Open to Debate: Reducing Polarization by Approaching Political Argument as Negotiation

On October 23, 1946, the Moral Sciences Club of Cambridge University was privileged to host a debate between two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The issue: “Are There Philosophical Problems?”—not exactly the sort of topic likely to start a bar fight.

And yet this proved to be the most infamous conference in the history of philosophy. Barely ten minutes into Professor Popper’s opening presentation, Professor Wittgenstein grew visibly annoyed and grabbed a poker from the fireplace. Audience members recalled Wittgenstein swinging the poker violently through the air as he spoke, brandishing it like a weapon. The exchange became so heated that when Wittgenstein angrily demanded an example of a coherent moral rule, Popper proposed: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” Enraged, Wittgenstein hurled the poker to the ground and stormed out of the meeting, slamming the door behind him (Edmonds and Eidinow 2001).

If such aggression is possible in a scholarly debate over the existence of philosophical problems, how much more so when it comes to disagreements among citizens over gun control, abortion, election laws, or race relations. Debates over these issues, complicated and weighty as they are, seem like the debates that need our rationality the most—but are also, by their very nature, the debates that yield to rationality the least.

Only a year before the poker clash in Cambridge, Popper had written The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), a philosophical reflection on the importance of open and rational dialogue for protecting democracy against fascism. A Jewish refugee who barely had managed to escape Nazi Germany’s occupation of Austria, Popper believed strongly in the importance of a society that values equality, liberty, and tolerance for different viewpoints. But he believed that those values all depend on our ability to engage in rational dialogue, and he was therefore unwilling to adopt a relativist stance on the importance of rationality itself. Like his work in the philosophy of science, which argued that the legitimacy of a scientific theory lies in its ability to be proven wrong, Popper’s political outlook prioritized the value of rejection—the idea that a healthy democracy is one in which we can remove rulers from power peacefully, can bring our convictions into doubt, and can resist the urge to inflict violence on those who do not meet our Procrustean ideals.

The idea of the open society is as relevant today as it was in 1945. We are no longer living in the immediate aftermath of two world wars, but we do live in a time of strongman leaders and a resurgence of uncivil politics. It is a time in which we are right, they are wrong, and they would see the truth if only they'd listen. It is also a time in which the very notions of fact, objectivity, and critical debate are being thrown into question. What makes Popper’s vision so relevant is the idea that these principles are not lofty intellectual luxuries—they are the rules of civil society itself. They offer us a process by which we can step outside our own personal interests and viewpoints to resolve political conflicts. In essence, they enable us to negotiate with others through something other than naked self‐interest, appeals to emotion, or brute force.

It may seem strange to find a defense of the open society in a journal on negotiation. But I suspect that negotiation experts are uniquely suited to diagnosing the all‐too‐human obstacles to constructive political discourse and civil debate. The study of interpersonal conflict and conflict resolution might offer a new perspective on why our attempts at rational dialogue fall apart, and how to improve them. My hope is that the field of negotiation, by analyzing both the rational interests and emotional drives that govern our use of reason and the formation of our political beliefs, can offer new insights into how we can steer those forces toward a greater willingness to discuss our political views openly, critically, and with an eye to greater collective understanding.

Anyone who has ever witnessed or taken part in an argument over sensitive political issues knows how confrontational the atmosphere can turn. Even when the exchange begins in a civil tone, it runs the risk of heating up. The parties grow impatient with each other’s seeming inability to take their perspective, restate their points with greater insistence, interrupt each other, and allow their shared frustration to build. Voices grow louder, harsher, and more insistent. And, tellingly, nonverbal cues reveal that the sympathetic nervous system is in high gear: posture braced for combat, heart racing, eyes wide and locked onto the target, be that prey or predator.

The emotional nature of these exchanges seems like a clue as to why political arguments so often fail to be productive. Why do they result in increased conflict? Why do they so rarely end with parties being able to relate to each other, let alone changing their minds about political issues? Even for those of us who feel sure of our political views, it is hard to deny that there is value in being able to exchange viewpoints with others—that some good can come of it, at least in theory—and that whatever that value is, we aren't getting it. Could it have something to do with the reason why people engage in political arguments in the first place? Perhaps by getting a better and more honest handle on what motivates us to argue about politics, we can improve the dynamics of our exchanges with people who disagree with us—and maybe steer them in the direction of constructive dialogue.

Any improvement would count as progress, as the bar today is quite low. While political scientists and pundits have long discussed the intensity of political polarization in the United States, the issue has received new scrutiny in the last decade, with many suggesting that American political parties have only continued to polarize (Klein 2020). Some have gone so far as to mourn the “lost art” of democratic debate (Sandel 2011) and label the United States a “rude democracy” (Herbst 2010). To those with a moderate and pragmatic emphasis on political civility, polarization threatens our communal life and hastens the decline of civil society. Even for those who firmly believe in the rightness of their own political convictions, polarization is a problem in that they are unable to effectively convince others to see their point of view. Is it naïve to still look for ways to improve the civility and intellectual quality of our political dialogue?

Granted, many have no interest in considering or tolerating other viewpoints, or engaging in civilized debate. Some try to sabotage public discourse by creating disinformation, appealing to the lowest forms of persuasion, trolling, and fomenting hate and distrust. Disinformation, the proliferation of QAnon‐style conspiracy theories, and the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021 have forced us to confront this disturbing reality. Fortunately, those attitudes seem to be in the minority. A survey by the Pew Research Center found in 2020 that 86 percent of Trump supporters and 89 percent of Biden supporters believed before the election that if elected, their preferred candidate should “focus on the needs of all Americans,” “even if it means disappointing some of his supporters” (Dimock and Wike 2020). This suggests that a majority of Americans might be open, at least in principle, to the prospect of a bipartisan approach to politics. For those with whom we might be able to reach common ground, there is no alternative to rational debate.

To resist the bifurcation of American civic life into two warring cultures, we need a common framework within which our competing substantive goals can be reconciled according to procedural principles with widespread legitimacy. In a democracy, that includes a process for debating those goals and their merits. Even with political bad actors capturing our institutions and sabotaging the political process, we need a more resilient political culture that will encourage voters to be less susceptible to such manipulation. This requires a more realistic model of why civil debate so often breaks down—of what prevents voters from valuing the higher‐order principles of political civility and the open society.

The goal of this article is to point the way toward an approach to political discourse that is rooted in the field of negotiation and dispute resolution. My claim is that political arguments, whether effective or ineffective, have important qualities similar to those of negotiations, and that principles of effective negotiation can accordingly be applied in useful ways to improve the quality of our political discourse.

