339 - Enlightened Disagreement

Summary

Podcast Summary: "You Are Not So Smart" – Episode 339: Enlightened Disagreement

Release Date: May 11, 2026
Host: David McRaney
Theme: Exploring the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University and the quest to save disagreement from polarization through science, games, critical thinking, and educational innovation.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the founding, mission, and pilot program of Northwestern University’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement—a new initiative aimed at teaching advanced skills for navigating disagreements, fostering intellectual humility, and countering affective polarization. Host David McRaney documents his personal experiences working with the center, interviews key faculty and students, and spotlights new related projects—including a science literacy game in development with the Medill School of Journalism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding the Mission (01:09–03:18)

• David McRaney recounts: his time as writer-in-residence, assisting with the center’s launch and pilot curriculum.
• The Center’s Core Purpose:
  • “Saving disagreement from polarization.” – (Brad Zakarin, 03:04)
  • Equipping students with dialogue, listening, and disagreement skills.

2. The Pilot Curriculum: Building Skills for Enlightened Disagreement (03:25–10:50)

• Six Module Curriculum:
  • Module 1: Advanced active listening via improv exercises taught by Heather Barnes (Second City-trained communication professor).
    • “She taught the kind of high-impact active listening you need to perform in improv on stage.” – David McRaney (03:51)
  • Module 2: Values ranking (with Dr. Martine Carcasson)
    • Students rank nine universal values: community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, security.
  • Module 3: Argument mapping via the "Point Taken" game (Dr. Steve Frankaneri) – turning debate into a structured, collaborative mapping activity.
  • Subsequent modules: Deliberative polling on contentious campus issues, keynote on "How Minds Change" with David McRaney, and “telescoping” conversations (motivational interviewing meets journalistic questioning).
  • Debriefings after practical exercises and real-world application.
• Notable moment:
  • “It was just a pleasure how actively engaged the students were and how insightful they were about what they’d learned throughout the course.” – Eli Finkel (10:37)

3. Student Reflections: Learning to Disagree Productively

(10:50–17:15)

• Tychea Woods (Psychology & Int’l Studies):
  • Motivation: Interest in peace and conflict resolution.
  • “Understanding how do these skills, like, what does it look like in practice?” (11:30)
• Yihuan Zhou (Mechanical Engineering):
  • Emphasized the value of curiosity, conversation, and perspective-taking.
  • “It never felt really like [disagreement]. It felt more just curiosity and conversations and active listening and fun.” (12:22)
  • Noted a changed attitude toward authority and leadership after engaging administrators.
• Adrian Woo (Economics, Learning & Org. Change, AI):
  • Highlighted environment fostering safety and intention in conversations.
  • “The modules set up a really supportive and safe environment for that aspect of learning how to be more intentional with conversations as the main priority.” (16:09)
• Key outcome: Students reported being better able to see beneath surface-level disagreements, recognize core values, and engage more openly.

4. Telescoping: A New Technique for Difficult Conversations (17:15–21:41)

• McRaney’s Workshop:
  • Introduced “telescoping”—deep questioning sequences based on motivational interviewing and journalism.
  • Practice involved innocuous questions (“Do you like people singing Happy Birthday?”) evolving into complex, personal, and even political issues.
  • Discussed confabulation: How people sometimes invent “believable” but inaccurate explanations for their beliefs.
  • Notable finding:
    • “It often only took three or four questions before the other person found themselves articulating things they may have never considered before.” (20:00)

5. The Role of the Center: Leadership, Vision, and Expansion

(24:18–25:49, 61:12–85:09)

• Meet the Team:
  • Eli Finkel: Professor of Psychology, focuses on relationships & social conflict.
  • Noor Kataly: Professor of Management, specializes in intergroup conflict.
  • Brad Zakarin: Curriculum Director, Litowitz Center.
• Mission Restated:
  • Not seeking bland centrism; want students to express convictions but with skill, empathy, and humility.
  • “Disagreement is a great thing. We’re not trying to make everybody just be nice... We think disagreement can be a lot better and that society, as a result, could also be a lot better.” – Eli Finkel (61:49)
• Community Model:
  • Focus on in-person, high-touch engagement.
  • Emphasize connection across ages, backgrounds, and disciplines.

6. Science Literacy, Games, and the Next Frontier

(30:46–55:20)

• Patty Walter (Journalism Professor):
  • Collaborating with Zakarin to build a science literacy game, inspired by student misunderstandings about scientific facts (e.g., protein intake, vaccine myths).
  • Game Premise:
    • Players self-assess, answer true/false science questions, access justifications, and review sources.
    • Collects data on confidence, curiosity, and humility.
    • Seeks to reinforce—“It’s OK not to know”—and foster curiosity over shame or defensiveness.
    • (Timestamps: 38:49–50:35, 53:25–54:36)
    • “Creating a space where the sheer fact of not knowing is actually the good thing and the curiosity thing and the way to step forward and learn and engage...” – Patty Walter (53:25)

7. Institutional Impact & Looking Forward

(69:03–86:02)

• How the Center Grew:
  • Started as a “white paper,” became a university-wide initiative after gaining key buy-in and funding (“a $20 million naming gift”).
  • Hosted conferences for cross-disciplinary experts.
• Surprising findings from pilot:
  • Students’ appetite for real engagement defied stereotypes.
  • After “training wheels” (social skill-building), students actively requested tougher, more contentious modules.
  • “Turns out there's more overlap in those domains than I had always appreciated...part of the value that they got...was actually just being in spaces together and having conversations for two hours that pushed them to actually hear and learn from other people.” – Noor Kataly (77:07)
• On the necessity of foundational connection before debate:
  • “The way you win Point Taken isn’t by scoring a point... It’s ‘Oh, that’s where we disagree.’... That’s the win for Point Taken. And that’s not a debate. It’s like a foundation for what you might want to do in order to have debate down the road.” – Eli Finkel (74:33)
• Next Steps and Ambitions:
  • Building a lasting community around enlightened disagreement.
  • Exploring intersections with AI and its role in future civics.
  • Research and expansion across education levels and partnerships.
  • “We’re not coming here to make you sort of more milquetoast in your perspectives. We’re putting you in a position to feel comfortable and confident, wading into really important conversations, bringing your divergent perspectives, because that’s what makes the society stronger.” – Noor Kataly (85:09)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Saving disagreement from polarization.” – Brad Zakarin (03:04)
• “Disagreement is a great thing. We’re not trying to create a bunch of centrists...We think disagreement can be a lot better and that society, as a result, could also be a lot better.” – Eli Finkel (61:49)
• “It never felt really like [disagreement]. It felt more just curiosity and conversations.” – Yihuan Zhou (12:22)
• “You don’t get experiences like these a lot where there’s no phones, no laptops in sight. Everybody is just talking to one another for an hour and a half straight...That is hard to find nowadays.” – Adrian Woo (21:41)
• “Disagreement is not the problem of our day. It’s the affective polarization that is associated with disagreement.” – Brad Zakarin (55:31)
• “This is not about making you less passionate. It’s about equipping you to navigate the hard stuff and not just throw your hands up in apathy.” – Noor Kataly (85:09)
• “How do we remain human in the midst of it?” – Tychea Woods (86:02)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Mission & Background: 01:09–05:14
• Curriculum Breakdown: 05:14–10:50
• Student Insights: 10:50–17:15
• Telescoping & Confabulation: 17:15–21:41
• Science Literacy Game Discussion: 30:46–55:20
• Faculty & Institutional Vision: 61:12–86:02

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Takeaways & The Episode’s Value

• The Center for Enlightened Disagreement is pioneering new methods for teaching students—and potentially the public—how to harness the power of productive disagreement.
• Experiential learning, games, and community are at the heart of the strategy—moving beyond debate toward understanding.
• Science literacy and intellectual humility are central, especially as misinformation and intuitive but false beliefs proliferate.
• Students' enthusiasm and curiosity debunked stereotypes about disengaged or hyper-sensitive youth, showing a hunger for honest, high-level engagement.
• The center is both a research hub and a creator of scalable interventions (like games and curricular modules), aiming to shape healthier discourse far beyond Northwestern.

