The conversations that bring us together: The Or Initiative’s plans to bridge across differences

Photo by Emily Paris, Photo Editor

Amidst a digital age that reinforces polarization and disengagement, the Samueli Foundation has recognized the need for open, receptive dialogue, investing $1.85 million in launching the Or initiative. This program seeks to reshape the mindsets with which people approach conversations by equipping them with the tools to tackle issues collaboratively. The program is being led by Vikki Katz, a professor in the School of Communication and the recently endowed Fletcher Jones Chair in Free Speech. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, her research has focused on how social media influences students’ civil discourse on politically contentious topics. 

“Social media, in particular, is a medium that is very poorly suited to getting a deep understanding of a topic that has very deep roots and a lot of different aspects of nuance,” Katz told The Panther. 

A big part of this issue comes from the fact that social media continues to blur the boundary between reporting and entertainment. The short, quippy videos that take advantage of the algorithm often fail to acknowledge the context and complex background of topics.

In Katz’s class on civil discourse, she tells her students that if they can sum up their position on a complex issue like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a hashtag, they likely understand very little about it.

The younger generations are often described as tech-savvy. However, digital literacy is more than simply navigating social media platforms. Research suggests that the ability to discern fact from mis and disinformation is becoming harder than ever in the modern digital age. 

“When it is more about distilling information into knowledge, that’s a skill that people struggle with at every age because we have more information at our fingertips than we’ve ever had, and it’s a flood,” Katz said. “It’s exhausting to distill what we should know.”

The lack of a gatekeeper on social media to verify information means that the so-called facts continue to get distorted, leading to further polarization and bias. 

The Or initiative encourages people to find the places where they agree, and work from there. Problem-solving has become more difficult when people perceive each other as enemies across political divides. Supported by social identity theory, categorizing and identifying oneself as a member of a particular group can cultivate competition and hostility against “othered” groups. 

“We are not just our political positions. We are more than that,” said Katz. “We’ve come to understand our positions as a stand-in for our identities and our deep selves.”

Social identity theory suggests that people begin to adopt the norms, values and behaviors that align with their group membership. According to Katz, choosing to pick a label can have dangerous consequences. 

“The idea that Democrats will always agree with Democrats and Republicans will always agree with Republicans — we know that’s not true,” said Katz. “And that’s true for wherever we put the dividing line on a particular issue. When you force people to pick a label — ‘I’m pro-life, I’m pro-choice’ — there are a lot of people who are on the razor edge of that or for whom it’s complicated, but if you force them to pick a label, it just looks like we got two teams playing in sports against each other.”

The Or initiative plans to train educators and implement a curriculum to teach students how to discern reliable sources in media and have open, honest and empathetic conversations on contentious topics. 

The next steps for the Or initiative will be to hire a team and reach out to middle schools, high schools, and universities in Orange to research how to tailor the curriculum effectively to each age demographic. 

Learning to have open, receptive conversations is vital in fostering collective efficacy, the belief that people can organize and collaborate to execute courses of action to achieve a goal successfully. 

“Collective efficacy requires social trust. And social trust — this sense that we can come together and we can solve problems that matter to us — that shouldn’t mean that we have to agree on absolutely everything,” said Katz. “For you and I to work together on an issue we care about shouldn't mean that every single one of our views aligns on every single thing. That’s when real change can happen. That’s when people start bridging across difference.”