Fellow Posts

By Ezra Minard ’28 (DCI Fellow)

It is in our nature to be social creatures. From the forums of ancient Greece to the protest movements of the modern era, we have always sought spaces to gather and deliberate about the systems that govern us. It’s no surprise, then, that political discourse and deliberation has transcended physical spaces and moved into the digital realm.

Today, the social media ecosystem is arguably the most influential platform in which social and political discourse occurs in America. For younger generations, platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram are where politics happens. For older generations, the public forum includes the neighborhood Facebook page. The internet is a new commons, but like the Wild West, the rules that govern it have yet to catch up. The effects of this innovative yet unpredictable space cannot be overstated. One key convention is the erosion of trust of major media institutions.

Given these developments, we must consider what meaningful deliberation looks like in this new, digital public square. We must learn the skills necessary to foster the best possible relationship with social media, particularly in this moment of political upheaval.

At its best, the internet offers a powerful democratic tool as a space where people can challenge each other and share ideas across thousands of miles. People can form social and political groups without ever meeting each other in-person. The barriers to entry for public speech have never been lower. But this access is complicated by the complex ecosystem that online platforms have created.

These platforms reward engagement above all else because, unlike the prototypical public square, the platforms themselves are a business. Nuance, reason, and context do not drive profits in this space, unlike virally appealing memes. This landscape allows fringe groups, conspiracy theories, and ideological cosplay to be promoted disproportionately. The internet economy is one of outrage and confrontation.

Consider the growing fetishization of niche, obscure, or extreme political beliefs dressed as ‘edgy’ memes. These interactions teach viewers a politics that is insincere, opportunistic, and often hateful. These are the politics that one is unlikely to share with their grandmother, or their book club, or their congregation. An optimist may assert these beliefs are manufactured by the internet attention economy itself, rather than organically growing through society. A pessimist might suggest that the internet is just amplifying what is already spreading among us.

In these online spaces, political expression appears more like cosplay than grounded ideology; influencers may be pretending to be extreme rather than actually believing in the views they share. The internet uplifts these voices even if they hold little practical value in real-world politics. More concretely, we need to be mindful of a generation that receives news and information not from those they know but from a person behind a screen who does not know them but wants their money, or at least, their attention.

A 2022 Pew Research survey found that 64% of Americans believe social media is a “bad” thing for democracy,^[1] while 79% of Americans believe social media has made people’s political opinions more divided.^[2] Why? For one thing, the internet makes us appear more combative than collaborative. It also enables extreme forms of personalization that creates a digital experience that is curated to each individual’s tastes and biases. The result is a social media landscape of echo chambers. While convenient, personalization leaves users more alone and less connected to real people;imagine our town hall meetings consisting of a multitude of self-selected smaller meetings, all disconnected from one another.

Recently, prominent journalist Ezra Klein has described a “ricochet effect” of polarization, in which high engagement movements rise and are met by equally high engagement counter-reactions from their opposition—resulting in a climate of exponential polarization.[3]

Still, the internet is not irredeemable. Whether or not we see it as a net positive, we live in the internet age. The work ahead is not to retreat from the internet but to learn how to foster a positive relationship with it. As a major force in society, citizens have the obligation to engage in this work. So what are the solutions? Government crackdowns on hate-speech? Or state-verified social media profiles?

No. Rather, imagine a social contract for the digital age in which we create and uphold norms of civility, integrity, and pluralism for the greater good. The government, for its part, ought to set legal regulations that prevent abuse by either users or platforms. It should initiate an open process for us all to deliberate about how we define such abuse and what we should do about it. More importantly, we all have an obligation  to use this gift of interconnectedness with great care. In their book, Why We Argue, American philosophers Aikin and Talisse state, “In order to have the humanizing effect we all need, our relations of mutual interdependence must be in some sense reciprocal.” Reciprocity is the core of my argument for a better media landscape.

Reasonable pluralism states that we can live together peacefully while disagreeing. Maintaining restraint and assuming good faith are two positive steps. What about disinformation, we might ask. With the prominence of AI art and Large Language Models (LLMs), it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the human-made and not, between reality and fiction. As such, media literacy has never been more important. We can’t necessarily control what’s on the internet but we can control how we respond to it.

Clearly, the ways in which we deliberate in person trickle into the online sphere, and vice versa. Therefore, we would mutually benefit from greater mindfulness about how we engage in online discourse. The internet has changed communication, but it has not changed the fact that we must communicate. We ought to approach digital communication with the same energy and care we bring to a town hall or a dinner table.

