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To get to tipping point change in overcoming toxic polarization, we need a host of interventions: political and cultural, grasstops and grassroots, online and offline.
RTT focuses on three mutually-reinforcing levers of change, grounded in research and practice on what has created change in conflict-ridden societies:
We equip and activate ideologically diverse force-multipliers with bridge-building tools and skills. One of our answers to scale is to train people with the social capital to influence behaviors and norms within their spheres of influence. We believe to overcome toxic divisions in our society we need to invest in healthy pluralism with those most proximate to us—in our faith communities; on our campuses, in our schools. We need a lived experience of communicating and collaborating across our differences where we are.
We forge transformative encounters across societal divisions and build relational infrastructure for transforming them, replacing distrust and animosity with bonds, trust, and a shared sense of “we.” In partnership with an exceptional diversity of strategic partners—from Deans at conservative Christian colleges to progressive activists to award-winning journalists to rural dairy farmers—we enable important communication and collaboration across political, racial, regional, and religious divides.
We harness the power of TV, film, and other creative media to catalyze content and stories supporting pluralism at scale, overcoming perception gaps, depicting generative conflict, and translating across the disparate streams, voices, and identities of American life. RTT has brought training in bridge-building techniques to showrunners and writers on many of the most popular shows on television, including Handmaid’s Tale, Mad Men, The Good Doctor, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Grey’s Anatomy, and Star Wars.
We also engage in storytelling and strategic communications to drive change. We create and distribute content that promotes perspective-taking and collaboration across lines of difference. Our short film, Purple, and its accompanying robust discussion guide have served as a gateway into bridge-building work for more than 100,000 viewers from members of Congress to K-12 students in museums, universities, high schools, public libraries, houses of worship, think tanks, and other organizations in 49 states.
Countering demonization and distortion that fuel escalation and threat perceptions.
Strengthening democracy and civic engagement.
1. Working within groups to build norms and practices for navigating differences; particularly in the face of escalation, we look to people like ourselves to determine what is acceptable, and what we see, we tend to spread.
2. Bringing rival groups together to facilitate communication and collaboration; a body of evidence shows that well-designed encounters across differences can reduce distrust and animosity and increase empathy and even resilience against violence.
By transporting people beyond their like-minded enclaves into each other’s worlds and modeling pluralistic relationships and behavior, societal storytellers—such as creators of popular television—can be critical partners in reducing prejudice and anxiety; providing a sense of empathy, trust, and shared humanity; and achieving greater vision, motivation, and will to live and work together in community across our differences.
