Rethinking journalism through the lens of mediation and psychology
July 1, 2018 10:14 AM   Subscribe

Amanda Ripley of The Atlantic spent three months working with mediators, psychologists, and rabbis to learn how to disrupt toxic narratives and help people open up to new ideas. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives now people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.

Why is journalism so bad at bridging the divides between people in our new information-heavy world? Why do so many articles just reinforce people's assumptions rather than bringing understanding? Because journalists are going for simplistic explanations, and aren't listening enough.

This is a fundamentally hopeful article -- if journalists can learn its lessons.
posted by suelac (30 comments total) 98 users marked this as a favorite
 
still reading, but you know you're in weird (perhaps fresh) territory when an acronym for Freedom of Information Act gets used as a verb, and then, in the same short paragraph, truth gets separated from reason ...

But it’s becoming clear that we cannot FOIA our way out of this problem. If we want to learn the truth, we have to find new ways to listen. If we want our best work to have consequences, we have to be heard. “Anyone who values truth,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, “should stop worshipping reason.”
posted by philip-random at 10:52 AM on July 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


This is a fantastic read, and some really great suggestions for deep-dive reporting that I do think in our current model we really lack.

I do think saying these things are important is not the same as providing a roadmap for how to get there in our social-media-driven age. That is not a critique of TFA, exactly, but maybe just what I think needs to be hashed out next.
posted by thegears at 10:58 AM on July 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


and then a little later:

This does not mean calling advocates for both sides and quoting both; that is simplicity, and it usually backfires in the midst of conflict. “Just providing the other side will only move people further away,” Coleman says. Nor does it mean creating a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and their opponents. That is just simplicity in a cheap suit. Complicating the narrative means finding and including the details that don’t fit the narrative — on purpose.

The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete,”


Emphasis mine. And mmmm, okay, I'm into this for the long, slow read. Thanks for posting, suelac.
posted by philip-random at 11:11 AM on July 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


truth gets separated from reason

Honestly, the more someone kicks up a fuss about how "rational" they are, the more I am inclined to think of them as probably self-deluded and unreflective.
posted by thelonius at 11:35 AM on July 1, 2018 [35 favorites]


This is a fantastic article. Thank you so much for sharing! I've been having really similar conversations about the media lately, but this goes much deeper than how I've been thinking about it.
posted by lazuli at 11:35 AM on July 1, 2018


I will admit the article has me thinking about how to better approach conflict resolution. But I think part of the "zooming out to show complexity" thing may actually be better described as "zooming out to make someone's petty awfulness look less craptacular in scope."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:35 AM on July 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


This reminds me of arguing with my sister. We both end up going hammer and tongs about something we don't really have any expertise in or to be frank really even care about,( eg: the German polity's culpability in the rise of Hitler.) Besides being completely pointless this makes us both mad and unhappy, maybe even distraught. It is like a vortex that occasionally opens up between us that we spiral into. I had an epiphany literally a few months ago about what we were doing. We don't listen to each other but instead listen for something to argue against, a word or a phrase. It is as if we are starved of being heard and want to scream out, and so we do this to and for each other. I think it is a family/childhood thing but that is another matter. In retrospect this seems obvious just as a lot of this article struck me as obvious but seeing as my sibling contretemps wasn't actually obvious I do not suppose that it is.
posted by Pembquist at 12:41 PM on July 1, 2018 [10 favorites]


surprised by the lack of discussion here. Maybe many did what I first did and misread the title as:

Rethinking journalism through the lens of medication and psychology

amazing how much difference a lower case "c" can make.
posted by philip-random at 2:16 PM on July 1, 2018


I found this article fascinating and optimistic. It's nice to think that there are productive ways to dig out of the kind of polarized, tribal, feud-driven politics that seem so normal now. Many of the techniques described are interestingly counter-intuitive in the sense that I wouldn't think of them naturally and would, in fact, default to a much less productive approach (like some of the Oprah examples).

Maybe one reason there is not so much discussion is that the article has a lot of ideas in it and they actually are technical and process oriented. You can't confront those techniques without acknowledging that you yourself may not simply be 'right' or that the best plausible outcome is not that your own ideas prevail but that you submit to some kind of awkward compromise.
posted by cron at 4:23 PM on July 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


Maybe one reason there is not so much discussion is that the article has a lot of ideas in it and they actually are technical and process oriented. You can't confront those techniques without acknowledging that you yourself may not simply be 'right' or that the best plausible outcome is not that your own ideas prevail but that you submit to some kind of awkward compromise.

