more on advertising that promoted a negative message than did those promoting Obama’s opponent John McCain via a similarly negative message.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“rather than thinking about negotiation as a battle, you should think about negotiation as collaborative problem-solving.’46 She argues that it is critical that you start by being prepared – and able – to frame your proposals as a solution to a problem your counterpart has.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Jordan Blashek and Chris Haugh found that a good way to reduce tension was to ‘strip away the labels’. ‘We learned to identify each other not as Democrats or Republicans with beliefs motivated by partisan ideology, but instead as the deeper identities that we both carried that matter to us,’ said Jordan.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“because one of the great mistakes many political analysts historically made was to assume, as the political scientist Anthony Downs did in his 1957 article ‘An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy’, that ‘the citizens of our model democracy are rational’.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“If today’s youth have less reason to believe things will improve for them under the democratic status quo, they have less reason to uphold those institutions.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“If, for example, people in group A believe that members of group B are ‘stealing’ their jobs, they will feel resentment and hostility even if what they think to be true is not objectively the case.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“A predisposition to reduce threat drives us to want to keep the world the way it is.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“we often don’t treat individuals as individuals. We treat them as members of a group. And in so doing, we bring a freight of preconceptions and prejudices to our judgements.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Yet despite such voter engagement, analysis shows that voter advice apps have had no effect on their users’ ultimate voting decision.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think the key takeaway there is that if we continue to only speak to people who agree with us, we won’t make change. We won’t change people’s minds. So the first step is being comfortable with being uncomfortable: being willing to speak to people who don’t agree with you. The second is that we have to recognise that the people that we’re speaking to, that maybe we see as enemies or as adversaries, quite often have a lot more in common with us than we care to realise”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Liberals tended to be good at solving the problem when the ‘correct answer’ proved that gun control reduced crime. Conservatives were better when the answer proved the opposite. In short, people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together

“Arguably, though, the most successful mechanisms for resisting political polarisation are, paradoxically, the ones that actually include by design a degree of tension or conflict.”
― Alison Goldsworthy, Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together