Automatic transcription of the interview with Martin Carcasson, it may contains errors.

Host: Alessandro Oppo
Guest: Martin Carcasson, Director of Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast. Our guest today is Martin Carcasson, who is the director of the Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation. Thank you for your time, Martin.

Martin Carcasson: Thank you for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.

Alessandro Oppo: As a first question, I would like to ask you what the Center for Public Deliberation actually does.

Martin Carcasson: I'm a professor in communication studies. My academic background was in argumentation, which is a sub-discipline that really focuses on the quality of arguments. How do we make distinctions between strong arguments and weak arguments and help us have better discussions so we have better decisions and better quality of life? I've always been focused on how do we talk about tough issues and how do we come together to address our shared problems. I started the center 19 years ago at CSU.

It serves as an impartial resource, primarily for the Northern Colorado community, but we do some statewide work as well. I train students in dedicated classes as facilitators, and then we design and run events in the community. We actually get hired by the city or the county or community organizations, or we get written into grants to have better events to help people have conversations.

A lot of my work used to be analyzing how politicians, particularly American presidents, talked about issues. But I grew more and more frustrated because they often did badly. They often ignored the research or they tried to sell simple stories to win elections. So I grew frustrated. I didn't want to spend 50 years writing papers about how badly people talked about issues.

So the CBD became my way of asking: how do we create processes that incentivize better arguments and help people come together and have these conversations? All my work now is helping other cities. Most of my focus is local. How do we build capacity in our cities for better conversations to help people come together, to have tough conversations, to bring expertise and the public voice and the passions and values of multiple diverse pluralistic perspectives all together to actually make better decisions?

Alessandro Oppo: What kind of conversations have you facilitated?

Martin Carcasson: In our 19 years, we've run over 500 meetings. We're process experts, not content experts. We get hired for everything. We've done work on climate change, decarbonization, and a lot of work on housing. We work a lot with our schools, so we do school issues, whether that's mental health issues or standardized testing. We do work on transportation. It's all over the place. Every semester, it's something new. We'll do four or five different projects, and we have a pretty big engagement toolkit, so we're designing specific processes based on the issue to help people have these conversations.

Alessandro Oppo: Can you give me an example of how a conversation or discussion should be held?

Martin Carcasson: It's the Center for Public Deliberation, so the word we use is deliberation, which is a particular way of talking. I make a distinction between debate, dialogue, and deliberation. For me, deliberation is designed to bring out the best of debate and dialogue.

A good debate helps elevate good arguments and expose bad arguments and helps us make sense of information. Dialogue is designed to bring people together in more productive ways, to depolarize and help us understand each other and build trust. So deliberation tries to take both of those together.

The downside of deliberation is it takes a lot more resources and time. We spend often a couple of months diving into the issue, trying to make sense of the noise, interviewing different sides, doing fact-checking.

One critical aspect of deliberation, particularly how we do it, is that for most of our events, we create some sort of discussion guide – a document that people are reacting to that we've developed to try to capture the issue and frame it in a way that's much more productive.

A lot of our work is trying to reframe issues, especially in the United States where we're so polarized with a two-party system where bad arguments are constantly incentivized. We're trying to reframe the issue, often getting away from progressive versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican. How do we frame this more as an issue we all care about?

Typically, it's a problem we're focusing on. We're looking at multiple potential ways of engaging that problem that all have upsides, all have downsides, and there are no magic bullets.

What the event looks like: we'll often start at the front of the room for maybe 15 or 20 minutes to explain the topic and explain what we're doing. But then my students – if 100 people show up, we can send them out to 15 different tables. I have two students at every table, one facilitating and one note-taking, with maybe six to eight people at each of those tables.

They're walking through this process that we've designed, reacting to that document, having conversation with a student trained in conflict management and deliberative techniques to help them have deeper conversations. Our processes, instead of like a public hearing where it's one at a time at the microphone for a lot of government engagement processes, are designed for people to talk to each other. We're not just collecting individual opinions; we're having people react to each other and react to the document and come up with better ideas of what we can do to move forward.

Alessandro Oppo: Do you think that in relation to this process, technology can help in some way? Have you tested some tools?

Martin Carcasson: With the explosion of AI in the last few years, I've been exploring that a lot more. Obviously with COVID in 2020, we couldn't do face-to-face events like we did, and we switched to Zoom. In some ways, it was a very similar event – we started together in one big room, and then at some point we would send people to breakout rooms, and my students would be in each of those breakout rooms. So the Zoom technology allowed us to do very similar things, especially with the video aspect.

I just went to a conference two or three weeks ago. Northwestern University in Chicago is starting a new Center for Enlightened Disagreement that I'm helping out with. They had a conference – a pedagogy conference about how to help build skills for students on how to disagree better and engage complex issues and talk to each other.

They brought in ten people doing innovative work in this area. I was there to talk about my program, but there were quite a few people using AI to help people think better and disagree better and engage better. I saw some really interesting tools. Overall, I'm a little nervous about AI – I see a lot of downsides – but it was the first time I left a conference thinking, "Okay, I am excited about seeing some potential upside to this."

I think there are a lot of new technology tools coming out in the deliberation world where people are realizing: how might we adapt these tools to help us think better and engage better? I think there's some promise there.

Alessandro Oppo: In relation to the downside effects, the negative effects related to AI, do you have anything specific you're thinking about, like deepfakes or other things?

Martin Carcasson: I frame the biggest issues we're dealing with broadly in democracy – my work is primarily US-based, but I think a lot of these issues are international now for all democracies – as three key problems.

One is hyper-polarization, this toxic polarization. We're so divided. When we're divided, we can't talk to each other. Facts don't work, and it just incentivizes all this bad behavior. So a lot of my work is to depolarize, which is often easier than we think because I think a lot of the polarization is exaggerated. We're not nearly as divided as we think we are. When we come together, we often realize that.

