President Smith:	Good evening everyone and thank you all so much for being here tonight to engage with a topic that could not be more important or more timely. To borrow the words of our speaker, Professor Diana Mutz, "We are here to achieve a deeper understanding of the challenges of and opportunities for hearing the other side."
	Before I introduce our speaker, I'd like to thank Professor Ben Berger for that wonderful introduction and to extend my gratitude to Aligned Central Pacific and Social Engagement, the A Law Foundation for the Advancement of the Liberal Arts, and the Center for Innovation and Leadership for their collaborative efforts.
	As Professor Berger explained, tonight is the kickoff of a yearlong engagement with the theme of public discourse and democracy. I appreciate their leadership in helping us to explore this theme as a community, particularly during such an important moment in our elective cycle.
	To open this series, we welcome University of Pennsylvania Professor Diana C. Mutz. Professor Mutz's teaching and research focus on public opinion, political psychology, and mass political behavior, with a particular emphasis on political communication. At Pen, she holds the Samuel H. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication, and she also serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics.
	Let me mention just a few of her accolades.
	Diana Mutz received the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship to further pursue her research on globalization and public opinion. In 2011, she received the Lifetime Career Achievement Award in Political Communication from the American Political Science Association, and she was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
	A prolific scholar, Diana Muntz, is the author of Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes, 1998, a book that received both the Robert Lane prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology from the American Political Science Association and the 2004 Doris Graber prize for Most Influential Book on Political Communication published in the last two years.
	She is also the author of population-based survey experiments published in 2011 and The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes, published in 2014. The Obama Effect received the Frank Luther-Mott Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism and Mass Communication Research Award. Her latest book, In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015.
	Tonight, Diana Mutz joins us to discuss her 2006 book, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy, which received the 2007 Goldsmith Prize from Harvard University and the Robert Lane prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology from the American Political Science Association.
	You've heard that before, that's the second time, but that’s the first time she won it and I’m losing track. In Hearing the Other side, Diana Mutz presents us with a vexing dilemma. In practice it appears that tolerant deliberation and political participation may not always go hand-in-hand. In fact, deliberation and participation might even be at odds.
	Diana Mutz's research examines a number of challenges that produce a tension between cultivating political participation and fostering the spectacle to the consumers' opinion. These include our tendency in the U.S. to form homogeneous social groups, a factor that can prevent engagement of different opinions in the first place. When we do enter spaces of diverse viewpoints, it's also common to avoid contentious topics out of a desire to maintain peace. Then, once we engage in these difficult discussions, that deliberative practice in itself appears to be tied to lower political participation.
	In the face of these challenges, Diana Mutz explores the opportunities that arise from engaging with difference, from increasing tolerance and support for civil liberties to greater appreciation for the perspectives of others, and even more robust understanding of our own opinions.
	Our conversation tonight about these challenges and opportunities and about potential ways forward is more important than ever, because we find ourselves at a critical moment in the history of Swarthmore, in higher education, more broadly, and in our nation as a whole. During this first month of the semester, we have been reminded in painful and challenging ways that we, as a community, are not immune to the social and cultural divides that we see mirrored across the nation.
	The questions that Professor Mutz will help us work through tonight are ones that will help us make the most of our last [inaudible 00:05:19] within diverse communities. Why is it vital that we continue to engage with difference, even when it challenges us deeply? How should those challenging conversations be conducted? How can we disagree while still maintaining a sense of belonging?
	There are no easy solutions, no easy answers, but I hope that our attempt to grapple with these questions tonight will be just the beginning of an ongoing effort to come together, not simply in spite of, but in celebration of our differences with difficult yet valuable dialogues in the months and years to come.
	Please join me in welcoming Professor Diana Mutz.
Professor Mutz:	Thank you very much for that kind introduction, President Smith. Thank you, Ben. for this opportunity to talk about hearing the other side. What I'm going to do today is I understand some of you are familiar with the book that I wrote many years ago now, so I'm going to give you a brief overview of what I learned from studying face-to-face communication about politics.
	Then bring you forward in time to some of my more recent work on mediated political discourse, because although face-to-face communication about politics is undoubtedly important, a huge amount of the political discourse that we're all exposed to comes to us through mass media. Then, finally, I'm going to talk about political discourse in the context of globalization as well, where the conversation has very much become one of us versus them in recent years.
	Now, don't run out and try to buy this last book, it doesn't exist. This is the book I hope to write this coming year, so it's up there as a placeholder. We'll see what it actually turns out to be like.
	As President Smith mentioned, many of these topics that I've been studying over the years have become especially salient in the current election, and for that reason I thought I'd bring them all in.
	I'm going to start out talking about face-to-face discourse about politics. Where does it happen in most Americans' lives, and what kind of consequences does it have, both good and bad? Then I'll launch into talking about political discourse in media, and as you might expect, it's very different from most of our face-to-face conversations about politics.
	After that, I'll talk about new media, how that affects the quality of political discourse, and how it both helps and hinders our ability to have meaningful political discourse. Then, finally, I want to talk about college campuses in particular.
	My campus, as well as yours, has had issues and [inaudible 00:08:13] that bring these issues to the fore, and I think that's worth acknowledging that college campuses are very different environments from those that you'll inhabit most of the rest of your lives for a whole variety of reasons.
