331 - Wicked Problems - Martin Carcasson

Summary

You Are Not So Smart, Ep. 331: "Wicked Problems" with Dr. Martin Carcasson
Release date: January 19, 2026
Host: David McRaney
Guest: Dr. Martin Carcasson, Director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the concept of "wicked problems"—complex societal challenges that resist simple solutions—focusing on the science and practice of public deliberation. Dr. Martin Carcasson shares how he and his team design systems for communities to have productive, nuanced conversations, countering the polarization, bias, and breakdowns that plague democratic discourse. The episode mixes psychology, argumentation theory, and real-world exercises to illustrate how deliberation offers a hopeful path forward for democracy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why We Fail at Tough Conversations

[04:15, 12:37]

• Dr. Carcasson argues that while we know how to have constructive discussions about difficult topics, these methods are seldom used at the national level.

  “We know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It’s just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level. And actually we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn’t work right.” – Dr. Carcasson [04:15, 12:37]

• The incentives of national politics encourage bad faith, argument, and polarization, not collaborative solution-finding.

2. From Criticism to Practice: Carcasson's Shift

[06:20-07:24, 23:29]

• Carcasson's research background began in rhetorical criticism, focusing on presidents’ communication, but shifted to practical facilitation and building systems for real community engagement.

• The Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) at CSU has facilitated over 600 meetings, training students as facilitators to help communities tackle shared problems.

3. Deliberation vs Argumentation and Debate

[08:37]

• Deliberation is not debate or argumentation (which are adversarial and about winning or convincing). Instead, it is a collaborative, future-focused system that weighs values and options under uncertainty.

• Deliberation leverages what we know from social science about human nature—bypassing triggers that bring out our worst (e.g. tribalism, confirmation bias).

4. The Challenge: Cognitive Biases + Bad Actors

[12:37]

• Carcasson references the concept of being "preloaded with biases" and the rise of "conflict profiteers" who exploit them.

  “…there are a lot of bad faith actors and conflict puppeteers…purposely trying to bring out the worst in us, whether that’s to win elections or to draw eyeballs or to raise money or whatever. Our goal…is okay, now how do we try to do the counter movement here?” – Dr. Carcasson [12:37]

5. Systemic, Not Utopian Solutions

[14:10-15:39]

• Deliberative systems are about making things “good enough” to muddle through, not achieving perfection.
• The analogy to aviation and traffic systems: "an enormous amount of work" goes into building environments where our flawed brains can make safe decisions.

6. Building Community Capacity

[15:39]

• Real change must be bottom-up—developing deliberative capacity across local institutions (libraries, newspapers, schools) and collaborating with organizations like Braver Angels and the Listen First Project.

7. What Are “Values” and Why Do They Matter?

[28:09-34:51]

• In conversations, values are often the hidden drivers—stable, socially-learned preference structures guiding judgments, attention, and decisions.
• Most people share similar values (freedom, equality, justice, etc.), but rank and define them differently. The friction comes from this prioritization, not fundamental opposition.

• “Values tend to be pretty abstract... we all tend to share most of the same values…It’s just that…as individuals, we rank values like that differently.” – David McRaney [32:35]

8. Fact, Value, and Policy Claims: Mapping the Terrain

[34:51-40:37]

• Dr. Carcasson explains three types of claims:
  • Factual: about realities that can be checked.
  • Value: about what is good, bad, important.
  • Policy: what should we do.
• Most debates focus at the policy level, but are really about hidden value tensions.

9. The Nature of Wicked Problems

[40:53-44:00]

• Wicked problems are complex and have no "right answer" because they're constituted by conflicting values—education, healthcare, housing, climate, etc.
• Unlike "tame" technical problems, wicked ones are never "solved" but managed with ongoing negotiation among values.

• “Wicked problems inherently involve multiple underlining values that don't fit together very well…there is no right answer. You don’t solve a wicked problem.” – Dr. Carcasson [40:53]

10. The Value Ranking Exercise: A Tool for Epiphany

[45:38-52:03]

• Carcasson's workshop involves participants ranking a set of core values (community, freedom, tradition, etc.) from most to least important, then reflecting together.

• Key moments include:

  • Recognizing that even like-minded people rank values differently.
  • Realizing that every value can “dominate too much.”
  • Gaining empathy for why others might prioritize a value one puts low.

• “Having those conversations, you realize you might have a value really low that your neighbor has really high. But then when they’re talking about what that value means to them, they’re like, well, yeah, if that’s what it means, I would have it high too. So you just start realizing, wait a second, we agree on this.” – Dr. Carcasson [46:14]

11. How Deliberation Practically Works

[54:07-59:02]

• Deliberation is slow and intentional. Key elements include:

  • Pre-meeting research to surface factual and value claims.
  • Discussion guides: not persuasive, but laying out all major perspectives and tradeoffs.
  • Facilitators focus on elevating the conversation, not winning arguments.

• Avoid binary yes-no framing—instead, offer multiple options and highlight trade-offs.

• “Your job is to elevate the conversation, not win the argument.” – Dr. Carcasson [59:16]

12. Sources of Optimism and the Path Forward

[60:23-65:14]

• Tools exist, and the science is clear—we know how to design better conversations and systems.

• The three central challenges:

  • Toxic polarization (often exaggerated by perception).
  • Information disorder (overload, missing gatekeepers, distrust).
  • Conflict profiteers (media, political and tech actors benefiting from division).

• The solution: shift from seeing problems as caused by “wicked people” to “wicked problems,” and build grassroots deliberative capacity.

• “Even if you think the problem is caused by wicked people, telling people…they’re wicked is very unlikely to make them less wicked. It’s going to backfire… So the better we change our conversations, the harder it’s going to be for the conflict profiteers, for the people that are purposely dividing us.” – Dr. Carcasson [64:55]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We know how to do this. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level.” – Dr. Carcasson [04:15]
• “Deliberation is a collective cognitive process aimed at figuring out what to do next, what the plan should be.” – David McRaney [08:37]
• “Our brains don't like messy. Our brains don't like nuance. We like simple stories.” – Dr. Carcasson [36:32]
• “I think humans are incredibly creative problem solvers when put in a good situation. Our political system doesn’t put us in good situations.” – Dr. Carcasson [26:47]
• “The art of creating a document that the purpose… is to spark good conversation – that is an art. We need a lot more…” – Dr. Carcasson [55:10]
• “Your job is to elevate the conversation, not win the argument.” – Dr. Carcasson [59:16]
• “Move from the simple assumption of wicked people to the nuanced assumption of wicked problems.” – Dr. Carcasson [64:25]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Understanding Values & Group Exercise: [00:15]-[04:15], [45:38]-[52:03]
• Intro to Carcasson's Work / Deliberative Systems: [04:15]-[08:37], [15:39]
• Deliberation vs. Argument/Debate: [08:37]-[12:37]
• Cognitive Bias & Systemic Challenges: [12:37]-[15:39], [60:23]
• What Are Wicked Problems?: [40:53]-[44:00]
• How Deliberative Facilitation Works: [54:07]-[59:02]
• Optimism & Moving Forward: [60:23]-[65:14]

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Most intractable societal problems are “wicked” due to conflicting, abstract values—taming them requires systemic, collaborative, science-informed deliberation, not just debate or advocacy.
• Empathy increases and polarization decreases when people surface, share, and discuss their ranking of values.
• Deliberative workshops, guided by trained facilitators and evidence-based materials, can transform the quality of public discourse and problem-solving.
• Building these systems at a local/community level is essential for long-term democratic resilience.