The second problem I call information disorder. Our ability to create and share information has exponentially exploded in the world. We have so much information out there, so much noise. Our ability to make sense of that information – to make distinctions, to elevate good arguments and expose bad arguments, to move from just noise to data to hopefully insight to knowledge, eventually to wisdom – has not only not kept up with the technology but has actually backtracked. We've lost trust in journalism, universities, and expertise.

In some ways, AI contributes to that problem because AI is creating information and flooding us with so much information. AI also struggles to make distinctions between misinformation and good information. But at that conference, what I saw was: hey, can we redirect AI to help us make sense of that? If we can train AI to help us make these distinctions, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Generally, AI is adding more to the noise. But how do we switch and focus on how AI helps us? Like training my students how to search for good sources. I'm concerned about them using AI to say, "Give me evidence that I'm right," which is part of the problem. Our brains are motivated reasoners with bias and confirmation bias. AI just makes it easier for them to cherry-pick information to fit their perspective.

But if we train our students to go to AI and say, "What am I missing here? What are the best arguments against my position? Steel-man the opposing position or help me understand multiple perspectives on this issue" – can we get them to use it that way? And then help them teach AI to find solid sources for those perspectives, not just find the first thing that comes up.

The other big thing is when I talk about debate, dialogue, and deliberation – all three are important if they're high quality, but debate and dialogue are limited in certain ways. However, debate and dialogue are much easier. I can design a debate and a dialogue pretty quickly. Deliberation takes a lot more time beforehand to understand the issue, and deliberation takes more resources because I need facilitators. I need two students for every six people. That's a lot of people power.

What I saw at that conference was an AI facilitator that, for the first time – I've been asked about creating facilitation robots for 20 years – it was the first time I actually saw some promise there. If we're able to figure that out, if we're able to have an AI facilitator that really helps people come together and helps individuals think better, that takes away one of the biggest costs of deliberation. We'll be able to deliberate more because we don't have to have this army of facilitators that have to be trained to help us do that. That's one thing I'm pretty excited about.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm very interested in polarized groups. In the two-party system in the US, what happens if two people are very polarized? How do you break this polarization? Because I can imagine that could be very deep.

Martin Carcasson: A lot of our work involves the design of the discussion guides. We frame something from an impartial perspective to reframe the issue, because so many issues are dominated by the frame of Democrats versus Republicans. That's a very bad frame, a very simplistic frame. Often just reframing the issue and not framing it in that way really helps and starts changing things.

When people come together in a better process, instead of going with the easy story that the problem is caused by the other side, all of a sudden we're able to shift it and see them differently. A lot of my work is trying to shift people from seeing the other side as an opponent that they have to beat, that they have to vanquish, to seeing them as a potential collaborator.

A big part of my work draws from social psychology and brain science and how our brains are wired. For me, deliberation is a particular tool that's really well designed to try to overcome – to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best.

The reality is our brains are wired for polarization. That's the core root cause of it. We want simple. We want heroes and victims and villains. We don't want to think so much – we're cognitive misers, to use Kahneman's term from "Thinking, Fast and Slow." A two-party system unfortunately takes advantage of that. Most of a two-party system is: I don't have to listen to the other side, I don't have to try to convince the other side, I mainly just have to fire up my side. I have to mobilize the people that agree with me.

The kind of messages that work to do that are very simple messages, particularly attacking the other side and blaming them. So most of our messages are designed to fire up each side. All my work is: how do we bring those sides together? How do we tap into a lot of people that aren't on a side?

The best part of shifting from the simple stories and loving our heroes and victims and villains – the best of human nature is humans are incredibly good creative problem solvers when put in a good situation to tap into that part of our brain. It's just sad how little, particularly in the United States, our political processes are designed to bring out us as problem solvers. It's mainly designed to blame the other side for the problems.

That's the heart of deliberation: we're creating a different environment. Instead of these simple arguments that divide us and don't help us solve problems, we shift that to a very different kind of conversation.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking that polarization in some ways is helpful to the actual political system. I mean, how it works with the two parties, but probably it's the same in Italy – maybe we don't have two parties, but also in Europe it's maybe the same.

Martin Carcasson: It starts with human nature, and then the political system often encourages that division. Our media systems, especially as media gets more and more partisan and we have more narrow-casting – we have more media for individual groups versus media that everyone trusts, which certainly in the United States we have very little of. And then most of our technical platforms, our social media, are also more designed to divide people and categorize them.

So we start with human nature that's susceptible to these simplistic divisive messages. Then our political system, our media system, and then our technology makes it all worse. That's what we're up against.

But the good news is we're seeing more and more, even with technology, some really cool innovative ideas of creating pro-social social media, bridging social media – social media, particularly in a local community, where the algorithms are designed to bring people together versus divide them and separate them.

I think you're seeing more and more reaction of new ways to adjust these systems – the political system, the media system, and the technological social media platforms – to stop doing so much of the divisive work and actually start repairing some of that.

Alessandro Oppo: Do you think that in the future, if people are more aware about deliberative practices, they can overcome this biological polarization that you said our brains are wired for?

Martin Carcasson: That's certainly the long-term hope of the work that I do. I feel very comfortable – like I said earlier, we've run about 500 meetings in the last 19 years, and almost every single one of those meetings has gone well. We've taken on some pretty complex, controversial, tough issues. We know, regardless of how crazy things are with the polarization and division and so forth that we're seeing in the world, deliberative scholars, deliberative practitioners, democratic innovation practitioners know that when you bring people together using the tools that we know work to bring people together across perspectives, humans can do this.

