All Angles spotlight event encourages students to challenge assumptions, spark discourse

The Institute of Politics partnered with multiple Pitt departments to host an event titled “Overcoming Polarization Beginning with How We Think” with Dr. Illana Redstone in the lower lounge of the William Pitt Union on Thursday afternoon. Redstone spoke about how removing assumptions they make in conversations can improve political and social discourse.

Samantha Balbier, director of the Institute of Politics, said the event was inspired by the results of its annual student survey.

“The issue of polarization rose to the top, regardless of students’ political affiliation and regardless of how politically engaged the student respondents felt that they are,” Balbier said.

Redstone, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, promoted her newest book “The Certainty Trap” and invited students to engage in an open conversation.

“It’s fundamentally how we view one another, how we view people who disagree,” Redstone said. “The problem… is a problem with contempt. Contempt is fundamentally a problem with certainty.”

Redstone argued that when it comes to pretentious topics, we get “sloppy” in our thinking and lose track of the assumptions that we make. She gave an example of conversing with somebody who believes women shouldn’t be able to drive and argued that people should interrogate others’ beliefs before jumping to conclusions.

“I don’t want to hang my argument on an assumption that [that] was the person’s motives,” Redstone said. “I’m not waffle-y on if women should be able to drive, I’m not on the fence about it. And so I can disagree and not sort of fall in the certainty trap.”

Redstone added that she doesn’t have a solution to overcoming polarization, but hopes to create a space where students can shorten the divide between each other.

“Civil discourse is incredibly important. I’m more focused on the thinking that feeds the civil discourse,” Redstone said. “[But] it’s not enough and doesn’t address the problems and limitations in how you think.

After the event, Megan Vesey, a junior law, criminal justice and society major and intern at the Institute of Politics, said they came to the event in order to navigate the polarization moving into the holiday season.

“I feel like it’s really hard to see the opinions of others and to hear people out sometimes,” Vesey said. “It’s very easy to get caught in your own head and in our own ideas, and it’s very interesting to learn different ways to think from other perspectives in order to genuinely understand why someone thinks that way in order to have conversation and not just to debate.”

Vesey added that Redstone’s ideas about making assumptions were “really interesting.”

“You assume that people think that way because those people do not have the same information that you have about a topic. But that’s not even necessarily true, because you have the same information as someone else, you still may form the opposite opinion,” Vesey said. “I never thought about it like that.”

Gianna Comito, a senior psychology major, attended the event and picked up a copy of Redstone’s book. They said offering the book for free was “cool” and removed a potential barrier in people learning about polarization.

Simon Wang, a senior economics and psychology major, tied the discussion to the upcoming election and praised Redstone for controlling an open conversation.

“I didn’t come away with anything necessarily new, other than an idea that I may not agree with, the fact that she was basically like, ‘You should never hold contempt for another person and judge them based off what they’re saying,’” Wang said. “I think that I don’t completely agree with it, but I don’t have a good counterargument to it.”