Resources
Newsletter
Games
Bad News
Cambridge University Social Decision-Making Lab
Drop all pretense of ethics and take on the role of fake news-monger. In Bad News, your task is to get as many followers as you can while slowly building up fake credibility as a news site. But watch out: you lose if you tell obvious lies or disappoint your supporters! Bad News works as a psychological “vaccine” against disinformation: playing it builds cognitive resistance against common forms of manipulation that you may encounter online.
Breaking Harmony Square
Gusmanson Agency
As the Chief Disinformation Officer, your job is to disturb Harmony Square’s peace by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other. Scientists found that playing Harmony Square improves people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques in social media posts, increases their confidence in spotting such techniques, and reduces their willingness to share manipulative content with people in their network.
GO VIRAL!
Cambridge University Social Decision-Making Lab
GO VIRAL! is a 5-minute game that helps protect you against COVID-19 misinformation. Players will learn about some of the most common strategies used to spread false and misleading information about the virus. Understanding these tricks allows you to resist them the next time you come across them online. Scientists who worked with us on the development of GO VIRAL! found that playing the game significantly improves people’s ability to spot misinformation about COVID-19.
How Do You See the World?
Authentic Agility Games
With open-ended questions that span everything from humor to thought-provoking issues, Authentic Agility’s original card game How Do You See the World? is less about breaking the ice and more about examining it. This family card game makes you think and reflect, helping you better know your friends, family, colleagues, strangers, and even yourself. Break out this large 500-question mentally stimulated game and play!
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Authentic Agility Games
Learning how to discuss important core values and beliefs without defensiveness, judgment, or anger can be challenging to master. Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? is a way to start the conversation with an open mind. Play this game to listen to others, be heard, and finally answer the question, why can’t we all just get along?
What’s Wrong With Grown-ups?
Authentic Agility Games
How often have you wished that your teen would stop playing video games, sending friends videos you can only hope are appropriate, and going out, and instead, share what they are thinking…with you? What’s Wrong with Grown-Ups?, a new card game from Authentic Agility Games, can help. A fun way to engage kids of all ages, the 500-question card game creates an open two-way dialog that allows you to make new connections and deepen your bond.
Nonprofits
Braver Angels exists to bring Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic by allowing people across the political spectrum speak fearlessly and leave with a greater understanding of their neighbors at over 1,200 events, including workshops, debates, 1:1 conversations, town halls and online discussions.
RepresentUs is America’s leading nonpartisan anti-corruption organization fighting to fix our broken and ineffective government. We unite people across the political spectrum to pass laws that hold corrupt politicians accountable, defeat special interests, and force the government to meet the needs of the American people.
Civic Health Project is dedicated to reducing toxic partisan polarization and enabling healthier public discourse. We invest in academic research and practical interventions that empower Americans to engage with each other constructively across partisan divides. Our team is continuously vetting the most promising work by practitioners and academics in the depolarization field, and our grantmaking is informed by experts from the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science, behavioral science, and economics.
Living Room Conversations works to heal society by connecting people across divides—politics, age, gender, race, nationality, and more—through guided conversations proven to build understanding and transform communities. These conversations entail two conversation hosts with different viewpoints each inviting one or two others to join together for structured conversation on a specific topic. Living Room Conversations can happen anywhere: our homes, coffee shops, conference spaces, churches, and online.
StoryCorps is committed to the idea that everyone has an important story to tell and that everyone’s story matters. Since our founding in 2003, we have helped more than 640,000 people across the country have meaningful conversations about their lives. These recordings are collected in the U.S. Library of Congress and in our online archive which is now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.
Listen First Project elevates the impact of the movement to bridge divides in America. We connect the efforts of 500 Listen First Coalition partners bringing people together across divides. We manage national strategies and campaigns toward social cohesion and collaboration. Listen First Project is the backbone organization for collective impact to save our country from tearing apart.
Videos
What Causes Political Polarization?
San Francisco State University
How Partisan Tribalism is Killing Democracy
Brian Klaas | TEDxThessaloniki
Examining the Crisis in America’s Democracy and the Polarization of its Politics
The Genie of Polarisation – How Can We Get It Back in the Bottle?
Kris De Meyer | TEDxLondon
Unbreaking America: Solving the Corruption Crisis
RepresentUs
Social Media and Political Polarization in America
60 Minutes
Courses
"How Technology is Shaping Democracy and the 2020 Election" by Stanford University
Democracy can only thrive with the participation of well-informed citizens. The 2020 U.S. presidential election will be historic for many reasons and all parties are leveraging the power of technology to both influence and mobilize voters. More than ever, digital tools and platforms are shaping the opinions and behaviors of voters who will determine the future of the governance of the United States.
This course examines the unprecedented influence of technology and technology policy on America’s elections and democratic process and takes a close look at how a public sphere plagued by polarization, online filter bubbles, a lack of transparency in content moderation policies, and foreign and domestic misinformation and disinformation campaigns, impacts our ability to be well-informed citizens.
"Civil Engagement in American Democracy" by Duke University
How does the American political system work? Who are some of the key actors? What are key concepts for a student trying to understand what’s going on? How can I as a citizen influence politics?
Civic Engagement in American Democracy takes on these and other key questions. This course is designed to provide a strong foundational introduction to US politics.