There's still a lot of optimism. We just need to build capacity. We know what to do; we just need to build capacity to do it. Every time someone comes to one of the CBD events or other events that my colleagues across the world are doing, they see an alternative that works.

When I started the CBD, I thought my students and I would pick a topic, maybe once a semester we'd do some event. But every event we did, we'd get ten people walk up and say, "We need to do this again. We need to do this on this issue." When we gave people an alternative, people saw the value of it. People want to engage genuinely.

Our goal is – and I work a lot with cities, universities, libraries, community foundations, local newsrooms – how do we tap into these local civic organizations and say, "Hey, you all need to work together to build this capacity to give people a chance to have these different conversations."

I do think the more people see it, while the negative aspects of human nature are stronger and more natural, they're not determinant. The more people experience this – there's a virtuous cycle of doing this deliberative work. The more people talk differently, the easier the next conversation is. They start rewiring their brain.

Then we start developing different individual habits. We start developing different organizational norms and hopefully community cultures of "we talk differently here."

One last thing I'll say is I believe at a CBD event or most deliberative events where people do these types of things, if someone shows up with a very simple solution to a complex problem, they look silly. People are like, "That's not what we're doing here. We're doing hard work; we're serious people trying to engage this complex issue."

But in the broader world – one at a time at the microphone or online or certainly now in government – unfortunately, they're constantly giving us very simple solutions to complex problems. For most people, we like simple solutions because we don't want to deal with the tensions and paradoxes and complexities. We want to believe our side's right and the other side's evil. So those simple narratives work at the national level.

Our goal is to show people at the local level that that's not the way the world works. Hopefully the more they get exposed to that, the simple solutions and simple strategies of the national level stop working so much because we realize our brain is like, "Yeah, I know my brain wants a simple solution. You're trying to feed me one. No, I'm not going to fall for that because I know the world's more complex."

Alessandro Oppo: Do you have other examples of polarization like the two parties? Maybe something that is common in the US?

Martin Carcasson: When we do local work, one of the things that we're dealing with is often a city council or a school board or a county government that has a specific ordinance that they're engaging the public on. Should we do this? Well, in most cases, that's going to be about one specific solution. Here's one way we can deal with this problem, and we're engaging the community basically on this yes-no question: do you support this one solution?

There are a lot of problems with that. That can cause a lot of polarization because it's a two-sided thing again. It might not be Democrat versus Republican or conservative versus progressive, but it's the yes versus the no. That causes two big problems.

One is we know from the research the no's are going to show up more. If I see a new idea that my city or my school district is doing and I think it's a good idea, I'm like, "Oh, that sounds great," and I go on with my day. If I think it's a bad idea, I'm like, "Hell no," and I'm going to show up and complain about it. So most public engagement on one solution, one ordinance, one bill at a time is going to be dominated by the people pushing back, the critics.

The second thing is, if it's a yes-no question, most people that show up have already answered yes or no before they walk in the door. From my perspective, their brains are off. They're not there to think; they're not there to get creative; they're not there to listen; they're not there to come up with an innovative way to deal with this issue or to reframe it. They're there to support their perspective. So the parts of their brain – the motivated reasoning, the bias that I want to seek out information I'm right and ignore or dismiss – that gets magnified.

What deliberation does is instead of "Hey, here's one potential solution to a problem that we're going to focus on," we back up and we say, "We want to focus on the issue." The dominant question for me for deliberation is, "Hey, what should we do about X?" – we being the community as a whole. That means yes, the government, but it also means nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations and private industries and individuals and groups. The X is a problem, and we work really hard to frame it as a problem that we all agree is a problem.

We might disagree on why it's a problem. We'll certainly disagree on what we should do about it. But we're starting from a point of common ground: how do we come together and say, "Hey, what should we do about this shared problem that we have?"

Often the discussion guide might have three or four different options. We use the National Issues Forum model at nifi.org in the United States that for 50 years has been creating discussion guides that are framed to help people have better conversations and to get away from one solution at a time.

That's our base model. We have lots of other models we use, but we start there: "Hey, what should we do about X? Here's three or four approaches or options that we can do. None of them are a magic bullet. There's no simple technical solution to these complex problems." But then people are reacting to that.

What that does is it sparks collaboration, it sparks creativity, it taps into the best parts of our brain because we're working together to try to address a shared problem versus showing up to defend a perspective that had already been decided before the meeting started.

Alessandro Oppo: If someone wants to run a deliberation process in his town, should the topic be something real, something that can polarize a lot? But I think it can be difficult. Sometimes I thought maybe doing a test with a test topic.

Martin Carcasson: When I give workshops to city managers and librarians and schools and so forth that want to start doing this work, it's often the first question after my presentation: "Okay, how can I do this with this one topic that's completely polarizing and dividing my community? Everyone hates each other." I'm like, "You're probably not going to start there." It's kind of hard to show people a different way of talking on the most difficult issue.

When I started the CBD for the first few years, we picked difficult issues, but not the most difficult. Let's start learning these new skills. Let's start learning how to talk to each other. Let's start learning how to ask good questions. I picked real issues – we didn't want to just be educational. We were working on real issues in the community. But yeah, picking something in the middle there – not so simple, but not the most difficult.

The idea is, again, the virtuous cycle: the more you do this, the easier it is to do. You start learning the skills, and the community starts learning the vocabulary and they see the value of it. So then slowly and surely you can take on more and more difficult issues because people start realizing, "This stuff is complex. We need to think differently and talk differently about this."

Alessandro Oppo: Do you have some examples about good issues to discuss that can be real so people can actually talk and engage?

Martin Carcasson: There are tons of resources. Even in the last ten years, a number of organizations are doing this work, and there are also a lot of international sources. Democracy Next is one of the biggest international ones. I'll give you some links if you want to post them if people want to hear more about these kinds of things.

