By James Coan and Ann Schockett
Civil discourse is often described as a cornerstone of a healthy democracy, yet many Americans remain hesitant to engage in meaningful conversations across the political spectrum. In this article, we explore practical, research-backed ways to encourage more constructive dialogue – while embracing a healthy dose of alliteration along the way.
Most existing efforts to encourage this civil discourse wisely start with skill-building. Yet Americans have many other anxieties holding them back.
A substantial body of research shows many Americans hold misperceptions making them more hesitant to engage in political conversations, and to connect across politics. These include viewing those on the other side of the political spectrum as more extreme and hostile than they actually are, as well as underestimating how valuable, productive, and even enjoyable such conversations can be.
Fortunately, research also shows that misperceptions can be corrected, reducing animosity and increasing interest in constructive political dialogue. Even brief interventions can make a meaningful difference, making it possible to reach tens or even hundreds of millions of Americans through scalable messaging efforts.
Our approach centers on a series of “M’s”: more motivation, minimized misperceptions, and delivering effective messaging—from micro-level conversations to macro-level campaigns.
To conclude, we tie this approach to the organization where we serve as co-founders, More Like US, which motivates civil discourse on college campuses.
Defining civil discourse and its importance
Civil discourse involves the “open, respectful exchange of ideas.” It goes beyond politeness, and it can ideally lead to problem-solving on issues important to a community or the country.
The quality of civil discourse exists on a continuum. At one end there is destructive communication—ad hominem attacks, mockery, and even calls for harm against individuals or groups. Such communication damages relationships, weakens social cohesion, and undermines our ability to work together.
Between the extremes are many forms of communication, from avoiding difficult topics to expressing opinions without genuinely engaging with another person’s perspective. The Dignity Index offers one way to visualize this spectrum, identifying eight levels of communication quality ranging from contempt to dignity.
In this article, we use “civil discourse” largely interchangeably with terms such as dialogue and conversation, though civil discourse more specifically refers to respectful engagement on civic issues.
Civil discourse matters because when people can speak and listen across real and perceived differences, prejudice declines, trust grows, and collaboration becomes possible. A healthy America depends on citizens’ ability to discuss important issues with both candor and respect.
First set of “M’s” for more civil discourse: More motivation
Americans need greater motivation to engage in civil discourse. We see three key components: increasing interest in engaging, reducing hesitancy to engage, and decreasing interest in destructive communication at the opposite end of the discourse spectrum.
Interest in civil discourse can be strengthened by fostering expectations of positive outcomes and connecting engagement to people’s values. Americans will be more willing to participate when they believe cross-partisan conversations can be enjoyable, productive, and grounded in values such as curiosity and mutual understanding.
Before increasing desire to engage in civil discourse, it is often necessary to reduce anxiety and hesitancy to interact well. This includes reducing the sense that conversations will be deeply uncomfortable or unproductive. Additionally, most existing efforts focus on skill-building, and it is helpful to build a greater sense of efficacy that one has enough skills to engage.
Finally, motivation involves reducing the appeal of destructive communication, which runs counter to the goals of civil discourse. This category includes demonization, disparaging comments, and snarky “zingers.” Methods can include improving views of those across the political spectrum, so it makes less sense to speak to or about them in unhelpful ways, and reversing perverse incentives to engage in destructive communication.
Second set of “M’s” for more civil discourse: Minimizing misperceptions
Minimizing misperceptions can help address many of the motivational barriers to civil discourse.
Consider the goal of increasing interest in dialogue while reducing hesitancy to engage. Research shows that Americans often enjoy cross-partisan conversations more than they expect, correcting the common belief that such interactions will be uncomfortable or unpleasant. Likewise, civil discourse skills can be taught in simple, accessible ways through techniques such as mnemonics, the rule of three, and strategic repetition. These help people feel less overwhelmed by the prospect of engaging constructively.
Correcting misperceptions can also increase curiosity. People become more interested in one another when they learn how much common ground actually exists and discover that those across the political spectrum are often just as curious about them.
People are generally attracted to enjoyable, relatively straightforward, and productive activities. These positive words are not currently frequently used to describe civil discourse. While admittedly some conversations on political and social topics can be difficult, research shows that these positive words are in fact largely accurate descriptions of civil discourse. And they are all highly motivational!
Minimizing misperceptions can also help to decrease motivation to engage in destructive communication. For instance, much research shows that Americans overestimate all sorts of negative aspects of those who identify with the other political party. Americans vastly overestimate the prevalence of cross-partisan political violence, dehumanization, and willingness to break democratic norms. Americans also tend to wrongly think those in the other political party are more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than they are in reality. Someone who actually believes these negative aspects of those in the other party may think it is morally justified to make all sorts of divisive statements about and toward this seemingly horrendous other group. Yet these views of each other are overwhelmingly overblown misperceptions, and they can be minimized.
