Can certainty kill big ideas?
How simple stories trap us, and what happens when we invite complexity
In this month’s Download:
How ‘us vs them’ thinking offers comfort and moral certainty, even when we haven’t heard the facts.
The reasons stark narratives dominate advocacy, and how that hurts long-term trust and collaboration.
Why curiosity beats consensus and how teams can move from defending positions to uncovering insights.
Practical ways to design spaces that can get you to honest tension without chaos.
Have you ever known what side of an issue you’re going to be on, even before you’ve heard any of the details?
Of course you have.
Political psychology has shown again and again that most of us adopt positions, not for the sake of a deeply reasoned argument, but because some integral part of us longs to be part of a group.
When our views align with the group we identify with, then we feel safer. And holding the ‘right’ stance allows us to get on with our day with a sense of moral consistency; even if it means oversimplifying a complex issue.
In short, polarity is wired into us. It offers us psychological comfort by shielding us from the fear of looking inconsistent and the discomfort of nuance (did we just sum up complex neurological arguments about nuance in under 100 words? Yep! Awkward).
Clarity cuts through, but at what cost?
Polarity isn’t confined to politics though. Campaigners and changemakers sometimes gravitate towards polarised narratives because a clear ‘us versus them’ message is very handy when time is short and the stakes are high.
Messages which tap into strong emotions travel faster and more widely than more balanced arguments. But when we lean on this kind of simplicity, we create fertile ground for tribalism, and that’s when nuanced, critical thinking loses its legitimacy. Arguably, the cumulative effect of this is the stark divides that are seemingly taking root worldwide, and contributing to stalling peace-building efforts and the slowing of development programmes.
Plus, behavioural and political science shows us that thinking in black and white terms is fundamentally incompatible with thinking long term. When leaders chase short-term gains they adopt polarised positions to rally support. Those binary stances then make it increasingly difficult to make nuanced, future-focused arguments. When you’re in this loop it becomes much harder to entertain evidence that doesn’t fit the ‘script’, and any ability to adapt and innovate withers.
If we want to tackle systemic challenges, we have to find ways to harness the motivating power of polarity, but without surrendering the nuance that lasting solutions need to work.
📡 Signals detected
Some recent thinking and reporting on the perniciousness of polarity:
In the latest Global Risks Report, societal polarisation ranks as number 3 in the list of short‑term risks (it’s been in the top ten for over a decade).
People think they’re ideological, but really they’re tribe-driven. We adopt ideas that reinforce our social bonds, not because they’re deeply reasoned positions.
New research on ideological polarisation in the Global South shows strong links between deep divides over religion and immigration and spikes in both conflict events and fatalities.
If we treat politics as ‘above conflict’ and always aim for a dream of harmonious coexistence, then we can drive dissent underground, where it can eventually explode in more destructive ways.
The opposite of polarity isn’t consensus. It’s curiosity.
Behavioural science warns us that the neatness of ‘us versus them’ feels powerful, but that it’s also a trap. When we create polarising narratives, innovation is inevitably suffocated.
But forcing superficial consensus isn’t the answer either. So, what if instead, we intentionally invited in complexity?
Say you kick off a session not by asking “Who agrees with this?” but “What haven’t we considered about this?” Suddenly, the room shifts from defending positions to sharing hidden insights. Conflict mediation experts call this agonistic dialogue or, in other words, “arguing respectfully in order to actually learn something.”
This isn’t about inviting endless debate. It’s about creating spaces where curiosity can bloom and where diverse viewpoints can coalesce into new opportunities.
When you tweak the culture to reward curiosity instead of conformity, it becomes much easier to build a system that catches mistakes early and pivots before they spiral.
How do you design interactions that don’t just tolerate diverse views, they actively encourage them?
Tools like empathy exercises, perspective-taking and narrative reframing help create space for complexity without tipping into chaos, so you can move the dialogue towards something useful.
An entry-level exercise that anyone can try but which yields quite powerful results: Ask people to imagine they’re an individual in a system - to imagine what those people see, where their blind spots are, and which risks or opportunities keep them up at night. Then ask them to move across the room and repeat the exercise from a different part of the system. Even this simple exercise will result in some surprising insights, hidden assumptions and tensions.
We are often asked, particularly in relation to complex systems work: how do you align everyone? And that’s the crux of it. You don’t.
Finding the middle ground isn’t about bland compromise or superficial consensus. It’s about building shared understanding, without flattening difference. Behavioural innovation gives us a way to do that, by designing for honesty, tension, and trust to co-exist in the same room. By learning about each others’ perspectives and actively seeking them out. And by proposing tensions between opposing forces, nuance, and misalignment as the default.
Brain Food
🗞️ Short read: A report on a new ‘mega-study’ exploring how a new approach “shows strong promise as a way to ease suspicion and rebuild trust among voters on all sides” of the political divide.
📙 Long read: Michael Muthukrishna’s book, A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, offers up a cross-disciplinary understanding of how polarisation and cooperation evolve in systems.
🎙️ Listen: In this episode of the Speaking of Psychology podcast, psychologist Keith Payne unpacks how humans construct identity-based divides and why we're not as ideologically rigid as we think.
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