Yeah, I don't have much to say here because I agree so thoroughly with the article. But the issues she brings up are things I've been wrestling with for a while, as a therapist watching how the media covers things. Like I said, I hadn't been able to connect both those sides of myself until reading this article, but I think she does an amazing job of explaining *why* people won't listen to the "Here's one side, here's another" style of journalism, and why it's been making things worse. I also very much recognize myself in the descriptions of why listeners dig in their heels rather than listening.
posted by lazuli at 6:09 PM on July 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


I do think this could be really valuable for journalism, but one of our problems right now is that large segments of news media have no interest in nuance or getting people to talk to each other. Personal contact with friends and family might help, but family dynamics often lead to people reflexively dismissing certain members (usually younger, usually female).

The problem is that in order to have a conversation, both sides need to have mutual respect for each other, and with politics that are influenced by sexism, racism, misogyny, etc. it doesn't matter how fair or measured or nice the marginalized party is. I've had these sorts of long circular conversations where we did push someone into acknowledging our view... and the next time we saw each other he'd completely reverted, because he'd seen some bullshit on the Youtube media landscape he was absolutely steeped in.
posted by storytam at 10:37 PM on July 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


"probably self-deluded and unreflective."

Boy howdy is that me more than I like to admit.
posted by Billiken at 6:44 AM on July 2, 2018


weird (perhaps fresh) territory when an acronym for Freedom of Information Act gets used as a verb

That at least isn't fresh - journalists have been using the lingo "FOIAing" for a long time.

I think it is a family/childhood thing but that is another matter

Personally I think this kind of schema is at the root of a lot of contention. A lot of people are operating from unresolved family trauma, and even those with fairly functional family histories are prone to map the voices in the world onto the landscape of their own family resentments, rivalries, and irritations - or on the authority figures of our childhoods. Many of us are reacting.

Complexity is contagious, it turns out, which is wonderful news for humanity.

I really wonder about this, out in the real world. I don't see a lot of appetite for complexity - it is easy to find examples of rejecting complexity and nuance even here on MeFi, as well as in a lot of liberal discourse. The news outlets that do try to trade in multiple perspectives and complexity tend to draw a lot of ire for "giving [whichever baddies] a platform" and not suppressing points of view that some readers find distasteful, as if even speaking about less palatable faces and the existence of rotten people empowers them. That force for belonging and righteousness definitely overcomes a willingness to be exposed to the uncomfortable reality that most issues are not easily solved or obviously right or wrong in every dimension. I like the notion from the mediators of "set[ting] a tone for complexity," and certainly think that is something I can do better, especially in online interactions. I have one friend who is quite liberal but also a historian, and he posts lengthy and historically informed thoughts on current politics. I am always impressed that people rise to the discussion and voice a lot of varied points of view. He sets a tone that his contributors follow, and the discussion is usually a lot more interesting than that on my avowed-liberal screedy Facebook pages and the like. But at the same time, that is probably in part due to his positionality as a doctor in history living in the American South - he sits at an intersection of a wide range of points of view. I'm not convinced complexity is desired among the broad population, or that it is something that people will learn to value in the information marketplace.

Indignation will always be the easiest way to lure readers, but by itself, it’s not enough to make people pay for the privilege of coming back day after day.

Really? Is it not? Because I am not sure all those people who have tuned out are doing so because the news is not complex enough.

Great storytelling always zooms in on individual people or incidents; I don’t know many other ways to bring a complicated problem to life in ways that people will remember. But if journalists don’t then zoom out again — connecting the welfare mother or, say, the controversial sculpture to a larger problem — then the news media just feeds into a human bias. If we’re all focused on whatever small threat is right in front of us, it’s easy to miss the big catastrophe unfolding around us.

While there's a lot of truth to this, it's hard to blame journalists. Part of the flaw in this article is the realization that so much information exchange and narrative development happens far away from the influence of journalists. I think of the many stories of individuals who become proxy for much larger stories - for example, Barbecue Becky or the individuals killed by undocumented immigrants - and how their narratives are developed and traded through social media, blogs, non-journalistic "news" sites, and so on. Then the information junkies come in after the fact and post the broader analyses by journalists in a million online arguments - but the ideas have formed, the narrative is firm, the horse is out of the barn. Changing journalism would be a positive move, but it will not necessarily have any impact at all on polarization, because journalism is no longer many people's major source of information.

The discussion about values, though, is a really important one. In my view, this is the key to all of it. I can often find a resonance of values with a conservative person, even when it leads us to different positions. And I find it very productive to move toward a discussion of underlying values when we talk about policy: what kind of outcome/society are we trying to create? When you move from personalities and policies to vision and values, the breathing room to have a discussion somehow opens up a bit.

In many other professions that involve delicate conversations, people get trained in the art of asking questions and listening. They approach interviewing like an art, one they never stop learning. Why don’t journalists?