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^[1] Richard Wike et al. 2022. Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, But U.S. is a Major Outlier. Pew Research Center.

^[2] Richard Wike et al. 2022. Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, But U.S. is a Major Outlier. Pew Research Center.

[3] Ezra Klein. 2025. A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics. New York Times.

By Coralyn Cairns ’29 (DCI Fellow)

On a superficial level, I think most people can agree that deliberative discourse is important to democracy, as communication and representation of diverse groups is a cornerstone of democratic beliefs. With that being said, critics of deliberative theory argue that deliberation is less effective in the maintenance of democracy than it is reported to be due to linguistic exclusion. In “Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy” (2000), Margaret Kohn suggests, “Under the guise of equality and impartiality, deliberative democracy privileges the communicative strategies of elites” (p. 426). In addition to amplifying elitist voices, deliberation may also exclude non-native speakers. About 37% of Americans have no higher education experience, and one-in-five (67.8 million people) speak a language other than English in the U.S (U.S. Census, 2022). Thus, the conversation of how best to accommodate deliberators of diverse backgrounds is incredibly important in the current U.S. landscape.

The U.N. deems language rights as human rights and declares that states should protect the existence of linguistic minorities (U.N. General Assembly, 1992). If that is to be respected, then policies promoting linguistic pluralism should be prioritized over assimilation to a “language franca.” This, however, creates a roadblock for democratic discourse, or, does it? In “Towards Multilingual Deliberative Democracy: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities” (2025), Lisa Verhasselt argues for a shared understanding instead of a shared language. Regarding linguistic pluralism, she states, “it should not be viewed as a problem requiring a solution but rather as a reality to be accepted and incorporated” (p. 62). So how do we accept and incorporate language diversity?

The first and most obvious way in which multilingual deliberation can be addressed is through training multilingual facilitators. With Spanish being the second most spoken language in the U.S, many professions such as medicine and law are now encouraging bilingual skill sets. Similarly, we should encourage civic-minded individuals to experience and learn about different ways in which people communicate, whether that be through formal language acquisition or familiarity with how different social and cultural groups converse.

Beyond facilitator translation, some groups are advocating for the use of generative AI to streamline and enhance understanding in deliberation across language barriers (Kalampokis et al, 2024). It is argued that generative AI can not only translate but also aid in comprehension, which is often lost in translation, especially when deliberating on divisive topics. Tools such as mind maps and automatic summarizations could be used as supplements during deliberation to support the transfer of ideas.

Deliberative discourse needs to occur across linguistic barriers, whether they are due to gaps in education or differences in language. Deliberation is meant to raise voices and bring people together, which cannot happen if others are excluded. For example, Hispanic and Latinx people represent 20% of the US population and 14% of the eligible voter population, yet they make up only 11% of those registered to vote, and registration does not always equate to casting a ballot (Pew Research Center, 2024; NY Times, 2024). This statistic, of course, is not entirely shaped through language inequality; however, we should strive to make civic engagement as accessible as possible through as many means as possible. And this necessitates that, as people dedicated to deliberative discourse and deliberative democracy, we need to find ways to make deliberation inclusive of diverse language backgrounds.

Sources:

“Cross-Tabs: July 2024 Times/Siena Poll of Registered Voters Nationwide.” New York Times, 25 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/25/us/elections/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html.

“Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.” United Nations, General Assembly 47/135, 18 December 1992, www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-rights-persons-belonging-national-or-ethnic.

Dietrich, Sandy and Erik Hernandez. “Language Use in the United States: 2019.” United States Census Bureau, August 2022, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/acs/acs-50.pdf.

“Educational Attainment in the United States: 2021.” United States Census Bureau, 24 February 2022, www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html

Kalampokis et al. “Fostering Multilingual Deliberation through Generative Artificial Intelligence.” EGOV-CeDEM-ePart conference, September 1-5 2024, Ghent University and KU Leuven, https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3737/paper22.pdf.

Kohn, M. “Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy.” Constellations, 2000, 7: 408-429. doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00197

Krogstad et al. “Key facts about Hispanic eligible voters in 2024.” Pew Research Center, 10 January 2024, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/10/key-facts-about-hispanic-eligible-voters-in-2024/#detailed-data.

Verhasselt, Lisa. “Towards Multilingual Deliberative Democracy: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities.” Representation, 2025, 61:1, 57-74, doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2024.2317781.