Some of the issues – again, you're trying to find that issue that most people agree is a problem. You're starting with that common ground. So you can fit that "what should we do about X" framework.

We do a lot of work on housing availability. How do we deal with that issue? We deal with social media types of things, dealing with resources. We've done some really interesting work on energy and decarbonization because we all want energy to not be too expensive. Most of us are realizing we need to decarbonize and get away from natural gas and coal and lean more on wind and solar and other alternatives. But we know that technology is not quite there yet in some ways. Obviously in Europe, particularly in France, nuclear is a huge issue, which is now part of the conversation.

So that's a good issue to think about: okay, how do we work together to do this? If a big part of the path we're taking is to completely decarbonize, well, we recognize there are whole industries and people that are working in those areas. So how do we incorporate that? How do we help have a just transition? How do we think about the jobs that might be lost with that? So we lean into those complexities instead of just picking a side and talking past each other.

Alessandro Oppo: Is deliberation a practice that is always the same around the world or around the US? Are there different kinds of deliberation schools or practices?

Martin Carcasson: There's quite a big toolkit. I mentioned National Issues Forums – that was my initial training and we still do that a little bit. Certainly, citizens assemblies – I actually just did a citizens assembly or a civic assembly here in Fort Collins. That's a particular tool where you're doing a random sample and bringing people together, a panel of 30 years or so, sometimes much larger, that are often paid, and then have a significant amount of time. The one we did here was over four days. Some of them are longer than that, bringing these people together.

Deliberative polling, which is coming out of Jim Fishkin's work at Stanford University Center for Democratic Deliberation, is a whole different way. So yeah, there's a broad range of tools. I think the common ground across all of them is it's a process design perspective. There's a facilitator. There's someone who's designing it, particularly for me, often from an impartial perspective. Their goal, their expertise is process, not content.

You have facilitation, you have these discussion guides, there are some basic elements to it borrowed from several fields. Some of this is from conflict resolution, some of it's from deliberation, some of it is from the business world, from collaborative problem-solving – how do we work together to address these issues? Things like polarity management and both-and thinking that are incorporated. So it's very interdisciplinary academically, but then also very much cutting across many practices that are all coming together with that focus on how do we help people have better conversations.

Alessandro Oppo: Having conversations or deliberating is something that requires time. I wonder how much time should people dedicate to this activity to be able to actually do it and also to have a healthy society where people are able to communicate.

Martin Carcasson: In some ways, it's the more time the better, but then the more time is a bigger ask for people. That's one of the challenges, certainly. Most of our meetings that we do now for the city used to always be two hours. Now they're normally two and a half, three hours, because we know people will come. That allows us to do a deeper dive into some things and have some pretty tough conversations. Sometimes we have all-day events or longer things. A lot of our projects now, we might meet a few different times. We have an initial meeting to get an initial reaction to the document and help us refine the document. Maybe a few weeks later – there are lots of different ways of doing it.

But yeah, deliberation is synchronous. Deliberation is people together at the same time, whether that's face-to-face, in person, or online. There are some ways to have asynchronous approaches, like a message board where people are going back and forth that people are experimenting with. But for me, so much of the heart of deliberation is real people talking to each other and reacting to each other. I think that's typically one key aspect of deliberation. So having to have people at the same place at the same time with some time to dedicate is certainly one of the drawbacks, one of the burdens, one of the costs of deliberative processes.

I think long term, the more people do this, they realize the value and importance of it. And I'll say people enjoy it. One of my favorite things at my events – I always stand by the door as people are leaving to thank them for their time. You can tell they're exhausted. You can tell we made their brains work in ways they're not used to working. But most of them realize they just did something important.

They realized, "Yeah, we need to do this. This is how we should do things. We should have these conversations." And they're willing to come back. So yes, it's hard work. I wouldn't say it's fun necessarily, but sometimes it can be.

Another tool in the toolkit is to gamify public engagement, to turn it into a game, turn it into different kinds of things. We've done stuff with Legos and done stuff with poker chips. There are ways we can make it more fun for people in different ways.

But the most important thing is I think people see the value out of it at the end of it and then ask to do more. I think that's pretty typical for my colleagues that do this kind of work locally. The more you do it, the more people want to do it, and it starts building capacity and hopefully providing a realistic alternative to what we're getting in these polarized politics.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm very interested by this gamification aspect. You mentioned Lego sessions, using Lego. How does it work?

Martin Carcasson: That was for something that we were doing on housing. Northern Colorado, Fort Collins is in Northern Colorado, about an hour north of Denver. We're a great place to live, so more and more people are moving here, all the towns around us. We're getting a significant population increase. But we also have some limitations – there's not that much water here in the West – so there are growing concerns about how do we deal with this growth and those types of things.

That was a process that we designed working with some partners. I forget the numbers now – it's been a few years – but it was a design process of, "We've got 200,000 people moving into our region here in the next five, ten years. Where do we put them?"

Basically the Lego pieces – we had smaller Lego pieces that were like single-family homes. Then we had larger ones that were duplexes and then even bigger ones that were apartments. We had a map. So then each table had to decide, and they could get ten of the smaller pieces and change it for a bigger piece, but that means more density and building up.

People want single-family homes, but if everyone has a single-family home, then we're not fitting these people. And we have a lot more traffic and environmental impacts. So that was trying to negotiate all these different things together. The Legos were a mechanism for them at each table to have a tangible way to try to do this process.

Alessandro Oppo: I was curious, do you know if people were able to repeat the process by themselves after participating in a session?

Martin Carcasson: Part of our basic concept, and we see this so often in our meetings – say there's a two-hour meeting – we always see and hear from our students that the first third of that, the facilitator is doing a lot. They're asking a lot of questions and they're intervening in the conversation to try to improve the conversation going back and forth. The second third, they're doing it less, and then the last third, they're doing it even less, because people start doing it themselves.