	Okay, is there a shortage of cross-cutting political talk in the United States? The short answer to this is yes, but relative to what is a good question. If you look at the overall frequency with which people talk about politics informally, we're not terrible in the United States. This is starting at the bottom, below median countries, for discussing politics in terms of the frequency with which ordinary people are willing to talk about politics.
	As you can see, the United States is there in red, we're above median. We talk a fair amount but we're nowhere near as high as some countries. For example, you'll notice this outlier here on the far right is Israel, where there's a whole lot of political conversation that transpires, but this is just frequency, it doesn't tell us anything about who talks to whom.
	What we know about the United States that's more troubling than sheer amount is that, basically, the more partisan a place is, the more homogeneous are people's discussions. The United States is a pretty partisan place, as you know, tremendous amount of concerns around the polarization of political views in the United States.
	When you look across a whole variety of countries, what you see is that more homogeneity in the network goes along with people having strong partisan views. That makes some sense. Basically, if people have strong views, they tend to self-select other people with similar views and surround themselves with them. As a result they don’t get as much cross cutting political conversation as they might otherwise.
	Some people have suggested over the years that the solution to this is just have bigger networks and maybe if we get more Facebook friends or we have more involvement in our day to day lives that that will increase the extent to which we’re exposed to difference. In one sense that’s true. If you look at people who have larger networks of political communication, you see that they are more likely to also have some discussants who are different from them politically.
	However, what you also notice over here on the right hand side is that the more discussants you have, the more that larger proportion of like minded discussants you have. What that means is if you’re a really political person, you’re even more likely to have highly homogeneous networks on the whole, as a result. Again, that makes some sense because if you’re involved in politics, you end up working with other people with similar views on the kinds of political causes that you’re interested in.
	There’s also been a push, mainly by Bob Putnam, for more voluntary associations as a possible solution, but over and over again what we find is that the kinds of organizations we join tend to be very homogeneous. People self-select into voluntary associations that agree with their political views. What’s more, studies of these voluntary associations show that even if it’s a choral club where politics has nothing whatsoever to do with it, if you’re more politically dissimilar from other people in the group, you’re much more likely to drop out.
	Even though these things aren’t about politics, so the garden club or the choral club, when you feel different from the other people in some way, you end up being more likely not to participate regularly. As a result, people with large numbers of involvements in voluntary associations tend not to get a lot of cross cutting political discourse.
	Where do people get it when they do get it? Although I did not predict this, in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Overall, the place with the greatest homogeneity is a place of workship. Again, not surprising, but the place not just in this study but in many studies since I did this original work. Overwhelmingly we get cross cutting exposure in the workplace.
	Now the reason that makes sense, in retrospect, is that the workplace is not a voluntary association. It’s an involuntary association. You need a job so you really can’t afford to annoy people or be difficult to work with. What happens in the workplace is that you don’t pick most of the people you work with. They are who they are. You’ve got to work with them cooperatively. You’ve got to get along, so you have a motivation to work in that sense and as a result of that you end up having incidental political conversations around the water cooler and such because you spend a lot of time in the workplace.
	Now one of the ironic things about the fact that the workplace really does seem to serve as a public forum these days is a workplace is one of the places that we don’t protect political speech in the United States. On one hand, this is where people are getting those interactions. On the other hand, we don’t have the same protections in the workplace that we do in other kinds of what we call public forums and so forth.
	What’s interesting about this is that most people would tell you, “Don’t talk about politics at work. It’s potentially controversial. You’ll make people irate and so forth.” What my colleague Jeff Mondak and I found when we went into different workplaces, all with different mixtures of political [crosstalk 00:14:04], some very homogeneous, some very heterogeneous, is that, first of all, nationwide, a heterogeneous workplace is the norm.
	Most workplaces are not all republican or all democrat or anything like that, but what’s more, people find it easier in the workplace because they work with these people. They do get along with them to a certain extent, at the end of the day they go home. They don’t have to be best friends. There isn’t so much pressure to agree on everything with co-workers as there might with a spouse or another family member. We all know what that kind of pressure feels like.
	Overall, yes, there is a shortage. Many of the post solutions to that shortage of cross cutting exposure don’t work out the way we think they should. To me one of the most surprising things is that only around 20% of people can report anybody that they talk to about politics who holds political views different from their own.
	That to me is pretty shockingly low. Again, that’s just an average but … and obviously some people have a great deal of diversity even in their immediate families, but that’s not the norm. I think that’s something important to realize.
	Secondly, doesn’t really do us any good. We all know this idea of cross cutting exposure is important. It really comes out of political theory for the most part and political theory doesn’t always equal empirical reality. What was of interest to me was looking at whether or not people who were exposed to either natural settings to cross cutting discourse or who experimentally were exposed to discourse across lines of difference.
	Did they end up being more open to other ideas? Were they more aware the rationales behind opposing political perspectives and were they more tolerant politically? Were they less likely to put those of opposing views down?
	Awareness of oppositional views is definitely a benefit that we see. Regardless of the kind of study, we see that the more you’re exposed to disagreement, the more you have an awareness of what people’s reasons are for holding these views that you yourself don’t agree with. It doesn’t mean you’re persuaded by them, not by any means. We found very little evidence that Americans were being persuaded by those who exposed them to cross cutting discourse, but they were in fact more knowledgeable about the rationales for opposing positions.
