Amanda Ripley: Listening allows people to coexist. People will put up with a lot of difference if they feel heard. People will open up to different ideas and opinions. If you are going to live in a pluralistic society, particularly a democracy like the United States, people need to feel heard or else everything goes to hell, one way or another, because people pull to extremes – they stop listening, they demonize each other, they can't see any shared humanity. Listening is the lubricant of civil society.

If we can't have productive conflict, which you can't have without listening, then you can't make progress as a society. Increasingly, I think a lot of us believe that if we can just shame someone or argue with someone enough, make them feel bad or isolate them, then that will force people to come to our side.

But the opposite is true in the research. When you argue with people, you give them permission to hold more tightly to their beliefs. When people feel understood, they can still disagree but come up with much more creative solutions. When people really feel heard by someone who is good at listening, all these amazing things happen. They become less anxious, they say more interesting things, they become more coherent in what they're saying, less extreme. And, they are more open about the contradictions in their own beliefs.

It's a reflection of the fact that we are living more and more politically segregated lives. The best way to reduce partisan prejudice is to live among and talk to people who think differently than you do, but that is becoming really rare. Most people do not talk about politics, in particular, with people who disagree with them. People are far less likely to date and marry people from a different political party than they were any time in my lifetime.

Thanksgiving seems to be the one exception. It’s the one time, for many people, where they come face to face with people who disagree with them politically, who get their news from different channels.

If you have a relationship with someone at the table, and you know that you disagree on something, I would strongly recommend leaning into the conflict—but doing it carefully.

Spend ten minutes – just ten minutes – really listening to that person, one-on-one. Make eye contact, and ask personal, open-ended questions. Don't ask about the border wall. Instead, ask how their opinions on immigration have changed over the course of their lifetime. Or, what do they wish the “other side” understood about their position that they don't understand now?

Then, try not to judge what they're saying. Every time they say something that seems important to them, stop and gently check if you are understanding them. Rephrase what they said in the most elegant language you can muster, and ask them if that's right. You'll see something happen. Either they'll say, “No, that's not right,” and they'll say something that's more useful to try to explain it. Or they'll say, "Exactly." It's almost always that word that people use: “exactly.” And you can actually see them kind of light up. It's an amazing thing to see because it's so rare that people feel heard. Even if it's about something not that emotional.

In this way, you start to build trust with them. And then you'll find that the next thing they say is more and more interesting. And then hopefully, by the end of that ten minutes, you can then say what you think, and they might actually hear it.

Part of the reason politics have gotten so combustible, so loaded, is that we're not actually talking about the things we care most about. Instead, we're having a proxy battle, and the conflict seems like it's about the Confederate flag or abortion, when it's really about more than that.

Then, as we get more and more separated from each other, we start getting different information loaded with different symbolism and meaning, and it becomes harder and harder to talk about the thing you're really worried about, like feeling afraid for your kids’ future. So, we stop speaking each other's language, quite literally. When I interview conservatives, they use very different language than when I interview progressives. It's scary because it's really hard to communicate if you don't speak the same language.

We're going to stagnate and regress, as a country, if we can't find ways to work together. This is like a marriage, and right now, both sides are trying to win the marriage, as negotiator William Ury says. You can't win a marriage. You can destroy it, but we've got kids together. This country has millions of kids together. We've got to find a way to deal with each other, right?