I will begin by attempting to establish that political arguments tend to be highly personal in nature, drawing on empirical research in moral psychology to support the inference that, psychologically speaking, the political is personal. I will apply theories of negotiation to the competitive dynamics of political arguments to argue that political positions serve (at least in part) as proxies for implicit psychological interests, and that failures of political dialogue result from competitive emotional dynamics that make us both more defensive and more aggressive when we feel those interests are threatened. I will then consider possible ways to adapt prescriptive strategies from negotiation theory to promote rational and civil discourse.

My core contention is that political arguments so often prove unproductive because they fail to rise above zero‐sum competition, or what negotiation experts call “positional bargaining” (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 2011). Effective solutions require parties to instead approach their disagreement from the perspective of interest‐based negotiation, using shared curiosity, trust in good faith, intellectual humility, and other process‐oriented principles to establish a shared set of ground rules for pursuing their emotional and intellectual interests as a team. Negotiation theory encourages parties to a negotiation to address the preconscious social and emotional dynamics underpinning their shared use of reason, working to replace adversarial tension with a personal inclination toward fair‐mindedness and reciprocity—in short, to approach their exchange of viewpoints as a collaborative exercise from which both parties stand to gain.

Several definitions are in order. For purposes of my argument, I define “negotiation” as any attempt at deciding how to allocate value among parties with nonidentical interests; what I have primarily in mind includes traditional types of bargaining as well as other forms of dispute resolution, such as mediation, arbitration, and international conflict resolution. By “political argumentation” I mean the art and practice of discussing political issues that are subject to disagreement in a way that makes use of arguments. And instead of the narrow, technical definition of “argument” as a set of statements in which the premises imply a conclusion, I have in mind any attempt to justify the acceptance of a given viewpoint by offering reasons in support of it. I thus use the word to refer both to the general deliberative process involved in discussing, debating, and often seeking to resolve disagreements, and to any particular set of reasons offered in support of a given position in a disagreement.

For purposes of this argument, I am limiting my discussion of argumentation and dialogue to interpersonal exchanges of ideas as opposed to formal debates or formal proceedings in which public officials resolve issues or politicians hammer out legislative agreements. The focus here is on what I submit are deep analogies between traditional forms of negotiation and informal exchanges between friends, partners, neighbors, and fellow citizens about controversial social and political issues—from the Thanksgiving dinner table to the university classroom. My focus, in other words, is on civic life generally, and on the important role deliberative discourse plays in our communal lives.

My view of political arguments as forms of negotiation rests on the premise that people rarely argue without an emotionally charged motivation to do so. Nobody gets heated about anything, including seemingly abstract and impersonal topics, unless they feel that something is at stake for them personally, as evidenced by extensive psychological literature relating to political reasoning and behavior.

Political psychologists are continuing to study the cognitive processes involved in our political lives—specifically, how political behavior is influenced by moral emotions, and how those emotions underlie and can also overpower the use of reason. The social sciences generally have undergone a renaissance over the last several decades, with surprising findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience radiating into the broader study of judgment and decision making. The behavioral economics movement has been particularly influential in unmasking our tendency to make systematic and predictable errors of judgment that deviate from standard models of rational behavior (Kahneman 2003; Sunstein and Thaler 2008; Thaler 2015), and in exploring the love–hate relationship between the automatic cognitive processes of “system one” and the controlled cognitive processes of “system two” (Kahneman 2011). Psychologists and neuroscientists in these areas have turned their attention to politics, applying their findings and theories to better understand how and why ordinary people fail to behave rationally when it comes to opinions on religion, gun control, and particular political leaders (Haidt 2007).

For our purposes here, three clusters of findings from this wave of cognitive political psychology are especially pertinent.

First is the finding that people are deeply tribal. Our political beliefs and attitudes are heavily influenced by social forces: we look to others who share our political affiliations for guidance, and our connection to them serves as a pillar of our personal identity (Shapiro 2017; Chua 2018). We coalesce into communities that demand loyalty and uniformity—and that are often defined, or at least reinforced, by the perception of a common enemy. Accordingly, tribal dynamics often are accompanied by a binary moral logic: “you are either with us, or against us.”

Research on tribalism goes back to the mid‐twentieth century, with experiments demonstrating that what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012) calls “groupish” behavior—the tendency to give ourselves to communal causes and to divide the social world into in‐groups and out‐groups—is a deep‐set part of human nature (Clark et al. 2019). Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner posited that collective behavior depends largely on how individuals view themselves in relation to their fellow group members and integrate those relationships into their “social identity” (1979). In Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, Daniel Shapiro identifies the “tribes effect” as a major source of division in negotiation and conflict resolution (2017). Empirical research suggests that these dynamics are at work throughout our political lives (Clark and Winegard 2020). Many of us are quick to label ourselves and others along ideological or party lines—right wing, conservative, progressive, country‐club Republican, moderate Democrat, fiscally conservative yet socially liberal, and so on. In doing so, we treat those labels as proxies with which to quickly determine whether or not someone is “on our side.”

Second, cognitive political psychology suggests that political beliefs are driven by values and emotions in a way that other beliefs often are not. Beliefs about issues pertaining to justice and the nature of society are only partly about what seems to be factually true; they are also in large part about what people want to be true (or, perhaps, what they feel compelled to make come true). Research on moral reasoning suggests that political beliefs are driven by moral attitudes that differ across individuals and communities (Haidt and Hersh 2001), and that these differences in “moral foundations” can predict differences in political affiliation (Haidt 2012; Graham et al. 2013). These moral attitudes are rooted primarily in emotion and intuition rather than analytical reasoning (Greene and Haidt 2002). Other research has shown that moral and political judgments are sensitive to negative emotions regulated by the amygdala—specifically, anger, fear, and disgust. For example, people who are prone to strong feelings of fear and disgust are more prone to express hostility toward immigration (Aarøe, Petersen, and Arceneaux 2017, 2020). Even being put into a state of fear has been shown to make liberals temporarily more likely to voice politically conservative attitudes (Bargh 2017), while inducing a sense of safety appears to make conservatives more open to endorsing left‐leaning views (Napier et al. 2018).

This is unsurprising. Moral psychologist Joshua Greene and others argue that moral emotions evolved to make us feel driven to cooperate with fellow members of our tribe and compel others to do the same (Greene 2013). By this account, political beliefs are really more like intellectual extensions of core moral values—specifically, values rooted in powerful and emotionally charged intuitions that bind us to other members of our in‐groups, choosing the efficiency of instinct over the precision of reason. This would explain why moral values trigger such powerful feelings of conviction and urgency, and suggests that our substantive moral values are not entirely separable from our social identities or tribal instincts. It would also explain why political rhetoric so often invokes the metaphor of “fighting” and involves not just glorifying our own political party, but also demonizing our political opponents as immoral, as enemies who must be defeated.