	Exposure to agreement, talking to like minded people didn’t accomplish that. Political tolerance was also consistently enhanced by exposure to disagreement. We asked people about their support for upholding people’s right to speak out and other forms of civil liberties and overwhelmingly when they had contact with people of opposing political views, they were much less likely to want to withhold those rights from those who didn’t agree with them, so so far so good.
	It seems to produce some of the benefits that we anticipate it will, but that’s not the end of the story, unfortunately. There are some severe drawbacks to mixed political company and to living in heterogeneous political environments. The most important one that comes out in my work is political participation, especially, public activities, working for a candidate or engaging in some sort of public forum of advocacy is something that’s much more difficult for people who are in highly mixed political settings.
	You intuitively know why that is, because you’ve probably been in one of those studies before. It’s awkward. You know these people, you interact with these people and then when they all of a sudden become very aware of your political views, it can cause tension in the relationship. It can threaten essential harmony.
	Indeed, that’s another reason people will tell you they don’t talk about politics with their neighbors or sometimes family members, whoever they anticipate will be of opposing political viewpoints, because it’s not just that they think cross cutting exposure isn’t important. It’s that they also value social harmony and they want to get along with other people. Hard to fault people for that particular goal that they don’t want excess conflict.
	We all know the discomfort that this causes, although we definitely vary as individuals in how much conflict we’re comfortable with. I personally will readily admit I’m a wimp. I hate conflict. I don’t like it with my neighbors. I don’t like it with my husband. I don’t like it with anybody. I am what you would call a conflict avoidant respondent, for the most part, but some people aren’t.
	Quite frankly, I admire them a great deal. They’ll say what they’re going to say and they don’t think twice about how someone else might react, but we know that this particular group of people, those who find time for uncomfortable in social settings are specially likely to be affected by cross cutting exposure in a way that leads them to abstain from active political participation.
	How do people resolve these contradictions? My major argument in the book is that we ignore the fact that we’re not just citizens, we’re also social beings. We care about relationships. We care about our friends. How do we resolve this tension that I’ve described here between wanting to be politically involved, having views, wanting to advocate them, and, yeah, also wanting to maintain our associations across lines of difference and not push them further than they will go.
	One of the things people do regularly and they will tell you they do this even is they de-value politics. They say, “Politics is conflictual, nasty, dirty, I don’t want any part of it.” They distance themselves from politics and don’t participate as they otherwise might. Example of this that I used in the book from quite a few years ago, although I still own the same car, I’m afraid, we have a little decal on the back of our Ford Econoline Van. It looked like this and I took my kids to preschool, parked it in the parking lot, came back out 20 minutes later and this is what it looked like.
	They took the legs off my Darwin fish.
	Clearly somebody found this offensive and I had this reaction of, “Oh, well, okay, I guess somebody might find it offensive but it just didn’t occur to me and now what do I do?” I could go out and get another one, put that on there and say, “In your face. I’m going to put my fish back on,” but actually, this was by [inaudible 00:21:15] columnist and what we did was [inaudible 00:21:17].
	We had this feeling, “Oh, we’re in this new place.” We were in Columbus, Ohio at the time and the fear was, “Oh, well, if this is a more religious community than we’re used to and they find this offensive, this symbol, perhaps we should not limit our network in this way and have such a statement on our car.”
	As it turns out, my husband’s call was to go apolitical. He substituted a sushi figure which we do eat a lot of sushi. We like sushi, nonetheless, this is chickening out, basically. This is saying, taking something that is a political comment of some kind and turning it into something about food, basically.
	Obviously, this is a case where we took it back. We decided, “Ah, rather than potentially offend all the people in this preschool who are conservative Christians, we will not just think of that one at the moment.” Incidentally, that sticker is still on our car. If you drive through Winwood, you see the Ford Econoline in the driveway.
	The second thing people do, that we’ve all heard about is, Balkamization. That is they choose to live among like minded others. You choose a neighborhood or a community where people tend to have political views similar to your own. This is something that’s been documented.
	One book called the Big Sort has done this in particular, showing how urban and rural America and suburban versus urban, and so forth, tend to congregate in ways even if people aren’t picky, specifically based on political views, they end up living among people who are like minded due to similar choices in schools or living near the co-op or whatever the case might be. His argument is that it’s really technology and wealth that make it possible for us to choose a place to live where we can, if we want to, avoid people who are extremely different from ourselves.
	A third solution, I'm not even going to bother talking about is nobody does this. People value their social relationships, usually more than they value politics. People don’t just say, “Oh, I don’t care about having any friends, I’m just going to say whatever I want to.” People don’t generally de-value their social relationships.
	The final thing that people do to handle this tension is something that I’ve seen especially commonly on college campuses. That is instead of engaging in controversial issue debates or partisan politics, students often engage in what we call civic engagement which is often interpreted to me non-controversial forms of political engagement, like Get Out to Vote campaigns or maybe helping the poor in the community.
	These things are the kinds of things nobody’s going to get mad at you about or find controversial that you’re engaging in and they’re very common. Civic engagement efforts seem a lot safer to many people than engagement in controversial politics.
	The problem, of course, is that none of the solutions I’ve outlined are very satisfying, right. They all have drawbacks. They all are not ideally the kind of way we want to resolve this conflict. One of the key issues here is how do we make political conversation, political discourse safe in the context of political diversity. I think this is something that we haven’t really dealt with as a culture, broadly in this country, as well as on smaller scales.