So part of the role of the facilitator as we're training them is to model how we have tough conversations, to ask interesting questions, to really listen, to paraphrase, to repack. All these skills that we're training the students, the facilitators to do, part of our goal is for the participants to pick up those skills.

We see that again in just a two-hour meeting. Earlier on, a facilitator might ask, "So that's really interesting. You seem passionate about that. I'm curious, what are the counter-arguments? People that disagree with you, what might be important to them?" – one of my favorite questions to try to understand the values of the people that disagree with you. That question the facilitator might ask in the first third, well, participants might ask each other that in the last third. We're hoping they're walking away from the event with new skills.

We have so much focus – maybe this is a US context – so much of our education is about public speaking and presenting and writing a paper and communicating out. We don't tend to teach people how to ask good questions of each other. We don't teach them how to listen nearly as much as we need to. Listening and asking good questions are hugely important, not only to democracy but just to any kind of collaborative problem-solving process.

That becomes part of the virtuous cycle. The more people do this, the easier it is to do because they start learning how to do it. Hopefully they go home and they have a different conversation. We do a lot of training. I do something with school districts of training a cohort of parents and community members in this work. Part of the goal is hopefully when an issue comes up and it starts to polarize and a very simple narrative starts dominating, they know how to push back.

That might be in the coffee shop with another parent that's saying, "Can you believe the school district's doing X, Y, and Z?" and they're like, "Well, it's not that simple." Certainly one of the goals of these deliberative processes is to build people's skills and hopefully to make it less likely that the simple stories and the worst of human nature dominates our conversation. We start having better and better conversations.

Alessandro Oppo: I was thinking about the role of education, also the role of schools. It could be maybe important to have these kinds of practices.

Martin Carcasson: I'll send you a link to a paper I wrote called "The Wise Collaborator." I'm basically making the argument to rethink how we do civic education. I think civic education often focuses a little too much on being informed and then being engaged. Those two adjectives appear all the time, at least in the US.

Well, I know from the social psychology and brain science that often we think we're informed, but we're quite misinformed because our brains are wired to "let me go find all the evidence I'm right." So sometimes the more informed you are, the research shows with motivated reasoning and bias, often the smarter you are and the more educated you are, the more likely you are to suffer from bias because you just become really good at finding evidence that you're right and better at refuting or ignoring or avoiding evidence that you're wrong.

So then when we're informed badly, we get engaged badly. A lot of times civic education is more activist education, which makes us feel good. We pick a side and we fight for it, but it doesn't give us the skills to engage across difference.

So my work – I mainly run these meetings that temporarily help people think better, but certainly long-term through K-12 education and higher ed, if we're training students with these skills of how do you talk to people that disagree with you and how do you understand issues from multiple perspectives, then all of a sudden, I think our brains are wired for outrage. We can rewire our brains through education so they're much more suited for deliberation. They're more deliberation-ready than polarization-ready. I think that's certainly part of our goal moving forward.

Alessandro Oppo: Have you run any workshops with kids? Was it different compared to adults?

Martin Carcasson: Our program is primarily undergraduate students as facilitators. So we work a lot with college students, but then we also work a lot with our local high schools. We used to have a facilitation corps with the high school. We trained some of these high school students and then they would go run events in the lower schools to help us come up with school issues. They would sometimes help with our events as well.

Lately, I'm not directly involved in this, but my colleagues with the center have a youth civic action program where they're going into the high schools and teaching them collaborative problem-solving skills. It's a negotiation between deliberation and activism. It might be sometimes, "Hey, we want to do this issue, but how do we do that activism in a way that isn't so divisive and polarizing, but it's activism that brings people together?" So there are interesting different ways of thinking about how do we move the needle on the issues we care about. But we're working directly with high school students quite a bit.

They're able to do this stuff. They normally see it as very helpful. At least in the United States, we have a lot of young people who are just so frustrated with the system. The political system just seems to be people yelling at each other and being simplistic. A lot of them have checked out. So we give them this alternative like, "Here's a different way to engage these issues, particularly local, that's going to be much more hopeful and also, I think, in the long term, much more successful."

Alessandro Oppo: I haven't asked you anything about your professional background, so if you want to say something about your academic and professional background, how you arrived here.

Martin Carcasson: My initial academic training was in rhetorical criticism and argumentation scholarship. My early work focused on American presidents, how they talked about issues, and I grew more and more frustrated because they didn't talk well. I think I mentioned that a little bit earlier. So as I finished my PhD, I shifted from that being the focus to getting engaged in this dialogue and deliberation world.

I was taught more about debate and then I saw these tools of dialogue and deliberation as much more important, much more useful. Now I use all three. But I shifted from being – I'm probably not as much of – I'm more of a practitioner now or a practitioner-academic. My work nicely combines theory, but then we run a lot of these events and that's constantly bouncing back and forth. We get to practice and test out these theories. Most of our work is actually out in the community every day running these types of things.

It's exciting to see a lot of this stuff growing and encouraging people. I think every university, every college and university in the country and the world should have a program like mine that's not only providing capacity to their local community – local communities severely need it – but it's also teaching students these skills and giving people these examples of different ways of engaging.

Alessandro Oppo: Would you like to share something about your personal background, starting from when you were a child?

Martin Carcasson: I was born in Argentina. I was born in Buenos Aires. We moved to the States when I was pretty young. So I grew up in Texas. I grew up in Houston and then did all my schooling at Texas A&M. Then I've been in Colorado for the last 20 years.

Probably the other relevant thing is politically I've been all over the map. My parents were small business owners in Houston. We owned a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store and then some daycare centers. I grew up in much more of a conservative household, at least conservative in the sense of not being too happy about taxes and regulations and so forth.

