Civity Storytelling was #1 in increasing social trust of the interventions tested in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge.
The Stanford-based Strengthening Democracy Challenge (SDC) megastudy – the largest social science experiment of its kind – measured several factors related to partisanship and political distrust. The results show that the simple act of engaging in the practice of civity – of seeing humanity in an “other” – reduces partisan polarization.
The megastudy, published in the journal Science, found that Civity’s eight-minute digital intervention – Civity Storytelling: Expanding the Pool of People Who Matter – was:
➤ #1 at increasing social trust;
➤ #2 in decreasing social distance – when people avoid being near someone of the other party;
➤ #2 at decreasing opposition to bipartisanship; and
➤ One of the top interventions for reducing partisan animosity (#4).
The Civity Storytelling intervention also:
➤ Reduced support for un-democratic practices;
➤ Was #4 in decreasing support for biased evaluation of political facts; and
➤ Decreased cold feelings towards out-partisans – people from other political parties.
“Democracy offers a vision for getting along and working together, even when we don’t know each other, disagree, or have different views or values.”
– Civity
Share Civity Storytelling
The Civity Storytelling intervention is available to the general public. We invite you to:
➤ Check it out! Take the intervention yourself.
➤ Share it with other people at a gathering!
➤ Invite participants coming to a dialogue or discussion to view it in advance so that they might be in a mindset for sharing and listening.”
Learn More about Civity Storytelling and the Strengthening Democracy Challenge
➤ ARTICLE: Can science-based interventions tamp down polarization? By M. Mitchell Waldrop – PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) (January 22, 2025)
➤ BLOG: A Path Out of Polarization: The Strengthening Democracy Challenge and the Civity Storytelling Intervention (June 15, 2023)
➤ PODCAST: Strengthening Democracy by Increasing Social Trust & Cultivating Connections Across Difference, with Robb Willer (February 27, 2023)
➤ BLOG: Stanford Study Shows Civity Helps Strengthen Democracy (September 14, 2022)
➤ VIDEO: “Civity Storytelling: Expanding the Pool of People Who Matter,” presentation at Strengthening Democracy Challenge Conference (September 29, 2022)
➤ FULL STUDY: Available on the Strengthening Democracy Challenge website. Published in the journal Science (October 18, 2024)