	How can we have a political culture that depends on this notion of freedom and debate and realize the benefits of that if that is seen as at odds with the achievement of community or the idea of social harmony? We have a sense in this country that politics is not polite conversation, that you don’t talk about religion and politics at the dinner table, as Miss Manners advocates. That it isn’t something that’s compatible with social harmony. That’s obviously problematic and on the flipside, it’s obviously also problematic but political homogeneity needs to be accepted for what it contributes as well.
	What I mean by that is I don’t if we did have a choice and we could control people’s social environment so that we could either maximize their experience of like minded contact or cross contact that we would necessarily eliminate like minded contact. The reason for that is participation’s important. Many of the most important social movements we’ve witnessed happened because people who share a problem, who are like minded get together and take political action.
	We all get energized to act politically when we’re with like minded people, because we’re not only more confident in the correctness of our position, we also have the kind of social support we need to take action. I think that is extremely important. It’s not only cross cutting contact that’s important. I don’t think these two things are going to take place in the same context, however. I think that’s something important to realize.
	We need context where students and people in our communities who are of like mind can get together with other like minded people and make plans for political action and advocacy, but we need other venues for the purpose of deliberation and cross cutting contact.
	I mean think about what these terms bring to mind. This kind of activism, participation that you see on the left, there’s not going to be a lot of deliberation going on there. That event is about political action. It’s about participation. On the right, on the other hand, we have one of these calm, cool kinds of meetings where people are hashing out differences. That’s a different kind of context and we’re probably asking too much if we want the very same context to serve both of these purposes.
	To switch gears a little, I think that cross cutting contact with face to face situations is important. Nonetheless, you’re all students, you know 90% of your communication with each other is probably also with your parents, your family, so forth is mediated in some way. Whether it’s online or whether you’re watching politicians engage in discourse with one another, there’s a heck of a lot of political discourse, probably the majority of it in this country is mediated before it reaches us, whether it comes from another individual or through television.
	Even though the internet certainly gets the most attention these days, it’s still the case that Americans are exposed to politics the most through television. That’s still people’s number one source of exposure to political discourse. The question that I posed in my second book, In Your Face Politics, does not have any of the same benefits. The immediate point people raise with me was, “Oh, you can’t possibly, because look at what political discourse on television looks like.”
	Of course they’re right. It’s very raucous. It’s very uncivil. It has a very different flavor from most face to face exposure to difference. In fact, what we know is that most people are pretty polite when they talk to other people about politics in face to face settings. They, even without knowing it, when someone disagrees with you at a party or something, you put greater physical distance between yourself and the other person. That’s common across all cultures, even though the amount of space differs by culture. Everybody physically backs off distance wise when they disagree.
	The question is, what happens with television when we’re exposed to views we really dislike on television? Does that really help us come to believe that reasonable people can disagree and to acknowledge the views of those that we may never come across in our face to face lives?
	The answer to is, the short answer is “Yes, it  can but it seldom does because of the kind of television that’s most popular to watch.” One  of the important points to get out of this is that mediation makes incivility a lot easier. Again, you probably know that because you’ve seen incivility online but it’s also true even on television.
	In this example, Ted Koppel is interviewing George Bush and one of the funny things about Koppel’s interviews is that he always interviews people who are not in the room on this little screen. Now what’s weird about that … I always assumed it’s because they’re in another city and [inaudible 00:30:25] them in. Actually it’s not. Even if you’re there in New York, in the studios, you have to go to the studio next door and get popped into the little box. Why?
	There is a good explanation and Koppel himself will say this, “You know it’s really hard to be tough on somebody who’s sitting right next to you.” It’s hard to be aggressive in face to face situations. We’re all really well socialized to be polite for the most part in face to face disagreements. Yeah, some people who’ll scream and yell and carry on but for the most part, when we disagree with people face to face, we’re pretty polite.
	This kind of thing makes it much easier to be tough on another person because they’re not physically there. The same thing is true in our internet communications. It’s easier to be impolite,  it’s easier to be aggressive than it is in face to face settings, because the person is not physically there.
	What are the consequences of getting exposed to much cross cutting discourse on television? As I said, my experiments show there’s potential for it to do good. The problem is the kind of communication that usually transpires on television. By this term, In Your Face Politics, what I mean is the kind of discourse that violates our face to face norms for social communication, in two different ways.
	One way is obviously the level of civility, allows screaming and yelling between political adversaries on television while they’re there, the stand ins for the candidates or the candidates themselves. In addition, the way that we experience politicians on television is actually very different from the way we experience people in day to day life that disagree with us.
	What happens on television when there’s a disagreement is that’s when they go in for the extreme close up: tense faces, sweat dripping down the face, people uncomfortable and angry. That kind of emotional visual is extremely hard to turn away from if you’re an audience member. It’s gripping. Even though you may not like what they have to say, when you witness a conflict, you pay attention. It’s just like watching Pro Wrestling Federation. I guess it’s the WWE now, not the WWF.
	We all are hard wired to pay attention to conflict because it’s important information in our environments. When they play up conflict on political television, ratings go up. It attracts people’s attention. Now what’s interesting about this to me is overwhelmingly the American public tells us they hate all the incivility on television, “It’s terrible,” “Can’t stand it,” “It’s at crisis levels,” and so on and so forth. The question is if everybody hates it so much why is there so darn much of it on the screen all the time?