This is a really interesting point. I work in public history and museum interpretation, a profession which is pretty much all about having conversations with a range of people, and we do an intense amount of training on how to have these conversations. There is a continuous-improvement philosophy. It's interesting to reflect on how the tradition of journalistic independence - which is important - has also meant that journalists rarely have support for growth in a community of practice informed by deep communication/interaction psychology. They don't get a chance to develop.

The discussion on looping goes back to the same point we've discussed here a million times: how can you show the generosity of curiosity and understanding to people advocating policies that do direct harm to so many human beings? I still have no answer for that. It is deep work. I find it just about impossible to respect ignorant, authority-driven, racist and resentful perspectives, no matter what positive self-concept and human need is behind them.

Communities with more cross-cutting relationships tend to be less violent and more tolerant...conversations go better when people have about 3 positive interactions for every 1 negative encounter


This is something I totally get behind. A lot of my work in life has been about helping to create situations and experiences in which people from different backgrounds can mix. Moving from one part of the country or world to another, living together temporarily in a residential setting, or participating in an arts event or community improvement project. It is pretty powerful and tends to lead to evolution and productivity for everybody, even if in small ways.
posted by Miko at 8:04 AM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


I like the ideas, but I am not quite sure how to fit them in — or whether it's even possible to fit them in — to the current market-driven media landscape, where outlets are competing with each other for eyeball-time so they can sell it to advertisers and they are willing to pretty much do anything for those eyeballs.

It's sort of like food. People may tell you that they want a healthy, balanced meal with lots of fiber and vegetables and whatever, but given the choice between that and chicken nuggets when they think nobody is going to judge them, they go for the chicken nuggets over and over. And so that's where the money is, and that's what gets made, and if the end result is that in some places you can't get the healthy meal but can only get fast food... well, that's the market for you. To paraphrase Mencken, market economics is the theory that people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. And by god we do.

I'm not sure that a media outlet that prioritizes complex, nuanced reporting — which by definition takes time, and probably takes it out of the fast-response news cycle — is likely to compete with and displace the dark-pattern-laden, reward-button-pressing, bias validators like Fox News et al.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:55 AM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'll need to come back and finish this, it's a great piece. I hate the us vs them place we find ourselves in so often.

The 'Difficult Conversations Lab' is helping us remember that people are complex, and have complex motivations.

We may never agree, but if we take a step back, perhaps we'll feel less at war everyday.

Metafilter: Complicate the Narrative.

ps. 'Difficult Conversations Lab' sounds absolutely like something that would appear in a Monty Python skit.
posted by dreamling at 9:21 AM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


I almost gave up reading this article after the first few pages, as it seemed to ramble and start with so much throat clearing. But something brought me back to it, and it is definitely filled with interesting insights. The important next step for the author or someone else is to (I know this sounds contradictory to the article's ideas) distill this and make it more readable and actionable for journalists (and all citizens).
posted by PhineasGage at 9:31 AM on July 2, 2018


> distill this and make it more readable

The complexity needs to be reduced!
posted by CheapB at 10:01 AM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


This was an incredible article, thank you for sharing it! Here are the sections, in case that will help the discussion move forward:

1. Amplify Contradictions - don't just accept them, dig deeper and get more discussion on the contradicting sides or viewpoints
2. Widen the Lens - the example used was, instead of arguing about if a specific piece of art should be installed, change the conversation to talk about how the community defines art, and what the community wants to see
3. Ask Questions that Get to People’s Motivations. Ask people to consider the other side's motivations.
4. Listen more, and better. "Loop for understanding" - say "I heard you say this, right?" It is amazing how useful this is.
5. Expose People to the Other Tribe. Just get people with each other, actually talking.
6. Counter Confirmation Bias (Carefully)
posted by rebent at 10:32 AM on July 2, 2018 [11 favorites]


Mod note: Couple comments removed. "I haven't read the article yet, but..." is something I'd like to see cropping up less, explicitly or implicitly, in MeFi threads where the focus is pretty explicitly the article itself; please just take the time to read first, comment second.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:39 AM on July 2, 2018 [15 favorites]


Nice distillation, rebent!
posted by PhineasGage at 11:03 AM on July 2, 2018


Just some headlines! Each one has good commentary and story behind it, and I feel we could make them even more complex with the right questions
posted by rebent at 11:10 AM on July 2, 2018


Just some headlines!

Literally -- those are the bullet points around which the piece is organized. I sincerely hope that interested parties will not just take them and run with them, but rather will feel compelled to READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE, because there is nuanced method underlying each point.

- but the ideas have formed, the narrative is firm, the horse is out of the barn.

this is pretty much where the article starts -- the notion of intractable differences

In this dynamic, people’s encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened. In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.