But then I went to grad school and started getting interested in bigger issues. In some ways, I became an angry progressive, somewhat Marxist maybe for a semester or two. But then I realized it made me feel good, but I was just screaming at people and I didn't see that as a way to move forward. So then I shifted.

With some of my work, I made the decision 20 years ago that if I dedicate my work to helping people have better conversations, I think I'm going to make more of an impact on the issues I care about by doing that. I could become an activist and be part of the screaming back and forth. I'm like, "The system's just not working." So I decided I want to work on the system. The long-term hope is if I believe one side or a particular perspective is the best perspective, my goal is to make the process work so well that the best arguments get elevated and the weak arguments get exposed.

I still believe idealistically – we're striving for an unreachable ideal, I know – but I still believe we can create processes that reward quality thinking, that reward good arguments. Our system often does the opposite, particularly a two-party system with winner-take-all elections. But we're seeing alternatives now. I think there's a lot of hope. Again, I think we know what to do. We just have to build capacity in more communities to do it.

Alessandro Oppo: I really like your optimism, and I also share it. In my life I saw very strong polarization when there were big events like – it could be the war, Ukraine-Russia, because maybe there are different points of view. It could be the same with Israel-Palestine, could be the same also during COVID. Sometimes I also saw that people stopped talking to each other because they started seeing that person as a sort of enemy, while the difference was just that that person had a different idea about a specific situation. That made me think a lot about how important it can be to talk and not to stop talking. I don't know if something like this happened also to you, if you have seen these kinds of conflicts.

Martin Carcasson: Earlier I talked about the three big challenges and I think I only talked about two of them. So this opens up the third one. I talked about toxic polarization being a key issue, information overload. The third one, the way I'm framing it now, is conflict profiteers. The easiest way to explain what I do is I try to design processes that avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap into the best. There are lots of people that are doing the opposite.

They understand human nature and they're taking advantage of that. Whether that's to win elections or to get rich, they get paid a lot more than me. Unfortunately, they're working with the flow. Our brains are more wired for what they're doing. We have to recognize that. So sometimes when you focus so much on toxic polarization being the issue – and I do think it's a big issue – and you're focused so much on bringing people together, you might be blind to some important distinctions and you're susceptible to getting manipulated by these bad faith actors in a way.

That becomes part of the work. Yes, one of the lines that's used now is "you don't want to build a bridge between the arsonist and the firefighter." You don't want to fall into both-sidesism or a false equivalency in assuming all perspectives are the same. It's another argument I make about debate, dialogue, and deliberation.

Dialogue for me is primarily designed to bring people together from different perspectives and understand each other and not make negative assumptions about people and assume best intentions. All of that is really important, particularly to shift from this exaggerated polarization to the actual. But if we just do dialogue, dialogue for me tends to be non-judgmental. Dialogue is we're just listening to each other's stories. Well, in a democracy, at some point we have to make a decision. We can't always just agree to disagree.

Democracy is not an educational exercise. It's a mode of living, to borrow from John Dewey. It's a way of us making decisions together. Ultimately, if we over-emphasize dialogue or over-emphasize bridging and over-emphasize understanding each other – those are important prerequisites, those are necessary certainly to help us have better conversations – but ultimately, facts need to matter.

Better arguments need to matter. People that are purposely dividing us using manipulative tools, we need to push back on that. That's where when I talk about toxic polarization, information disorder, and conflict profiteers as these three intertwined challenges that we're facing in democracy, there are a lot of efforts focused on each of those. But if you just focus on one of those without recognizing the danger of the other two, I think ultimately we fall short.

That's where I'm trying to fashion deliberation and these building tools as able to deal with all three of those. When we build a better environment, a better way of talking and build capacity for this, it helps us depolarize. It helps us make distinctions between good information and bad information. And it takes away a lot of the power from the conflict profiteers. Their tactics are no longer as successful as they are.

I think long term, that's the heart of the argument for these deliberative practices, these democratic innovations, that it helps us take on those three challenges that we're facing right now.

Alessandro Oppo: Can we say that when there is some toxic polarization that is maybe produced by newspapers or some other content that is seen by a lot of people, that there could be an intention to do that? Because you also say that the system where we live actually is very polarizing because of the two-party system or other kinds of reasons. So I wonder if this polarization is produced in a conscious way or not.

Martin Carcasson: The idea of conflict profiteers – there are people that purposely create polarization. That polarization helps them. They're profiting from the polarization. Certainly at a political level, that's one of my biggest concerns about a two-party system – it incentivizes polarization. That's what works to win elections. That's what works to get people fired up.

People ask me about Trump all the time, and the safest way for me to respond to Trump is Trump's really good at a really bad game. Certainly Trump is a polarizer. His rhetoric is designed to divide us and create an us-versus-them and for me bring out the worst in human nature. The problem is pushing back on Trump with those same tools, I don't think long-term really works. That's where we're trying to change the game versus play the game better in a sense.

A lot of that polarization – and I'll also say, not all polarization is bad. We don't want everyone to think the same. So that's why I use the term toxic polarization. It's when polarization gets to a level that it undermines us and it brings out the worst in us and it leads to just simple assumptions. If I assume the other side's evil, there's no reason for me to talk to them. If I assume the other side has these hidden problematic motives, it cuts off all communication.

In democracy, if half the population doesn't trust and dismisses the other side, there's no way a democracy can function. So clearly depolarization has to be a part of it and we're learning more and more about it. But we can't just focus on "let's just come together and assume the best" because sometimes there are bad faith actors. I don't think half the country is a bad faith actor, but there are certainly some people that are purposely trying to divide us for their own profit or ideological benefit.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking about how power works. It's quite complex, but I'm thinking about the internal enemy strategy and outside enemy strategy that makes the group more compact. I think that this is also used a lot, I would say in every place of the world. That creates, most of the time, some toxic polarization and the people that are doing that, of course they are doing it because they see an advantage. At the same time, also related to the question that I did before, if they are conscious or unconscious – if they are conscious that this way of doing could actually lead to something very dangerous. I'm thinking about nowadays we are not used to having, luckily, civil wars in Europe or in the Western world, but I'm thinking that in the past, Europe saw a lot of violence. I'm thinking also about religious wars.