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Further Resources

• Listen First Project: listenfirstproject.org
• Center for Public Deliberation at CSU: link (Check for future “meeting-in-a-box” resources.)
• Braver Angels, National Issues Forum—see episode for more organizations.
• Value Sorting Exercise: Try for yourself by ranking community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security, and discuss in a group.

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Transcript

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[David McRaney]

You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code Smart50Smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out Middle of the Show. Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast, episode 331. Welcome to the Show. I'm David McCraney. Before we get the show rolling, there's a game we're going to discuss later in the show. It's a workshop exercise that you can try yourself and it's super simple. Also, if you support the show over on Patreon, I would love to see your answers to this exercise in the comments under the episode and here's what you do. Simply rank the following values, the ones I'm about to list, in order of most important to you to least important to you. And these values are Community, Freedom, Individual, Responsibility, Diversity, Tradition, Progress, Equality, justice, and Security. Here they are again. Community, Freedom, Individual, Responsibility, Diversity, Tradition, Progress, Equality, justice, and Security. Now number those from one to nine, one being the most important and nine being the least. Then ask yourself why did you put the one you put up top as number one? Then can you define what that value means to you? Next, ask yourself why did you put the one you put at the bottom as least important? And then try to define what does that value mean to you? If you can do this in a group or just with another person, it's way, way better. Also ask yourself if you can imagine a situation where your top value dominates too much. Are there situations in which you can have too much of it? And next, can you make the case for the importance of your bottom value? People who care about that value, who might put it way up top, why do you think they would do that? Now, looking at your top three values, do you see any tensions between them? Does focusing on one make it harder to honor the others? And after doing all that, re rank your values a second time and see if anything seems as if it should go up or down the list. Again, doing this in a group, it's amazing. It's a really great exercise and you just take turns with the questions and then take turns re ranking everything at the end and try to agree. See if you can all agree on how the ranking should go. Okay have fun with that. Share your answers wherever you do social stuff with this podcast, Facebook, Spotify, Patreon, I would love to see your answers. I'd love to see what happens if you did this in a group. Let me know about it. Okay, on with the show.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level. And actually we use the opposite. We knew we use stuff that we know doesn't work right.

[David McRaney]

That is the voice of Dr. Martine Carcasson, and he is the director of the center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. As part of his work, he trains people to facilitate deliberation. He and his students and staff at the center for Public Deliberation, they hold events where people in a community, in an institution, a municipality, a county, and so on. They get these people together and help them discuss how to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. They've held about 600 of these events, and in so doing, they've developed a process, a procedure, a framework that works extremely well. And it's based on science. It is based on what we know about how people work, when they get together and disagree, when they share an uncertainty about how to proceed. Dr. Carcasson's work and these events, they are informed by the science, the evidence collected over the last 100 years or so on how to avoid the conditions that lead people to talk past each other, to derail their own efforts through poor conversations, poor communication, outright arguing, and everything that is not deliberating, as he puts it. His job is to spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

I am a communication professor. So my research, now what, almost 24, 25 years, has always been how do we have the conversations we need to have for democracy to work? My initial academic training was in argumentation, the subfield of communication studies that takes arguments seriously. How do we analyze arguments? How do we try to make distinctions between the strong argument and a weak argument? And early on, all my research was more national, focused a lot on the American president, how American presidents talked about complex issues. And I grew more and more frustrated because it was pretty clear that the national system is not a system that rewards good argument.

[David McRaney]

And so Dr. Martine Carcasson spent decades researching, studying, refining, and outright creating new ways for people to get together and talk, to discuss issues, then make plans based on those discussions that work for everyone. In other words, he refined deliberation, and he did so through a scientific lens.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

I was doing well publishing, but all my papers were about how badly we talked about complex issues. So that's what led to my work. When I got the job at CSU about 22 years ago, I shifted from national to local, and I shifted from being a critic. I was trained as a rhetorical critic, analyzing other people's communication to become much more practitioner. And it was basically, you know, learning the kind of conversations we need to have and how do we kind of understand each other across difference and those type of things, and just realizing most of our processes weren't leading to that. Right. The incentives were kind of the opposite direction. So start experimenting. My classes first of, okay, how do we design some things to hopefully spark better conversations? And then the CBD, which I started 20 years ago now, was kind of the next step of that. Okay, hey, the stuff that works in classrooms, might it work in the community? So we started experimenting. I trained students as facilitators, and We've run over 600 meetings now in the community. We get hired now by the city, by the county, by the school district, community organizations to design and run events that help people have very different conversations so we can kind of come together and address our shared problems a little bit more productively.

[David McRaney]