Our emotional entrenchment in our values can make us uncompromising. The values that drive our political behavior (religion, environmentalism, etc.) often strike us as absolute, even to the point that we are unwilling to consider the possibility of subjecting them to trade‐offs (Atran and Axelrod 2008). Merely being asked to consider compromising on those “protected values” can anger people and reinforce their commitment to those values as a matter of principle (Baron and Spranca 1997). This suggests that one cannot understand political beliefs without looking at their normative undertones and the absolutizing effect they have on our thinking. In fact, it might be a misnomer altogether to call them “beliefs”; perhaps they are more like commitments to desired states of affairs, verging on emotional insistence.

A third finding of cognitive political psychology is that our use of reason is flimsy. We are not consistent in our use of rationality, logic, or respect for empirical evidence. In fact, we are impressively clever and flexible in our ability to bend reason to support the positions that we would like to affirm. In keeping with the emotional effects of our moral values, we tend to conclude first and reason second (Haidt 2012). To channel Winston Churchill, American voters will accept what seems to be true, but only after they have tried everything else. And even then, some attempts at using evidence to change people’s minds can backfire, causing people to affirm their support for their preexisting beliefs even more fervently in spite of the facts (Trevors et al. 2016; Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler 2017).

The natural tendency to seek out evidence that confirms our preexisting beliefs while rejecting unfavorable evidence—a tendency widely known as “confirmation bias”—has probably been with us all along. Francis Bacon, while cataloging the many pitfalls of human nature that prevent rational progress, observed that

Brain imaging studies have sought to illuminate the neural activity involved in confirmation bias. In one study, subjects were shown examples of instances in which politicians made public statements and later ended up contradicting themselves. The subjects expressed criticism of politicians representing the opposing political parties, while letting their own politicians off the hook. Based on fMRI scans, these individuals showed little activity in brain areas associated with reasoning, instead showing high activity in areas associated with moral emotion, impulse control, conflict resolution, and reward (Westen et al. 2006).

Findings from this line of research suggest that, for most people, the use of reason is embedded in an emotional context defined by personal motivations, including moral and social commitments. We seldom come to blows over the rules of arithmetic or the weight of the electron. Issues involving personal interests, however, strike closer to home, activating emotional circuits that guide our use of reason toward urgently desired conclusions. We become determined to find justifications for our preferred beliefs and ways of life, struggling to find what we can convince ourselves are good reasons for what we believe or do. Our use of reason is opportunistic and selective. The total weight of literature on motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and the backfire effect suggests that moral and political beliefs are simply not about reason. They are governed by an urgent drive to defend our moral commitments—a goal for which reason all too often is merely an instrument (Haidt 2001).

There are handy evolutionary explanations to support this position. One popular view among social psychologists posits that our capacity for reason evolved not to pursue truth, but to gain social influence and persuade others by winning arguments. Proponents of the “argumentation theory” of reasoning believe that humans are predisposed to think like lawyers rather than judges—to look for whatever arguments can be used to gain support for our position (and thus to gain social support against our competitors). The main thrust of the argument is that reasoning and rationality are not always aligned with each other, that reasoning is a self‐interested activity, and that if we aspire to the dispassionate use of reason in social situations, we face an uphill battle against our own brains (Mercier and Sperber 2011).

That we can be so one‐sided and inconsistent in our openness to reason suggests that Hume was right to say that reason is “the slave to the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Hume 1739: 415). At the end of the day, political reasoning, and the moral intuitions that motivate it, are driven by personal interests and emotional commitments. Even selfless devotion to the objects of our moral values usually reflects a core emotional commitment to those values—one that functions as a personal need.

If political arguments really were impersonal exchanges of views and analysis, they would not arouse the level of emotion that they do. We get stressed when we feel we have something personally significant on the line. To the extent that political arguments are interactions in which people feel their personal interests are at stake, it might be useful to analyze the dynamics of political disagreement through the framework of negotiation theory. Negotiation experts have studied at length the ways in which parties’ attempts to cooperate to pursue their respective interests can fall apart, and have offered prescriptive strategies for improving the quality of those interactions. Perhaps some of the leading approaches to analyzing negotiations can help to explain how political arguments go wrong, and what to do about it.

Negotiation experts argue that when forced to choose, people prioritize self‐interest over rationality (Fisher and Shapiro 2005). Similarly, political arguments can often be understood through the lens of personal interest. Could it be that political arguments are often framed and conducted in a way that makes the parties feel personally threatened—that, in the heat of the argument, we fear that opening ourselves up to other people’s reasoning will force us to compromise our core values and needs? The predominance of emotion in political arguments would seem to suggest so.

One of the most foundational theories of negotiation, as articulated in Getting to Yes, divides negotiations into two basic categories. By this account, ineffective negotiations result from what the authors call “positional bargaining”: clinging to fixed positions, viewing concessions as defeats, and settling on unsatisfying zero‐sum agreements (if any agreement is reached at all) (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 2011). Effective negotiations happen when the parties look past their stated bargaining positions to engage in what the authors call “interest‐based negotiation” (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 2011), searching together for opportunities to create value by exploring their respective interests cooperatively and with respect for the relationship. Interest‐based negotiation involves the parties taking a broader view of their ultimate goals, resisting the urge to treat their own interests and those of their negotiating partners as mutually exclusive.

In accordance with this theory, interest‐based negotiation is made possible when the parties can agree to four procedural principles: (1) separate the people from the problem, (2) look past positions to pursue interests, (3) lay out options before coming to an agreement, and (4) commit to shared standards of objectivity and fairness (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 2011). Accordingly, the key to successful negotiation is to resist (or pivot out of) positional bargaining by emphasizing process over substance—in effect, by creating a meta‐agreement and cooperating at the level of process.

The diagnosis of unproductive negotiations offered in Getting to Yes stacks nicely with the zero‐sum, oppositional nature of most political discourse. Political arguments commonly take the form of positional bargaining. All too often, people refuse to back down from their stated beliefs or values, declaring them insistently and demanding that the other party accept their position without relating those positions to the other party’s broader interests and values. Parties that focus too intently on defending their own initial beliefs can get locked into a showdown against the other party, believing that changing their minds amounts to a personal defeat. This in turn causes them to take a narrow view of their own interests and prioritize the goal of “winning” the interaction over other goals of potentially greater ultimate interest, such as improving the quality of their beliefs or maintaining the relationship.

The best and most constructive arguments, on the other hand, are those in which parties hold themselves accountable to shared criteria of legitimacy, making sure their stances are supported by arguments that a reasonable party would accept. Better yet, effective participants in political argumentation can transcend particular positions to consider their underlying reasons, establishing common values as first principles from which to arrive at new conclusions together.

