Listen First, Block When Necessary
Avoiding echo chambers while still creating healthy digital spaces
I was raised in a “one right answer” subculture where some people were perceived to be better, more valued, and more worthy than others. Lately, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wondering why I (and others raised with the same views … even my parents!) moved away from that subculture, while some people became more entrenched, intolerant, and even dangerous.
Time and again, I come back to the fact that, though the subculture was a dominant part of my life, it wasn’t all encompassing. Everyone in my family had relationships and interactions with people from other backgrounds who held different beliefs and had life experiences vastly different from ours. As for me specifically, I read tons of books, played sports with a diverse group of kids, and participated in extracurricular activities like journalism, public speaking, theater, and academic decathalon that required me to research, humanize, and defend other viewpoints and perspectives.
My curiosity about and empathy for fellow human beings led me into professional spaces where listening, learning, understanding, and bridge-building were vital skills. The more I learned about the views of others — and the more people I knew and held dear — the more perspective I gained on my own beliefs. It become intellectually and relationally impossible for me to continue to cling to “one right answer.”
As psychiatrist George Makari says in Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, when people with differences “work, play, and love together, the psychic processes that drive conditional threat reactions and unconscious bias can diminish.”
In this digital world, we have the unprecedented ability to engage with all kinds of voices on every topic imaginable. We have access to a wide variety of thoughts and perspectives different from our own … and the luxury of pondering them from the comfort and safety of our own spaces. How amazing!
There is a story behind every belief or viewpoint a person holds. The story is always more interesting, more rich, more revealing than the belief or viewpoint itself. Social media lets us listen to the reasons behind a viewpoint. It lets us examine the experiences that inform perspectives. It humanizes philosophies and ideologies. And a humanized perspective is a lot harder to dismiss.
“Dialogue with the Other can restore the capacity for empathy and the possibility of mutual recognition,” says Makari, expressly acknowledging that “Online tools may help us encounter our own ‘implicit biases.’”
By engaging with others, Makari says, “We learn to tolerate an initial discomfort, take in new information, refine our appraisals, and go beyond categorical judgments as our slower, conscious capacities for judgment kick in.”
Despite the unprecedented opportunity digital media provides us to listen to and learn from others, research shows that many of us tend to listen to voices and perspectives that reflect and echo our own.
Instead of expanding our sources of information, we narrow them to those that reinforce the things we already think and believe. Even if we aren’t intentionally seeking out like-minded voices, algorithms tend to feed us content that appeals to the preferences and viewpoints we already hold.
When we repeatedly encounter the same thoughts and ideas, we find ourselves surprised, perplexed, and even angry when confronted with a different perspective.
Take, for example, the impacts of “color-blind” education and beliefs, as explained by economics and policy researcher Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone …
A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots…. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.
When we aren’t routinely exposed to alternative, opposing, or merely different views, we don't always know how to make sense of them. There is a tendency to think that people who disagree with us are wrong or evil or out to hurt us. We don’t see them as human. We see them as monsters. We develop an “us versus them” mentality. We feel the need to defend our position, prove the other side wrong, and argue people into agreeing with us.
But when we commit to listening to those who are different from us and those we disagree with … when we strive to understand their reasons, we start to understand that the same desires for security, comfort, love, joy, and meaning underlie most ideas. We start to see we simply have different ways of prioritizing what matters or different ways of achieving similar outcomes. It becomes a lot harder to assume bad intent, to decide there's nothing of value or worth in a position, or to say that no reasonable, responsible, or good person could think that way.
As we get to know others, we are more open to seeing the world through their eyes. We’re more interested in solutions that take their concerns into consideration. We’re more willing to try to understand why they speak, act, and think the way they do. And the more someones we get to know, the more collaborative, creative, and inclusive we instinctively become.
Our willingness to listen enables us to build bridges and discover inclusive solutions together.
It also empowers us to consciously and in good faith tune out the voices and perspectives of those who poison courageous dialogue — people so steeped in their own perspectives and so convinced theirs alone is the “one right way” that they actively resist finding other ways forward together.
We can’t assume people who see the world differently from us automatically hold rigid and inflexible views. It’s only through dialogue that we can uncover the contours of their beliefs and challenge the plasticity of our own. After engaging in good faith, however, we can confidently identify people who willfully choose to see others as evil, immoral, or the enemy.
Makari notes three signs that we have encountered someone entrenched in rigid, unalterable beliefs:
an inability to consider grey areas (their views are staunchly black and white)
an inability to allow others to have a variety of feelings about issues
the loss of a capacity for guilt
Rigid, xenophobic thinkers, says Makari, “are always justified, always the victims, even after perpetrating violence. External condemnation falls on deaf ears. In-between arguments are swept aside as weak.” Put more simply, they operate from the mindset that “we are good and they are bad.” Inclusion of and collaboration with others “poses an existential threat” to someone who thinks this way.
When our good faith attempts at dialogue are met with these signs of rigidity and inflexibility — and, yes, even hatred — we can confidently exclude these voices and perspectives from our digital spaces without fear of creating an echo chamber devoid of alternative views.
And, as we engage in digital dialogue with others, it’s worth considering whether we’re showing signs of rigid and inflexible thinking on some topics or issues — and whether that’s hindering us from finding new ways forward together.
ALSO BY LAUREN HUG …