The center for Public Deliberation, it has a unique way of doing all of this, and we will get into all of that in a moment, especially how it deals with values, the scientific concept, the psychological phenomenon of values as a thing that brains generate. And we will deep dive into all of that. And we will deep dive into something I think is incredibly useful to understand called wicked problems, which is the thing that his system really addresses. But before we do that, I want you to know that there are a lot of organizations working on this issue right now. There's a website you can Visit. Listen for ListenFirstProject.org Listen First Project.org where they've collected more than 500 organizations, many of them formed in the last decade, some in the last five years, all devoted to bringing Americans together across divides in this highly polarized time. And most of them are experimenting with variations of deliberative systems. Just as you must create banking systems or highway systems or airport systems, you must create deliberation systems in which humans can coordinate. Otherwise, if the problem is very complex and there's lots of uncertainty and there are multiple groups with different value structures, we don't do a great job working on problems together. We need something to help us Coordinate. Also, before we get into Carcarson's work, it's important to note the difference here between deliberation, argumentation and debate. Scientifically speaking, deliberation is a collaborative decision making process under conditions of uncertainty. So, for example, just a couple of people trying to decide where to have dinner, or a group of people on a road trip trying to decide which road to take, where to stop, when to eat, when to leave, where to park, stuff like that. Deliberation is a collective cognitive process aimed at figuring out what to do next, what the plan should be. It is future focused, and it involves weighing options, entertaining counterfactuals, forecasting consequences, and as you will soon learn, taking everyone's values into account, just addressing the fact that everyone does have values. Argumentation, on the other hand, is a communicative practice focused on supporting or challenging claims using reasons and evidence and justifications and rationalizations. And debate is a formal, if done well, it is a formal adversarial interaction where two sides of an issue take opposing positions. An attempt to persuade the other side or an audience to agree that their argument is superior to their opponents. So deliberation will include some argumentation and some debate. But it isn't those things. It's a framework, it's an architecture, a system, a constructed mechanism designed to help people not yell at each other and to prevent a joint decision making process devolving into throwing lamps and lecterns or fists. And as Martin Carcasson mentioned earlier, we know how to do this, how to do this well, how to make such structures, how to create such systems. So he, his organization, and more than 500 organizations like his are all quite optimistic that we can, with science, evolve our institutions to survive the rapidly changing information ecosystem in which our democracy and democracies across the world are struggling to adapt.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Part of my optimism is hard. It is to be optimistic these days. I truly do argue that we know how to do this. We know how to have these tough conversations across perspectives to get things done. It's just very frustrating how little of it we use at the national level. And actually we use the opposite. We use stuff that we know doesn't work right. And this is where I connected with your work a long time ago with the you are not smart book. As I was doing this deep dive into social psychology and brain science and just trying to understand how our brains work. And how I typically explain my work now is I try to create processes that are specifically designed to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best of Human nature. And there is a lot of good stuff, right? We know how to do this stuff. It's not natural. And unfortunately, I think the negative aspects of human nature are easier to trigger. One way you framed it, one of your books is like, we're preloaded with all these biases. So we're preloaded with all these biases. And then we have a lot of bad faith actors and conflict puppeteers. One of the new terms that are taking advantage of those and purposely kind of doing the opposite of what I try to do. Purposely trying to bring out the worst in us, whether that's to win elections or to draw eyeballs or to raise money or whatever. So our goal and part of lots of different organizations doing this is okay, now how do we try to do the counter movement here? How do we use the social science in a pro social way and start giving people an alternative to what we're getting at the national level that divides us so much.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Yeah, I feel this so much. I've used all sorts of metaphors over the years. The human body, brain, and like visual system and all of our other sensory modalities. It didn't evolve in an environment that had, like jets. So the pilot getting you from point A to point B is having to work with the system they were born with. And we had to build an infrastructure around that to make it possible for us to sit there and fall asleep on the way to, you know, Pittsburgh. That didn't just happen. We had to make it. And we had to contend with all manner of things. Like, what about people have to poop on airplanes? Like, what about pilots could be having a problem in their family right now and not press all the buttons they need to press? Like, what do you do to create a system that works? I think about it just dealing with traffic going from one place to another and all the interlocking systems on the highway, inside a city and going out of a city onto another highway. An enormous amount of work had to be done to make as safe as it currently is. And I think about some of the stuff you've written. Like we're not looking for democracy or civil discourse to be perfect, or we're not looking for a utopia. We're looking for a way to how do we muddle through this in a form that doesn't come crashing down and does the best possible thing it can do? And you have to contend with the.

[David McRaney]

Brain that comes preloaded with a bunch.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Of weird stuff to do that. I see that all throughout your work, and I really dig that.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. We've been doing a lot more work lately with the notion I like to look at my local community where my work is focused, and then try to help other people build similar things in their community as a deliberative system. So using systems thinking, design thinking, kind of like what you're just talking about. Right. So if I look at, say, for the city of Fort Collins as a deliberative system, I'm really looking at, okay, what are the different institutions, organizations, individuals, groups that are elevating the quality of public discourse, that are making it easier for us to have these kind of conversations and engagements and, and which are the ones that are kind of undermining it and my job, you know, being the center, the, the director of the center, yes, we're running events which are part of the system, but we kind of changed our thinking about 10 years ago. Like, no, I want to kind of step back and how do we kind of build the capacity of my community overall? That led me to working a lot more, say, with the local library, with the local community foundation, with the local newspaper, with, you know, K12. How do we kind of help build the capacity in our community for these different kind of conversations and to show people an alternative. So similar to what you say, let's look at this system. And we've got, unfortunately, so many pieces of our political system, much more nationally, but still all the way down, tend to reward things that reduce the quality public discussion. People don't want these good conversations. So that's the exciting thing of how much work there is going on. You know, you look at something like the Listen First Coalition. If you go to that website, you know, there's probably six, seven hundred organizations there. I think most of them probably started in the last four or five years of people realizing we have to change things, like we have to have a different kind of conversation. So I work with Braver Angels, a Better Together America, and all these kind of new organizations, a lot of them like me, focus on bottom up. Right? We have to change. The more and more we change individual local communities, I think eventually that that starts kind of changing broader things. Changing our national system is going to be tough, though. Some smart people are working on that.

[David McRaney]

After this. Commercial break Wicked Problems how to solve them and how the smart people at the center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State are working on how to improve deliberative systems across the United States and across the world. All that after this.

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[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Okay, that thing I said I would talk about in the.

[David McRaney]

Middle of the show.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

It's not quite the middle of the.

[David McRaney]