The principles articulated in Getting to Yes have received valuable updates since they were first articulated in 1981. The work of Fisher and Shapiro, for example, underscores the psychological dimensions of cooperation, examining how emotions play a prominent if not fundamental role in negotiations (2005). Their analysis of the role of emotions in negotiations dovetails with the role of emotions in political arguments, lending further credence to the model of political debates as implicit negotiations.

In Beyond Reason, Fisher and Shapiro argue that emotions provide information about the importance of our personal concerns (2005). When someone experiences negative emotions in the course of an interaction, that signals that they feel their interests and needs are being threatened. It is naturally frustrating and distressing to be confronted with people who do not share our fundamental assumptions about what matters. That makes it all the more important that people look for constructive ways of finding common ground—specifically, of establishing a common framework in which to structure their interactions toward productive ways of pursuing their interests.

Negotiation experts have widely commented on the effects that stress and negative emotions can have on our cognition. When we interpret situations as threatening, the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for action by releasing cortisol and heightening our sensitivity to negative emotions such as anger and fear. Both of these effects interfere with the prefrontal systems involved in complex thought. This narrows the scope of reason, redirecting whatever rationality is left toward the overwhelming fight or flight impulse (Fisher and Shapiro 2005).

Fisher and Shapiro examine the many ways in which negative emotions can throw a negotiation off course. They can turn agreements into feuds, cast the parties’ good faith into doubt, and make parties petty and unwilling to trust each other. Negative emotions can damage relationships, poisoning the parties’ interactions with resentment. Surely this applies to political arguments as well. The anger and self‐righteousness that so often define our political disagreements can intensify our unwillingness to even try to understand each other. They can make us prioritize defending over listening. They can encourage us to retreat into the camps of those who already agree with us. Arguably, they can even boil into a resentment powerful enough to motivate a whole base of voters—and determine an election (Abramowitz and McCoy 2019).

Positive emotions, on the other hand, can help parties to find agreement on substantive issues. They can make us feel more willing to help each other, more generous, and less insecure about our investment in the interaction. They make us more willing to trust each other, and also to forgive occasional transgressions in the interest of maintaining the relationship as a whole. In other words, positive emotions help us to focus on the big picture (Fisher and Shapiro 2005).

Fisher and Shapiro emphasize that the key to successful negotiation is not to eliminate emotions from the equation. Doing so is impossible—especially when it comes to topics as personally and morally charged as politics. Fisher and Shapiro instead encourage negotiating parties to look beyond their immediate negative emotions to the personal interests behind them. In the authors’ view, these interests often boil down to five “core concerns,” or personal psychological needs that involve how we see ourselves in relation to our environment: appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role (2005).

All five core concerns, or psychological needs, listed by Fisher and Shapiro are likewise involved in political arguments:

1. Appreciation: We feel more inclined to respect people who show respect to us. When we dismiss our interlocutors’ efforts to explain their positions and treat their beliefs with contempt, we convey that we do not respect their point of view.

2. Affiliation: We feel more instinctively inclined to help those who welcome us into their circle and view us as teammates, and become defensive around those who treat us as adversaries. Indulging tribal rhetoric makes us quicker to jump to such conclusions, usually for the worse.

3. Autonomy: People often react against being told what to do or think. If people suspect that someone is proselytizing them, they commonly become defensive and distrustful.

4. Status: We instinctively want to be recognized as legitimate and worthy of respect. When others put us down by talking over us, judging us, or dismissing our beliefs and values as frivolous, they convey that they do not respect our interests as much as their own. That tends to make us more focused on defending our honor within the interaction than on the substance of the argument. We become defensive about making concessions, fearing that showing even the slightest hint of agreement with the other side will convey weakness or inferiority.

5. Role: We want to have a fulfilling relationship to our activities and pursuits, but we feel threatened when our relationship to things that give us meaning—such as the values at the core of our political worldviews—is challenged. In contrast, we feel safe and even proactive when our interactions with others seem to offer new ways of pursuing the goals and values that ultimately matter most to us.

Other influential books on negotiation offer similar frameworks and strategies. In Never Split the Difference, for example, Chris Voss (2016) channels his expertise as a former FBI hostage negotiator into a set of basic principles: Do not default to “splitting the difference,” or meeting the other party halfway, in the interest of an easy compromise. Set the emotional terms of the negotiation by starting with empathy; express a sincere effort to understand where the other party’s demands are coming from. Avert defensive emotions by allowing the other party to believe that cooperating with you does not require them to surrender or capitulate to you. When challenging them, make the challenge impersonal; avoid forcing them to say “you’re right” and instead encourage them to say “that’s right.” By Voss’s account, effective negotiators look past their adversaries’ stated demands to identify motivations and underlying needs. Foremost among them, people want to be heard, acknowledged, and given a sense of agency. One cannot enlarge the pie without first addressing the personal and interpersonal dimensions of the interaction.

The prevailing wisdom throughout the contemporary literature on negotiation is to focus on managing aggressive emotions and confrontational social dynamics. This encourages the negotiating parties to step back from their immediate goals, step into the other party’s point of view, and cooperate in looking for opportunities to create value in places where the parties’ interests overlap. These works offer an important message about reciprocity and cooperation: people can indeed bring themselves to acknowledge the validity of perspectives or arguments other than their own, but only when they feel that doing so will not threaten the personal and emotionally charged interests behind their stated positions.

Applying this framework to political dialogue might help to explain why negative emotions crop up so often when discussing controversial issues. Political arguments implicate core concerns. We enter into political disagreements as representatives of opposing tribes, seeking to defend and even champion our roles as representatives of our values. We tend to identify personally with those values, and with the positions we hold out to the other side. When those positions are challenged, we feel that our connection to our values is being challenged, and ultimately that we ourselves are being personally challenged by proxy. The adversarial nature of these interactions is usually enough to inflame our tribal attitudes, which themselves implicate some of our strongest core concerns (Shapiro 2017). These triggers all converge toward a preconscious drive to defend ourselves, our honor, our social relationships, and the values that help define our core identity. We stop searching for what can best be proven and start arguing like we have something to prove. These negative emotions can build on each other and spiral outward, making it harder to maintain rationality and reducing the discussion to a contest of wills.

While argumentation in the abstract need not be viewed as a form of negotiation, actual arguments between individuals do involve a form of give and take between social beings—one that can degenerate quite easily, even if it started out well.

There is inevitably some degree of competitive interaction in any disagreement. But the goal usually is to resolve differences according to some shared process through which parties can respect each other’s participation in the exchange and accept the outcome (and its underlying process) as legitimate or otherwise valuable. There needs to be some common framework—some shared field of mutual comprehension—in which their disagreement can be rendered intelligible and give rise to a meaningful answer. The result might not be a complete resolution or synthesis, but the exchange may at least help the parties to better understand each other’s point of view, the nature of their disagreement, and perhaps even the issue itself. Making sense of the difference between their views requires that they adhere to some set of standards by which they can evaluate one another’s views. In other words, they must be willing to agree on the terms by which to settle, narrow, or at least investigate their disagreement.