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Final Reflections

The program, faculty insights, and student experiences together form a compelling argument for a future where disagreement is embraced rather than shunned; where curiosity and humility are strengths; and where education builds bridges rather than silos—even in an era (and an information ecosystem) so often defined by division.

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For more:
Visit You Are Not So Smart Podcast for links to topics, references, other episodes (including references to episodes on argument mapping, "How Minds Change," and game-based learning), and further resources.

Transcript

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[David McRaney]

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[Brad Zakarin]

happy they went quiet.

[David McRaney]

They went quiet. Welcome to the you Are not so smart podcast, episode 339. I'm David McCraney. This is the youe Are not so Smart podcast and I just got back from one of the most rewarding and challenging and fascinating experiences I've had as a science journalist who is deeply invested in a better understanding of disagreement, arguing, deliberation, how that happens in the brain, between brains in cultures. If you've listened to this show for a while, you know there are a lot of people who study that sort of thing scientifically. We've had them on the show, we've talked to them, and there are organizations out there devoted to improving discourse in the modern era. There are organizations out there devoted to funding and coordinating research in this domain. And there are organizations that are devoted to creating a system of lessons and programs and even games that hopefully could enter K12 education, college education, to do all of the above. I just spent a few weeks working with an organization doing all of that, one with a pretty fantastic title. Also that title the Lidowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement. And what do they do at this center? What is its mission?

[Brad Zakarin]

Saving disagreement from polarization.

[David McRaney]

Saving disagreement from polarization. That is what they are really, truly working on. And the person who just shared that is Brad Zakrin.

[Brad Zakarin]

I'm Brad Zakarin. I am the Curriculum Director at the Lidowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University.

[David McRaney]

I met Brad while I was serving as a writer in residence at Northwestern, where I helped kick off the pilot program at the Lidowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement. And yes, they are aware that that name is amazing and high minded and harkens back to old academia. Its own purpose I was there to help them launch a residential certification curriculum, a series of classes that they did there, exercises that students who signed up to be part of this pilot program took part in. In those classes, the students learned advanced dialogue skills, listening skills, disagreement skills across six modules. For example, the first module involved learning high impact active listening, the kind you would need to perform improv on stage in front of a big audience. And they learned that via an improvisation exercise taught by Heather Barnes, a communications professor at Northwestern and a former faculty member at the Second City Training center in Chicago. Second City is a legendary comedy institution with alumni like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Farley, Bill Murray. The students, they gathered up and they learned, they practiced in person during the classes how to do this improvisation exercise. And then they'd go out and practice outside of class and then return for debriefings and more modules. Allow me to introduce Dr. Eli Finkel, a psychologist who is also one of two faculty directors at the center for Enlightened Disagreement. And here he is explaining how all of this came together, how it was laid out over time.

[Eli Finkel]

First quarter was basic skills. There were several of us who had some concern about throwing, for example, first quarter freshmen. Some of the people are first year students in at the deep end with really contentious issues. And so the first quarter was basic skills. So our friend Heather Barnes came in and did some demonstrations of key techniques from Second City, astoundingly effective at teaching people how to listen, not just for what people are saying, but for what's underneath what people are saying. And then we brought in Martine Carcasson, who I think also is a friend of the podcast here.

[David McRaney]

Yes, Dr. Martine Carcasson, who is the director of the center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. He appeared on episode 331 of this podcast where he discussed the wicked problems that often emerge during debate. That's what they call them, wicked problems. And they emerge during disagreement and deliberation. And he and his team at Colorado State are developing ways to facilitate that kind of deliberation, especially in local government, to, as they put it, quote, spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best.

[Eli Finkel]

And he asked people to think seriously about values, nine different values, all of which are good.

[David McRaney]

Those values are community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security.

[Eli Finkel]

Everybody values all nine of these things. How would you rank them? Oh, that's interesting. Now that you've ranked them, how did the person next to you rank them? Why did you rate security as Number one. And I rated it as number seven. And that was incredibly stimulating. In the winter quarter, that's where we did start tossing them in. Toward the deeper end, we used Steve Frankaneri's game, a game called Point Taken, to allow them the opportunity to engage in a discussion of a politically contentious issue.

[David McRaney]

Yes, Dr. Steve Frankaneri, he's a cognitive scientist who has done incredible work at his visual laboratory at Northwestern. He appeared on episode 329, and on that episode he shared a project that came out of his work studying data visualization. He and his team, they found astonishingly effective ways to visualize arguments, the kind of arguments that tend to grow toxic and turn into fights. Using all that research, they created a game called, as Eli just mentioned, point taken. This game involves picking a topic, writing reasons on octagonal pieces of paper for being for or against this topic or something related to it or something within it, and placing those tiles around a big octagon in the middle of the table or wherever you're playing this. And inside that big octagon is the original question or the topic that's being discussed or argued. And as you keep playing, each side writes rebuttals to the reasons already on the game board. And these rebuttal tiles go down next to the reasons tiles. And on it goes, both sides working to quote, unquote, win the game. And the way you win the game is by closing a thread. And the way you close a thread is by placing a thumbs up emoji token on tiles you agree are good rebuttals. Or you place scale emojis on rebuttals that indicate different priorities. Or you place an emoji for we should fact check this or you place one for this is a difference of personal taste. And once all the threads on the board are closed, your team wins.

[Eli Finkel]

And what's so cool about the way that we were able to do it with the Point Taken game is the game is structured to maximize argument mapping. There has to be a formal structure to the case that people are making. It's embedded in the game and also communication skills. You can think of it as like couples therapy. Plus, logical thinking is the game. And that got tense sometimes, but they just plowed through. They plowed through it when it got tense. And then the last session in the middle part was deliberative polling. So some people out there might have heard of the idea of America in one room. But the idea is if you were to design a democracy where people actually think critically about the issues and are equipped with the Most relevant arguments and the best information. What would it look like if they got 10 people around a table to debate the issues? And so we did various aspects of free speech, campus free speech. And to what degree should social media companies be responsible for things posted on their website platforms? Really in the weeds and excellent. And then I'm delighted to say that we brought you, David McRaney in for the spring quarter. So the fifth of the sixth modules was a keynote address. We gave all of the students in the program a copy of your book, How Minds Change People out There. If you have not yet memorized it, I urge you to buy and read or listen to it as soon as you can. And then we had you in residency here long enough that we were able to do the sixth and final module with you happening now. And what we did there is you had trained people up on how to do telescoping, a form of communicating about politically contentious or morally complicated issues, a basic version of how one might want to do that. And so you helped debrief that technique that you exposed them to. And then we then closed down the overall experience. And the debriefings at the end were, it was just a pleasure how actively engaged the students were and how insightful they were about what they'd learned throughout the course. Course of the year.

[Tychea Woods]

This experience was really interesting for me because a lot of these concepts like I've been researching or like I think about very actively because again, like, this is the field that I want to pursue.

[David McRaney]

That's Tychea Woods, a student at Northwestern who went through all of this. She's a senior studying psychology and international studies.

[Tychea Woods]

But my long term aspirations are to just work in peace. So I'm really interested in peace and conflict resolution, which was. That's kind of why I was interested in joining the center.

[David McRaney]

As you can hear, the students were so highly engaged. They took these modules very seriously. They had so many questions, so many insights.

[Tychea Woods]

So I think it was very interesting from the standpoint of seeing what it means and what it looks like for students to engage in this space a bit more organically, like not in a class discussion, but also maybe not at the macro level of like people who do conflict resolution and all this stuff at a high scale. So I think for me, the modules were a very interesting exercise of like, understanding how do these skills, like, what does it look like in practice?

[David McRaney]

Basically, in my modules, a lot of the students told me they had some experience with debate back in high school. They'd been on debate teams and such. And they were really into that sort of thing. So they were surprised at how debate was either de emphasized or completely reframed across all of the modules.

[Yihuan Zhou]

The dynamic of this whole structure, I think it's very, very well organized and it makes a really comfortable environment for students to get involved in it. And even though disagreement is in the name of the program, I think it never felt really like that. It felt more just curiosity and conversations and active listening and fun.

[David McRaney]

That was Yihuan Zhou, a student at Northwestern who went through the modules, and she is studying mechanical engineering.