	The series of studies that I do with In Your Face Politics sets out to answer that question and it does it in the following way. It says, look, if we as human beings are reacting to television the same way we would if we were say at a cocktail party watching these people, what we know is that when they start going at one another, we’re going to be uncomfortable. Physiologically, are level of arousal goes through the roof and you probably know what I’m talking about.
	Even if you’re in a dinner party, and maybe there’s a couple across the table starting to argue with one another, even though you’re not participating in that argument at all, it’s tense. You feel uncomfortable. You wish they’d stop. It causes our level of physiological arousal to go up just witnessing conflict. We don’t have to participate. Particularly, if those people are physically close to us, it sends our level of arousal through the roof.
	The reason is that we’re hardwired to back away from conflict for reasons that make perfect sense. It’s dangerous to be close to conflict. What we find is that the way people react to televised conflict is very much the same way. This is an example of a kind of shot to politicians that you often have these days where they’re really strange perspectives in a way.
	If you think about it, nobody is going to see George Bush from this perspective where he fills your entire field of vision. Maybe his wife might, at some point, if you’re that close to each other, but it’s never going to be the way we would see him if he were physically in the room, because we wouldn’t be that close. It would be inappropriate.
	We get all kinds of extreme close ups and the reason for that is we know people orient toward the human face, particularly in [inaudible 00:35:26]. That’s something we all do from the time we’re infants is pay attention to faces, particularly when they’re in our face, in the sense of physical closeness.
	Now if you’re not convinced that distance conveys meaning, think for a minute about the big deal that was made after the Gabby Gifford shooting about the State of the Union seating plan. Normally, you’ve got republicans on one side of the aisle, democrats on the other and after this is a show of unity. They sat like boy, girl, boy, girl. Now one hand, how silly, of course they can sit next to each other for a couple of hours. How ridiculous is that? Yet, it was seen as a really important symbol of them somehow getting along and being closer to one another in the non-literal sense, just because they’re sitting next to one another.
	We see this in psychological experiments. There are classic ones where they have a subject sitting in a room and they give him or her a copy of the questionnaire that they say has been filled out by the person they’re about to meet. It’s obviously made up so that it’s real similar to that person’s politics or very different. You know this person’s either a lot like you or very different from you and then they come into the room.
	Later on, they ask people how much they like that confederate who comes into the room and of course people say they liked better the person who they assume is like them politically, even though they never talk about politics. What’s really interesting is if that person is randomly assigned to sit right next to them as opposed to across the table, they really hate them, if they’re different politically.
	Basically, whatever emotion you’re feeling, closeness, physical closeness intensifies it and physical distance, if it’s someone who you think is different from you will not intensify it in the same way. What we find is the intensification of emotion is driven by the sense of physicality. Now one possibility is this is all irrelevant because we know TV isn’t the real world. We know they’re performing in a sense for us, the audience, and that that may mean it’s inconsequential for how our brains process it.
	My own prediction was that it mattered a whole lot and the reason I predicted this is because there’s a whole lot of research going on about human-media interaction. What that research suggests is our brains really aren’t very evolved to representational technology. I don’t know about you but I still think it’s funny to put cat in front of the TV and watch it run around behind it and try to find the bird or squirrel.
	Same thing, you’ve seen videos on the web of the dogs barking at the animals on the TV screen and we all say, “Oh, aren’t they silly and stupid and we know better.” Actually, turns out we don’t know a lot better. As evidence of this, think about you’re at a movie and a train seems to come toward you on the screen, without even thinking about it, you pull back. That’s ridiculous, the train isn’t going to hit you and you know that, right. Cognitively, you know that.
	Nonetheless, our brains seem to respond to visual stimuli as if it’s real. Even when it’s a televised image, human beings seem to respond the same way and there’s a lot of really fun research about human-media interaction these days. Some of my favorite studies are the ones where they have people come in and they’re randomly assigned to either a male voiced computer or a female voiced computer and they ran programs on it and afterward they estimate the size of the hard drive and how fast it is and all this.
	The male voiced computers are always judged faster and have data hard drives and so on and so forth, except in one case the female voiced computer is judged superior and that’s when it’s running a program on love and relationships.
	Now and that made me think, “Why that’s utterly silly, they’re just computers and they all know they’re computers.” In fact the authors of this study originally got rejected and were told, “Oh, people are silly. They’re anthropomorphizing computers,” and so they ran the same study on Silicon Valley employees and it worked the same exact way.
	Our modes of interacting come from the face to face social world, even though we know it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Same thing happens if you come in, you have people sit in front of a computer, run a program, half the people have to evaluate that computer performance to its face and the other half are sent to a second room and use a second computer to evaluate the performance of the first computer. You can guess what happens.
	Just like people to your face will tell you, “You did wonderfully,” and then backstab you when they go in another room and talk to someone else. People backstab computers as well. They tell the second computer the first one didn’t do nearly as well as they would tell it to its face. A lot of social psychology is really embedded in the way we interact, even when it makes no sense.
	Do people respond to these violations of norms on television when they are uncivil in ways that they wouldn’t be in our face to face life and they’re physically in our faces in a way that we don’t usually come that close to people that we disagree with? Just to give you an example of one study that documents this, what I did was I hooked people up to physiological measures of emotional arousal. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re happy or sad or positive or negative but it tells you how much emotional arousal they’re experiencing.
	What you find is in fact that if they see the uncivil close up version, it’s massively arousing to watch. The uncivil medium less so and in the civil versions of these programs, very same programs, incidentally, that was done with actors, they find incredibly boring and unarousing to watch. Not surprisingly we pay attention to conflict and we find it emotionally arousing.