All parties to a disagreement have an interest in being “right.” That interest can be framed narrowly in terms of vindicating one’s immediate position, successfully attacking the other party’s position, and personally defeating that party. Yet that same interest in being right can also be framed broadly: coming as close to truth as possible, even if that means revising one’s immediate position along the way, with the help of others. If the parties can avoid getting bogged down in defending themselves and their immediate positions, and can come to understand the interests underlying the other party’s arguments and positions, the dialogue may become a source of fresh insight and understanding.

Consider again political argument done well. Even those engaged in constructive disagreements are nominally competing: each is arguing on behalf of a viewpoint the other has yet to accept. But to make progress, they are ultimately agreeing to work together to resolve or at least sympathetically explore the nature of their disagreement, and ideally come closer as a group to figuring out what is true (or, at least, arriving at solutions that could further both sides’ interests). At least in theory, they are playing by a common set of rules. They enter into a shared universe of discourse in which they hope to be able to establish some positions as valid and others as invalid. Their competition is structured within a cooperative process defined by shared principles: first‐order competition, higher‐order cooperation.

In other words, when arguments go well, it is because the participants are agreeing that they would benefit more from discussing and evaluating their ideas together than from not interacting at all. They are agreeing to abide by a set of rules that do not favor either party over the other. Nobody has more of an entitlement or presumptive access to facts or logic than anyone else—nullius inverba (“on nobody’s word”). In constructive arguments, the participants agree to open their claims to criticism, and trust each other to uphold the rules of rational debate and apply them impartially. At the very least, they make a good faith effort to understand one another’s positions and underlying interests. They take each other’s reasons seriously, even without accepting them. What is this if not a principled, interest‐based negotiation—an agreement to cooperate in maintaining a constructive space for competition?

What about when arguments fall apart? Not everyone goes into an argument willing to listen and be persuaded to see things differently. More often, we go in wanting—even expecting—to know just what to say to change the other party’s mind. We go in bent on championing our own view, making the others listen, and perhaps even venting our righteous anger at them as punishment for challenging us in the first place. In short, we are playing to win (and defining “winning” as making our opponents lose). And in doing so, we are, without necessarily realizing it, putting ourselves first, prioritizing our own positions and taking for granted our own superior legitimacy. At any rate, that is the impression too often conveyed.

The problem is, the other side is doing that too. We end up talking over each other, less concerned with figuring out together what is true than with making the other side listen. The problem is not necessarily that either party is irrational—it is that the parties are motivated by concerns that do not include, and might even appear threatened by, considering opposing positions. They have entered the interaction without having agreed to listen to each other, to abide by common rules, or really to cooperate in any way that could improve their ability to pursue their interests jointly rather than separately. At best, they are using each other as unreceptive audiences for their own displays of moral emotion.

Constructive dialogue involves mutual commitment to reciprocity, to recognizing the equal legitimacy of the other party and its interests within the exchange. Unproductive dialogue involves each party putting its own interests first and demanding to get its way. Even then, the parties are interacting with the hope of getting something out of the interaction, but with a myopic, adversarial, zero‐sum view of their respective interests: still a negotiation, just poorly conducted.

Negotiation experts emphasize the ways in which environmental conditions can influence the dynamics between negotiating parties (Fisher and Shapiro 2005). If civil political discourse is difficult on its own, our polarized political climate makes it harder. Political polarization is nothing new to the United States, but the modern social landscape has allowed it to intensify (Bail et al. 2018; Tucker et al. 2018). The ability to communicate online anonymously allows for expression without personal accountability. Social media provides few controls to ensure that the flow of information online meets minimal standards of even factual reliability, much less logical rigor. And because social media offers us more choices as to how to structure our social lives, it often caters to our lowest tribal instincts. It encourages us to take the easy path of sequestering ourselves with others who share our political worldview, rather than forcing us to do the hard work of interacting with those on the other side—or compelling us to acknowledge their humanity. The fact that we spend more time dealing in stereotypes of those with whom we disagree than in actual interactions with them makes it easier for us to reduce them to abstract, one‐dimensional concepts. This in turn frames our view of them in an adversarial light and can prime us to feel aggressive emotions toward them. The result is that when we do interact with them, we go in looking for a fight.

Together, the frameworks summarized in Getting to Yes and Beyond Reason offer what psychologists would call a “dual‐process” theory of negotiation: one that takes into account both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human psychology and focuses on the interactions between them (Evans and Curtis‐Holmes 2005). To the extent that the dynamics of political argumentation seem to resemble those of negotiation in certain important respects, can we devise a similar model of political argumentation—one that involves a dynamic interplay between analytical reasoning and the pursuit of social and emotional needs? Perhaps the techniques offered by Fisher, Ury, Patton, Shapiro, and others can be translated to help parties to an argument focus on the rational benefits of intellectual cooperation while maintaining a foundation of cooperative emotions. Doing so would not (and need not) guarantee that the parties walk away in agreement. But it would enable them to remove the personal impediments to a productive exchange of ideas.

The interest‐based approach to negotiation encourages us to focus on construing parties’ rational interests as being mutually compatible: each party’s goals, including becoming more accurate in their beliefs, can benefit from rational dialogue. And Fisher and Shapiro encourage us to remain mindful of the emotional subtext of the interaction: if the parties’ rapport is interpersonally cooperative, they can manage an intellectually competitive exchange. But if their rapport is interpersonally competitive, there is little hope for cooperation of any kind.

What follows are some possible strategies for political dialogue to make people want to reason cooperatively—to make the exchange a constructive negotiation rather than a brute contest of wills. These strategies boil down to five essential principles: (1) listen, (2) relate, (3) explore, (4) play fair, and (5) set ground rules.

What these strategies have in common is an emphasis on reframing the interpersonal subtext of the exchange to counteract and reduce competitive instincts among the speakers, and to motivate the speakers to treat adherence to principles of rational and fair‐minded debate as consistent with their interests. In essence, the goal is to get the speakers to view each other as partners in a micro‐tribe that is more salient than their competing tribal affiliations in the background—one that is defined by a common interest in getting closer to truth.

The competitive tribal instincts that often flare up in political arguments create a sense of opposition and an urgent desire to “win.” The solution involves getting parties to slow down, see the big picture, and prioritize what they believe is ultimately most likely to be true over what they feel would help them defeat the other party in the short term. That means addressing the attitudes that lead those parties to lock on to each other as opponents in the first place. While the following suggestions are by no means exhaustive, the hope is that they will offer plausible examples of how to shift the interpersonal dynamics that so often block parties from pursuing their interest in becoming more right together.