Show, but here's the thing. So curiosity is this unusually common trait of people who listen to this podcast. You may have noticed that about yourself. And if you're the kind of person who wants to understand how minds work and sometimes don't work, which is clearly who you are because you listen to the show, you are probably super interested in critical thinking. If you are the kind of person who is right now listening to this podcast, then you might also be curious to find out about the Higher Order Thinking Skills course that I am co presenting at the Executive Thinking Academy. The Executive Thinking Academy. It's about executive thinking like the executive centers of your brain, but also executive thinking too, if that's what you want to do with it. It's a four week course to level up your strategic, creative, critical and executive thinking skills. But it's a bit different because first it's not a passive exercise in watching a video and then filling out some multiple choice questions. Instead, you will be actively participating in hands on activities using templates and frameworks that you can use well beyond the course itself. It's a genuinely interactive experience that will help you to think in new ways. You also get the full set of kitted thinking tools with more than 200 beautifully designed physical cards in these fancy magnetic boxes that you can use to plan and facilitate workshops, elevate brainstorming sessions, supercharge strategy planning, and much more. These cards, they they have digital versions, they have QR codes on them, they have a whole like thing that you can use on a website to make them cooler. The course is incredible and it shows you a bunch of ways to use those cards at your workplace or anywhere else. And you'll have the option to learn collaboratively with a small group of like minded peers so that you're holding each other accountable and encouraging each other to push your thinking boundaries. Plus, you don't just get access to this one course. You get 12 months of membership to the Executive Thinking Academy itself, and that includes webinars in Q and A sessions with global thought leaders, with authors, with academics. It's a whole lot of stuff and you get 50% off if you use the code smart50 at checkout when you visit kitted shop. Half off smart50 kidded shop. If you are curious to learn more and to join me for next month's Higher Order Thinking Skills course, head over there right now, click on the link in the show notes and lock in your place. And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the youe Are not so Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney, I am your host, and our guest in this episode is Dr. Martine Carcasson. And I should mention I met Dr. Martine Carcosin earlier this year at a conference at Northwestern University where a group of experts devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements gathered to compare notes and trade ideas. That conference was held at the Ludovic center for Enlightened Disagreement, where the directors Eli Finkel and Norika Tayle are right now building something truly amazing. And it's also where I will be spending a portion of April as a writer in residence, doing lectures and teaching freshmen the things that I have learned over the years, both on this podcast and writing a book about these topics, including how Minds Change. Eli Finkel has already been a guest on the show, and so has Josh Green and Stephen Frankaneri, all of whom attended that conference, spoke, traded things. And we will talk more about the center and all the projects people presented in upcoming episodes as the other guests join us to talk about what they're up to, what they're doing. And in this episode, that guest is Dr. Martine Carcasson. And one of the first things I asked him was how did this become his life's work?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Yeah, so it started like I mentioned earlier. You know, I was trained as a rhetorical critic and argumentation scholar, looking at how presidents talked about complex issues. Got more and more frustrated with it. One of the big changes, I was in grad school during the Clinton administration, beginning of his second term, he started a national conversation on race, right? And, you know, so what I was doing back then was how do presidents talk about complex issues? So I was looking at his speeches and so forth and how he was framing that issue well as part of that process they created these discussion guides. So they worked with some people I know now in this kind of dialogue and deliberation field, you know, basically creating this how to. How do you get people together in your local community to have a better conversation about this complex issue? In argumentation, I was trained in debate. I was never on a debate team or competitive debate, but I. I taught debate classes and had debates, you know, competitive debates in my class. All of a sudden, I'm introduced to dialogue and deliberation as these two other ways of talking. And I saw that as, oh, no, this is kind of what my students need right now. Part of it, the whole big project I'm working on now is making distinctions between those three words. Debate, dialogue, and deliberation. And for a while, like a lot of dialogue and deliberation people, I became pretty anti debate. Like, debate is bad, and this stuff is good. That's now changed about the last 10 years, realizing, well, no, bad debate's bad, but good debate can be really good. The problem is, most of our debate's bad, but I was kind of attacking a foil in a sense, as we're looking now, toxic polarization is one of our huge issues. But just information disorder, information chaos, just misinformation, disinformation also. And debate done well inherently elevates good arguments and exposes bad arguments. So we need elements of debate, so we need all three. But that just kind of started this process of me learning these new tools that people were designing. And that also led me to, like, conflict resolution world and other kind of mediation and so forth, like, realizing we need better ways of how to talk to each other through all that too. I started my favorite class as an undergrad was a persuasion class, which is much more of a social science class. When I got to csu, they're asking me, what other classes you want to teach. I'm like, oh, I'd love to teach the persuasion class. And I started teaching that. I use Calendini's book Influence. I don't know if you're familiar with that. That was the first book that really kind of social psychology basically makes the argument that we've already been talking about that human nature has these quirks, and then these marketers take advantage of those quirks to get you to do things. And that really started that process of me melding together this dialogue and deliberation world within the social psychology of, like, okay, so bad faith actors are taking advantage of these quirks of human nature.

[David McRaney]

Nature.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

How do I do the opposite? Which for me is a Two step process. One is doing things that doesn't trigger the bad stuff. But then also, and this is the. For the last year, with national craziness going on, I've spent a lot more time focusing on what are the positive aspects of human nature we can trigger, rather than just focusing on avoiding the negative, which is much better for your, your mental health. Right. But there is a lot of good stuff, I think. In the how you change minds book, you mentioned this. Like the fact that we're able to change our minds is one of our superpowers, right?

[David McRaney]

Yeah.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Like, like now it's hard to change our minds and we're resistant to changing our minds. Right. But once you figure that out. So that's where a lot of my work. I think humans are incredibly creative problem solvers when put in a good situation.

[David McRaney]

Right.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Our political system doesn't put us in good situations. Right. So how do we create different situations so we can tap into that?

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

If you watch an episode of Mad Men and you marvel at how great Don Draper is at something, it's not like he went to school for it. It was a bunch of AB testing in a marketplace that rewarded doing things that got you money. And then you just keep going in the direction of things that work out and you start to develop best practices. That's true across the board in any information economy. Right. And that's. We're, we're getting to. We had social media just long enough that people who have AB tested it pointedly so are starting to get the results they were looking for. Whether they have any, like, conscious understanding or could even articulate what it is that they're doing. Well, they're starting to do it well in several different directions. If you've been on autopilot, your democracy is like, pull up, pull up, pull up right now. I don't know why I have so many pilot metaphors, but that seems to be what's happening.

[David McRaney]

So how does Carcasson approach this problem? How does his team at Colorado State, how do they get together and create deliberation facilitation systems? How do they work? Well, to answer that, we must first briefly attempt to define what is a value in the collection of psychological phenomena that come to the foreground when we have difficult conversations? Things like beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on. What separates a value from those other things? What makes a value unique? In short, in terms of something that a brain generates, what is a value? So if you create a list of common values, you'll notice right away that they are difficult to define. That Is if you were to ask 50 people to define something like freedom, you might just get 50 different answers. Freedom, justice, equality, progress, tradition, diversity, personal responsibility, community. All of these, in a philosophical sense, are abstractions. That is, they're not concretes. You can't hold them in your hand like an apple. You can't put them under glass like a fossil. You can't pin them to a board like a butterfly. Cognitively, what does that mean in the brain, what is an abstraction? Well, from a cognitive linguistics perspective, an abstraction like say, the word intelligence, it has no platonic essence, no final definition. In language, abstractions are merely functional labels for the sake of coordination. And those labels can create a sort of illusory stability, when in fact the concept, the category is in the brain, a network of associations. And because it's a network of associations, there's a fuzzy border to it. You can go just a little bit outside of it and you're still kind of talking about it. You can find examples that seem more like the abstraction, some that seem less. But in different contexts and different situations, that can change. So even if you think about one particular abstraction a whole lot, it's just a habit of interpretation. The brain is noticing a recurring relational pattern. If you want to get super brain science nerdy about it, Abstractions are learned, dynamically activated schema that allow the brain to group non identical, but kind of similar sensory, motor and social experiences into buckets, categorical neurological buckets, patterns of activation. And they form sort of an equivalency which we use for the purposes of communication, coordination, and when alone, prediction, inference and action. So the sun is a concrete object, a sunrise is a concrete experience. But when we share through language how beautiful and awe inspiring a sunrise can be, beauty, awe and inspiration are abstractions. And it just so happens values tend to be pretty abstract. So with that in mind, what is a value? Well, when scientists who study the brain and social systems, when they talk about values, they're referring to stable, socially learned preference structures. And these preference structures guide judgment, attention, emotion, and behavior across contexts. Did you notice there's a lot of abstractions in that previous statement? That's just how this all works. Language, it's weird, it's messy. So yeah, preference structures, these are tied to what we consider good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. These particular preference structures are about what is more important and what is less important when it comes to how we spend time, money, resources, how we spend that which is expendable. For instance, where should our tax dollars go to education or to aircraft carriers. That's a value judgment. You can imagine in a much earlier environment, around a campfire near a cave. We would have similar discussions about what is more important, or at least similar intuitions about where we should be spending our time, where should we be spending our effort. And we might disagree, but we'd probably group up in a way that allowed us to cooperate and coordinate. There are two things, though, that make values truly unique. One is that they're usually deep, psychologically speaking, they're usually unarticulated. They motivate our behaviors and drive our emotional reactions and responses. But we might not be consciously aware of them, or at least not aware of how important they are to us, or not aware of how we're prioritizing them. And that's the other thing that makes them unique. The research suggests that we all tend to share most of the same values. Sort of a collection of values that we all agree upon are important for human beings doing stuff we all care about tradition and progress, security and freedom. It's just that tradition versus progress, security versus freedom. As individuals, we rank values like that differently. We consider some higher than others, and the differences in how we rank them can create friction when attempting to solve a shared problem or achieve a shared goal. But here's the thing. To solve the shared problem of how to better solve shared problems, humans have had to create all manner of institutions and systems for coordination and deliberation. Science, for example, is one of these systems. But when it comes to wicked problems, systems that are great at sorting out facts and producing empirical data can get bogged down by issues that are inherently value laden. And that's why we need systems like the one created by the center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. Here's Dr. Martine Carcasson to explain.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