	The short answer to this is that people do respond to politicians the same way they do face to face humans when they’re on television. That is when they see them engaging in uncivil behavior in close up perspective, it exacerbates whatever feeling they have toward that person, whether it’s positive or negative.
	What that means, of course, is that we have a polarization going on. If you look at the effects of viewing the very same event in close up versus medium, you get much stronger arousal from the close up shot and much stronger from the uncivil version as well.
	This particular graph is not actually arousal, it’s about recall. This shows you how much people remember from these programs. You might be surprised to find that those highly arousing kinds of programs people actually do remember what happened. You know that in a sense, because what do you talk about the next day? Not some boring exchange that you heard. We tell each other and talk to each other about, “Oh, did you see so and so call so and so an idiot and blah, blah, blah?”
	That’s the kind of stuff people redistribute, they Tweet to others and it’s the kind of thing that they actually remember. They also, however, remember policy positions from those highly arousing portrayals.
	It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, arousal does increase people’s attention to the content and their recall of the content, even hardcore policy information. It also makes people hate the opposition even more. It intensifies their dislike.
	The final finding is that it makes people view the arguments that the person on the other side makes as less legitimate. Whenever you have one of these fire exchanges, people talk a lot about who won and who lost in these exchanges. What we find over and over again is whoever you walked in liking, you become more extreme and whoever you walked in hating, you especially extreme in your dislike for that person.
	When someone you agree with engages in aggressive interactions, you see it as righteous indignation, just defending themself the way they should, but when the opponent does it, you think they’re a total idiot and not deserving of your respect anymore.
	What we have is a situation where most critical television, basically, helps us demonize the opposition. It increases the intensity of our negative emotional reaction to the opposition, whatever that opposition might be.
	The final thing it seems to do that is unfortunate is that it lowers our trust in government in general. This is a different kind of effect that’s not so much an emotional one as it is people come away saying, “These people don’t act like normal people. They don’t engage in the world the way I do. It’s not just that they don’t understand the scanners at the grocery store, it’s that they have a different set of social rules than the ones you and I obey in our day to day lives.
	What we find is that when exposed to the same political exchange that’s uncivil, people come away saying politicians can’t be trusted and so forth. This I think is key in the sense that if you look at the middle bars, the white ones, that’s a control group.
	In this case, they watched a video on shooting free throws. How do you improve your free throw shooting? They were there in the lab the same amount of time, but what’s interesting is that the civil version did increase their trust in government when they watched these politicians engage in a civil debate. It was actually good for their attitudes toward politics and politicians, just as the uncivil one had a bad effect.
	Overall, we have a situation where there’s both positive and negative but there’s one key thing I’ve left out thus far that makes this problem really difficult. That is this finding. Overwhelmingly, even though people tell us they hate incivility, you ask people, “Which of these shows would you like to watch more?” “Would you be likely to tune into this show again next week?” Overwhelmingly, they liked the uncivil show. They indicate it’s more interesting, exciting and they’re likely to watch again.
	This obviously means that the very kind of material that’s not particularly good for us is what is most likely to have high ratings and to get our attention. In this particular case, Bill O’Reilly is sadly right that getting people to scream and yell at one another does make for hit shows. It draws audiences in.
	I can’t emphasize enough how political television faces a really difficult situation these days when it comes to audiences. Because, basically, we’ve got a lot of good television out there we can watch and most of us don’t watch in real time. We don’t watch the evening network news anymore. What we find is increasingly people don’t watch any political television at all.
	They instead watch fiction. They watch Game of Thrones. You all know what they watch. There are a lot of interesting forms of drama out there and the quality of television, in fictional television is quite good. We see lots of examples where big ratings have come from conflict. You all know they expect big ratings next Monday for the first debate between Trump and Clinton because no one expects that to be a calm, civil affair. For that reason, people will be watching.
	Television turns out to be a closer simulation of real life because of its visual, audio/visual nature, but part of what I want to emphasize is I’m not saying that politicians have fundamentally changed. Those of you who are into Hamilton know they’ve always been nasty and loud and argued and so forth. What’s different is the way we as citizens experience their conflict. It’s no more behind closed doors. We see it performed for us on a stage more or less. That has important consequences when you see it up front and personal.
	The other thing that is important here is that television has itself changed. The visuals that we see now in political television are more intense in terms of conflict and that’s just a function of competing for the relatively small audience that’s interested in politics.
	The closeness of visuals, one of the interesting things is just regular network news but as you can see, Chet Huntley on the left appears much smaller than Brian Williams on the right and this is your standard news shot. What television producers have discovered is that faces that appear to be close to us draw our attention so we see more and more shots that emphasize people who appear to be close to us.
	We also as a result of technological advances have cameras that go out of the studio. In the old days, the backdrops for news were excruciatingly boring. They had these enormous cameras, they didn’t move and they just sat them there and you had a very stationary, unexciting shot. Nowadays, this is two different stories on unemployment that came up on the same day, different years in my sample.
	Here they interview a woman who recently lost her job with the US government to illustrate unemployment. If you look closely there was a tear coming down her cheek. It’s a very emotional, very tight close up illustrating the event. The other thing you probably are aware of intuitively is our TVs are a lot bigger than they were. Our living rooms have not gotten correspondingly bigger and as a result things appear to be closer to us on television than they used to because of increasingly large screens.