Martin Carcasson: When I talk about avoiding triggering the worst of human nature to tap into the best, one of the key aspects is this notion that humans are designed – our brains are wired to be social. We are social beings. Jonathan Haidt talks about this in terms of groupishness. We're groupish. The academic literature uses the word tribal. We're political tribes and so forth. I think I have ten books on my shelf that have the word "tribe" in them.

I tend to avoid the use – I think tribes are a more complex term. But that notion of humans – another book is called "Making Monsters" – like humans are one of the only species that demonizes our own kind. So it's this clear aspect of human nature that we tend to think naturally in terms of us and them. There are two sides of this coin. Some of the worst things humans have ever done is because of this. We have an us and we define a them and we dehumanize them and we justify atrocities and we're still seeing this all over the world today.

But on the flip side, some of the best aspects of humans are that we're groupish. We're not individualistic as a species. We're in a group. There's a power of us. There's a way of connecting. In some ways, we're one of the most cooperative species. There's research I've been digging into that makes the argument that humans welcome the stranger more than any other species that exists.

This becomes this question of what are we tapping into? Are we tapping into the powerful negative side of that, the us-versus-them and the dehumanization, or are we tapping into the positive side of that, of bringing people together? My shift from focusing on national politics the first few years of my career to shifting to local was really tied into that. At the national politics level, we have a red team and a blue team and it's bringing out the worst in us. It incentivizes that.

For some people that's a conscious decision to do that. For a lot of other people, it's unconscious. The media world that they're in tells them this narrative and they've fallen for that narrative. So I don't think they're evil; I think they've been manipulated. We're trying to get them out of that. But if we switch to local, if someone's primary identity is, "Hey, I'm in Northern Colorado" – and yes, there'll still be a lot of distinctions, but at least the broad identity brings us together.

But we often get divided by politics, we get divided by race, we get divided by religion, we get divided by all these different things. All of those things have led to horrible things. How do we reframe that and tap into that other part of our brain, which is bringing people together as humans? There's a natural empathy, which is a fascinating upside and downside to that. That's my long-term work – how do we understand the negative aspects of our brain that are constantly being triggered? How do we design processes to avoid doing that?

But then the second half of my work, which is much more hopeful and those works are much more interesting to read for me, is how do we avoid all this bad stuff? How do we tap into the good stuff? There's a lot of good stuff with humans. Again, that's where my optimism comes in. It's harder to tap into the good stuff. It's not as natural, but we know how to do it.

The more you do it, the easier it is to do. So how do we engage people, not as opponents, not as warriors in this good-versus-evil, us-versus-them battle? How do we engage them as creative, collaborative problem solvers? How do we switch? I use Wicked Problems a lot in my work. It's actually amazing – I've been talking for an hour and I haven't brought it up yet. But the heart of my work, I use Wicked Problems as a way of looking at issues.

That particularly assumes any complex issue has multiple underlying values that don't fit together. In a pluralistic society, different people would prioritize those values differently. But the heart of the wicked problems frame is instead of assuming problems are caused by wicked people, bad people that have bad values and bad motives, we put the wickedness in the problem. That's a huge part of shifting from activating people as adversaries trying to vanquish evil to how do we work together shoulder to shoulder to work these problems differently.

I've had a lot of success using that lens to help. I'm not saying that there's never wicked people. Yes, there are some conflict profiteers. There are some people that are problematic, but I think a vast majority of people are not wicked. Pragmatically, I think very few people self-identify as wicked. We know from the research that if you tell people that you think they're evil or they're racist or whatever term you're using, that doesn't tend to work because people don't self-identify like that. That just divides us more. So the pragmatic effectiveness of framing an issue as a wicked problem can be very successful to help bring people together to see the issue differently, to open up space for us to have very different conversations that I think ultimately help us move the needle on these issues.

Alessandro Oppo: So I think if the person doesn't identify himself as a racist or something else, using that term, that person feels attacked. So that is the thing that should be avoided.

Martin Carcasson: We know, thinking about the battle between facts and values and beliefs and so forth, arguments that challenge someone's own identity and challenge their self-perception are always going to fail. We see that with the backfire effect. If you're trying to convince someone that they're wrong and that they're a bad person, that's a very hard thing to do. What it often does is it just increases the polarization. It's a backfire effect.

That's where, how do we talk about these issues better? I'm not saying everyone's opinions are as good as everyone else's. Part of the heart of deliberation is once we have that better conversation, if someone truly believes that they're right, these processes help us recognize that. That's where people are going to change their minds when they have genuine conversations with people that they trust. That's where they're going to have the aha moments. You see that with examples.

There's work on extreme listening – I think her name is Daryl Davis, or I forget the name of the musician – there are tons of TED Talks and YouTube about it, that get people to leave white supremacist organizations. You don't get someone to leave a white supremacist organization by attacking them for being racist. You do it by asking them questions and talking to them. All of a sudden they realize, "Wait a second, I'm wrong."

It's not always just listening to us. There's a pragmatic aspect of this – if you want to change someone's mind, you have to give them respect and really listen to them. Now, I'm not saying vulnerable audiences should try to have conversations with white supremacists. It's a very complex issue. But it's the ultimate – if we want to change minds.

