The most recent election points to America, and many parts of the world, being divided. Now more than ever, we should prioritize fostering constructive dialogue over casting blame. In a sense, we need more peacemakers.

“Once we free ourselves from the fiction that anyone who disagrees with us must be a monster or a fool, we need not be so afraid of allowing ourselves to be persuaded,” wrote Steven T. Collis, a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Texas, in his most recent book, Habits of a Peacemaker.

Collis spoke to KVUE sports journalist Cory Mose at From Day One’s Austin conference. They discussed the habits of peacemakers that allow for sometimes difficult, but fruitful conversations.

Understanding the Limits of What You Know

Collis is a First Amendment law professor who specializes in freedom of speech and religion, and is no stranger to difficult conversations on a broad range of topics. He’s been thinking about how to more effectively have those conversations for a while. “I travel all over the globe talking about those really controversial topics. And I started to ask myself what is it that we’re doing that’s allowing us to have productive conversations about these really difficult topics? When most people just devolve into shouting matches and arguments."

Collis’ mission isn’t just navigating difficult conversations in politics and culture. His aim is to offer non-partisan tactics for dealing with all sorts of conversations, often drawing on anecdotes from his own life. “The book was about how to have productive conversations about hard topics. We see them in our family dynamics. We see them in the workplace. We see them at schools, at churches, anywhere where [you] have to deal with another person, difficult conversations come up.”

Drawing from his book, he started with intellectual humility and tells the story of his middle school days of looking cool. One day, he confidently strolled into the bathroom and spiked his hair with what he thought was mousse. Strutting out of the bathroom, his mom caught a whiff of his head and immediately marched him back in and washed his hair out. “It turns out that what I thought was moose was actually her hair removal product, Nair. And for the next week, all my hair started falling out. For the rest of the summer, people thought I had some horrible illness.”

“We get in trouble in life when we think we know about something and we don’t, and we have strong feelings about it. Intellectual humility is critical.”

In a heated debate, we’re all experts. Especially if we’ve learned a little bit about something, then we’re not only experts, but we form very concrete opinions. “Scientists call this the Dunning Kruger effect, and it’s been pretty well established,” Collis said.

At the University of Michigan Law School, a frieze above one of the doorways features a pertinent inscription: “a little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not.” Collis often walked through this door. “That has become ingrained in my mind as something to remember. Now the question is, how do we establish that in ourselves?”

Compounding the Dunning Kruger effect is that most of us walk around “enjoying something called the knowledge illusion,” or a bias in which we think we understand more than we do. “Any one of us actually knows almost nothing,” Collis said.

A senior business leader he recently talked to shared that recognizing how little he knows and how much he can learn from his team has been vital to his success. By fostering open communication and encouraging input, he ensures his position doesn’t intimidate others, creating space for growth and collaboration.

Asking yourself that same question: ‘How much do I actually know about this,’ is a good way to remind yourself of how little you actually know, says Collis.

The Root of the Argument

“I know it’s hard for a lot of people to do. But one thing that stuck out to me, was how you explain the surface level argument that you may be having with someone may not be the root of why you’re having that discussion,” Mose said.

This touches on something Collis finds true of all effective peacemakers. One of their enduring habits is that if someone “come[s] in really hot about something,” peacemakers assume a good motivation for why their interlocutor acts or thinks the way they do. “Most of us strut around the world thinking, there’s three kinds of people: there’s the people who agree with us, and then there are monsters and fools. Peacemakers don’t do that.”

Peacemakers realize that their disagreeable interlocutor has a position they have to better understand. Perhaps they have the same goals but differ on how to achieve them. That’s a valuable conversation to have. Or, perhaps your goals are different, yet another worthy conversation there.

“There are bad actors, but generally speaking, in our families and our work lives and the day to day people we’re having contact with, it’s not a good practice to start off assuming the absolute worst about somebody.”

Another quality of peacemakers that Collis admittedly doesn't have in spades, is spending time with people. In the workplace, for example, Collis says it applies to work relationships as well. “Spending time with your colleagues in a way where you’re just building the relationship and you’re not dealing with the hard topics, allows the later conversations that will inevitably come that are difficult to be far more productive.”

None of this is easy, though, and Collis says people can spend a lifetime perfecting the good habits of a peacemaker.

“I can’t emphasize enough the idea that the ideas in this book are ones that we could all spend a lifetime perfecting. Nobody has perfected any of these things, and I don’t mean the book to be exhaustive. I would encourage people to take the skills that they already have and add [to] them.”

An important message going forward, and one derived from the pages of Collis’ book, is also simple but hard to do. Peacemakers need to have the ability to change and adapt to new information.

“Being a peacemaker carries with it important responsibilities. One of which is being willing to change. This is a hard concept for humanity to understand. But recognizing that we don’t know everything, and being willing to learn, seeking the best sources for doing so, asking people honest questions, all of those mean nothing if you’re unwilling to ponder the new things you are learning and consider changing your views.”

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.