	I still like to go to the movies. I was actually Film Major as an undergraduate and I still like the really big screen of the old fashioned movie theater. There’s something about that experience that’s fundamentally different than a smaller screen, so I well understand people’s desire for large screen televisions.
	Overall, what we have is during the same historical period when in your face visuals have gone up, up, up, people’s dislike for the political opposition has gone down, down, down. There’s more than one reason for this but what you see on the left is basically flat padding when we look at how partisans think about their own party. They don’t like it better, they don’t like it less, but over here on the right, what you see is that when they rate the opposing party, they demonize that opposition now. They hate it much more than they did in previous decades.
	What about incivility and new media? It’s true that new media isn’t always pictures. It  can be but it’s not always, but the principle in the book that applies extremely well to online media is that more arousing messages are more likely to be re-transmitted. It’s the outrageous things that are going to go viral. They’re going to land in your Facebook queue that you’re more likely to see and politicians know that. Trump knows it all too well.
	When those things are said that make you go, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe he said that.” You all know about them. Those are highly arousing types of messages so even though people say, “Isn’t incivility terrible?” they pay attention and it’s very difficult not to as human beings.
	Now what? After all that, it seems like a really difficult if not impossible box to get ourselves out of. Obviously, drawing attention to things and being able to get attention drawn to whatever it is you care about is an important thing and uncivil media’s better at that than civil media is. On the other hand, just as certain kinds of settings aren’t going to work well for purposes of deliberation, the calm reasoned discourse and uncivil discourse are going to take place in different settings. They’re not going to be in one and the same.
	Now I’m perhaps a little more optimistic than most people about political television because I think there’s a lot of ingenuity out there. One hand, it’s true that political television is what we call market failure in that what people want to watch isn’t necessarily what’s very good for them. Yes, it gets their attention but it leaves them with a very bad taste in their mouths and he’s right, there is media out there that’s quite civil but how many even watches it? Even if we had a lot more of that, what good would it actually do?
	There are some other countries that have come up with some novel ways to get people who are not that interested in politics to pay attention and to target young people in particular.
	This is one in Canada, very popular program called Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister and they have college students come on this program who want to be politicians. The really amazing thing is that these are the judges. It’s not Randy and what’s her name, no. These are all former Prime Ministers of Canada who serve as judges on this show. Furthermore, the winners get lots of money toward college and so forth. Alex Trebek, the Jeopardy host is actually a Canadian which I didn’t know. He hosts this game show.
	Many people don’t take politics so seriously that they put off those who are only tangentially interested. Another thing that I think is just brilliant, how do we get people to watch things they wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to? Fantasy Football was the smartest thing anybody ever came up with. If you look at what happened as a result of Fantasy Football, used to be everybody watched their home team. They cared about that game, they watched it.
	The viewership of football has gone through the roof because now we care about games other than the home team. We watch all these other games because we’ve got to see how our players on our Fantasy Team perform. This was no accident, this was planned and that’s the reason that the networks set up Fantasy Football for us to play.
	Year that I commuted, I found out that’s all anybody on Amtrak ever talks about, is their Fantasy Football team, and I had to get one just so I have people to talk to.
	All these struck me that we should be able to do something like that very similar for politics, something that gives people an incentive to pay attention but that’s fun, that’s not necessarily, “Oh, I feel the duty to be a good citizen and that’s the only reason I’m going to do this.”
	In South Korea, they have a fabulous approach to having elections, which is hilarious. All the popular movies of the previous year, they pop the candidates into and they show them engaged in battles and so forth, in order to show who’s doing better than the other candidate. Here they’re doing sword battles. There have been tons of people who have commented on how this whole broadcasting election coverage is so much more entertaining and more fun to watch than the grass that we all see on our news stations.
	One part, and maybe I just don’t get something, but there’s this blind teddy bear that wanders around South Korea and then lays down on the beach in the end, during one of the broadcasts. I have no idea what it means, I don’t speak the language but there’s one other thing I do want to point out, very, very clever thing. When you go to vote, when you’re at the polling place on election day, you can take a selfie and all day long, they run selfies of people who voted.
	Now who likes selfies? Young people like selfies and this also has an interesting psychological effect, people dress up, they do all kinds of things before going and they watch because they want to see themselves, their friends, and so forth go across the bottom of the screen for having voted. It’s something that encourages turnout among younger people in particular. As one correspondent put it, after watching how South Korean TV covers an election, “I’ll never watch CNN again.”
	It’s a lot of fun. It’s interesting to watch. Even my own kids would watch it whereas most political television they won’t watch.
	Again, another example, the selfie down here, again, they’ve had marvelous success with what we might call more entertaining forms of political television.
	Okay, those are some ideas to not leave you too horribly depressed about the future of our exposure to contrasting political views. Unfortunately, I’m going to be a little more depressing here at the end by talking about the current discourse on globalization.
	One of the things that I started studying a few years ago, even before this became a really big deal in the United States was how people talk about people in other countries and this is something that’s fascinating to me because it’s mediated. Almost all the communication, whether it’s economic or news, etcetera, is mediated because we’re talking about global communication systems and global economic systems.
	As we know, when it’s mediated, it’s a lot easier to say nasty things about one another. What’s interesting is how this is played out in attitudes toward training in the United States. This is a result of an experiment where we tell people that, “Here’s a policy, it’s going to bring this many jobs to the US. This many jobs to the training partner country,” or we say, “It’s going to cause a loss in the training partner country.” Now in doing this experiment, my thought was, “Of course, what’s not to like when everybody wins? Everybody gets more jobs, more economic development, etcetera.”