[Yihuan Zhou]

I'm really interested in healthcare, robotics, and the whole side of bioengineering as well.

[David McRaney]

Yihuan shared that for her, the best part of the program was was how all of this set her up to have a different kind of conversation during the two student coffee chats that the center held with the administration. In those chats, the students could ask any questions they wished. But with their new active listening skills, the ones that had been enhanced by the modules and their conversational skills that have been leveled up, Johan found herself perspective taking and in a whole new way.

[Yihuan Zhou]

These two coffee chats were one with President Michael Shill and another with President Henry Biennon.

[David McRaney]

Back in high school, Johan had been president of the student council, and she said it involved a lot of conflict, a lot of disagreement, a lot of value clashing. But using what she had learned in the program, in the modules. Well, this conversation was illuminating.

[Yihuan Zhou]

I had asked them, having such a hard job, like you basically have the impossible task of making everyone happy and managing such a big school where you have to communicate and work directly with the government and also with a board of trustees, with students, parents, faculty, so much happening, so many different values are being in conflict. What do you make of that and what is your approach? After hearing the responses, my own mind was actually completely changed on how I viewed the way my high school principals approached leadership and administrating. I think it combines a lot of things. First of all, I'm getting to hear so many perspectives from President Shill, President Bienen. But then also I'm thinking really critically. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, asking them questions. I get to compare and evaluate these, their responses and experiences, and then applying that to my own life, my own experience and tension with administration. In high school, and then all throughout high school, I had a lot of tension. But now looking back, I'm like, wow, I really respect my high school principal.

[Adrian Woo]

What I really appreciated about this was the modules took things that are components of other interactions and foregrounded them to be the main objective of what people were trying to do.

[David McRaney]

That's another Northwestern student, Adrian Woo.

[Adrian Woo]

I'm double majoring in economics and learning and Organizational change with an AI minor. I like people, I'm interested in people, I like teams. And that's what drew me to this program.

[David McRaney]

Adrian said that for him, the modules showed that in any conversation that involves disagreement, there will be things motivating each party that maybe neither party is aware of or neither party is willing to admit outright if they don't feel safe to do so.

[Adrian Woo]

So for example, if you are having a conversation with your parents, the objective is probably not to destroy anything in your life, but also probably it's like to get whatever you want out of the conversation. But that first thing is a little bit backgrounded in our brains, I think sometimes because we just sort of think about how can we win in this conversation? And then that ends up being the point where you feel very vulnerable, because if I let up, then I'll be showing weakness. But I think what the modules did really well is that they set up a really supportive and safe environment for that aspect of learning how to be more intentional with conversations as the main priority instead of winning at something else through conversation. So it was simply an act of how can we interact with another human being a little bit more intentionally, regardless of what context it is in.

[David McRaney]

For my part in all of this, as Eli Finkel just shared a moment ago, I gave a keynote lecture on How Minds Change my book. I took parts of that book and demonstrated how they related to the program. And then we moved into a more workshop like setting where I introduced the students to something I like to call telescoping, which is my combination of motivational interviewing techniques from psychology and therapeutic practices therapy combined with something they teach you in journalism school, which is the art of asking follow up questions. It's something that journalist Monica Guzman and I touched on briefly in episode 306 discussing her book. I Never Thought of it that way. Guzman learned her version of follow up question asking from a workshop led by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jackie Bunaszinski. In my version of this exercise, you ask a question that activates a person's introspection and then you follow that question with another question that activates that person's reasoning. It evokes their reasoning, their justifications and rationalizations and explanations for why they answered the way they did in the first question. For training purposes, you start with something innocuous like do you enjoy it when people sing Happy Birthday at a birthday party. And then you follow that question with another question that boils down to asking the person why or why not? Once you've asked for the other person's reasoning, you then must focus on each answer as they come to you and ask follow up questions that only address their most recent answer. And you keep doing that, each follow up question referring to the most recent answer for as long as possible. After a set amount of time, you switch roles with your partner and they ask you a different question, but with the same rules. And once you get the gist of this and you've practiced a little bit, you can open with a question about a person's opinion on a polarized topic, a political issue, a moral issue, or something that is personal. It's affecting you and the other person, affecting your family, affecting your relationship. After demonstrating all of this, showing all this, doing the exercises, we sent the students out into the world to do this on their own. And then they came back the next week to learn more. When they came back, I talked about confabulation, which is when portions of the brain that speak for you, they're somehow isolated from particular stimuli. And those portions will then outright lie about why you are responding in a certain way to those stimuli. They create narratives that are believable, plausible, defensible, but what makes them confabulation is that, well, they're just not true. And you, the person who is saying all this, believe these statements are true. So it's lying, but your conscious self is not aware that it's lying. And I talked about all this to help frame how motivated reasoning works in general. And what can happen when two people discuss an issue in such a way that it can become a surprising revelation to the person on the other side that that is underpinning a lot of their argumentation. The students shared in the debriefings, it often only took three or four questions before the other person found themselves articulating things they may have never considered before. And in so doing, they often felt some dissonance between their initial knee jerk responses, their assumed motivations, their assumed explanations, and the deeper underlying values that became more and more clear over the course of the conversations. They also shared that they found that both sides felt okay to be vulnerably and transparently interviewed in this way. And through that communication, they were able to produce less confabulatory justifications and explanations, things that emerge in this kind of interaction. And on the question asker side, each time you do this, you become a better, non judgmental, active Listener a crucial skill set for the sort of things the Litowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement aims to teach.

[Adrian Woo]

It was really such an amazing organic experience of having everybody come in to this room and then all authentically be vulnerable and really try to improve at these things, because these are difficult topics and they make people uncomfortable, like challenging themselves in these ways. And it could have easily just turned into a thing where you show up and you just kind of like eat food and you talk about some stuff and you listen to somebody have a slideshow and you leave. But instead it turned into this, I think, really intentional, shared by many, many students, sort of community of people who are all trying to gain something unique from the themselves out of it. You don't get experiences like these a lot where there's no phones, no laptops in sight. Everybody is just talking to one another for an hour and a half straight. Like it's just person to person interaction. The most electronics is like a slideshow. That's kind of it. So I just think stuff like that is hard to find nowadays. And to have something like this, especially in the pilot year, is something really, really magical.

[David McRaney]

By the way, Monica Guzman, who I mentioned a moment ago, is a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a bridging organization who sent a representative to help develop these training programs, these modules. That all happened at a meeting a couple of months ago. That's where I first met all these incredible people that Northwestern gathered to help create the center and this pilot program. They held a conference of experts and enthusiasts and nerds on these topics, all devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements. And at that conference we all gathered to compare notes and trade ideas. Braver Angels sent Jesse Manisto, their director of debates, who created a formal argumentation framework which uses a moderator and a set of rules that combined truly works wonders. And I'll have links to all of that, all the things mentioned so far in the show notes. But as you can see, there are a lot of connections here with you Are not so Smart and my book How Minds Change. For instance, I should mention Eli. Eli Finkel has been a guest on this show back on episode 319, where he talked about what movies often get wrong about romantic love, relationships and human intimacy in general. He has his own podcast about that sort of thing called Love Factually and a book about that called the all or Nothing Marriage.

[Eli Finkel]

I am Eli Finkel, a professor at Northwestern. I study intimate relationships and political partisanship.

[David McRaney]

And as I mentioned earlier, Eli is one of the two faculty directors and a co founder of the center for Enlightened Disagreement. The other is being chair of the center, Dr. Noor Kataly.

[Noor Kataly]

Hi, I'm Noor Kataly and I'm a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management here at Northwestern University. And I study intergroup conflict and intergroup relationships.

[David McRaney]

Okay, so you've met a few of the principal players at the Litowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Eli Finkel, Norca Taily, and Brad Zakrin. And you've heard from some of the students who went through the pilot program there. Which brings us to something I want to talk about after the break, which is something new that they're working on in partnership with the Medill School of Journalism, something that is very in line with what we often talk about here on the youe're not so Smart podcast. Intellectual humility, skepticism, science literacy, media literacy. All that combined together with the resources of the center and its power to educate and illuminate people in service of its mission, which, as Brad Zakrin puts

[Brad Zakarin]

it, is saving disagreement from polarization.

