As many of you know, the Civity team submitted an intervention in the Stanford-based Strengthening Democracy Challenge back in 2021. The Challenge was to test whether online interventions of eight minutes or less could significantly lessen partisan animosity and other indicators of political division.
Out of 252 submissions, 25 were selected for testing. Civity Storytelling: Expanding the Pool of People Who Matter was one of the 25.
Civity Storytelling was designed to give viewers, as much as possible, the Civity workshop experience of “seeing” and “hearing” people as complex human beings. The intervention centered five videos of people talking about themselves and their communities, and it was one of the few submissions grounded in practice as well as research.
In the megastudy results, Civity Storytelling did very well. It placed:
➤ #4 of those tested in reducing partisan animosity,
➤ #2 of those tested in reducing social distance, and
➤ #1 of those tested in reducing social distrust
It was incredibly rewarding to be part of the megastudy and very affirming to have the Civity approach validated by researchers.
The team at Stanford’s Politics and Social Change Lab kept going. In 2022, they put out a call for proposals for “research teams working in partnership with civic organizations to put some of the most effective interventions to test in real-world settings.”
Enter the Rev. Jerad Morey, Director of Civic Dialogue at the Minnesota Council of Churches, and Dr. Mark Brandt, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. Jerad and Mark proposed incorporating the Civity Storytelling intervention into the Respectful Conversations Project of the Minnesota Council of Churches.
Specifically, they proposed—and eventually tested—inviting participants in the Project’s intensive three-hour dialogues on challenging topics to view the Civity Storytelling intervention beforehand. They then explored whether adding the “low-intensity” online intervention of just a few minutes would/could increase the effectiveness of those “high-intensity” dialogues.
What Mark and Jerad found, though technically inconclusive, was very encouraging:
Although people expressed more positive opinions about those with whom they disagreed in the video intervention condition, the estimated benefits between the two conditions did not emerge as statistically significant.
Mark and Jerad observed that with small effects, a large data pool is important. Further, the effects of a short video may be hard to ascertain compared to the significant effects of the “immersive experience” of the dialogue itself.
Yet, acknowledging the inconclusiveness of the research in terms of the rigors of statistical analysis, Jerad made his own practice-based assessment to continue to use Civity Storytelling going forward:
It made enough of a difference that now, after the funded experiment is concluded, we make sure all of our Respectful Conversations participants have the chance to prepare their minds, bodies and souls with what Civity has put together… We’ve now included the Civity Storytelling Intervention in confirmation emails to everyone who attends our events.
Jerad and Mark’s innovation shows that the Civity Storytelling intervention can be used in conjunction with other processes.
Further, Mark and Jerad’s work highlights that Civity Storytelling can serve as preparation for dialogues on many sensitive topics—not only those related to political divisions.
Thank you, Jerad and Mark!
The Civity Storytelling intervention is up and available on the Civity website – feel free to take a look and also to share with others!
➤ If you haven’t already, view it yourself.
➤ If you are looking for ways to prepare participants for a more intensive process, send them the link ahead of time and invite them to watch.
Or…if you see another way to use Civity Storytelling to help people connect across difference, take it and run with it—and let us know!