	Interestingly, for many people in the United States, they see the way we relate to the rest of the world in competitive terms so that even if we gain a lot, it’s no good unless we’re beating the other side. That is they see it very much like a football game. You can’t have two winners. Now that’s exactly the opposite of course of how economists view trade but what we see is this really interesting pattern now where over half of the American public sees globalization in zero sum terms. That is, “If they win, we lose, and if we win, they have to lose.”
	This obviously is very troubling, even more troubling to me in these studies, we had open ended questions that asked people about the rationales for decisions they made. The level of nastiness in these was quite frankly shocking. “Jobs matter more to us than to them.” “There’s a lot of us and them here.” “Americans greater than foreigners all.” How’s that for an equation?
	Over and over again, the justification people gave is “We matter more,” and “It’s not patriotic not to think of ourselves over them,” and “It’s a zero sum game and so that’s the way we’re going to play it.” Obviously, it suggests a huge amount of tension in the discourse over globalization because some people are approaching this as a win-win proposition and others are approaching it in a way that suggests we’re all at odds with one another.
	Even the kind of universalistic attitude of treating all human beings as worthy of jobs, of economic development, and so forth was seen as a bad thing in many of these open ended comments. “The US should worry about people in this country, not other countries.” That’s why we’ve become a plug up country, as they put it. Over and over again, people argued, “We aren’t favoring the in group enough.”
	Now putting Americans first, as a political psychologist I found this fascinating, because on the one hand, we have all these forms of in group favoritism that are considered socially unacceptable or at least undesirable to voice like racism, like sexism and yet when it comes to putting our compatriots first, it’s actually the opposite. We not only had overwhelming America comes first kinds of statements, we also had people saying that anybody who didn’t feel this way was not a patriot because they weren’t putting the in group first.
	This is fascinating to me because it is viewed so differently from other forms of in group favoritism. Now you might say, “Aren’t they just saying this as a sense of duty that they feel to their compatriots or a sense of obligation to help your own compatriots first?” Probably not because what you see is the more strongly someone identifies as American and the more positive they feel about America, the less enthusiasm they have for helping their in group via job training programs, social safety net, bigger and help more people, etcetera.
	It’s not very consistent with this idea that it’s really about wanting to do well in our obligation to our compatriots.
	The final study I want to show you suggests why this elite discourse I think is really important and the kinds of things that we’re hearing [inaudible 01:02:33] let’s talk about this year has important consequences not just for how we [inaudible 01:02:38] but for other aspects of life as well.
	One of my former graduate students, Laura Silver and I did this study a couple of years ago and what we did was we used ads from the 2012 election campaign, one from Obama and one from Romney. Both of these ads as you’ll notice … I’ll play them for you real quickly … are very similar in an important respect.
	[videos 01:03:06-01:04:07]
	Okay, so yeah, basically they’re both saying, “I’m tougher on China than the other guy is.” During elections we see a lot of this. It’s not surprising that Obama had some trouble when he started advocating trade agreements after this kind of thing. Because basically people did become more fearful of China and what we did is we did an experiment with a sample of adults and we randomly assigned people either to get the China Obama or Romney ad or they got a different Obama or Romney ad that was about gender related issues.
	What we did then was we had people do a lot of other tasks for about an hour and then at the end they were asked to serve as an admissions officer for a college and they were given a big list of students and we randomized the descriptions and profiles of the students. They were all very qualified students, but we randomized them in a way that the qualifications varied and asked them to evaluate this candidate for admission.
	They went through a list of 10 or 15 different candidates for admission and the way that they were different is we used the pictures and we randomly assigned them to have a given profile with either Asian or white race or we said they were an American or a Chinese national. We wanted to see whether having been primed to be anti-China by the political ads had any lingering effect.
	Obviously, we don’t think this was the purpose of these ads, nonetheless, what we found is that in the control condition the same student with Chinese nationality was evaluated more positively than if they were exposed to the anti-China ads. Same thing for those who were racially Asian, evaluated more negatively for admission to college if they saw the anti-China campaign ads.
	This kind of rhetoric you may say, “Oh, they’re just trying to get votes,” and that’s absolutely true but it has consequences for how we interact with one another. I’d like to point out that that’s what’s so unusual about the college campuses in a lot of ways. You’re not only from different countries, different backgrounds, you are purposely selected in most cases to represent diverse interests and usually in small communities they tend to be highly homogeneous.
	Usually if you want diversity, you go to the big city. You go to a large area and what’s odd about college communities is, on the hand, they’re communities and they often like Swarthmore can be pretty small so that you have close contact with one another on an ongoing basis but that makes civility extremely important in that context because you are in close physical contact, nonetheless are quite diverse in viewpoints.
	College campuses are in this sense more like the workplace in the requirements that they make of us as citizens in interacting one another, than they are our comfortable homes where we feel like we know where everybody stands and can say whatever we want.
	Involuntary associations are to some degree also characteristic of colleges because on the one hand, yes, you join groups you want to join based on your interest and so forth but when you come to college you don’t come having self-selected the people that you’re going to live and work with and go to classes with for the next four years. That I think makes it an especially challenging environment for cross cutting political discourse.
	I’m going to stop there and open things up for questions and conversation.