While this article mainly focuses on increasing the quantity of civil discourse, correcting misperceptions should also improve the quality of civil discourse. Conversations will likely be unnecessarily rocky and uncomfortable when they start from incorrect assumptions about the conversation partner.
Strong support exists for minimizing misperceptions. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge led by Stanford found that misperception corrections comprised two of the three of the best-performing interventions that “significantly reduced anti-democratic attitudes, support for political violence, and partisan animosity.” In a 2020 article in Science from 15 leading researchers, the first intervention “addresses people’s faulty perceptions or intuitions” – in other words, their misperceptions.
Minimizing misperceptions positively compare to other methods of increasing civil discourse motivation
In addition to minimizing misperceptions, other approaches can motivate civil discourse. These include making moral arguments, starting with behavior change, and pushing for structural fixes.
All of these can be valuable. However, they tend to have more limited impact, and/or can only be successfully implemented by or for a small group of Americans.
This said, we strongly support using them in addition to misperception corrections, when they can work (especially on college campuses, as we explain below). From our standpoint, correcting misperceptions should be the default approach, and other methods can supplement when possible.
First, moral messages like “it is good to be curious about each other” or “love the stranger” can be helpful. However, they fail to address most of the underlying reasons for hesitating to engage in civil discourse or engaging in destructive communication. It is also unclear why the listener should accept the moral authority of the person giving this message, unless that person is already highly respected.
Separately, starting with behavior can increase motivation. An example of this involves putting people in a situation in which they must talk to or collaborate with those across the political spectrum. This is the crux of the largely well-supported Intergroup Contact Theory / Contact Hypothesis. Yet few people are in situations like this, aside from those in specific educational settings like classrooms or freshmen orientation programs.
Finally, structural reforms are needed to address the perverse incentives that fuel destructive communication across media, social platforms, electoral systems, and parts of the nonprofit sector. Achieving such reforms, however, is an uphill battle that often requires challenging some of the world’s most powerful institutions.
Even if incentives improve, messages that actually bring people together would not necessarily magically appear. Separate work like misperception corrections would be needed to explicitly generate constructive messages about each other. Well-connected and resourced groups should try to improve structural issues, but there should also be realism about how much they will likely accomplish.
Third set of “M’s” for more civil discourse: Messaging (from micro to macro)
Efforts to improve the political environment require massive scale. America has over 340 million residents, over 150 million of whom voted in the last couple of presidential elections. Previously, one of the co-authors wrote that a low-end estimate would be to target 85 million Americans, equal to the number of 2024 voters with a very unfavorable view of the other party. The target should likely be even greater.
Regardless of the exact numbers, any efforts must reach and affect large shares of Americans.
The most plausible way to do so is via the information environment, and messaging is central to any information environment approach.
Messaging must begin at a broad “macro” national level to reach large audiences. While some content is created directly, much of the work involves partnering with influential leaders to shape existing narratives and practices. Target audiences include entertainment creators, political leaders, journalists, and religious leaders. Various organizations address these, including Bridge Entertainment Labs and Resetting the Table (Hollywood), Disagree Better (political leaders), Trusting News (journalists), and One America Movement (religious leaders).
These leaders can communicate various messages. These include tips for how to talk with one another, misperception corrections, and encouragement to share the tips and misperception corrections with those you know.
We realize not everyone loves alliteration. However, the “M’s” in this article pair well with another useful frame: the “3 N’s,” regarding message-spreading power through Neighborhoods, Networks, and, for a select few, Nation. Most people can shape attitudes in their neighborhoods and in their in-person or online networks, where trust is often strongest and influence runs deepest.
Many approaches in this space struggle to reach enough people. Consider the workshop model, which many organizations rely on. Even if workshops reached 1,000 Americans every day, equivalent to one daily 20-person workshop in every state, it would take more than 400 years to reach every 2024 voter just once. On top of that, workshops naturally attract a limited subset of people with the time, interest, energy, and confidence to participate.
One can hope that there will be domino effects from workshops, and that each workshop participant will influence many others. However, in the absence of a better information environment, the positive effects of a single workshop tend to weaken. Even those invested in workshops should support more messaging and a better information environment, so the impact of the workshops persists.
How More Like US uses the “M’s” on college campuses
More Like US directly uses this framework of “M’s” on college campuses, with a focus on more motivation, minimized misperceptions, and messaging (from micro to macro).
We focus on several ways to increase motivation on college campuses, starting with reducing common misperceptions. These include interpersonal misperceptions (such as having overly negative views of students with different political beliefs or underestimating support for respectful dialogue), outcome misperceptions (such as expecting conversations to be more uncomfortable or socially costly than they actually are), and preparation misperceptions (such as believing that productive conversations require more difficult skills than they really do).