[David McRaney]

After this break, you will hear all about this new initiative, this gamification of science literacy through the center. And then we will return to Eli Finkel and Nora Catale, who will tell us all about what this pilot program was like for them and what they have in store next for the center for Enlightened Disagreement. All that after this break. So good, so good, so good.

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FDIC, subject to credit approval.

[David McRaney]

The School of Thought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a nonprofit organization. They provide free Creative Commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide and their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools K I T T E D Thinking Tools and the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them, and the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality. Each one about double the size of a playing Card, Matte Cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas you if you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investors Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a User Experience designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. You're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to kitted Shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the School of thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. I'm David McCraney. This is the youe Are not so Smart podcast and the person who you are about to hear is journalist and journalism professor Patty Wolter.

[Patty Walter]

Hi, I'm Patty Wolter. I am the Helen Gurley Brown Magazine professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

[David McRaney]

As a journalism professor at one of the most respected journalism schools in the world, Patty Walter teaches her students about a lot of fascinating fact checking, science writing, narrative structure, feature writing, magazine writing, storytelling in general, and much more. Journalism is alive and well and there are many, many students learning the trade right now who are about to enter the world and tell us about that world. And as digital natives, they will take some of the old and some of the new and put that together and carry journalism forward for another generation. That's what Patty Walter does, prepare students of journalism for a world that desperately needs them to be great at their jobs. And right now, Patty Walter is working on a new related project and I think it's easier to introduce it to you with a question. Here is Patty Walter asking that question?

[Patty Walter]

True.

[Tychea Woods]

False.

[Patty Walter]

Most American women did not eat an adequate amount of protein daily, especially for weight loss and strength training.

[David McRaney]

True or false? Most American women do not eat an adequate amount of daily protein, especially for weight loss and strength training. What is your gut reaction to this question? Does it feel right to say this is true or does it feel right to say this is false? Well, the answer is, according to a lot of science devoted to this topic, in the United States right now, everyone is getting plenty of protein. Most adults, most men and women meet or exceed their daily recommended amount of protein daily. And you don't need meat or eggs or protein powders or protein bars or taco flavored protein chips to get that daily recommended amount of daily protein. Oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, all sources of protein. If you add some cheese or any meat of any kind, you'll likely exceed your daily requirements, even if you're strength training. Despite this, in a recent survey of U.S. adults, 71% said they were worried they were not getting enough protein. And my sources for all of that, if you are like a little skeptical, which I hope you are and hope you always will be, that's research by Dr. Joshua L. Hudson and his team. He's a gastroenterologist and research scientist at UNC Chapel Hill. In addition, I checked the Department of Agriculture's Food Data Central database, along with reporting on the topic by journalist Alice Callahan, who covers nutrition and health for the New York Times. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes for this episode. The point here with this question and all these sources is this is what Patty Walter is working on right now. The science reporting of it, the back and forth conversation we're having with science reporting, or the lack thereof. Despite all of this being readily available and common knowledge among scientists who study nutrition and diet and how bodies do what bodies do, most of the United States is currently wrong about this particular topic. Protein. Not just factually incorrect, but worried about it. And worried about it because they are confidently wrong when it comes to opinions and attitudes based on some factually incorrect beliefs. And they don't know that. They don't know that they are incorrect. In fact, they believe they are very much correct about the lack of protein in their diets. So much so they might argue about this online, in their homes, with their families, and so on. This is why Patty Walter is currently working on a new project for focused on basic science literacy and basic science communication on the part of journalists. How to get better at explaining how we know what we know. And by we, I mean experts, scientists, people who know things, and how to better convey all that sort of thing to your audience. For me, the idea here seems a lot like reigniting the flame of science communicators like Carl Sagan, who focused on the method of thinking like a scientist as much as the science itself. And all of this is for students both in high school and college. The focus, to reiterate, is a foundational understanding about how science does science, how it knows what it knows, hypothesizes what it hypothesizes, and all for the sake of becoming a better consumer of science news and a better skeptic of sciencey sounding nonsense and a better communicator of all of the above. So this project, it's in the prototype beta testing stage and Patti is working on that project, that beta version of this whole idea with Brad Zakrin, who introduced himself earlier, but here he is introducing himself a second time.

[Brad Zakarin]

I'm Brad Zakarin. I am the curriculum director at the Lidowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University.

[David McRaney]

In this partnership is possible because the center isn't just producing a series of modules, it's also doing research and developing programs, games and Lesson plans for K12 education and beyond. The idea being with the resources at their disposal, with the expertise at their disposal at a university like this, with a center like this, they could produce things that would go into the mainstream. They already have a game like Point Taken and another game they consulted on and were introduced to by Joshua Green, who was on an episode of this podcast talking about this called Tango. You can check that [e-mail] you can listen to Joshua Green talk about this on episode 327. It's a game that helps people overcome disagreement. It helps people become more intellectually humble. It's really cool. And Joshua Green was at that original conference of people who wanted to help the center get started and design the pilot program. So gamification was a big part of that original meeting. So they're imagining this science literacy idea as a game, something that could go mainstream, something that might end up on an app, on your phone, or part of a magazine or national newspaper. This game, this potential game, is something that Brad Zakren and Patty Walter together co imagined after they met at an institution at Northwestern called the Garage, which is an entity that helps students learn about entrepreneurialism. The Garage held a problem summit where they invited faculty to present problems in the world that students could possibly work on to possibly help solve through a new business or product or an invention. And at that summit, Brad Zakarin introduced the center and all of its intricacies along with one of its games. Point taken. Patty Walter gave a talk about science literacy and the lack thereof in the currently chaotic media creation and media consumption ecosystem. And in that talk she asked the following questions of the audience.

[Patty Walter]

Last year there was a comment the third interstellar interloper. This suggests possible signs of alien life.

[David McRaney]

True or false? Last year we saw a comet come pretty close to Earth, the third interstellar interloper, in a relatively brief window of time. Does this suggest possible signs of alien Life? Next question.

[Patty Walter]

2024. The last complete record was the hottest year on record as well as the highest CO2 levels in the atmosphere. True or false?

[David McRaney]

And here's another.

[Patty Walter]

The CDC FDA created the VAERS database in 1990 and has a three decade record of adverse vaccine reactions. True or false?

[David McRaney]

Here's another one. True or false?

[Patty Walter]

Caffeine is linked to shorter lifespans.

[David McRaney]

And one more There is a possible

[Patty Walter]

link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy. True or fals?

[David McRaney]

Patty Walter asked all of these questions, including the earlier one about protein consumption of the students who attended the Problem Summit at Northwestern.

[Patty Walter]

I did a Mix of things that had been in the news, that were heavy hitters in the world of misinformation and also not. And the only one the students got right was the false statement of there's a possible link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy.

[David McRaney]

To be clear, the current consensus is there is no causal connection. As recently as March of 2026, a meta study, a study of studies, 43 studies, found across all that research there was no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy increased the risk of autism.

[Patty Walter]

That was the only one they correctly answered false.

[David McRaney]

Which you might think would caused Petty Walter to feel some optimism. But her concern is right or wrong, how are you vetting your opinions on scientific fact based issues like these?

[Patty Walter]

And then I said, how do you know that and I don't? You probably even saw the audience better than I did. But one of the guys raised his hands and he was sort of motioned. He's like, we can, because we're here. And I said, well, who's looked at the studies? Who read the articles that explained why they did studies as siblings and why that, you know, and nobody had nobody, nobody could answer how they knew that they knew this. Yes, it was their environment and their political leanings and their university setting that in this case sort of probably is right. And that their degrees of separation from the kinds of researchers that do this and can explain to them why that there is not a link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy. So they're not wrong there, but the fact that they couldn't even answer that. And I think going back to the protein 1, it is not hard to look up information from legitimate medical sites that explain that most people get way more protein than they need. Right. And yet we're not questioning why we even need to question that in some cases, let alone what your sources are or what sources would be good sources. And again, how do you know? You know that?

[David McRaney]

So after this event, after presenting her problem and seeing the audience's reaction, seeing their answers, and then watching Brad Zakrin's presentation about gamifying argumentation, she couldn't shake the idea that maybe there was a connection here, maybe there was a possibility here, a potential.

