Make America talk again: the lab teaching sworn enemies to have decent conversations Could the secret to healing a riven politics lie in a Difficult Conversations Laboratory?

This is an edited version of a longer piece that you can find here In a hard-to-find windowless room deep inside a New York university, some difficult conversations are taking place. But this is not unusual, because this is a Difficult Conversations Laboratory.
Though it does not physically resemble a dungeon, it probably should. Researchers conducting experiments here routinely generate the kind of excruciating discomfort that most of us spend every family gathering trying to avoid.
Participants sign a waiver warning them that the experiments could cause stress or unpleasant feelings, before they are surveyed on a range of fraught topics, from abortion to the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are paired with someone who utterly disagrees with them and asked to talk things through around a small conference table. All while being recorded.
It does not always go well – but that’s the point.
“It is hard to study real-life, intractable conflict as it happens,” says the social psychologist Peter T Coleman, who started the lab over a decade ago with a group of colleagues. “This is an attempt to get as close as we can.” So far, the lab and several satellites worldwide have hosted and analysed nearly 500 contentious encounters. Read more here