In argumentation, you know, you look at how people are making claims like an argument is, I'm trying to convince you of something, right? So I'm making a claim, which I'm trying to convince you of, and I attach that to some sort of evidence, right? Some reasons. Sometimes that's hard evidence and facts, and sometimes that's other reasons. So argumentation is try to kind of understand how arguments work and kind of put it in its pieces. I use the Toulmin model for that that some people might know about. But one big distinction that they make, which I think is we really need to think more in our world about is distinctions between a factual claim, a value claim, and a policy claim. So a factual claim is a claim about reality, right? I'M saying something that at some level of factual claim, you should be able to check it. There's a famous kind of thing in journalism education, like if one side's telling you it's raining and the other side is telling you it's not raining, the job of the journalist isn't to report. Oh, there's different perspectives, is to go outside and see if it's effing raining. So factual claims, if I'm a reporter, if I'm a conflict resolution person, and two sides are saying something that's factual but have different perspectives, my job is to seek, hey, can I go figure out which one's right? So that's this whole world. Instead of making a distinction between fact and opinion, I think fact value policy is much more helpful. So that's facts is something real you can check. And somehow some of those are easy, some of them are much more complex because a lot of causal arguments like, hey, wearing a mask will reduce the spread of COVID That's a factual claim, but a lot harder. Anytime you get into cause and effect, you have multiple variables and so forth. A value claim is a claim that something is good or bad or favorable or unfavorable. Right? It's a reason why you're making an evaluation of something. And that's where if two people have. If there's a value conflict, there isn't an outside source I can go to resolve it. Particularly if we believe we're a diverse society that believes in democracy, believes in freedom, and believes in pluralism. Right? The reality of living in 21st century democracy is we're dealing with lots of different values and lots of different people rank those values differently. And then the problems we face inherently involve multiple of these values. It's just really messy. Our brains don't like messy. Our brains don't like nuance. We like simple stories. So the way we talk about values is huge because when we talk about values badly, it's one of the biggest sources of the false polarization and division and all this kind of stuff. When we learn how to talk about values better, all of a sudden it becomes this huge mechanism to shift from these really bad conversations to actually tapping into the good parts of human nature like creative problem solvers. And that's the heart of this work. Our basic model is if I'm focusing on national security and you disagree with me, I'm just thinking they don't care about security. Right? We love to define the people we disagree with by what they're against. Monica Guzman makes this a great point in her TED Talk about curiosity will save us. Right? That's our default on our brain, is we've got the good values and the people we disagree with reject those good values, right? Or have negative motives. And that makes us feel good because that means we're right and they're wrong. And if we just believe, oh, they have bad values, not only are they wrong, they're not worth talking to, they're not listening. Like, why do I even bother paying attention? And that's what we're dealing with is we got half the country thinks the other half of the country has ridiculous values, and there's no way to engage. So that's the value art. A lot of the work that we do with these issues is analyze the discourse, people talking past each other, figuring out all the underlining values. And values are often. Underlining values aren't often explicit, right? We don't think, I care about freedom, therefore I have this position. Right? So we have these strong positions, and then the values are the underlining logic to them. So my job a lot is to talk to the different sides or to read the message boards or to kind of make sense of all this noise, identify all those underlining values, and then put them on the table. So then the conversation starts with, hey, Here are these 10 values that are relevant to this issue. Generally, we all have the same values. We just rank them differently. Right. And we tend to be selective on what values we're focusing on. Right? So my job is to kind of set up, you know, this is part of the role of discussion guides. And, you know, a facilitator is identify those values, put them on the table, and then help people work through the tough issues of how do we figure out how to deal with the tension between these values? How do we negotiate them better? Policy claim is a claim about we should do X. Right. And it uses the word policy, but it might not be policy. You know, policy is more of a government kind of word. But often when we're disagreeing, we're disagreeing on, hey, we should build a wall or we should take over Greenland or whatever we're doing. So we tend to focus on the policy claims the most. But my argument is any policy claim inherently involves fact and value claims. If you're saying we should do X because it leads to Y, does X actually lead to Y as a factual claim? Right. If we do this, will this actually happen? And often, you know, some of the most interesting things about policy claims are the unintended consequences, right? So, you know, our brain tends to focus on the positive intended consequences of the policies we like and the negative unintended policy consequences of those that we don't like. And that's just another way we tend to talk past each other and get polarized. Right? So, yeah, it's factual. Does X lead to Y? And then if I'm saying we should do X because it leads to Y, I'm making a value claim that Y is a good thing. Like we need. Why so so much of our discussions are all about these policy claims. Part of the, you know, bringing from the world of argumentation is, okay, how do we break that up a little bit? So there's some factual stuff and how do you evaluate the quality of a factual claim is different. But so much of our conflict is based on value claims that are kind of hidden.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Talking in terms of values and trying to solve issues that are value laden leads to a examination of wicked problems and then ways to deal with them. So just to get started there, what is this terminology? What is a wicked problem?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Yeah, so the actual, you know, the term's been around about 50 years. It was initially developed by, like, city planners, civic engineers. And the one story I read about it was, you know, these civil engineers got their degree and they went to go work for a city. And pretty quickly they realized that the kind of problems they were trained to solve and I. The kind of problems they were asked to solve were quite distinct. So the initial article made the distinction between tame problems and wicked problems. So a tame problem could be really, really complex. But there is an answer to it. It's like a technical, Right. I always go to Apollo 13, right, of this notion of that scene where they had to get the tube that had the round filter to fit in, the one with the square filter on the two different spaceships. So he had all the equipment, this is all they have. And they had a group of engineers, experts, and said we had to figure out how to get that to fit into the thing made for that using only this. That's a tame problem. Really, really complex. Required a lot of smart people, but there was kind of a right answer. So you leave it to the experts. And really the only problem is how do we implement that correct technical solution as efficiently or cheap as possible? Well, the wicked problem they explained was. Well, wicked problems inherently involve multiple underlining values that don't fit together very well. Right? So when you're trying to make a decision with a. So not only does the problem itself involve multiple underlining values, but then as we've been talking about different people rank those values differently. So it gets really complex. And part of the reality of a wicked problem is there is no right answer. Like you. You don't solve a wicked problem. We're never going to find the perfect way to educate people. We're never going to find the perfect way to deal with housing. We're never. Because all these things and inherently involve lots of different things, individual responsibility and equality and efficiency and so forth. Right. That the best we can do is have really tough conversations to find better ways of negotiating the tensions, that come up with better ways of addressing it, that move the needle on the issue, that improve quality of life. But there's no stopping point. Is the way that kind of riddle and Weber was the initial article that kind of. There's no stocking point to which it problems. So for me there's a lot of literature in Harvard professor hyphens talks about type one, two and three problems. That's adaptive leadership that a lot of people might know. I use it a little bit differently. Instead of a category or a type of problem, I like to use it more like a lens through which to see problems. So it's more like if I step back and say hey, let's look at this, the wicked problem, which means I'm really looking at the underlining values and what do people care about and how do we kind of of identify those and put them on the table? How does that change the conversation? And that's where informed so much about my deep dive into social psychology and brain science. Framing something as a wicked problem really helps open up space for conversations, deeper conversations we need to have. We switch our brains want to blame wicked people. Our brains want. The reason we're in this problem is because there's bad people and we just need to kind of vanquish those people and the problem will go away. Right? Well, when you shift from the problem being wicked people, bad people with bad values, and put the wickedness in the problem, that's part of that shift.

