that liberals and conservatives
have grown further apart. They increasingly wall themselves off
in these ideological silos, consuming different news,
talking only to like-minded others

And I think that
the most alarming of all of it is seeing this rising
animosity on both sides.

I'm a movie buff, and so I'm often like, what kind of movie are we in here
with this pattern?

But what I keep thinking is that
we're in a zombie apocalypse movie. There's people wandering around in packs, not thinking for themselves, seized by this mob mentality trying to spread their disease
and destroy society

What can we do to chip away
at polarization in everyday life? What could we do to connect with
and communicate with our political counterparts?

the political divide in our country
is undergirded by a deeper moral divide.

Some are, some aren't, depending on the philosophical basis which undergird those theories.

So one of the most robust findings
in the history of political psychology is this pattern identified
by Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham, that liberals and conservatives
tend to endorse different values to different degrees.

And Matt and I were thinking
that maybe this moral divide might be helpful
for understanding how it is that liberals and conservatives
talk to one another and why they so often
seem to talk past one another when they do.

It's really important for parents to try to improve communication with their teenagers because it's very easy to talk past one another.

I thought there was agreement between us but we were merely talking past each other.

People's moral values,
they're their most deeply held beliefs. People are willing
to fight and die for their values. Why are they going to give that up
just to agree with you on something that they don't particularly
want to agree with you on anyway?

So what would work better? Well, we believe it's a technique
that we call moral reframing, and we've studied it
in a series of experiments.

Another group of participants were assigned to read
a really different essay that was designed to tap into
the conservative value of moral purity. It was a pro-environmental essay as well,

And we've studied this on a whole slew
of different political issues.

So if you want to move conservatives on issues like same-sex marriage
or national health insurance, it helps to tie these liberal
political issues to conservative values like patriotism and moral purity.

All these studies
have the same clear message: if you want to persuade
someone on some policy, it's helpful to connect that policy
to their underlying moral values.

And when you say it like that it seems really obvious. Right? Like, why did we come here tonight? It's incredibly intuitive.

Maybe instead it's a buddy cop movie. Just roll with it, just go with it please. You know the kind:
there's a white cop and a black cop, or maybe a messy cop and an organized cop. Whatever it is, they don't get along because of this difference.