[Patty Walter]

By the time I went to the parking lot, I was emailing the guy who organized it. By the way, this was a Saturday and I was not entirely thrilled about coming back to campus. I'm like, hey, that was really, really fun. And I think that the students, if they were really listening to what we all said, should take Brad's game and solution and apply that to my problem of science literacy. By Sunday night, I had an email from Brad saying that he had said the exact same thing to Mike. But Brad took it a step further and had already designed a game that could lend itself to both understanding disagreement and increasing science literacy.

[Brad Zakarin]

I was so intrigued by what she was talking about and felt so much resonance with her problem and the problem that I was about to be pitch. I was able to get through my time in pretty good order and like Patty said, by the time the session was over, we had already asked Mike about combining forces. And I was so inspired I started working on a game that night, and Patty and I are eager to develop this and have already had some conversations about different directions it could go in and how to refine it. There's a lot in the realm of important enlightened disagreement about topics involving scientific literacy, because some of the most heated debates in public right now are around things like vaccines and some things that we would just commonly take as accepted in the realm of science. And the way she put together her presentation with the quiz made me think about certain other initiatives out there. I know you've had Josh Green from Harvard on your podcast talking about his game Tango in the way you can play these online games and test yourself, collaborate with somebody, and then check in on how well do I really know something? And so what Patti brought to the table struck me as something that was relevant to the larger world of enlightened disagreement work, but also very applicable to my focus of that day, which is developing games for the K12 world. Because there's a lot that's happening in basic science education in the K12 world where you would hope students are coming to understand the basics of the scientific method and that the point of the scientific method isn't to prove a thing. It's right to find out more, enhance a theory. Right? Make us more confident, more sure that we know something until somebody tells us otherwise. Right? And so it struck me as I'm about to give this pitch to a bunch of really curious and creative Northwestern students, and what Patty just served up on a silver platter is the potential theme or basis of a game. And it was so compelling that, like she said earlier, I went off that night and started putting together the shell of a game.

[David McRaney]

So what is this game that you're both interested in? What is this next step that we're thinking about?

[Brad Zakarin]

So the idea is to set up what will likely be an online game where people can put their scientific literacy to the test and we would invite players to come in and let us know what they think their level of scientific literacy is. And then they can answer a number of questions. Some of them would be along the lines of the examples that Patti gave from her presentation at the garage. And if they answer a question and it's wrong, we would have the game present them with the correct information and we could ask them would they like to know what the basis of the correct answer is. And then they could be opting into getting a little bit more information and there could be links embedded in that. They would then have the option to click on those links. And so along the way, as they're demonstrating their scientific literacy, or lack thereof, they would be generating data for us about how one's self assessment is correlated with their knowledge, is correlated with their curiosity to learn more about something that maybe they don't know as well as they thought they knew. If they got something right, what, what did they base the answer on? Is it common knowledge? Is it part of a belief system, you know, religion, faith, perhaps? Is it from a source like that? They read a story recently, did they learn it in school? And try to get them to think I answered true or false very quickly, but why did I answer quickly and why did I answer that way? And so throughout the game, what should happen, whether it is ultimately a one player or a two player game, is people are going to get to the end and have a chance to reassess their scientific literacy. And we hope that they'll walk away with a little bit more intellectual humility. One of the things that would be interesting about a two player version is there could be some degrees of collaboration like Tango offers, and there would also be an opportunity to see what your partner got wrong. And then at the end of the game be able to answer some questions where you're projecting what you think the profile of your partner is. Their age, their education level, their political leanings. And so you get some exciting gameplay, but you also generate some interesting data that can inform refinements of the game and help us think more subtly about topics like scientific literacy like intellectual humility and correlations between mindsets and skill sets. Like am I going to bother to click through to actually learn more when I get something wrong?

[Patty Walter]

I also really liked a whole section of the draft that Brad created is about what is an authoritative source and a credible source. And not what I think is an authoritative or credible source, but what the user, the person playing the game, thinks is a credible or an authoritative source in my perfect world. And we haven't gotten this far yet. There might be some way to ultimately, I guess this is the teacher in me talking, bring it around to what is a way that explains why one source might be credible to a scientific community. Or you know, again, I don't. I always want to be careful with what my view of a credible science source is and why versus versus People who believe something that maybe doesn't feel as credible. But where can their ultimately in the answers and the training lend to teaching? And that may be once we gather a whole lot of data that we then go back and think about refining. I have an amazing PhD student that I'm working with in the science communication certificate, but who's in cognitive science and looking at something called refutation text. And how do you order information to honor somebody's belief whether it's true or false, and then frame the information that comes after it such that it actually has the power to change their minds? And you know this way better than I do. You've written about people's tendency to hear facts and get more entrenched in the thing they already believed. But there is some psychology around where you can order information and bring people to the point of having a better assessment tool and maybe changing their minds. And I would love the game to both help us assess and understand science literacy, but get to a point where we're giving people the kind of information that, and I think this is what I was learning even with reading your book, is you empower people to have the knowledge so that they feel in control of changing their own minds. And that to me would be the ultimate, ultimate goal of science literacy. But the game of course starts with this. How do you know what you know and how do you believe what you know? And at least starting this point of questioning and conveniently also allowing us to

[David McRaney]

study it, there's sort of a dice roll of nature nurture thing. There's a distribution of being comfortable. Journalists, scientists, people in academia really like not knowing stuff. Being introduced to a great pocket of ignorance I wasn't aware of before is exciting because I can and walk into that ignorant space and that's a. It seems to me that there's, there's a way that this game you're describing is, can introduce that being a positive thing. I'm interested in the game that you're imagining here. One thing that I'm sensitive to is like how do we avoid in the game going haha, you believe that like making them feel silly and stupid and just avoiding a shame state a lot

[Brad Zakarin]

of that does get into the details of not only the content that we're bringing in, but also the responsiveness of the game. A lot of standardized testing for folks in the K12 world today. It's all done online. And the better you're doing, the harder the questions will get. So I think we can modulate how the game advances so that somebody who's struggling may not continue to get harder and harder questions. They might get more questions that are designated as being at a certain level to increase the likelihood of them getting some wins in there. And that's why Patty and I need to get through the rest of this academic year and spend some more time together and being completely honest, spend more time with people who have greater expertise, whether it's faculty and graduate students in fields like psychology or some of the undergraduates and graduate students who are coming from across the university, including the Kellogg School of Management, to help us think about how to package this in a compelling way. People who know game design, people who know what will keep users in the game and not have them feel like they're losing it prematurely.

[David McRaney]

I'm thinking about adults now or people who are coming to this from the Internet in general. They're not being introduced to this in a classroom setting. Like, how do we make this something that people would want to even do? Like, why would I even submit myself to try playing around in this world? Have you put any thought into how do we compel people to just give it a go?

[Brad Zakarin]

Have you heard of wordle? I think the bar is quite low for getting people to spend five or 10 minutes doing a thing for a dopamine hit or two. And that's where I think we can work on the intellectual goals and societal goals of cultivating scientific literacy and packaging it in a way that people could take five minutes or 10 minutes out of their day or out of their week for the next bank of questions to drop.

[Patty Walter]

Something that I think I feel deeply and is one of the reasons that I've connected so much with Brad on this topic. And something you said about shame is that I don't think the purpose is take this quiz and prove that you're right about the moon landing out that this is for people who want to be curious and want a safe place to be curious. So, like, when you said shame, it really struck me me on the way I heard it was shame around being wrong. But I think especially in an environment like Northwestern and certainly science and whatnot, there's shame. It's not so much. Shame is I can't let people know how much I don't know. The intellectual humility is not considered positive, so the what you don't know is considered a negative. And creating a space where the sheer fact of not knowing is actually the good thing and the curiosity thing and the way to step forward and learn and engage that it's okay to want to know or to not know or to be challenged or to change your mind or any of these things.

[Brad Zakarin]

This is another reason why I need more time to hang out with Patty and talk about this game. Because I think when I was trying to give you a quick rundown of how it might work and I was saying you might get an answer wrong and then be offered the opportunity to learn more right, we haven't talked through the scoring of the game. I can imagine a world where you get positive points for answering a question correctly and you might get as many, maybe even more positive points if you get something wrong. But continue to click through those articulations of I want to know why I am wrong and can you show me a credible source so that I might know more by the time I'm done with this game.