College campuses are unique and offer several ways to increase motivation beyond correcting misperceptions, as mentioned in a previous section. Trusted voices can encourage curiosity and openness, orientation programs can promote positive behaviors from the start, and academic departments can explore structural changes that reduce incentives to act divisively. Together, these approaches can reinforce efforts to correct misperceptions.
College campuses are also strong settings for messaging. A traditional campus is a semi-closed information environment, where more macro messages can be repeated in so many ways. These include physical means (e.g., flyers, buttons), messages from respected leaders (e.g., student government leaders, coaches), and online platforms that are often campus-specific (e.g., a school Intranet, Instagram pages popular on a campus or specific to it). Students can interact with each other all the time, leading to many micro-opportunities to spread ideas.
At More Like US, we use a range of approaches to increase motivation and reduce misperceptions, with a strong emphasis on messaging at every level, starting from broad public campaigns and filtering down to one-on-one interactions:
- At Michigan State University, we are deploying a social norms campaign designed to reach the entire 50,000+ student body. Based on survey data revealing widespread political misperceptions, the campaign uses social media, campus events, printed materials, and trusted campus leaders to communicate a powerful message: students are far more respectful, cooperative, and open-minded than many assume. Drawing on decades of successful social norms research, the campaign helps make constructive engagement feel normal and desirable.
- We also run messaging campaigns that can be adapted across campuses and address all three major categories of misperceptions. For interpersonal misperceptions, we emphasize the “3 C’s”: people across the political spectrum are generally more Curious, more Civil, and have more in Common than many assume. Knowing all of these should reduce anxiety and hesitancy to interact. This campaign also covers outcome-based misperceptions, such as short-term expectations that conversations will be uncomfortable, and highlights the long-term personal and professional benefits of interacting with those across the political spectrum. Finally, this approach covers preparation misperceptions, using a “stop, drop, and roll”-like mnemonic about how to have conversations, mainly inspired by psychologist Julia Minson at Harvard and sociologist Robb Willer at Stanford. A three-step mnemonic cannot cover all conversational details, but it can orient students in a better direction. It is much easier to remember three steps in the middle of a conversation than a laundry list of conversational to-dos.
- Finally, we offer programming and capacity building designed to turn these ideas into lasting campus change. Built around our perception gap lesson, these sessions help students replace false assumptions with a more accurate and hopeful picture of their peers. Georgetown University has found that students who completed the roughly hour-long lesson reported less anxiety, animosity, and perceived threat toward those across the political spectrum, along with greater willingness to engage. These programs are especially powerful in orientations and trainings for faculty or campus leaders. They do more than teach concepts; they equip trusted messengers to reinforce healthier norms through classes, conversations, and campus leadership. The more students engage with the material, the more likely these ideas are to stick.
Conclusion
Efforts to encourage civil discourse should be applauded. Many current efforts reasonably start by focusing on skill-building. Yet the existing approaches have much room for improvement.
Improving skills will only motivate civil discourse across the political spectrum to a certain extent, since people have so many other questions that can give them anxiety or pause: Who am I really being asked to talk to? How uncomfortable will these conversations be? What will my friends say if I start talking to or hanging out with “them”?
Research consistently finds that people answer these questions too negatively. Americans tend to see those across the political spectrum as more extreme and hostile than they really are, expect political conversations to be more uncomfortable than they often prove to be, and even misjudge the social norms within their own ideological groups in ways that fuel unnecessary division and conflict.
Minimizing these misperceptions leads to more civil discourse motivation. Americans can become less anxious and hesitant to engage. Some can be enthusiastic participants, after realizing a surprisingly high percentage of Americans actually enjoy these conversations, and there are personal and professional benefits from being able to interact well with a wide variety of people. Interest should decline in destructive communication that is caustic to society.
In a country as large and diverse as the United States, reducing misperceptions and encouraging more constructive dialogue requires reaching people at scale. That is why messaging must be a central component of any strategy. Effective messaging often begins at the macro level through trusted messengers and institutions, but its greatest impact occurs when it spreads through personal networks and neighborhoods, where friends, family members, and peers reinforce these messages through everyday interactions.
At More Like US, we focus on college campuses—an ideal setting for fostering healthier discourse at a formative stage of life. Social norms campaigns have successfully shaped campus behavior for decades, and we are now applying that proven approach to civil discourse. At Michigan State alone, our campaign can reach more than 50,000 students, and we see a clear path to reaching millions more across the nation’s roughly 19 million college students.
To keep it memorable, our framework for strengthening civil discourse centers on three “M’s”: more Motivation, minimizing Misperceptions, and using Messaging from the micro to the macro level. Together, these approaches can help mobilize meaningful momentum toward a healthier civic culture and a stronger future for America.
James Coan is Co-Founder and Executive Director of More Like US. For the past decade, he has used findings from the social sciences to develop methods of improving the US political environment at scale.
Ann Schockett is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of More Like US. She brings extensive experience in public service, business, public relations and media production / communications, and served as president of the National Federation of Republican Women.