The other thing I'll say is, if people truly believe the world is dominated by powerful people that are purposely oppressing us and holding people down, I believe that they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter. It makes it easy for them to do that. But as we transform our processes and start having better conversations, I think it makes it harder for those people to stay in power. That's the goal.

Ultimately, my work is pragmatic about how do we have these better conversations. Some of the issues I take on are clearly wicked problems – reasonable people on all different sides. I think these processes help. Sometimes the issues are, no, it's actually pretty clear that one side or a particular perspective is a much stronger perspective. It has better evidence, but also a better set of values. Maybe it's clear one side is being manipulative and spreading misinformation or disinformation. I still think sometimes these types of processes are the best to reveal that.

But there is a tension. We engage a lot with my students between more of an activism perspective or a deliberative civility, bring-people-together approach. It's not an either-or choice; it's a spectrum. Depending on our project, there are different ways we negotiate that.

Alessandro Oppo: I have a couple of questions if you have time. In relation to how to have better conversations, you mentioned some books before. If you have any other books to advise and also some resources.

Martin Carcasson: One of my favorite books for facilitation is Sam Kaner and he's got a few co-authors. It's "The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making." We use that a lot with our training and actually, specifically talking about AI and technology and so forth. I think that's an interesting – I'll try to paint this picture pretty quickly – but the main model of how do we make good participatory decisions, decisions that involve the people that it impacts.

For me, democracy – he talked about these three stages of divergent thinking. First, we have to make sure we hear from everybody and we get past the status quo and the assumptions and we hear lots of voices. Then we have to go through what he calls the "groan zone." This is this tough conversation where we're actually really listening to each other and developing mutual understanding. But then at some point we have to do convergent thinking. We have to come back together and make some tough distinctions and prioritize and decide how to move to action. So we use that quite a bit.

Both in our facilitation training and our process design, because each of those stages – the divergent thinking, the working through the groan zone, and convergent thinking – require a different way of talking, a different way of engaging. There are pitfalls along the way. If you over-emphasize dialogue, like I said, you have a lot of divergent thinking, but you never actually work through things. You can get stuck places. So that book, we use that in lots of different contexts to think about, "Okay, where are we in this conversation and what kind of techniques do we need to move forward?"

I'll also plug my colleague's book: Katie Knobloch and John Gastil. Katie is the Associate Director of the CBD and on faculty. They have a book called "Hope for Democracy." We've talked a little bit about hope and optimism. It's focused primarily on some citizens assembly, the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review project of really digging into and seeing and it really brings out, "Hey, what are some of the things that we know work?" Again, that notion of we know what works to bring people together on these tough issues. How do we build capacity to do that?

Hopefully I'll have my book in about a year or so. I'll send you an article that summarizes what I do about imagining this robust, deliberative city. I'm in the process right now of turning that essay into a book that hopefully will be out in the world soon.

Alessandro Oppo: Wonderful. And the last question, if you have a message for the people that are maybe doing something similar to you in other parts of the world, or maybe they are working on technology to create systems that could help facilitating. So people that are exploring a new way for democracy.

Martin Carcasson: I work a lot with an organization called the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, ncdd.org. That is more US-based, but certainly the concepts apply internationally. Democracy Next is the international one I know that does a lot of work, a lot of interesting producing of resources. The Listen First Coalition, if you do listenfirst.org, has a bunch of organizations. Again, most of these will be national.

But there's a growing movement across the world. A lot of this, I think in some ways Canada and Australia and some things in the European Union are ahead of us on some of these things. My work is US-centric, but I think we're seeing more and more innovation of how do we do things differently? We know screaming at each other doesn't work very well. Let's stop trying to play that game and let's create some different games that we know are going to work a lot better for us.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you, Martin. Thank you a lot.

Martin Carcasson: Yeah, thank you. Enjoy the conversation.

You can tell it's not hard getting me to talk about this stuff.

Alessandro Oppo: If you have anything else to add...

Martin Carcasson: One thing we didn't mention that I'll just put out there too – I work a lot with, like I said, cities and libraries and community foundations and school districts for local capacity. For the last four years, I've worked quite a bit with local newsrooms. So I wrote a paper in the National Civic Review about this dual crisis of local journalism and democracy and how they can work together. We've been working quite a bit with newsrooms to think about how can we equip local newsrooms with these deliberative processes, these deliberative skills to help us change conversations.

One of my favorite articles is by Amanda Ripley, a journalist who wrote an article called "Complicating the Narrative." It was a journalist that got some conflict resolution training and realized like journalists have been doing conflict badly. They've been leaning into the conflict. They've been highlighting the melodrama. They've been saying, "Hey, these are..." because that's what's interesting. That's what people want – they want the attacks and the bad guys and so forth.

But when she got the conflict resolution training, she was like, "What if journalists actually help us understand the conflict and dig deeper and help us reframe the conflict in more useful ways?" That led to something that they're calling solutions journalism, which I think is probably nationwide or worldwide now. So there are a lot of innovations.

Like I said earlier, our brains are wired for polarization and our political system, our media system, and our tech platforms all tend to make that worse and take advantage of that. Well, in all three of those now, we're working a lot on democratic innovations and political innovations to make better political systems. The deliberative journalism that I'm working on and solutions journalism are trying to figure out better ways of doing journalism that do that. Then some of these new tech platforms – Flipside Forum is one I played with a little bit.

I know in the Northeastern United States there's Front Porch Forum. There's Sway – that's one of the AI tools that I learned about at Northwestern. Simon Cullen's work on creating these tech platforms or AI that are helping us come together. That's where leaning on those new technologies, those new ways of thinking that I think are informed by our brains, but are designed to, as I've said several times, not trigger the bad stuff and actually get into the good stuff so we can function better.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, let's hope that all these platforms work so we have more facilitators and better conversations. Thank you a lot again.

Martin Carcasson: Yeah.