[David McRaney]

Before I parted ways with Patty and Brad, I asked them both why they were so passionate about this, so confident this was something worth pursuing.

[Brad Zakarin]

Disagreement is not the problem of our day. It's the affective polarization that is associated with disagreement. So we've got to figure out what's baby and what's bathwater. And you don't just flip a switch on that. You need to give people easy and early opportunities to clear the lenses and to be able to distinguish what's good, what's bad. Because the point of the Litowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement isn't to find some consensus around a mushy middle. Sometimes disagreement is what you need for the real progress. And without training people in what I like to refer to as pre disagreement activities, which is the curiosity, the intellectual humility, you're not setting them up to be successful when they need to navigate a real disagreement around a moralized issue. And if games get us going with 15 and 16 year olds but it turns out that 50 and 60 year olds like to play it too. In the New York Times app seems like a win all the way around.

[Patty Walter]

I love learning science with the students I teach science writing and journalism to.

[David McRaney]

Patty Walter teaches a Writing for Consumer Audiences class for STEM and PhD students.

[Patty Walter]

Some days it almost feels selfish that I have a room of 18 PhDs from all across the university and I have this bird's eye view of all this amazing research that's going on. And I also am painfully and passionately aware of the gulf between what the average journalism student, not even talking about the public, the worlds. I know the average journalism student who's not in science doesn't understand about science, but also the world in which the PhD students have to inhabit and how that world also prevents them from being able to share this amazing stuff they're doing with the world. The need to bring those worlds together can create all kinds of curiosity and excitement and engagement. My own kids will tell you how annoying it is almost every dinner table conversation. I'm like, I have a student who's working on that and I can talk about what's happening in the world. But these very fundamental ideas of any given study is just a data point on a continuum of knowledge and foundational bench. Science is so crucial and that we do that at a university because you wouldn't have an electric vehicle if there weren't 50 years of people at universities, painfully, for no, you know, extra money or patents or anything, figuring out electricity and batteries in a new way. And how can the especially university scientists and university student scientists make it sexy and exciting to explain why they push a button all day in a dark lab just to place a little bit of knowledge onto the this thing that might become a greater enterprise? And to the journalism students who want, who are trained in news judgment and media to have the headline with the exclamation mark, the cancer cure, the, you know, life found on a planet, all that kind of stuff. And to say in a world in which that's not actually what we find every day in science, but there's so many exciting things we are finding. Your job as journalists is to also understand that continuum. And if I can get both sides to understand their job is to make that enterprise exciting and how to have that conversation and that there are rules and norms and again, science literacy and all of this that allow that understanding to happen. Then we do this huge service to the public. And in the United States, our citizens are paying for a lot of that science. So how do we bring these groups to together to get this world and this message out there in a way that feels not like, why haven't scientists figured out this out yet? But isn't it cool that they're doing this thing so that they can figure out that other thing someday? So even as I'm talking about I want everybody to do this together, I'm also recognizing, and this goes right back to the game that everybody has this fear of not appearing smart enough, and it means they don't engage. So how do you pave the path to curiosity by giving people steps and tools to do that.

[David McRaney]

Let's return now to the pilot program at the center for Enlightened Disagreement, the Litowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University, and sit down with faculty directors Eli Finkel and Noor Ka Tehiley to get a grand overall debriefing of how it went, what they learned, and what they see on the horizon. This is professor of management and organizations at Northwestern, Noor Kataly, with an overview of what this center is.

[Noor Kataly]

So, yeah, the center of Enlightened Disagreement is really our attempt to get a better understanding of and have a useful impact in the main of how to sharpen people's understandings of their disagreements, how to make people confident and comfortable in engaging on political and moralized issues in such a way, such that they can really understand the substance of where they disagree and also feel comfortable wading into conversations where they disagree in ways that are forthright and move the conversation forward.

[David McRaney]

And this is professor of psychology Eli Jay Finkel. Same question.

[Eli Finkel]

Disagreement is a great thing. We're leaning in. We're not trying to create a bunch of centrists. We're not trying to make everybody just be nice. We want people to advocate forcefully for the things that they believe in. But our society is not really functioning effectively along those lines. And we think disagreement can be a lot better and that society, as a result, could also be a lot better.

[David McRaney]

Second question. Now that they've gone through the pilot program, what were some surprises?

[Eli Finkel]

I think one of the things that surprised us and also delighted us is the engagement from the students. There's a stereotype about the kids these days that they're unwilling to engage, they're unwilling to communicate openly, especially about really difficult topics. They're obsessed with their phones. Right. There's a lot of stereotypes about that. And in this pilot year, we got a couple hundred students. We have them in several different cohorts, and they show up almost every time they show up, and we ask them to do difficult things. We ask them to develop critical thinking skills. We ask them to develop better listening skills. We have them talk about really contentious issues. On a couple rare occasions, feathers really did get ruffled. And I was just so impressed with the students here in terms of their eagerness to engage and how well they tackled it. Once they got involved, students were super

[Noor Kataly]

plugged in, like Eli's saying. I think that throughout they, you know, not only did they show up, they rolled with it. We asked them. This program was very experiential. Every single one of the modules, they were doing stuff, and they were having to share out and report and, you know, engage with peers of theirs that had different opinions on meaningful issues. And, you know, at every stage, people were present, they were engaged, they were doing their best.

[David McRaney]

Third question, and this is actually something I shared with the students. It's an old journalism trick. This seems hard. Always a good question to ask in any interview. This seems like a hard thing to do. Why put so much effort into it? Especially for people who have a whole academic career they have to deal with and put up with and juggle and spin plates. This seems hard. Why do this?

[Noor Kataly]

I grew up in a society that was divided along sectarian lines, where the whole was not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts, where a lot of that conflict ended up causing real damage to the society as a whole. And I believe that it is important to be able to both have the difficult conversations, but also have them in ways that are constructive. I believe that it's important for people to be willing to show up and actually engage. I felt that it was important to train our students to actually feel comfortable, to know that having a difficult conversation didn't mean that they had to necessarily give up on the substance of what they believed, but rather to empower them to be able to honestly present their perspectives in ways that represent them.

[Eli Finkel]

Well, yeah, I mean, if Noor's path is relatively straightforward, mine's kind of weird. I was always an intimate relationships researcher. I wrote a book for the general public about how to have a better marriage. I host speed dating events for Northwestern undergraduates because I'm interested in studying romantic attraction. And sometime during the first Trump administration, I actually became, like, deeply concerned about the future of my country, partly as a partisan, but more as an American. And I just realized that we lived in different epistemic ecosystems in different worlds, and the same events meant something totally different to, you know, reds and blues or people with one viewer versus another view. And I became existentially concerned about the future of a country like that, where you don't actually share a common understanding of things. And so I pivoted pretty significantly. And my initial point of pivot was to think about America as a marriage or a nation as a marriage. And I thought, well, okay, like, let's imagine that, you know, reds and blues or, you know, conservatives and liberals or something are sort of married. We're sort of stuck Here, together. We made this vow to be together, or we were born into it, anyway. And I set myself a thought experiment, which was I tried to think, well, if I wanted to build the worst possible marriage, like, literally the most toxic marriage, I could. And I got a bunch of my married science buddies into a marriage lab and said, all right, what ingredients would we need to build the worst possible marriage? And it would include things like, have as much contempt for your spouse as you can. Anytime your spouse does a thing, interpret it in the least generous way that you can. Surround yourself only with people who detest your spouse. And I came to this realization that we pretty much built it in a sort of Congratulations, America moment. I thought, well, we seem to have built basically the most toxic marriage I can imagine, and we call it the body politic, and we're running the Republic together. And I wanted to figure out, are there ways that we could make this better? Are there insights from the world of intimate relationships that we might be able to use to make things a little better in terms of how we manage our differences?

[David McRaney]

That sounds extremely difficult. That's a great thing to think of. In the shower, that might be where it happened, and just type it out and then send it out as a substack or a post or tell people over a meal, what do you do next after you have an idea like this? Or how do you find each other? How do you even start? What is step one in making a center?

