Peter Coleman, PhD, is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, where he is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice, co-executive director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity, and director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. An expert on constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace, he studies how people and groups navigate profound divisions and differences effectively—and sustain positive relations over time. His research explores how skill sets like conflict intelligence and systemic wisdom help to navigate conflict in families, communities, workplaces, and societies. His latest book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (Columbia University Press, 2021), examines how communities can move beyond the intractable polarization in the United States and other societies around the globe.
You talk about our current situation of toxic political polarization as an addiction—why do you characterize it this way?
My understanding of addiction parallels my understanding of polarization today in the U.S. in that it is a complex biopsychosocial and structural problem. It involves our neurological wiring, what we pay attention to and don’t, how we react or don’t react to members of certain groups, our social relations, and our networks. It’s in our media feeds, algorithms, the television that we watch or don’t watch, and even where we travel and don’t travel on vacation. There are multiple layers of forces that combine to reinforce one another and serve to pit us against each other and pull us apart. Like addiction, it is a powerful force that is bigger than any of us.
In your book The Way Out, you talk about our current state of “systems level” polarization. What does that mean, and why is it so difficult to find our way out?
Exactly, because polarization is a multilevel biopsychosocial structural problem. It’s a very powerful constellation of forces working together rather than a single event or political figure. I’m currently working on a second edition of The Way Out [forthcoming in 2026], and what is increasingly clear to me as a psychologist is that the research is showing us that many of the well-intentioned bridge-building efforts to bring red and blue Americans together that have sprung up over the past 5 years seem to be having very little sustained effect. These initiatives don’t last long enough and only reach a small percentage of Americans (and mostly Democrats). So they are being overwhelmed by the many other signals in the system that are working to drive us apart. [Reducing polarization] is really going to require us to move from focusing our interventions on the micro level to thinking at the macro level about how the current incentives, norms, narratives, and leadership models overwhelm our better angels or instincts. These external, structural-level factors are what make it so hard to change the pattern that we’re stuck in.
Describe the difference between clock problems and cloud problems, and how trying to fix things in the wrong way can make things worse.
Karl Popper, an eminent philosopher of science, identified two fundamental kinds of problems that humans face. Some are clock problems, which are more mechanical and predictable. You solve them by taking the clock apart, finding the broken spring, repairing it, and putting it back together again. But some problems are cloud problems. Addiction is a cloud problem. It’s not one thing. It’s a multilayered set of problems that feeds and reinforces itself in complex ways. It is driven by many things interacting in messy, unpredictable ways. When we try to use our clock tools to fix cloud problems, it often backfires or has no observable effect.
What practical recommendations do you have for psychologists for reducing polarization?
A main idea in my book is the importance of finding ways to loosen up the closed, narrow, overly simplistic ways that many of us experience polarization and the “other” side—the half of the country that differs from us politically today. One key recommendation is the power of movement, either physical, emotional, or imaginative, during difficult conversations. What research suggests is that if you actually get people up and physically moving, sometimes in a room, or walking outside side by side, it matters. There is something about physical movement that can shake up our assumptions and the automatic wiring in our brains, because of our neuroplasticity. When you move together with others, there is a physical synchronization that happens. Researchers study dance teams, marching bands, and combat troops who move together in step and have found that it creates a kind of neurological bond. Long ago, diplomats discovered that going for walks when negotiations stalled often helped to open up new possibilities for resolution. But we need to integrate such practices more intentionally into peacebuilding and psychology.
Where is your work currently helping in concrete and ongoing ways?
The Difficult Conversations Lab was built to study discussions over tense, morally divisive conflicts and to learn about the conditions under which they go well or poorly. After I published what we learned in The Way Out, I worked with the nonprofit Builders, a nonpartisan organization that works to bridge political polarization, to create the Polarization Detox Challenge (PDC).opens in new window I found that groups that do bridge building, where they bring people together for a dinner, a conversation, or an event, didn’t move the needle sufficiently. Events don’t build habits. What builds habits is repetition in a new environment. I wanted to design something that would be ongoing and allow people to try things over time to develop different kinds of habits. The PDC offers a set of simple, brief, daily exercises over a 4-week period focused on managing (a) yourself, (b) your in-group, (c) intergroup tensions, and (d) the community issues that divide us. And it highly recommends that you take this on in small, ideally diverse groups. We have gotten some feedback about the PDC being too demanding in some ways. So there’s a new iteration underway to accompany the second edition of The Way Out, which will address that criticism and make it even simpler—something that can be accessed on your phone and will be more frictionless.