Jackson Strelo ’26 (DCI Fellow)

In a time where the answers to our pressing questions are often formed quickly – from the press of a button, or maybe from a 15-second clip from social media – it seems as if we’ve somewhat abandoned the art of holistic problem solving. At almost all stages of our lives, many of our learnings derived from thoughtless exploration. In our youth, we likely didn’t learn to not touch the hot stove because Google told us so, but rather because curiosity got the best of us. While not every conclusion that we draw requires us to dive off the high board, we must learn to occasionally draw some distance between an issue and our conclusions. In other words, we must practice the careful art of devil’s advocacy in deliberation.

Martin Carcasson (2014) identifies The Devil’s Advocate as one of his four primary deliberation styles. In his eyes, one playing this role raises perspectives that are not being expressed, a style that aims to complicate a particular discussion that may lack dimensionality or diversity. While this is essentially as far as the DCI Deliberation delves into Carcasson’s properties and goals of the Devil’s Advocate style, their limitations of its intention must be noted to truly understand its value and apply it in our dialogues.

As alluded to earlier, a good deliberation doesn’t need to be intensely probed to achieve the goals of this style, especially if the topic contains sensitive subject matter. I believe that the base of the philosophy of Devil’s Advocacy is the aim of challenging thinkers to avoid drawing too-swift conclusions. Thus, it’s important to understand that word choice in this role can be the difference between progression towards curious thinking or regression away from it. In our training, even as a participant in a mock deliberation, I made sure to be thoughtful about the climate at our table. Did anyone share particularly personal or intimate accounts of an interaction with this issue? Even if the answer was yes, was there a productive or empathetic opportunity to dig deeper? Depending on the answers to these questions, I may evaluate whether the topic is too “hot” to explore, or if there’s a chance to promote curiosity.

Furthermore, a Devil’s Advocate should strive to not lead participants – explicitly or implicitly – towards a counter-conclusion. For example, facilitators in a roundtable discussion on climate change should challenge the thinking or conditioning behind their ideas – “what if our community was a fracking haven, would that change your sense of our environmental policy?” – rather than their political orientation as it relates to an ideological attachment to the issue. Jamieson, Valdesolo, and Peters (2014) found that dissent roles affect both physiological and psychological needs, with targets of Devil’s Advocacy or similar dissenting styles displaying avoidance behaviors as well as threats to belonging, self-esteem, and other basic psychological needs. Of course, there is certainly some variance in the presence of these threats stemming from blindly executed devil’s advocacy, but much of it can be erased by following fair principles of deliberation.

One crucial requirement in effective and productive dissent is to strive to maintain an egalitarian attitude in terms of what perspectives the Devil’s Advocate challenges. While perfectly balancing the level and frequency of dissenting questions posed to the one, or many, sides of the issue isn’t always feasible within the structure of a deliberation, maximizing equality and minimizing partisan choices and implicit biases should be prioritized. This is not only necessary in terms of respect and fairness, but also in fostering a climate in which all participants are encouraged to voluntarily dig deeper as they contribute to the conversation.

The second requirement is anticipation – thinking about the potential immediate impact as well as the chain-reaction of a potentially contentious dissent. Will my attempt at a light-hearted dissent be viewed as such in the context of the topic, the language of choice, as well as the climate of the deliberation?  Have any parts of previous interactions or sections of the deliberation prompted the use of a more cautious approach to deepen discussion? Of course, it would be foolish and limiting to ignore creative methods to challenge the group to explore arguments and counterfactuals out of fear. However, the art of effective Devil’s Advocacy requires the ability to forecast for and prepare for friction, and to limit scenarios in which that friction violates the bounds of productive deliberation.

While I could write all day about how other guiding principles – empathy, attentiveness, humility, the list goes on – should bake into the ideal Devil’s Advocate, I want to end how I began by highlighting the growth potential of this noble art. In my facilitator training, DCI Fellows were advised to essentially “roleplay” their positions in our final mock deliberation. In doing so, understandably, we struggled at first to articulate our dialogues under these roles. On its face, it seemed like a bland attempt at preventing one-dimensional discussion. However, as the depth of thought required in our sections increased, we rose to the challenge of our given roles. How does this relate to Devil’s Advocacy? Well, that relation wasn’t apparent until we began our reflections. While most of us agreed that it was difficult to stand on our given positions, it also gave us each the chance to practice holistic argumentative inflection – the main goal of Devil’s Advocacy.

As I serve as a DCI Facilitator this year, I will be thinking of how to sharpen this tool, to both challenge my own beliefs as well my ability to invoke curiosity into my deliberations.

