Episode 98: Constructive Dialogue- Mission Possible?!? with Mylien Duong, Director of Research at Constructive Dialogue Institute

Mylien Doung is a Senior Director of Research at constructive dialogue institute. She’s trained as a clinical psychologist, and she has broad experience in developing scalable behavioral interventions. She led the research to develop social-emotional learning programs for teachers and kids or all schools, and conducted research studies to develop and test behavioral interventions for students and youth and social and juvenile justice settings

The Problem of Constructive Dialogue

What we have seen is that social scientists measure something called effective polarization, which is how much you dislike and distrust the other group. For example, if you are a Democrat, then it will be how much you dislike and distrust and have contempt for Republicans, and if you are a Republican, it is vice versa. They’ve been tracking this for decades and what we see is that level of content and distrust that we see happening right now across parties is at an all-time high. When you talk to people, what you hear is that it has always been heated to talk about these controversial issues. The debates have always happened in schools, but what we see that is new is that people are increasingly reluctant to talk about it with somebody who doesn’t agree with them. Within a classroom, you see students looking at each other giving winks and nods as signals to let others know if they agree or disagree but they will not say anything to make the discussion happen in the classroom.

How Do You Fix The Informational Gap When People Are Not Even Listening?

What we have seen is that in the 1950s and 1960s, everyone watches the same news. Everyone sat down and tuned in to the same thing. It could be on two or three different channels but everyone broadly shared the same media ecosystem. Now there are a million new sources such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook so anybody can get their information and their point of view out there on the internet. What we are seeing is a fragmented information ecosystem and so people go to the thing that agrees with their world view or they go to the thing that causes them outrage and they just rail against that. This is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon but at the same time, it is not everyone. There are still people that trust the facts and follow legitimate sources. We do have a vocal minority that is buying into the misinformation and when coming to young kids we ask the question how would they know? Have you done anything to teach them how to tease out misinformation from real information? As adults, it is their job to teach the young how to prepare them with these skills.

Do We Have To Be Better Parents To Open Constructor Dialogue?

Conservation between a parent and child is important. If they do not know the answers to a question then both the parent and child can research and find the answers together. This allows them not only to find the answer but to see what agree with and disagree with. These are the kinds of things that the Constrictive Dialogue Institute is trying to make more commonplace in the home and at school and also just in general society. There are not a lot of models these days for kids about how you actually even engage in this kind of dialogue. There are a lot of models on how to attack other persons’ dialogue, how to call them names, how to vilify, and even call it fake news without engaging in any dialogue. There is a benefit of slowing down and listening and saying, “ You don’t know something.” It is important to recognize intellectual humility where you recognize that you do not know everything and that maybe other people have something important to say. It is correlated with interpersonal and personal benefits.

Contact Mylien Duong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmylienduong/

Learn more about Constructive Dialogue Institute: https://constructivedialogue.org/

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