[Noor Kataly]

Well, that part wasn't too hard because Eli and I actually share an office wall, so it was literally less than a stone throw away. But, no, I mean, it's interesting. As Eli mentioned, we come from different intellectual backgrounds. Right. So my background, my work really was in the world. World of intergroup conflict, intergroup relationships. A lot of my research was on black, white relations, Democrat, Republican perspectives, or perceptions of one another, how we believe that other groups perceive our own group, and the ways in which believing that we are dehumanized by another group can contribute to our own dehumanization of them and to cycles of conflict. So I was sort of squarely in the space. Eli was coming at it from a slightly different perspective, from the intimate relationships perspective. But, you know, in the conversations that we had over the years, and particularly with his growing interest in how some of those dynamics played out in our politics, we noticed that we were approaching it from slightly different angles that could be productive together. Right. I really think a lot about social structure, how groups are arranged hierarchically, think about the group level, whereas Eli is really looking at things from the level of oftentimes the dyadic interpersonal relationship. But both of those levels of analysis have a lot to add. And so together, I think we've been able to look at the problem from different lenses, different angles, in ways that I think move the conversation forward in a useful way.

[David McRaney]

What is step one of actually making a center that. I mean, I've got to experience this all week. Last week too. It's working, it's happening. Months ago, I got to go to the beginning of all this and see the people you'd plucked and pulled. Pulled. How do you even get something like this started? I'm thinking of people who are listening, who have ever even attempted to do anything like, oh, you pulled it off. How do you step into it in a way that you had to have not. It had to have sucked or been bad or you had to have made mistakes. At some point it started to gain momentum. I'm wondering how you got to the momentum stage.

[Eli Finkel]

Yeah, it started with us identifying some common interests. So even though Noor was an intergroup researcher and I was literally like a marriage researcher, one of the common grounds was motivated cognition. I'm sure your audience is very familiar with this idea that we have a propensity to view things in a way that is arguably self serving or from our own perspective. And as we discovered a lot of these overlapping things, we just had more and more conversations about what it is that we're seeing in the US and in other societies. And so we got together, I think, in early 2020, and we wrote it's called a white paper, and we shared it with our dean over in the Kellogg School of Management. At that point we thought it might be a business school focused endeavor. And she started working on procuring some funding for that. And then at some point, the president of the university got very involved, basically shared the view that something was amiss in terms of society's ability, but also the university's ability to engage productively across really moralized or politicized disagreements. And so he heard about us and said, wow, that's interesting. And to fast forward a little bit, it ended up being a university wide initiative housed in the provost's office of the university that was much more focused than we had initially thought on undergraduate education. That's a lot of what you're seeing is actually downstream from the fact that what we initially thought of as a Kellogg focused undertaking ended up being a university wide undertaking with a heavy emphasis on helping Northwestern undergraduates engage more seriously around these issues. By cultivating stronger critical thinking skills and stronger communication skills.

[David McRaney]

What would you say was your first success?

[Noor Kataly]

One early success was Eli and I actually worked together on a piece for the Harvard Business Review, which was published in their magazine, looking at how leaders and managers could manage in an ideologically charged age. So that was sort of nice. It was one of the first times we sat together and really thought through how some of these issues could operate at that point at the level of the workplace. But that was pretty early on in our journey. It takes time to sort of secure the funding that's necessary to get a venture like this off the ground at scale. So if we were to sort of fast forward a little bit, that piece was published in 2022. I would say the biggest sort of tangible win that got a lot of momentum going was the conference that we held, the pedagogy conference that we held in the summer of 2025. Not that we hadn't done anything in the intervening three years, but that was one of the first times where sort of as a center, after we had sort of officially launched and announced the initiative, we convened a group of something like 20 different people from across the country that were interested and had been doing sort of pedagogy in the space that had actually been bringing people together and having them in conversation. And it was just fascinating to have brought in such a different breadth of perspectives, Everything from people doing gun violence prevention to legal scholars, to science journalism. Science journalism. Big fan, as you know. Well, David. So that was just, I think, a real high watermark point. And. And there was a lot of magic that came out of that.

[David McRaney]

It was one of those things. I mentioned this with the students earlier. It was the Spider man meme was happening. We were all like, you two, you did like, oh, look, this is like, are you a specific nerd for a very specific thing that you didn't know other people were? I know there's like a general thing, but I'm like, really thin sliced. And you were that person too. And we all wanted something like this to occur. We all wanted something like this to exist. And there were attempts here and there, but they figured out a way to make this actually happen. If it's gonna happen, this is how you would probably do it.

[Eli Finkel]

I mean, I think you had that realization right at the moment. We had that realization. I mean, you'll notice that there were three years that were sort of glossed over in Noor's summary. And it's not that we weren't getting stuff done. We were getting Stuff done. But there's a real challenge with regard to your question of, like, what are the mechanics of this? There's a real cart before the horse problem of we're busy people. How do you build something without any staff? But you can't really hire staff if you've got like a few hundred thousand dollars here and there. You need like the major funding to make sure that you can really hire people and promise them that they'll actually have a job for, you know, on the order of at least half dozen years or more. And that pedagogy conference happened right around the time that we got our big $20 million naming gift and everything felt different and, and also the topic that we were exploring, and I think the way we were exploring it resonated for people such that pretty much everybody we invited to that conference came. And I think you have some sense of what we're up to now. And we're very, very ambitious in the people that we're communicating with. And by and large, people hear what we're up to and can check it out online at this point and say, whoa. These people really do seem to know what they're up to. But I think you were at the ground zero moment when we also were like, okay, it's happening. It's really come together. And since then, the pace has honestly astonished me.

[David McRaney]

I've been able to debrief people several days in a row now. A lot of things keep coming back. The students, they kept bringing up curiosity, but they kept bringing up curiosity in a very specific way. However, the current information ecosystem, whether or not we're phasing out of social media the way it was for a while, there is definitely an awareness in that age cohort that the algorithms are afoot and it feels like you're being poured into a bucket and being asked to be a bucket shaped person. I want to be a human being.

[Eli Finkel]

I'm like almost crying over here. We did kind of ruin it for them. I think that they're growing up in a pretty conflictual world where the disagreement is not being handled well. And yes, that's downstream from the social media companies, but I think this is related to one of the big things we've learned since we started the center. It's something that isn't really about the certificate program in particular, but we thought early on that one of the major things we were going to do was have debates. I mean, I actually think a lot of organizations like this, that's one of the first things you'd start with. We need to hear from diverse perspectives. That's absolutely consistent with our ethos and think clearly and what are the pros and cons of the various things. And we've really put that on the back burner because debates are great, they're valuable, and there are organizations that do that extremely well. Braver Angels is one, for example. But our focus, at least thus far, is on understanding, communicating effectively, certainly also advocating for your point of view. But the way you win Point Taken isn't by scoring a point and the people in the circle raise flags because you scored a point against the other side. It's, oh, that's where we disagree. You think this policy will create more death, and I think it will create more life. And it's like, great. If I had your view about that, if I had your assumption about the empirical consequences of a policy, then I would have your view too. That's like 80%. I mean, I'm spitballing that estimate. But a huge amount of the time when they play Point Taken, they're like, oh, wait a minute, I can't even find a disagreement anymore. Or they say, I know exactly where it is. We disagree about the facts, or this is something that you value and something that I value. That's the win for Point Taken. And that's not a debate. It's like a foundation for what you might want to do in order to have debate down the road. But it's like almost a necessary first step to be able to understand what is it that you are actually saying. Not the demon version of you in my head, but you as a real entity. And have I been able to hear that, and have I been able to communicate my side to. To you in a way that you understand?

[Noor Kataly]

You know, to a large extent, our program actually ended up generating human connection. If I think about what did we best help instill in these students, it's the skills in order to generate human connection that actually sets the foundation to be able to have productive debate and disagreement about some of these issues. Right. Like, if you don't start with good listening, if you don't start with an ability to actually hear what the other person is saying, you're going to have a very hard time having a useful disagreement.

[Eli Finkel]

You should be a marriage researcher.

[Adrian Woo]

Yeah.