"Securing Digital Democracy" by The University of Michigan
This course explores what every citizen should know about the security risks—and future potential—of electronic voting and Internet voting. Students will take a look at the past, present, and future of election technologies and explore the various spaces intersected by voting, including computer security, human factors, public policy, and more.
Research Papers
Candidates’ Policy strategies in Primary Elections
Does Strategic Voting By the Primary Electorate Matter?
Samuel Merrill III, Wilkes University, Pennsylvania; James F. Adams,
University of California, Davis
Cooperative Coalitions on the Religious Right and Left
Considering the Resilience of Sectarianism
John H. Evans, University of California, San Diego
Party Competition and Responsible Party Government
A Theory of Spatial Competition Based Upon Insights from Behavioral Voting Research
James F. Adams, University of California, Davis
The Political Polarization of Corporate America
Vyacheslav Fos, Boston College; Elisabeth Kempf, Harvard Business School; Margarita Tsoutsoura, Washington University, St. Louis
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics
Noam Gidron, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Will Horne, Princeton University; James F. Adams, University of California, Davis; David Bracken, University of California, Davis; Kaitlin Senk, Rice University; Diana Z. O’Brien, Rice University
Polarization in Abortion Attitudes in U.S. Religious Traditions, 1972-1998
John H. Evans, University of California, San Diego
The Multiple-Matching Perspective on Value Versus Identity
Investigating How Political Ideology and Party Identity Contribute to Citizens’ Support for Political Candidates
Hui Bai, Stanford University
Politics, Religion, and Society
Is The United States Experiencing a Period of Religious-Political Polarization?
Thomas A. Hirschl, Cornell University; James G. Booth, Cornell University; Leland L. Glenna, Pennsylvania State University; Brandn Q. Green, Bucknell University
How to Combat Health Misinforma-tion
A Psychological Approach
Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge; Sander Van Der Linden, University of Cambridge
A Unified Theory of Party Competition
A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors
Bernard Grofman, University of California, Irvine; James F. Adams, University of California, Davis; Samuel Merrill III, Wilkes University, Pennsylvania
Documentaries
The Social Dilemma
Divided States of America
The ReUnited States
Books
Why We’re Polarized
By Ezra Klein
Klein shows how and why American politics divided by racial, religious, geographic, and cultural identities in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. He traces the feedback loops between the polarized identities and institutions driving our system toward crisis.
American Schism
By Seth Radwell
Radwell describes the revolutionary Enlightenment period, the impact of the eventual schism on American history from the early expansion of the U.S. through Jim Crow and The Age of Trumpism, and a plan to build a civilized, progressive, and tolerant society where Americans can firmly ground their views in rationality.
High Conflict
By Amanda Ripley
Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud—and how they can break free. She argues that when we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, work, or home—it is because we are not seeing how the conflict itself has consumed us.
Political Tribes
By Amy Chua
Chua posits that because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles (e.g. Capitalism vs. Communism), we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics, a blindness that undermines foreign policy. She argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes.
The Hype Machine
By Sinan Aral
Aral reveals just how much social media shapes our choices: the tech behind social media offers behavior-influencing levers, and thus affects everything from elections to dating to health. He covers Facebook’s massive growth, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids.
Divided We Fall
By David French
French describes chilling, plausible scenarios of how the United States could fracture, destabilizing the world. However, he reveals that by implementing James Madison’s vision of pluralism, we can prevent oppressive factions from seizing absolute power and heal America’s partisan divide.
Mistrust
By Ethan Zuckerman
Zuckerman helps readers understand what relationships they want to have with existing institutions―hold them responsible and make them better? Replace them? While some contemporary leaders weaponize mistrust to gain power, activists can use mistrust to fuel something else.
This Is Not Normal
By Cass R. Sunstein
Sunstein examines dramatically shifting understandings of what’s normal—and how they account for the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the founding itself, political correctness, the COVID response, and changing understandings of liberty in the United States and beyond.
America’s Best Chance
By Pete Buttigieg
Buttigieg contends that our success, or failure, at confronting racial and economic justice, pandemic resilience, and climate action will rest on whether we can effectively cultivate, deepen, and, where necessary, repair the networks of trust that are now endangered, or for so many, have never even existed.
Why Washington Won’t Work
By Marc J. Hetherington, Thomas J. Rudolph
Hetherington and Rudolph argue that distrust in rival party governance has deadlocked Congress, concluding that it is unlikely that political trust will significantly increase unless foreign concerns come to dominate policy and the economy is consistently strong.
Uncivil Agreement
By Lilliana Mason
Mason argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents—we view one another with distrust and work for party victory over all else. She explores this increasingly “social” type of political polarization through political science and social psychology.
Breaking the Social Media Prism
By Chris Bail
Bail takes readers inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that detail how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. He offers data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections and countering tribalism.
Discourse
Anti & Pro Feminists Debate
Democrat and Republican Converse
Modernists and Traditionalists Debate
Civil Discourse
Educational Platform
Political polarization is plaguing the country. One’s political affiliation is now a strong predictor for their religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, favorite TV show, and favorite grocery store (Mason).
Since online resources have become increasingly popular and valuable, I developed a platform in 2021 for youth and adults alike to learn about proper discourse in order to engage with other people from around the globe.
The platform contains free conversation guides, research advice, topic information, and a library of resources. I encourage you to scroll, read, and enjoy.
Questions?
(650) 382-2509
letstalkunite@gmail.com