It’s Thanksgiving, that time of year when we do what Americans have done for generations: stuff a turkey, gather extended family and friends — and have a good, old-fashioned throw down about the Epstein files.
Will Uncle Billy goad us into a squabble about ICE raids this year? Will Aunt Sally start another brawl with her talk about genocide in Gaza? For many American families, the holidays now come with the added stress of knowing that, at any moment, the celebration could explode into an in-person extension of the taunts and insults that pervade our online lives the rest of the year.
But don’t stick your head in the deep fryer just yet. Psychologists have happened upon a new intervention that offers a way to disarm political opponents and detoxify the conversation — at the dinner table and online. This is something for which we can all be thankful.
The solution comes from the burgeoning study of curiosity, which has been connected to all manner of well-being, from happy marriages to longevity. Though curiosity was once thought to be a fixed personality trait, recent research has shown that the congenitally incurious can become more inquisitive and open-minded, potentially allowing them to reap the psychological benefits that come with innate curiosity.
And now comes a study proposing that we can use a simple mechanism to induce more political open-mindedness, both in ourselves and in our political foes.
There is a conspicuous lack of curiosity in our current political discourse, and that is largely because partisanship has become as much a social identity as an ideological one. We identify with one side or the other in a misplaced attempt to satisfy our human need for belonging to a group. We distinguish ourselves by building up all the positive aspects of our “in” group, and by demonizing those in the “out” group as not just wrong but evil. We keep our distance from the other side, and we avoid expressing any disagreement with our own side, lest we be called out for disloyalty.
But it’s all based on a common misperception. In a paper published this week, researchers from George Mason University and the University of California Santa Barbara demonstrated that both Democratic and Republican partisans significantly overestimate the extent to which people in their own party have uniform and immutable views.
There was an exception, however: Those who scored higher on a standard measure of curiosity were 25 to 30 percent likely to perceive (correctly) that many of their fellow partisans disagreed with the party on at least some issues. Such people were more open to changing their views in the face of new information and in having more contact with political opponents.
Using that information, the investigators then undertook a second study to see if they could induce such curiosity in others. First, they informed participants of the finding that their fellow partisans have more intellectual humility and open-mindedness than most people realize. They then asked each participant to write a letter advising how to have a conversation with someone who holds a different and “seemingly offensive” political view.
In reality, nobody received the letters. The letter writers were persuading themselves. The exercise “significantly increased perceptions that people in one’s political party valued diverse views” — and, in a modest but measurable way, it made them more curious.
“One of the many problems with extreme partisanship is that you assume that your group is more homogenous than it actually is, and because of that we come rigid,” says GMU psychology professor Todd Kashdan, who led the study. “This is about allowing people to be black sheep in their groups where they can think differently.”
The findings aren’t just academic, for they suggest each of us can turn down the political temperature in our own conversations by simply adding a note of curiosity. “One of the worst questions that you could ask people, politically, is … what they believe and why, and that’s what most people do,” Kashdan tells me. Instead of asking them why they feel that way about abortion or immigration, he says, tell them: “I’m totally hearing what you’re saying. I’m wondering, how would that work?”
It is the “how” question and not the “why” question, Kashdan continues, “that gets people having to really think through it and realize, ‘Shoot, I don’t even know what fracking is. Shoot, I don’t even know what DEI stands for. Shoot, I don’t know what Marxism or Socialism is.’”
The “how” question shouldn’t be posed as a gotcha but with humility: I don’t know this stuff as well as you. How would it work? Once your interlocutors realize they don’t know, they become more open to new information and ideas. By abandoning the attempt to persuade Uncle Billy and Aunt Sally to change their minds, we actually make it more likely that they will.
This is consistent with many other recent studies of curiosity. “We found in a series of experiments that if you ask a question and then you justify that question with your curiosity, it almost doubles the amount of interaction with the question — whether you’re looking at Twitter data, Reddit or personal interactions,” says Spencer Harrison, a professor of organizational behavior at the European business school INSEAD.
Harrison says this is because curiosity is contagious. There’s a “mirroring effect” in which the inquisitiveness is reciprocated: “Because you were curious, now they’ll want to be curious back.” If we avoid challenging people with “why” and instead ask for more information, he says, “Eventually you’re going to find that I might disagree with 80 percent of what you’re saying, but here’s the 20 percent where we see that there are connection points.”