[Noor Kataly]

So it turns out, turns out there's more overlap in those domains than I had always appreciated. I mean, I'll even say something very, very basic that has very little to do even with the general foundations of where we started the program with. I mean, one of the things that was almost even incidental. One of the things that ended up happening in the program is that we had pretty much representation from every single year of college at Northwestern. We had first year students all the way through seniors. And one of the things that was remarkable to me is hearing how many different students reflected on just the mere pleasure that they got from engaging with peers from different years that they otherwise don't interact with at Northwestern, or people talking about, I'm an engineering major. It was really interesting to hear the perspective of a theater major that might be in a different part of campus or goes to different clubs and groups on campus than I do. So part of the value that they got, frankly, was actually just being in spaces together and having conversations for two hours that pushed them to actually hear and learn from other people. Including in those cases where those other people came from different backgrounds, had different perspectives or different educational trajectories.

[Eli Finkel]

I think that's part of the reason why we've seen people so comfortable with debate. And in fact, you know, David, you witnessed one of the recent debriefings we had at the end of the sixth module where the students were pretty clear. They're like, we're ready, like, take the training wheels off. We wanted to do even more of the really contentious stuff. I think it's the thing that Noor's talking about is it turns out that when you've built these basic social skills, these basic interpersonal skills, which are also relevant to other issues, like there's something of a loneliness epidemic going on. But these basic skills then place people in a situation where they feel comfortable saying, no, we're ready. We're ready to talk about the really heavy stuff. And they did it in this certificate program. But the sense I have is that we could have pushed further. And I think that's because of the way we started with these basic listening skills and things like that.

[Noor Kataly]

And, you know, it's interesting, you know, as you think about the way that our center is set up in a space that is to some extent crowded, We've actually really leaned into those aspects that are sort of high touch and human connection, right? There are efforts, and there are good efforts to have people have conversations about difficult issues that are AI mediated, for example, at scale, and people are just chatting in a chat lobby with an AI that comes in and suggests that perhaps you might want to phrase things a little bit differently. All of that has great value. What we have decided, though, is really important to what we want to build at Northwestern is like, no, actually get the people in the room together, have them be in community with, with one another. Not only in the six modules that we generated this year, but again, part of the way we designed it is so that you meet other people that actually are co located with you on campus, right? That they live nearby you so that we can actually build that community, generate a different perspective on the value of having these conversations and provide opportunities for people to dig deeper. We think there's something really important in that very human touch aspect. And frankly, in a world where the role of, of technology seems to be getting greater and greater, my suspicion is that the value of humans being in community together is only going to go up, not down.

[David McRaney]

My great hope here is like this has just been. This is just a phase we all lived through and some of us got born into it and some of us got to watch it come and go. And some people unfortunately didn't get to see it go before they went. It's the leaded gasoline of our times. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut blamed it on. He thought that of television. He said, that's going to be the lead in the Roman pipes of our generation, right?

[Eli Finkel]

He was so naive.

[David McRaney]

It was so much simpler. He was worried about American gladiators being the end of civilization, right? So let's bring this in for a landing off of that, which is you have overcome a lot of challenges and you have learned a lot of lessons and you have seen things that worked and didn't work and you've seen places to go. Where are we going next?

[Eli Finkel]

Two of the big things that we're really excited about. One is something that's come up already, which is building a community around this set of issues, right? This arguably narrow set of things where you commented about what it felt like to come to that pedagogy conference. And it's like, boy, it turns out that there's a critical mass of seriously smart, engaged, passionate people here. And I want the center to help to cultivate that community. Even if it's happening, some of it's happening at other institutions. That's a huge priority for us. A second is, we've talked briefly about AI already. AI is making its way into pretty much everything and it's certainly making its way into things like civics and politics and discourse and therapy and couples therapy, right? How couples manage conflict. And so we are bringing together a group of leading academics, but also high level people in industry, titans of finance, people high up in politics this fall for a conference where we're trying to figure out how can we cultivate A world in which AI helps enlightened disagreement function better, that is, helps people deal better with their disagreement about facts, about values, rather than polarizing us further, rather than making it so that only some people get to control everything. Those are two of the big priorities we care about.

[Noor Kataly]

I'd also add that, you know, one of the things that's foundational to the center is doing basic research in this space. So both Eli and myself are researchers. We got into this in part because we were doing academic research on things like motivated reasoning and political partisanship and the role of ideology and shaping our cognition, things of that nature. So research is really foundational to our ethos at the center. One of the things that we're doing is actually doing academic research on the program, right? Evaluating the program, figuring out what does and doesn't work. And we'll continue to do that as we grow the program next year. So soon enough we should have something useful and valuable to say empirically about where are we having the greatest impact and in what particular ways? So we're going to continue to do academic work in the space. One of the other goals, goals that we have is to actually create a community of researchers at Northwestern and beyond that are interested in studying these topics, not just through the lens of one on one interpersonal interactions, but even things like the construction of social media algorithms. How might you actually create infrastructures online and via technology that are either more or less conducive to the types of outcomes that we're looking for in terms of enlightened disagreement? So lots of exciting stuff happening and, and I think and believe that we're just going to hopefully go from strength to strength here. One of the cool things about being at a university is that you get to impact students that are going to go out and be future leaders and people who shape the world. And we are getting them at a pivotal moment in their lives and we have the chance to have an impact that extends far beyond Northwestern. So one thing that's been really cool is working with this population across all of the years of the college experience and seeing the transformation that they themselves have experienced and feeling like that's going to actually end up translating into something big out in the real world.

[Eli Finkel]

The programming that we've been building is high touch, so it's not something that's readily distributable online through some automated webinars or anything like that. But we're already talking widely with other institutions of higher education, high schools. I think there's a real hunger for a better Mode of engagement, not partisan victory, although surely fighting for what we want is crucial, but a way of helping people, whatever their partisan allegiances are, whatever their moral allegiances are, of being better at handling conflict, at engaging with people who believe differently. And I think. I think that, as Noor was saying, we could get people who are teenagers and young adults just to think more critically about the reasons why they have the beliefs that they have and to understand why other people have the beliefs that they have, and then to engage constructively across those differences.

[Noor Kataly]

One of the things that I think is also cool about the ethos of our program is we're hoping to train students to be civically engaged. What they're not doing is just throwing their hands up and being apathetic. They're not disengaging from the political process. It's not that they are less impassioned about the things that they came in believing. Rather, we're actually giving them the tools to wade into those debates. We're making them people who want to contribute to their societies. Right. And so I think one thing that's foundational to the way that we view this is we're not coming here to make you sort of more milquetoast in your perspectives. We're putting you in a position to feel comfortable and confident, wading into really important conversations, bringing in your divergent perspectives, because that's what makes the society stronger.

[Tychea Woods]

I wonder if our current relation to each other and the way that we're forcing each other to engage through this heavily, like digitized and stratified reality is asking us not to just grow up and change with the times, but to literally ask us to fundamentally shift what it means to be human. And I think specifically tying this back to the program, one of my biggest reflections was how I feel like all of these modules really taught us how to rehumanize conversation. And I think where I see us going as a society, but specifically as young people, like, we're always trying to stamp out fires and alleviate tension and reduce nuance so that we can appear like, oh, now we're all getting together, because we're not arguing. But that's not how humans related to each other at all. In the past, you can have different opinions and still be friends. And I think just the erasure of that essence of what it means to be human is what I feel like we're really living in now. And I think instead of trying to push away weight or erase tension, the question and the energy should be focused on how do we remain human in the midst of it.

[David McRaney]

That is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. You can find my book How Minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details [e-mail] and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well right there in your podcast player. On my homepage davidmcraney.com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, or you are not so smart dot com. You can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue sky and everything else that's like that avidmcraney symbol David McCraney. Follow the showtsmartblog. We're also on Facebook. You are not so Smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation. No editors, no staff, just me. Go to patreon.com you are not so Smart. Pitching in at any amount gets you the show ad free, but the higher amounts that'll get you posters and T shirts and sign books and other stuff. The opening music that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support this show, the best way to do that? Just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it on all these platforms or just tell somebody directly. Hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something that really connected with you and check back in in about two weeks for a fresh new episode. SA. Foreign.

[Patty Walter]

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