A starting principle is the need for each party to give priority to understanding the other party’s standpoint. Using active listening to make them feel heard would in turn make them feel validated and psychologically safe, assuring them that their personal needs are not at risk and potentially opening them up to making concessions. The authors of Getting to Yes suggest acknowledging the other party’s interests as being legitimate; this lowers their defenses by making them feel understood, and it suggests to them that the speaker may be able to contribute in some way to attaining their interests and therefore deserves their trust. In the context of political dialogue, this can mean acknowledging the other party’s interests both with respect to the discussion (feeling heard, being taken seriously, etc.) and with respect to the substantive issues being discussed (defending the particular political values at issue).

Fisher and Shapiro argue that it can be useful in negotiations for parties to practice taking each other’s sides as an exercise in perspective (2005). Can this be applied to political arguments as well? One party could suggest an exercise:

This can have multiple advantages. First, it has the obvious benefit of making sure the parties actually understand the substance of the disagreement and more thoroughly comprehend each other’s standpoint. Second, it can help build trust by reassuring the listener that the speaker views them as legitimate and even identifies with them. Third, the act of engaging in role reversal encourages the parties to psychologically orient themselves alongside each other’s point of view, which can help them to sympathize with each other and encourage a broader mindset of fairness and reciprocity. If the person who goes first can actually succeed in providing what the other would consider a fair representation of their viewpoint, that demonstrates the person's sincerity, taking the lead in setting a tone of openness and in pursuing mutual understanding.

There is the risk that by doing too good a job at method acting the other side’s point of view, we will inadvertently raise their expectations that we have been persuaded. If we have in fact been persuaded, that is one form of a good outcome. More likely, we will not be totally persuaded, but we will have achieved a fuller understanding of their reasoning, point of view, or motivations, which might point the way to discovering common interests or shared perspectives. If not, the exercise of taking their perspective might at least help bring to light the weaknesses in their argument. Not only that, but it might offer emotional credibility when raising those weaknesses, as the critiques will now be coming from someone who appears to identify with them and appreciate the legitimacy of their opinion.

One might also consider framing one’s positions and reasons in terms of the other party’s values. This includes showing how one’s position could be a means of furthering the other party’s ultimate goals, and how being open to it would not threaten their personal or social legitimacy. Doing so would help to make one’s political viewpoint more intuitively accessible and relatable to the other party, which is likely to make them more receptive to it. Establishing a shared purpose—especially if it involves a common enemy—can help to induce a sense of alignment between the parties.

The most powerful suggestions to come from the study of negotiation are the recommendations to pursue interests over positions and to address the emotional subtext of the interaction. To apply this advice to political argumentation, the parties must enter into the dialogue with minds open to new arguments and alternative perspectives. This requires recognizing, and then disengaging, the natural urge to prove that our position is the right one. It involves shifting one’s focus away from the explicitly analytical dimensions of the disagreement to its implicit and personal dimensions—reframing the relational subtext of the interaction from interpersonal competition to cooperation. Instead of opponents facing off in a contest of beliefs, the parties are together examining a variety of possible standpoints in a joint effort to bring their respective beliefs closer to the truth.

Detaching from one’s position in a negotiation requires being able to feel that one’s personal needs and ultimate interests do not depend critically on that position. In the context of political argumentation, being committed to a given position takes the form of believing, or at least defending, some proposition to the point of refusing to change one’s mind. In other words, we fall into the trap of placing more value on feeling right in the present than on actually being right in the longer term—prioritizing our personal attachment to what we currently believe over what a disinterested version of ourselves would believe. Convincing people to put interests over positions, when applied to argumentation, means giving people an opportunity to believe that their ultimate interests can be served without having to remain committed to their prior beliefs, or might even be hindered by refusing to change their minds about those beliefs.

It is crucial that the parties not frame their interests as being pitted against each other in a zero‐sum manner. Each party will be more effective at persuading the other party by instead focusing on ways in which their interests seem mutually compatible. This might mean showing how our values translate into theirs, and vice versa. It might mean zooming out to identify how our values and those of the other party are different applications of a broader category of common values. This requires being willing to convey respect for the other party (at least for purposes of the interaction) and to show a sincere effort to understand how they see the world. Perhaps this already comes naturally to you. If you are human, odds are you just think it does. If you catch yourself saying, “I already am good at arguing—they just never listen,” that should be enough to tip you off.

When we cite the fact that two plus two equals four, we do not expect anyone to take issue. The key to that reasonable expectation of agreement, beyond the fact that it seems to reflect irrefutable facts about the outside world, is that nobody has a strong interest in avoiding having to accept it. Other questions of fact—for example, how many Americans are killed in mass shootings every year, has the rate of fossil fuel emissions released by American companies into the atmosphere increased in the last five years, does the Christian god exist—can be harder to tame and hugely consequential.

When political commentators talk about Americans living in distinct political realities (Bump 2016), they generally mean that people are unwilling to concede facts that are inconvenient to their values and political objectives. It appears as though our political culture has consolidated into distinct and homogenous tribes, both of which are so defensive about conceding facts to the other that they have closed off their willingness to reason based on any principles outside of their own normative commitments.

There can be no doubt that the notions of “fake news” and “alternative facts” reflect a discouraging inflection point in our political discourse (Alcott and Gentzkow 2017; Scheufele and Krause 2019). Some might fear that the politicization of facts is the last nail in the coffin, and that there is now no way of reasoning across party lines. While I share much of this concern, I also think the psychological literature gives us reason to be hopeful. There is reason to think that some people’s desperation to deny another party’s version of the facts is motivated by a refusal to admit (at least not publicly) to being factually wrong on important issues—which in turn reflects a widespread fear of having our values and self‐worth challenged by others. If so, then perhaps a greater emphasis on the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of our political disagreements can help to build the trust necessary for parties to be willing to open themselves up to critique—to allow themselves to be vulnerable to reality in front of others. This depends crucially on whether we will succeed in reframing the dialogue to promote affiliation, overcome adversarial tribal rifts, and convince them to view us as civic allies rather than as enemies.

One might also emphasize the common goal of becoming “more right together” to make sense of the world, or to at least understand each other. It may be useful to suggest that all parties to the disagreement resist the urge to compete over who owns facts and logic and instead share ownership of those resources according to commonly held rules. Invite the other party to participate in considering different points of view open‐endedly without rushing to justify any particular position.