I don't for a moment dispute the notion that we (the culture) are in a very troubled place re: how we get and process and apply information. And yeah, journalism hasn't just collectively fed the mess, it's also done a solid job of negating its own efficacy with regard to doing anything about it. Because seriously, why would I now trust those ratf***ers who so enthusiastically messed things up in the first place -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that?

The answer, I guess, is because I haven't entirely given up on the notion that we can somehow work this stuff out, and yeah, those journalists who start waking up to the mess and their part in it, and perhaps start working with some of the processes explored in the article -- well they are far better equipped to "reframe the discussion" than most.
posted by philip-random at 12:04 PM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


this is pretty much where the article starts -- the notion of intractable differencs

Let me clarify there. I'm making a different point - not about intractable differences, but about the fact that journalism is now often in a reactive position - stepping in long after an event has taken place and popular narratives have already been formed and started to generate their own momentum. This is especially visible in breaking news about sudden events such as mass shootings and police violence, but also in cases of the social media outrage of the day. Yes, journalists can do a lot, but they are often not the ones introducting the subject matter of a conversation in the first place. It is possible the author is overestimating the influence journalists can have in this environment.
posted by Miko at 1:14 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm making a different point - not about intractable differences, but about the fact that journalism is now often in a reactive position - stepping in long after an event has taken place and popular narratives have already been formed and started to generate their own momentum.

I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying there. I do wonder if there's a place in our current media landscape for a broadcaster/publisher that doesn't even try to break stories, because Twitter wins every time at this point. Rather, just take a day or two to decide what's important, do some decent research on it, and publish a meaningful, informative piece.

At the moment, reading a NYTimes article, for instance (neither throwing shade nor praising, just an example), there's nothing in the actual article that I wouldn't have guessed from the headline. The comments section honestly has more novel information. It draws my eyeballs because outragefilter but it doesn't actually make my life better in any way to read it.

In contrast, I listened to a podcast today which discussed a pop culture topic that's Not That Important in the scheme of things but I honestly feel like I understand the world better after an hour of listening to some somewhat-knowledgeable people try to make sense of it, even if they didn't come to amazing conclusions.

If there's a point to this ramble, it's that maybe separating the concepts of "journalism" and of "news" is in order?
posted by thegears at 2:48 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


I do wonder if there's a place in our current media landscape for a broadcaster/publisher that doesn't even try to break stories, because Twitter wins every time at this point.

This is basically what I see ProPublica doing on a regular basis. They don't "break" news; they do long-form indepth investigations, laying out both the context and the data of particular situations. And they are changing public policy as a result.
posted by suelac at 3:02 PM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


Not-quite-breaking news, with some deliberation and analysis, was the premise of Time & Newsweek, and The Week now, too.
posted by PhineasGage at 3:10 PM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


I am so wary and tired of the pain that current news brings that I've shut it out. I hesitated to read this article for even that reason. But I'm glad I did. It reinforces things that I believe, but helps me reframe some of the current issues we face as not as intractable as they seem.

Humans need to be heard before they will listen.

I'm regularly in conversation with men who believe things that are fundamentally anathema to me. But one of the things I try to do, even in the face of some pretty horrendous comments, is focus on the person, not the content of what they say. (The following example is much-simplified) Once, someone in our group disclosed having committed sexual assault. Since our goal is to have discussions about masculinity and gender-based violence through a lens of power and healthy relationships, I tried to focus on the feelings ("that seems hard for you to admit", "I'm glad you felt safe enough to share", etc), and treat them as a person, as opposed to someone who is "less than" or a monster. It allowed them to open up, and be more receptive to our overall message/goals. And not only does it change them, but it changes me, too. Recognizing others' humanity is at the core of mitigating violence, both explicit and implicit.

Miko's comment how can you show the generosity of curiosity and understanding to people advocating policies that do direct harm to so many human beings? is particularly resonant for me, and I struggle with it every day.
posted by Gorgik at 12:40 PM on July 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


And thanks for posting this. It's going to be grist for the mill for a long time.
posted by Gorgik at 12:47 PM on July 3, 2018



This is one of the better posts that I've read in a while on here; thanks for sharing. Still processing it.
posted by fizzix at 12:13 PM on July 5, 2018


Instead, Haidt identifies six moral foundations that form the basis of political thought: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. These are the golden tickets to the human condition. Liberals (and liberal members of the media) tend to be very conscious of three of these foundations: care, fairness and liberty. Conservatives are especially attuned to loyalty, authority and sanctity, but they care about all six. And conservative politicians reliably play all six notes, Haidt argues.

The last three are just tacit pointers to the majority belief system without naming anything. For example: loyalty to their beliefs, authority of their beliefs, sanctity of their beliefs. If someone happens to agree with it but believes in another set of beliefs then they are still disloyal, subversive, and profane.
posted by Brian B. at 8:29 AM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


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