[David McRaney]

Right.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

So that's what we're trying to do is we see this as a problem that has multiple unique values. We all have the same values. We kind of rank them differently. We don't know which one should be most important here. That opens up space for having a very different conversation that for me tends to avoid bringing out the worst of human nature and tapping the best.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Remember you using an example like healthcare because like you want it to be accessible, high quality, low cost, wicked problem right off the bat, how would you get all three of those, how would you ever get those three things to happen at the same time? With our current level of technology, with our current level of how economies work, if you don't have a Star Trek replicator, how do you make healthcare accessible? High quality, low cost. If you get together and try to solve that and just solve it, you will run into some weird deliberation and.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Most conversations will just pick one of those, right? I care about being low cost, I care about accessible. And you can make a case and you can get people that agree with you fired up, Right? But the reality is, oh, we're trying to deal with all these same time, right? So what happens in a polarized environment is one side picks some value, another side picks the other value, and they just talk past each other. And the tension, tensions. The heart of a wicked problem is dealing with these tensions. The tensions are either just missed because we're not talking about them, or sometimes strategically, you know, they're designed by people to avoid them. Right? So that's a lot of my work, is how do we identify those tensions and then help people deal with them? Because I think good decisions, high quality, collaborative decisions require us to engage those tensions, whereas most of our political top is designed to avoid people ever recognizing that they're there. There's no tension because it's good versus evil.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

The way you introduced this to myself and others, and I've told so many people about it, was this interesting card workshop thing. And I would like to talk about that just for a second because it's something that. What you actually did was hand out a bunch of pieces of paper and said, here are things that are values and just put them in order, stack them. Most important at the top, least important at the bottom of these values that you probably care about all of them. But just rank them, if you could. What is this game workshop thing? How does it work? What are the steps and what are you. What are you accomplishing here and how do people tend to respond to it?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Yeah, yeah. That's something that has been part of our training for our facilitators. Because so much of the training that's doing facilitators is to bring out underlining values. Right? When people have a strong position, often a policy position, we should do X. Right? Their job as a facilitator is to say, why is that important to you? You know, this is like Fisher and Yuri getting the. Yes. Talks about this a lot, right. Moving from positions to interests. Right? So get those underlining interests. You know, we, we use a, A collection of nine values. So you print it out on cardstock and cut them out. So it's like a business card size. It just has the name of value. So I think we have community, individual responsibility, quality, security. And we have a set of questions that we ask people. So the first one, as you said, is like, hey, just organize these from. From most important to your least important to you. And we tell them, like, you know, if we asked you to define these, we would get 30 different definitions, right? That's part of the academic literature on values. You know, they're these essentially contested terms, or they're called God terms, right? There's these powerful words that we use all the time, but we don't ever really define them because we don't want. We want people to kind of fill in their blanks, right? Like, oh, he's talking about freedom, right? I care about freedom. Once we actually start defining what we mean, they kind of lose their power and way, right? So that's part of what we want to do, is whatever they mean to you, organize them. And we're doing this in a small group. So then we have a set of questions. Okay, you know, look at your neighbors, right? How did they rank them? Looking at your top value, like, why did you put that number one in? What does that value mean to you? And then for your bottom value, like, what did you put on the bottom? And what does that mean to you? And you start realizing that most, again, we all agree with most of these values. We define them a little bit differently, you know, and sometimes the values on the bottom is because someone else has weaponized that value and used it against your side, right? So you see it as a negative thing. But just having those conversations, you realize you might have a value really low that your neighbor has really high. But then when they're talking about what that value means to them, they're like, well, yeah, if that's what it means, I would have it high too, right? So you just start realizing, wait a second, we agree on this, right? And then the later questions are even better because one of my favorite questions is looking back at your top value, can that value dominate too much? And that causes huge aha moments. Because almost I'll make the case that, yeah, every value can dominate too much. We'd like to take values one at a time, right? So if the question is, and I always kind of make a joke when I ask people to rank them, like, if we did these one at a time, like, if I asked you all show of hands, how many of you all prefer justice to injustice, right? Everyone prefers justice if we don't have to define it. Right. What the heart of the difficulty of living in a diverse democracy is we don't get to take values one at a time. These issues we deal with inherently involve all these values. So asking people, can your top value dominate too much? They often realize, well, yeah, you can, you can almost add toxic to any value. Right? And that's when, okay, we're so focused on that value that it clearly shows how we're not like we're undermining other values. Right. And then the same thing we ask them, hey, look at your bottom value. Can a reasonable person have that in their top three? And almost always they can answer, yes, right? Yeah, I can see how they can kind of focus on that. So it just kind of opens up this perspective to get people to think about these often unstated values that are so critical to any. When we talk about policy claims dominating, anytime we say something's a problem, anytime we're saying something's a goal, anytime we're saying we should do something inherently, all those things have values tied to them. They're just kind of hidden. So that process of learning how to deal with people we disagree with is I need to figure out what that, I need to figure out what values I'm talking about that are kind of not clearly in my head, but also understand their values and get away from that easy assumption that we always go to of just defining people by what they're against. And just that step changes things so much in how we talk to each other.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

It was such an incredible exercise. I, everyone in my group, we did this for all of us when we were doing the thing at the opening of the center for Enlightened Disagreement. And in my group, every single person had a, ah, every single person I had it, they had it. And we, we generally thought we were very like minded and we became astonished when we saw that we had a slightly different rankings. And then when we asked each other what was going on with it, we had multiple AHAs in there of like.

