On a Thursday evening in Fort Collins, Colorado, community members gathered around tables to discuss whether the city should allow marijuana dispensaries within city limits.

Rather than take turns for two minutes at a microphone, the participants considered various viewpoints, engaged with quality information and focused on exploring solutions that worked to mitigate the concerns of the critics but still supported the goals of the advocates.

Gatherings like this one have happened more than 500 times in and around the northern Colorado town over the past 20 years. Each was facilitated by college students. While outrage and polarization dominate many political discussions, these events provide compelling evidence that when offered a more nuanced way of engaging, the public recognizes the value and calls for more.

I’m a communication studies professor with a background in argumentation and debate. I founded the Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation in 2006 based on the theory that democracy requires high-quality communication and engagement to thrive. Existing political, journalistic and social media systems rarely provide such opportunities, but a growing number of organizations like the center are learning more about how to provide them.

The story behind the experiment

Initially, my research centered on national politics. As I learned how issues like poverty, race and the environment were discussed, I became frustrated.

I came to understand that social issues are best understood as “wicked problems” that involve competing underlying values that are inherently in tension with each other. These tensions stand in the way of “solving” the problem long term. In a diverse society where people reasonably prioritize values differently, it is clear that addressing wicked problems requires a more collaborative style of communication.

Research in social psychology and brain science, however, shows humans are simply not wired for these conversations.

Scholarship reveals that humans are motivated reasoners susceptible to numerous unconscious biases that undermine their ability to engage complex issues. Humans are prone to confirmation bias and my-side bias, so we tend to cherry-pick the facts that support our preconceived ideas and reject those that challenge them. We often suffer from an inflated sense of certainty.

Humans are also narrative creatures who prefer simple stories with clear heroes, victims and villains. We have a natural attraction to divisive, identity-based appeals that too often see the world through us-them frames that lead to divisiveness and contempt.

In other words, when given a choice, humans strongly prefer to assume that problems are caused by wicked people, rather that engage the inherent wickedness of problems.

By the end of graduate school, I understood that a highly partisan two-party system makes a problematic situation worse by rewarding the exploitation of these human tendencies. As a result, adversarial politics lead to an exaggerated sense of polarization that breeds divisiveness and misunderstanding. They can also fuel information chaos, an overwhelming swirl of misinformation and disinformation that the researchers with RAND aptly named Truth Decay. Information chaos is also directly related to the erosion of trust in journalism and academia, two institutions that traditionally helped elevate quality information.

This adversarial environment is also a ripe breeding ground for bad faith actors who undermine our civic culture. There is a growing recognition among civic engagement scholars and practitioners that conflict profiteers, merchants of doubt and polarizers actively work to take advantage of human biases for their own benefit.

Above all, I recognized that how people engage each other matters. I decided to explore alternative models of engagement better suited to how our brains worked as well as the problems our communities were facing.

Experimenting in the classroom

The practice of deliberation is a form of structured interactive communication designed to help people engage with complex issues and come to more reasoned judgments. I began experimenting with this new tool in my classroom starting in around 2000. At first I adopted material from the National Issues Forums Institute, a nonpartisan organization that has been developing deliberative discussion guides for educational purposes since 1981.

I was hired at Colorado State University in 2003 to take over the argumentation and debate class, and I shifted the class’s focus from debate to deliberation.

The course challenged students to frame an issue from a deliberative perspective by asking, “What should we do about X?” with X being a shared wicked problem, such as the increasing number of mental health issues on campus.

The assignment shifted students from being advocates of a particular viewpoint to serving as impartial analysts. Many assignments in K-12 and college education ask students to start with a conclusion and then do research to support it, encouraging motivated reasoning. This assignment was designed to force their brains to see different sides of an issue by adopting what author Julia Galef describes as a “scout mindset.”

Students developed a well-researched discussion guide that outlined at least three distinct approaches to address their problem. These guides served as useful tools for others to overcome my-side bias and exaggerated polarization and to be more likely to, as psychologist Adam Grant has encouraged, think again.

Taking the conversations outside the classroom

In 2006, the Center for Public Deliberation launched.

To support it, I designed a course that trains students to facilitate small-group discussions. Our first major project involved running six nights of forums for the local school district that engaged over 600 participants in a discussion about reorganizing schools. My students and I worked with them to and successfully debuted a deliberative form of engagement.

Soon we were designing and running events for the city, county, university and community organizations on issues such as housing affordability and decarbonization. College students facilitated every event.

Our work shows that the events our student facilitators supported had a positive impact on the quality of local engagement. Well-designed and well-facilitated processes bring out the best of human nature, particularly our creativity, cooperative social instincts and sense of purpose. They can rebuild trust and provide hope for democracy.

Building local civic capacity nationwide

Since 2006, our staff has grown. The center has continued to refine our methods, drawing from the interdisciplinary academic field of deliberative democracy and using resources from practitioner organizations focused on quality engagement and collaboration, such as the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, the Interactivity Foundation and the International Association for Public Participation.

Similar centers for civic life have developed on other campuses. The Center for Public Deliberation is currently a part of a Department of Education grant to further expand the network to 40 campuses across the country.

Beyond campus, organizations such as Braver Angels, Better Together America and the Trust for Civic Life are dedicated to building local civic hubs that use these tools. They also train facilitators and serve as critical bridging institutions between diverse groups.

The challenges our communities face are significant. But every day more people are realizing that how we engage each other matters and are making space for the conversations that must be sparked for democracy to thrive.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Martin Carcasson works for the Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation, serves as the co-chair of the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council, and partners with organizations such at National Issues Forum, the Interactivty Foundation, and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation.