The best books to open your mind and reduce political polarization

In this book, Berkeley Psychologist Dacher Keltner explains the emerging scholarship he and his colleagues have conducted on the psychological significance of awe, an emotion we feel when in the presence of something vast that challenges our preconceptions.

I recommend this book because the underlying message—that awe opens our minds and pushes us away from our habitual way of seeing and engaging with the world—seems especially pertinent to a society of politically dogmatic and divided partisans. Part of our problem as a society is that we are stuck in rigid ways of thinking about political disputes. For us to overcome our challenges, we need to become “unglued,” and Keltner’s research on awe suggests a potential means for encouraging the kind of creative thinking that we need in American politics.

In this book, New York Times columnist David Brooks describes research he has uncovered examining how we should think about other people. He admonishes us to avoid the trappings of closed-minded thinking when we evaluate or attempt to “see” other people. For instance, he advises against “objectivism,” based on aggregated statistics that we are today constantly confronted with, in favor of particularism, seeing each individual as a unique person. Corresponding with that advice comes the suggestion to avoid “essentialism”–the belief that groups have essential characteristics–and “the static mindset”–the idea that people do not change.

These are all characteristics of a closed-minded way of thinking about people, and they aptly describe the forms of cognition common among the most polarized partisans. Brooks’s book is, therefore, a useful “how-to” guide for changing our perceptions of others into a more open and less polarizing way.

Michael Pollan’s scientific and personal investigations into the powers of psychedelics reveal how malleable our brains and minds are and illustrate the potential for people to change from a closed-minded way of viewing the world to one that is considerably more open-minded.

Pollan’s review of the scientific research on psychedelics shows, for instance, that the psychedelic compounds can lead to changes in the openness to experience dimension of Big Five personality traits. This and other similar findings, as well as Pollan’s narrative about his own personal experiences, are useful for suggesting another potential mechanism for changing minds.

Jamil Zaki’s investigations into the psychology of empathy suggest it may be an important resource to combat rising levels of political polarization. Zaki makes a strong case that empathy is a malleable characteristic—that it can be grown or expanded.

He suggests that we can train our minds to empathize beyond our narrow ingroups. Collectively, these findings, and others, lead me to believe that a more empathic community may be a more open one.

In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the “timeless questions” about human nature, fate, and politics. Morson’s analysis clearly shows that novelists and poets allow for much more complexity and nuance in their worldviews than ideologues. The famous Russian writers, in other words, appear to excel in the type of open-minded thinking that I argue is conducive to liberal democratic values.

By reading Morson’s book, one sees clearly the importance of Russia’s literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human existence.