That 20 percent could save your holiday — and fix our broken politics, one conversation at a time.
Even Ted Lasso knows that it’s good to “be curious, not judgmental.” Although the TV show misattributed the quote to Walt Whitman, science supports the sentiment. Curiosity has been called a “super-virtue,” because it has long been known to predict creativity, resilience, academic and professional success,satisfying relationships, meaning in life, long life and resistance to cognitive decline.
More recent experiments have sought to answer whether this is a cause-and-effect relationship, and they are finding that “curiosity really drives these positive outcomes,” says Madeleine Gross, a UCSB researcher and co-author of the political curiosity study.
Gross has established that you can boost your curiosity by practicing four small behavioral changes: stopping to ask questions about something you notice, pausing to find something in your surroundings that inspires wonder, looking at something around you from a different visual perspective, and doing something that breaks your daily routine.
After repetition of these behaviors, the increased curiosity that resulted was durable, Gross found, which suggests that a fake-it-until-you-make-it approach can help transform us into genuinely more curious people. Her just-released app, CuriVerse, offers prompts to make users more curious.
Becoming more politically curious is a tougher challenge, because there is intense social pressure to do the opposite. While people might see curiosity in general as desirable, Gross says, they “think it’s not desirable to be open and curious about an opposing political party member because they’re terrible and there’s no need to be curious about terrible people.” Partisans tend to regard those from the opposite party as less human, in large part because they assume the other side dehumanizes them to a greater extent than they actually do.
Though much in politics is reduced to false equivalencies between the parties and “whataboutism,” in this case the disgust directed at the other party is a problem on both sides. Gross’s colleagues found that Democrats, who in other contexts have proven to be more tolerant, “expressed more dehumanization and antidemocratic spite toward Republicans than vice-versa” during the 2020 election.
But here, again, it seems possible to recalibrate those assumptions. When told that they overestimated the extent to which their opponents dehumanize them, both Republican and Democratic partisans were less likely to dehumanize their opponents.
Partisanship is a strong force, because it grows out of our evolutionary instinct that being part of a tribe is critical for survival, explains Jacqueline Gottlieb, a Columbia University neuroscience professor. “People build their whole self-image, their whole cognitive structure around some beliefs about politics, so when you get to a place where that’s challenged, it’s very threatening,” she says. “You’re afraid of something very deep, and this is ostracism.”
Fear narrows our thinking so that we focus only on the threat. But Gottlieb says the exercise of informing people that others within their political tribe are heterodox “diminishes the fear that you’ll be ostracized from the group.” When you feel safe, you can be curious.
Of course, our political problems are severe enough that they’re not going to be fully resolved by a mass outbreak of curiosity. Social media algorithms often reward the most abusive speech, while partisan outlets, disinformation mills and too many political leaders stoke it.
There’s also the possibility that large chunks of the population are so poisoned by partisanship that they are beyond the reach of any intervention. “If you are such a true believer in your cause, then finding out that other people who are in your party are really open-minded and willing to consider other things may be seen as a bad thing,” says James C. Kaufman, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut.
Still, even if we can’t change the world with our curiosity, most of us can change ourselves. We don’t have to surrender our principles or moderate our views or accept fiction as fact. It requires only a willingness to ask questions and to revise our positions if new evidence shows we’ve been wrong.
“Curiosity provides us this mechanism of connecting with each other while at the same time honoring each other’s autonomy,” says Harrison, the organizational behavior professor. “In an age where we’re digitalizing everything and we’re competing against computers in terms of intelligence, curiosity is one of these things that is redemptively humanizing.”
So, as the holidays approach, give it a try. Write a letter, email or text to a younger person in your life explaining how to talk to somebody on the other side of the political divide. Maybe you’ll persuade the recipient to be more open-minded. Even more likely, you’ll persuade yourself.
That’s what I’ll be trying to do as I pose more “how” questions than “why” questions this season. After a career as a political commentator, I doubt I’m headed for an ideological makeover. But it’s important to practice curiosity and intellectual humility — for the country’s health, and our own.
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