Deep Dialogue Works—But Can It Work Even Better?

In 2021, Stanford’s Politics and Social Change Lab (PaSCL) joined forces with Civic Health Project and scholars at Cornell, MIT, Northwestern, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania to launch the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a massive online experiment of 32,000 Americans designed to advance understanding of what interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and partisan animosity.

The landmark results of this ‘mega-study’ identified a set of 25 strategies that effectively countered anti-democratic attitudes and reduced partisan animosity. With Stage 2 funding from Stanford Impact Labs, PaSCL went on to sponsor a Field Test Grant competition in 2022 for research teams working in partnership with civic organizations to put some of the most effective interventions to test in real-world settings. The four hybrid teams that won grants (including one led by the authors) have since completed their field tests. 

This team’s grant tested whether the Minnesota Council of Churches’ long-running Respectful Conversations Project, a high intensity (three-hour, in-person) group intervention designed to reduce polarization could be improved if paired with a low intensity (9-minute, online) intervention. The low intensity intervention designed by Civity was one of the most successful at reducing negative attitudes in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge.

People often disagree. This is normal in personal, professional, and political domains – but it becomes a real problem when disagreement prevents communities from solving important problems. Researchers and practitioners around the country are actively working to identify and test effective methods to manage conflicts and disagreements so that we – as an engaged, diverse citizenry – can productively work together to solve our joint challenges. 

The two of us recently teamed up to test a few ways to refine some of these methods for greater impact. Our goal was to see if we could use the results of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge to improve the Minnesota Council of Churches’ (MCC) Respectful Conversations Project, a 13-year-old program that bridges divides in polarized spaces. Specifically, we wanted to learn whether pairing an easy-to-implement, successful intervention from the Strengthening Democracy Challenge with the MCC’s time-intensive, proven intervention would boost the latter’s effectiveness.

The goal of Respectful Conversations is to strengthen relationships, communities, and democracy by offering structured, facilitated experiences that equip people to manage conflict using empathy, perspective-taking, and active listening. The conversations are designed not to change minds, but to soften hearts and sustain continued relationships.

At a Respectful Conversations event, trained facilitators lead a large group through a dialogue process that starts with a shared meal. After the meal, a lead facilitator provides an orientation that includes humorous videos about the concept and ground rules. The program then invites the individual tables of participants to respond to questions designed to evoke personal narratives, values sharing, and emotional revelation in ways that move discussion away from a binary right/wrong domain into one where participants experience and express more curiosity about each other. 

Conversation topics vary, from national-level political issues to local concerns, and are conducted in a variety of contexts and spaces, including congregations, campuses, and community centers. Over 9,000 people have participated in one of the more than 300 Respectful Conversations events held in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or North Dakota since 2012. 

After taking part, people report increased empathy for others, greater awareness of diverse perspectives, and greater confidence in their ability to engage difficult conversations. The events also appear to offer lasting impact, as a recent longitudinal survey revealed that 67% of program participants could name a healthy engagement behavior they were still practicing up to two years later. Despite the regional success of Respectful Conversations events, increasing polarization on a national scale indicates that far more work in this domain remains to be done. 

Through the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, we came together to explore whether the effectiveness of Respectful Conversations events could be enhanced for participants who took part in an additional component: a video series produced by Civity. These videos showcase people's unique experiences and explore how connecting with different perspectives within a community builds understanding. In one video, a white librarian from a small midwestern town describes how her ability to speak both English and Spanish helps her build rapport with a broader set of people.

In another video, a woman describes her experience with homelessness and disability and how that helps her connect with others. Prior research, conducted as part of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, has shown that watching these videos can reduce negative feelings about people on the other side of the political divide. In our experiment, we tested whether these short videos could be an efficient, productive way to prepare participants for the Respectful Conversation experience. 

Before and after ten Respectful Conversation events that took place between October 2023 and November 2024 (most of them focused on the 2024 presidential election), we asked attendees how they viewed and felt about attendees with opposing views. People reported greater liking, empathy, and understanding toward those they disagreed with after the event—demonstrating the approach's effectiveness.

We tested whether watching the video series before participating made a clear difference by randomly assigning half of the people who signed up to watch the videos first. In the registration confirmation emails attendees received 2 days, 1 day, and on the morning of the event, participants were asked to complete a pre-event evaluation. Half of them received an evaluation that included Civity’s intervention and had to affirm with a typed response that they watched the embedded videos. 

Unfortunately, the results of the experiment were not as clear as we had hoped. Although people expressed more positive opinions about those with whom they disagreed in the video intervention condition, the estimated benefits between the two conditions did not emerge as statistically significant. That outcome may be due to the fact that we did not have a large enough data pool to accurately estimate the effects. (Out of approximately 750 event participants, we collected 259 matchable pre/post evaluations.) It could also be that the immersive experience of the 150-180 minute MCC event is more powerful than the more subtle effects of the 9-minute video series. We’re hopeful that future research will explore these questions, as well as the longer term effects of both interventions.

Despite the low statistical significance of our measure of the impact, the Minnesota Council of Churches elected to add the Civity videos to all Respectful Conversations registration confirmations going forward. As practitioners working to reach population-level change, the MCC team believes that every little bit counts. The short video series is an easy-to-include tool that any steward of intensive peace-building interventions could adapt with minimal effort for additional gain. 

At a time marked by increasingly toxic levels of polarization that erode our sense of community, we believe that any reduction in negative attitudes between people of opposing views helps advance the public good.