References

Jamieson, J. P., Valdesolo, P., & Peters, B. J. (2014). Sympathy for the devil? The physiological and psychological effects of being an agent (and target) of dissent during intragroup conflict. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 221–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.07.011

Madeline Kleiner ’28 (DCI Fellow)

Starting my second semester of being a DCI Fellow, I felt more prepared. I had learned a lot from my first round of D Teams about including more people in the conversation, when to step in and when to let the conversation flow, and how to make people feel comfortable sharing their opinions. The second semester, though, a new measure was implemented that slightly changed how my facilitation occurred.

As anyone who was on a D Team this spring would know, there were two facilitators overseeing each session. One held the role of leading the conversation and making sure everyone gets a chance to speak, while the other took notes on the conversation and stepped in if another perspective was needed. Every DCI Fellow gets the chance to cover both roles, which is an interesting way to see both sides of a conversation.

The group I served as a secondary facilitator for was pretty varied in their perspectives so I didn’t feel the need to step in that way. Taking notes, though, was a very informative experience. I had never looked at the conversation before as having tangible outcomes, but the notes served as a physical output of the conversation. Taking the notes allowed me a chance to deeply listen to what every participant had to say and how that influenced their relationships and conversations with other deliberators. For my primary facilitation later in the week, it also gave me inspiration on how best to lead the conversation to make sure that every deliberator felt that they came away from the conversation with something.

As a primary facilitator, having a secondary facilitator in the room served as a support system. Yes, I knew that I was mainly supposed to be leading the discussion on my own, but having someone else in the room that could step in if I was struggling was comforting.

All this to say, in a deliberation it is totally okay to ask for help. Some conversations are really tricky and having another person in the room can be helpful for resolving conflict or if you’re nervous to cut off someone who’s been talking for a while. For conversations that are more one-sided in opinions, the secondary facilitator is also helpful for providing another perspective to the conversation.

Finally, this secondary facilitator is influential in providing a tangible output of the conversation. There are times, especially in longer conversations like D Team meetings that last for two hours, where it can feel like the group has been circling the same point for most of the conversation. Writing down and reading about the nuances and the specific opinions of each deliberator in a systematic way can help clarify the group’s main takeaways and areas where they both agreed and disagreed.

Lily Ogawa ’28 (DCI Fellow)

Which one is the most persuasive to use in a deliberation: emotion or logic?

When asked this question, most people’s gut instinct would be to say logic. People tend to believe you more when you cite data and evidence to back up a claim rather than explaining using your emotion. It may also seem easier to engage in a conversation when the person talking is using logic as you would be able to support or refute their claims using logic. When using emotion, it may seem harder to disagree with another person as we don’t want to hurt their feelings.

On the other hand, deliberations without any emotion can ignore a major part of the topic. Emotion plays a crucial role in topics such as on the government’s management on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of our recent DCI D Team topics. Participants may have lost loved ones or have lost their businesses due to the pandemic. To say that these participants cannot share their emotions and must only use hard logic can make the deliberations feel out of touch with reality. Emotion humanizes these participants and their perspectives and adds a unique value to the deliberation that logic cannot bring.

With these thoughts in mind, the questions then become “how to balance between the two?” and “which one is more important?” Despite the popular belief that logic and emotion are polar opposites, Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking,” argues that they are interconnected. Emotion guides people to choose what sensory information to pay attention to and what data to consider when making a decision.

In other words, emotions shape how we think. Paul Dirac, considered “one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century,” encouraged us to “be guided above all, by your emotions” (Mlodinow). Even in the field of physics, emotion influences how we make assumptions or what path of mathematics we study (Mlodinow). Emotions can subconsciously affect how we think and absorb information.

In deliberations, emotions can play a vital role in showing the diverse perspectives of participants. While emotion should not dominate the deliberation, both emotion and logic are essential ingredients in having an effective deliberation. In my D Team meetings, participants often shared what they felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, and what they feel now. They also shared data or factual evidence they came across. In other words, they used both emotion and logic to have a sincere and meaningful deliberation. Perhaps there may not be a perfect formula to balance between emotion and logic, but both emotion and logic can play an important role in bringing about fruitful conversations on difficult topics.

Work Cited

McDermott-Murphy, Caitlin. “Logic or Emotion: Which Is More Valuable?” Harvard Gazette, 31 Jan. 2022, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/logic-or-emotion-which-is-more-valuable/.

Mlodinow, Leonard. “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking.” Next Big Idea Club, nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/emotional-feelings-shape-thinking-bookbite/31632/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.