Another essential shift of perspective toward constructive argumentation involves intellectual humility: being willing to admit what we do not know and to change our minds when better evidence and arguments are presented to us. This requires signaling to others that we are willing to acknowledge when our positions are wrong or unfounded and making clear that if they would be willing to do the same, we would not embarrass them or challenge their personal integrity. One might reframe the act of revising one’s beliefs as a sign not of personal surrender, but of strength and intelligence—both for themselves and for the other party. For example, one could voice their belief that acknowledging when we are wrong about something is not a failure, but a necessary side effect of becoming more knowledgeable. This depends on, and in turn influences, whether the exchange of ideas and arguments is framed as a personally competitive interaction or a cooperative one.

Inducing a cooperative mindset between parties to a political disagreement requires getting those parties to accept the possibility of revising their beliefs, if only minimally. That in turn depends on being able to make them feel personally secure about, rather than threatened by, the idea of changing their mind. In other words, they need to be able to believe that they can pursue their core interests without having to stay committed to their prior position—and, ideally, that their interests might be even better served by revising that position.

Doing this requires taking a broader perspective on the interaction, which is unlikely when confrontational social cues are causing negative emotions and stress to flood the parties’ thought processes. This is not to say that negative emotions must be avoided completely. When arguing about morally loaded topics, our competitive instincts are almost guaranteed to kick in. There is seldom any political argument without negative emotions. In Fisher and Shapiro’s words, “They happen. Be ready” (2005: 141). The goal is to manage those negative emotions—to recognize them and address their sources, rather than let them flood the interaction and overwhelm the parties’ capacity for rational dialogue.

As Fisher, Ury, and Patton point out, effective negotiation does not require middling compromise. To the extent that cooperation requires making concessions of some kind, it is at the level of process rather than substance. The parties are agreeing to hold themselves to a standard of legitimacy outside themselves, something they both believe a reasonable person could accept. To have effective negotiation in the context of political argumentation does not require meeting your interlocutor halfway in the substance of your beliefs; that would be a fallacy of the middle. But it does require being able to step outside your own substantive position, having a flexible and reflective attitude with which to justify your position without appealing to naked self‐interest. Even when a spouse in an argument knows she is right, her ability to persuade her partner depends on whether she can effectively justify her stance in terms of her partner’s values and interests. Likewise, when we are convinced that our position on gun control or climate change is the right one (or at least the most factually supported one), our ability to persuade those who disagree with us depends on whether we can appeal to a shared set of values or ways of reasoning—something other than our own intuitive sense of conviction. If nothing else, that requires engaging with their worldview and interests deeply enough to be able to appeal to those value points strategically.

When one party believes that climate change is the most pressing issue facing humanity and the other barely believes climate change even exists, a desirable outcome is not for both parties to conclude that climate change is 50 percent likely to happen. A desirable outcome is for both parties to agree not to take for granted that their own view is correct, and instead to examine honestly the reasons behind their factual and normative assertions. In other words, the goal is to proceed under an agreement that nobody’s claims are any more legitimate than the reasons given to support them. If one or both parties end up discovering that their positions are insupportable, neither party needs to turn it into a personal issue; both parties can instead respect each other as fellow participants in a search for answers.

We might indeed have good points; we might even be right on a given issue. But that does not mean that our moral positions are not motivated or mired in emotions other than pure rationality. We all think our argument is pure and theirs is politicized. That is itself a delusion produced by our cognitive entrenchment within our own moral values. After all, they are thinking the same thing.

Ideally, all parties would agree to evaluate one another’s positions and reasons according to criteria that all parties could agree are legitimate. Offer to trust the other party to apply those standards in good faith, and ask them to do the same. Offer to accept their efforts to hold you accountable to those standards when they think you are running afoul of them, and ask them to do the same. When the other party seems to be engaging in self‐serving logic, ask them whether they would accept that form of argument if it were being offered to support a position they disagreed with.

This approach should not be taken to suggest that there must be no adversarial elements to the exchange. Most negotiations have an adversarial structure baked into them, and some form of competition is likely to arise whenever multiple parties with nonidentical interests interact in pursuit of their respective interests.

Effective negotiation uses principles of personal cooperation and mutual gain to structure the parties’ distribution of value across competing interests. Likewise, effective debate is intellectual competition couched within a framework of personal cooperation and mutual gain. It reflects a willingness by each party to hold themselves to some standard of reciprocity, and to show respect for the equal legitimacy of the other party’s side of the exchange. And that, arguably, is the essence of civility itself—in traditional dispute resolution, in politics, and in the exchange of ideas.

Civility, at least in democratic politics, requires ground rules and commonly held foundational commitments. It requires wanting to live together and resolve disputes in a way that reflects something more principled than clashes of self‐interest. It requires a willingness to regard each other with respect, and a sincere commitment to building a good society together. In the context of argumentation, civility does not require respecting the other party’s beliefs on their merits, but it does require trying to understand them. It means respecting the other party's shared role in the interaction and regarding their efforts to participate in the exchange of ideas with a sense of mutuality.

This standard of mutuality or reciprocity is closely related to the standard of intellectual objectivity. When we complain that the other side is not being rational, we think we mean that they are simply being inconsistent in their application of logic. But perhaps what we really are taking issue with is their use of logic as a blunt instrument to serve their own side of the argument. In other words, the problem with their reasoning is not its inconsistency, but that it is self‐serving. When we accuse others of being unreasonable, we are actually accusing them of not playing fair. To the extent that political argument is a form of negotiation, commonly held principles of objectivity—evidence, logic, truth, and so on—are rules by which we hold ourselves accountable to something other than our own interests. They serve as the procedural criteria by which we decide when to accept a belief or argument as legitimate.

Finally, parties would benefit from agreeing to a process that all parties consider legitimate to set the terms of the argument. This can include defining the scope of the discussion—especially by agreeing on topics to avoid in the interest of keeping the peace or steering clear of unproductive rabbit holes. Setting the terms can also include defining the parties’ shared goals for the discussion. For example, is their shared goal to resolve their differences, or at least to narrow them? Or is it merely to better understand them?

Since process is crucial to effective negotiation and argument, it is worth elaborating on this category of suggestions by offering more concrete examples of a productive self‐imposed code of conduct for political discourse:

• Consider together whether to make some sort of confidentiality agreement. This may encourage the parties to begin trusting each other, and to feel more willing to explore ideas openly and honestly without fear that doing so will be used against them.

• Agree to hear each other out. No interrupting or talking over each other. Keep the temperature down by striving to maintain a peaceful emotional tone.

• Avoid generalizing about the other side or using inflammatory language. Resist the urge to stereotype, and ask whether your characterizations of the other side’s beliefs and behaviors (and those of their tribe) are accurate.

• Wherever possible, try to maintain an impartial tone as opposed to statements like “you’re wrong” and “I’m right” that could unnecessarily personalize the disagreement.

• Use “because” sentences when making claims, which emphasize the reasons behind assertions and rely on external standards of legitimacy instead of personal authority.

