Yess! So excited to see this out. Can’t wait to cite!

We hope this project points to the merits of academic-practitioner collaboration and will encourage others to connect science to practice as well.
Finally thank you to my co-authors @Narrative 4
(Lee Keylock and Evan Barker) and
@kurtjgray.bsky.social

Taken together this work provides further evidence for the power of narratives in building empathy and connection, while also healing political divides (see also: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...)

Further, the program also led students to report lower affective polarization for those who disagree with them on political issues.

Using experimental methods, we find this intervention promoted empathy, civic outcomes, and many other pro-social outcomes (e.g., respect for others, perspective taking) among those in the intervention (vs. control).

The intervention taught students skills in story sharing including perspective taking, active listening, and how to share a compelling story. This intervention culminated in a story exchange between students.

This collaboration tested the efficacy of a 10-session narrative intervention developed by practitioners at Narrative 4 among 380 high school students in 5 schools in Kentucky USA.

Academics and practitioners rarely work together, but would both benefit from collaboration. Practitioners benefit via statistical testing of their interventions. Academics benefit via connecting research to practice.

Many of these ideas originated with my previous research exploring the role of perceived harm and truth in shaping people's willingness to silence others
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Importantly, when we (endorse) censoring opponents it drives further political division--creating a feedback loop of increasing polarization and willingness to silence opponents.

Social media and polarization feed off one another, and through a variety of processes, drive epistemic polarization. This disagreement over truth fosters peoples' beliefs that their opponents' ideas are harmful and untrue--driving willingness to censor.

Using knowledge from political psychology and communications research I develop the Social Media- Polarization-Censorship (SPC) Framework which explains how social media and polarization interact to drive political censorship

Congrats Mikey! This sounds super interesting.. looking forward to reading it!

It was a long road with this piece but I am so happy to finally see it published! Thankful for the team effort from my co-first author @versteegenluca.bsky.social and the amazing @kurtjgray.bsky.social

This work builds off our own previous research on moral conflicts and that of the relationship literature (i.e., self-disclosure as a key driver for positive relationship building). We hope our findings provide insights into a key mechanism (self-disclosure) for future intervention development.

Finally in Study 6, we found that in general we were successfully able to teach partisans how to be more self-disclosing in cross partisan communication--driving real opponents feelings of connection, respect, and interaction with opponents.

We find self-disclosure builds felt connection between opponents on divisive issues like immigration and gun policy--thereby driving greater willingness to respect and interact with opponents