[David McRaney]

Well, I could see that.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

And then when it came to just seeing like you have like, community, community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, security. I've got it in front of me, I didn't memorize it. And you can pick out any three of these and think of it and realize, okay, community, freedom, individual responsibility, these things. If you clearly I care about all three of those things. Almost everyone cares about those things.

[David McRaney]

One, they are vast abstractions.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

This is something that is very difficult to concretize and say here is what that word means. Easy to feel, hard to define and they're going to have different perspectives on that. Then I can come up with a million ways that community and freedom could somehow become and go into conflict with one another. Individual responsibility and freedom and individual responsibility, all of these things. I can imagine scenarios where they could come into conflict if one vastly was over prioritized. Or I could imagine a terrible situation in a culture that didn't care about one of these hardly at all. And the other two they did. The complexity of it, just revealing that to people, just letting that come to the surface and accepting the fact that.

[David McRaney]

Oh, things are a bit more complicated than they seemed at first.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Just getting that feeling seemed epiphanous to me.

[David McRaney]

It seemed huge.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Even among people who thought that this is what we care about and talk about all the time. There's a huge value to this game.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

And I'm actually working right now with National Studios Forum that does a lot of cool national work. They're putting together some stuff for the 250th to try to kind of hopefully not have the 250th be another thing that divides us, which obviously that's the direction it's going to. No, let's use this two 50th to bring us together and to kind of think about the American creed and so forth. So I'm adapting that exercise. I'm adding like democracy and patriotism and a couple other values, but then basically like packaging it up like a meeting in a box. I'll have some videos tied to it. So then hopefully other organizations, you know, whether this is college classrooms or, you know, I'll be farming it out to like Braver Angels chapter and so forth and saying, hey, here's this. If you got two hours, bring people together and kind of show them how to do that. So hopefully we can kind of provide a link on, on yours to that once we get that done.

[David McRaney]

Oh, for sure. And did you say you've done like.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

600 of these things?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Yeah, we probably over the 20 years, if you kind of count up, you know, most of our stuff is off campus, some is on, we'll go into different classes. But I think when we added it up, it's probably over 600 different, like individual meetings that we've done and you've done.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

But you've done things in municipalities, in counties, you've done things that actually have taken place in local governments. So you've seen it work when it works. And I'm wondering, like, okay, all that stuff is cool. Help me understand paraphrasing you. Like, democracy requires high quality communication and we don't do that naturally. We have to create high quality conversations at scale if we want anything to happen. And we should be using all of the things we've learned scientifically about how people actually work, how brains actually make sense of things, and how conversation and argumentation and communication, persuasion work and roll all that into something that can help us get to the next level of whatever it is we're trying to do on this planet. I'm wondering what does it look like in one of these things that you like when you're trying to actually help people deliberate or solve a problem together or work together on something with their own as conflict? How does it typically roll for you when you're doing one of the things that's informed by all of your work?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

I mean, one thing about deliberation is it's, it's not quick, right? It takes a lot of time. So, you know, we'll start a project. I have to spend some time kind of making, like I said, making sense of the noise, you know, the, the city. If we're doing something for the city, they'll send me all the emails I got on an issue and I can watch video of one time in the microphone, which is like, you know, horrible people talking about past each other. But if you know what you're looking for, right, if you're trying to get a sense of different sides, then we often have to do some fact checking, right? So we make a distinction between the fact claims and value claims. And okay, let's learn about the factual stuff. But obviously a lot of the work is try to understand the underlining values, put them on the table, then we'll create, we often create some sort of discussion guide that's one of the kind of key aspects of deliberation. And I've used these discussion guides for 20 years. I was trained initially from Natural Shoes Forum, which creates these national discussion guides. And it wasn't until about 8, 10 years ago when I started really doing that deep dive into social psychology and brain science of realizing why those discussion guides are so important. Because when you have this piece of paper at the middle of the table that is informed by all these different perspectives and it's fact checked and hopefully people see their voice in there. Because we often create those discussion guides from people's comments. When people RCP for our events, we'll ask them some additional questions. So, so their, their Voice is in there, but it fairly lays out different perspectives, right? So because if you don't have a discussion guide, if we're getting together to talk about a controversial issue and you have a really strong opinion and you express your opinion and I disagree with you, that means I either have to say, no, you're wrong to your face. Where humans are, most humans avoid conflict, right? Some humans love conflict. So then, yeah, me calling you out, you're an idiot, you know, but that's not great either, right? So these discussion guides help kind of provide more multiple perspectives, which, as you've done in your books, our brains are not good at thinking of alternative perspectives, right? We're really good at all the reasons we're right and all the reasons they're wrong. So this lays it out, lays it out from a wicked problems perspective in a sense that there isn't a right answer. Any of these actions that we might take inherently have trade offs. And the hard work of living together in democracy is kind of figuring out which trade offs are we willing to work with and so forth and hopefully get creative to minimize those trade offs as much as possible. And then, you know, we have a small group, we have a facilitator who's trained to kind of walk people through that we tend to avoid yes, no questions. Because when the question is yes, no, should we do this or not, right? And obviously in local government and school boards, most of the time they're asking yes, no questions because some kind of problem came up. The city staff came up with a potential solution, comes up with an ordinance, and then they're debating yes no on an ordinance. So they're typically debating yes no to one specific solution to a complex problem. If things are framed as yes, no. When people walk in the door, almost everyone has already answered yes or no. So their brains are off, right? They're not there to think, they're not there to learn, they're not there to ask questions. They're there to kind of defend their perspective. Plus, we know from negativity bias, much more likely if you think no, you'll show up. If you read something the city's doing and you think it's a good idea, you're like, that's great. And you go on with your day. If you think it's a horrible idea, you're like, oh, hell no, I'm going to show up, right? So you completely over sample the no's, right? That's why most people hate public engagement, because 90% of the people are there to say this is A stupid idea. Right. Well, then the city council left with two really bad choices. They can vote yes, even though everyone that talked to them said no. And it looks like they're, you know, dismissing democracy. Or they can say no. Well, saying no, all that does is okay, that solution is not working. It does nothing for the problem. Right? So a deliberative process is stepping back instead of saying, hey, should we do this one thing? It's more the overarching question of deliberation is what should we do about X? Right? The we, ideally being the community. The we is not government. Government is one tool, the community. But a lot of our work is to spark, hey, what's the role of nonprofits? What's the role of faith institution? What's the role of individuals? And then X is for me, a wicked problem. Most of these discussion guides often always at least have like three approaches. Like, here's three paths we can take to address this problem. Because we want to get away from the yes, no, we want to get away from yours on one side or the other. And then the discussion guide does inherently, again, mention the trade offs and the underlying evaluate the opponent arguments. So that discussion guide, the whole meeting is reacting to this discussion guide. And it's just a tool to help us have so many different conversations. We ask people, we tell them, this discussion guide isn't perfect. It's designed to spark a better conversation and the art of creating a document that the purpose of the document is not to persuade someone, not even just to inform someone, but it's to spark good conversation. That is an art. We need a lot more because most of the loudest voices are pushing for a side. They're reacting that and they're telling you, hey, what do you like here? What do you not like here? What's missing here? And it just creates a completely different environment of what we're trying to do. You know, in two hours, y' all can go back to screaming at each other, but we're just going to try something for the next two hours. Let's do something a little bit different. And just people realize that, no, this is a better way of doing things.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

I think maybe directly quoting you or paraphrasing you said something like, the aim is to win the conversation, not win.

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

The argument, to elevate the conversation. And that was something that was initially our training thing, like the job of the student. Like my students, when they're a facilitator, they don't have an opinion, right? Their, their whole job, their brain is just to help other People have conversations and ask the follow ups and help people kind of engage each other, you know, so we kind of explained it to them as like your job is to elevate the conversation, not win the argument. But then we realize like the more people that walk in the room with that. Right. That's the problem is too often when we engage people, they've already decided. And if they already decided because you know, our brains are wired, confirmation bias and eyesight bias and all that other stuff. Right? To defend our perspective. But if you ask a more interesting question, if you frame it differently, then instead of tapping in kind of people's adversarial brain, you're tapping into their collaborative brain. That's exactly what you want. We want to engage people as problem solvers, not as advocates of one perspective.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Is there cause for optimism in this difficult time in world democracy and especially United States democracy? And if so, what sort of conversations should we be striving toward?

[Dr. Martine Carcasson]

Right now the optimism is we do know how to do it right. People that do this work in lots of different field and this is international. There's a lot of across the globe, this growing democracy. Next is one of these big organizations. I was just on a webinar this morning with them doing lots of cool stuff in other countries. We've got the tools we know from the social psychology and brain science, and from both the practitioner abroad, practitioner world, but also academic academics how to do this. So that's the base of the optimism. Now obviously there's lots of reason for pessimism, like we're getting further and further away of doing this right, that we're so divided. We're dealing with three challenges. One is toxic polarization. That in some ways our number one issue. Because when we're polarized to the level we are, we just can't think right. Facts don't work. We see everything through this lens. Most of that polarization isn't real, it's exaggerated. Right? We don't disagree nearly as much as we think. But unfortunately the perception of polarization is much more important than reality. If we think we're this polarized, we get it right. The second one, I'm using the term now, information disorder. And that's just the reality that our ability to create and share information has just exponentially exploded our ability to make sense of that information and particularly to make distinctions between good information and bad information. The heart of argumentation where I started has really fallen back. We don't trust journalism anymore, we don't trust experts anymore. So the gatekeepers are gone. So how do we kind of figure that out? And then the third big challenge is conflict profiteers. There are people that are profiting from this, right? The outrage industrial complex, our political system, media system, most tech platforms are all designed to divide us. There's really interesting efforts for all three of those. The challenge we have is those three are intertwined. So if you just focus on toxic polarization and you just focus on bringing people together and understanding each other other, you might reduce polarization. But in an environment that rewards conflict profiteers and has information overload, you're not going to move much. Right? So that's the work that I'm doing is I think the more we build up capacity for quality deliberation and debate and dialogue as well in our communities, it can take on all three of those. Often when I'm towards the end of my basic talk, I kind of have a summary slide that talks about these, the four shifts that we're trying to do with deliberative engagement. And the first one is moving from the simple assumption of wicked people to the nuanced assumption of wicked problems. And I normally stop there and I say, I'm not saying that there's not wicked people. Clearly over time there has been, I am saying half the country isn't evil. And I think you'll agree with this, very few people self identify as wicked. Humans are wired to like, I've got good reasons for what I believe and we're really good at rationalizing and coming up with good reason, right. So I kind of tell people that, you know, even if you think the problem is caused by wicked people, telling people that don't think that they're wicked, that you think they're wicked is very unlikely to make them less wicked. It's going to backfire. It's just going to end the conversation. Right? So for deliberate, a lot of my topics are true wicked problems, real, reasonable people on different sides. And we're trying to kind of find a better way for them to engage each other. And particularly local, that works pretty well. But I also a lot of my work is I'm a pragmatist at most, right. I'm trying to figure out better ways of coming together if the issue truly is bad faith. Actors, bad people, powerful people trying to hold people down, oppressors trying to oppress everybody. Well, first I think they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter, right. This polar environment is great for them, right? So part of it is, hey, the more we elevate our conversations. The more we understand each other, the harder it's going to be for those people to kind of dominate. The best way to kind of move forward is to do that, right? You know, so instead of attacking and this is part of the if we overemphasize on conflict profiteers, if we over emphasize, you know, we have to beat the other side in a two party system to move forward, that's kind of playing this bad game and that often strengthens, right? If someone's trying to be an authoritarian and wants everything us versus them. If we're attacking them, we're just playing the role of them, right? We're playing their narrative. So that's the better we change our conversations, the harder it's going to be for the conflict profiteers, for the people that are purposely dividing us for their own personal gain. And again, from the bottom up, I think that's going to be our best path forward.

[David McRaney]

Sam. That is it for this episode of the youe're not so Smart podcast.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

For links to everything we talked about.

[David McRaney]

And a little bit more head to you are not so smart.com or check the Show Notes right there Inside your podcast player you can find my book How Minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details [e-mail] and there's links to all of that in the Show Notes notes as well. On that website you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts who are featured in the book. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews and hire me to come give a lecture wherever you are at and I'll give you workshops on.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

How to change people's minds and how minds change.

[David McRaney]

For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Music, Audible, or you're not so smart dot com. Follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue sky and everything else at David McCraney. Follow the showtsmartblog. We're also on Facebook. Slash, you are not so Smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, like really keep it going because I don't have any editors, staff, nothing. It's just me. Go to patreon.com you are not so Smart. Pitch in at any amount and it.

[Podcast Guest or Collaborator]

Will help a whole lot.

[David McRaney]

You'll also get the show ad free after that and if you pitch in higher amounts, I'll send you a poster, a T shirt, signed books, all sorts of things. The opening music that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you truly want to support the show, just tell everyone you know about it. If there's an episode you really liked, send that their way and check back in about two weeks for a full fresh new episode.

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