• If possible, see whether the parties can establish in advance what sorts of evidence and factual sources both parties can agree to accept or reject. The goal is to try to bring both parties into a single shared reality, at least for purposes of the discussion.

• Agree on a phrase or other signal to be used when one party thinks the other is being unfair or otherwise violating the rules. Decide what to do in case this happens, be it having a discussion about the argument itself or taking a break to cool down. The goal is to be able to step out of the discussion, and to disengage from any tension it causes, so that the parties feel more control and psychological safety within the discussion. This may make people less likely to become defensive and more open to considering outside arguments.

What if we feel that our differences with the other party are too deep to be resolved, or that we will be unable to agree on common norms for resolution? There are indeed situations in which we find ourselves face to face with people with whom we just cannot seem to agree—even people we might be eager to dismiss as “deplorables.” I will not attempt to resolve this issue with a limited set of tentative suggestions. Rather, if the analogy to negotiation is indeed apt, readers might consider the wealth of negotiation literature on how to deal with people to whom we seem fundamentally opposed. Consider, in particular, Robert Mnookin’s landmark work, Bargaining with the Devil (2010).

Civil discourse and other forms of negotiation are essential to our society. While considerable attention has been devoted to ways in which the dynamics of negotiation apply to traditional forms of political bargaining and conflict resolution (Mansbridge and Martin 2015), I have attempted to show that they also apply to the implicit interpersonal conflicts that arise in political discourse. Effective deliberative discourse is the lifeblood of democracy, and it is embedded in the messy psychological forces at work in human life. We may never succeed in lifting our rationality out of those forces completely, but we can learn to manage them more effectively—to at least clear a space for constructive, proactive, and rational dialogue.

Being objective in political dialogue is not a matter of logical ability. It is ultimately about fair‐mindedness—about being willing to acknowledge some basis outside one’s own interests for deciding what to accept as legitimate. People struggle to maintain their ability and willingness to be fair‐minded when they feel that their interests are under attack. The exchange of facts, arguments, and viewpoints to reflect on our beliefs is so often unsuccessful specifically because the parties in those exchanges feel threatened by the prospect of having to change their minds—and to the extent that they would be open to doing so, they are usually fighting an uphill battle against their instincts for territoriality and social competition. All too often, we really are there to vent our emotions, express sacred values, and protect our social standing in the context of that interaction. The hope is that if negotiation principles are effective, and if political arguments indeed resemble negotiations in at least certain respects, then applying negotiation techniques to political arguments might help people take the risk of considering the interests and viewpoints of others alongside their own—in short, to be objective.

We know there are many sorts of interactions in which people might genuinely believe in the value of constructive cooperation, yet nonetheless succumb to adversarial emotions and competitive drives that lead them to give excessive priority to immediate concerns. Negotiation theorists and practitioners believe that with the help of various techniques—most of all, learning to recognize and be mindful of those competitive drives—parties to a negotiation can resist the temptation to indulge their negative emotions, enabling them to keep sight of a wider range of interests (including their own and those of other parties) and shift into a more cooperative mindset. Like traditional forms of conflict resolution, effective political argument requires a realistic understanding of the preconscious processes driving the parties, and of how personal concerns can subvert reason and impartiality when threatened. For political arguments to be constructive, the parties need to fundamentally want to learn from each other. That requires that they trust each other and not view their personal interests as being mutually exclusive with changing their minds. To be able to climb to the second floor of intellectual interests, the parties need a sturdy foundation on the first floor of psychological interests. To be willing to use reason, they must be aligned at the level of emotion.

Some of our political institutions are putting active pressure on their constituents to resist being open to changing their minds. Instead of people simply overlooking higher‐order values such as respect for process, they are now being encouraged to reject higher‐order values explicitly—or, alternatively, to treat unconditional commitment to their first‐order values as a higher‐order value. This is anathema to civil society, and it is unclear how deeply entrenched this messaging has become. Yet as psychologists and negotiators understand, people’s view of their own values is context‐dependent and sensitive to how their interests are framed for them. The hope is that there is still room for us to tilt people toward viewing their ultimate interests as including a better understanding of alternative viewpoints and greater openness to revising their views in light of new evidence or arguments. The most effective way to do so might be to look under the hood of logic and apply the techniques of negotiation theory, which are devoted to shifting the emotional and social context of interpersonal conflict to favor rational cooperation.

Granted, there are limits to this approach, such as when people see it as being in their interests to undermine discourse. There will always be those who are fundamentally uninterested in reasoning with others. Popper himself acknowledged that there are limits to what an open society can tolerate when it comes to maintaining its integrity. He recalled an incident in his youth when he attempted to debate with a Nazi sympathizer in Vienna. The man responded, “You want to argue? I don’t argue; I shoot” (Edmonds and Eidinow 2001: 110).

We should have no interest in attempting a civil dialogue or reasoned discussion with those determined to avoid changing their minds at all costs. Debating such people, in Thomas Paine’s words, is like giving medicine to the dead. Yet there is still the hope that many people could be brought closer together with the help of better process. Even among those who appear to be rapt in the bluster of certainty, many may well be open to being open—if only they can come to view civil dialogue as a pathway, rather than a threat, to their personal needs and sources of meaning.

Not everyone will agree that working together toward greater mutual understanding is feasible, or even desirable. Our present state of polarization might seem too great to overcome. Indeed, some might even argue that where there are moral causes on which we are (or should be) unwilling to compromise, negotiation might not be the ultimate goal to begin with. Some things, depending on our point of view, might be nonnegotiable. But unless we are willing to write the “other tribe” off as evil or irredeemable, there are no better alternatives to cooperative rational discourse. Even to the extent that there are certain issues on which we are unwilling to alter our positions, we should want to narrow those to as few issues as possible in the general interest of avoiding unnecessary conflict. Better to focus our efforts on the few positions that truly count. On everything else, we should want to maximize the scope of opportunity for constructive debate.

And, of course, there is always the possibility that our dialogues with others will reveal blind spots or inaccuracies in our own worldviews—however frustrating those might be for us to acknowledge. To channel Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken” (1650).

Ultimately, we have to decide whether or not we are committed to a common political life in which we resolve our differences through something other than violence (or other, less extreme forms of positional bargaining). The idea of civil society itself arguably is a form of interest‐based negotiation—one that seeks to transcend accidents of race, gender, and other differences in the interest of something deeper and more universal. In essence, the goal is to transcend our tribal instincts as best we can by appealing to higher values. If we cannot escape tribalism completely, we can at least aspire to something broader: a meta‐tribe organized around the values that define the open society. The question, then, is how far we are willing to go in overcoming the line‐drawing logic of us versus them, and in building a framework for healthy democratic discourse.