Improve Cross-cultural and Cross-Party Understanding

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 21, 2026

Cross-cultural misunderstanding occurs when people interpret words, behavior, and events through different assumptions about what they mean. This can happen across national, ethnic, religious, or regional cultures. It can also happen across political cultures. In the United States today, many people on the left and the right live in different information worlds, use different moral languages, and hear very different stories about what is happening in the country. As BI’s essay on cross-cultural communication explains, even people who are acting in good faith can misunderstand each other when they do not recognize the cultural meanings behind what is being said.

In polarized conflicts, these misunderstandings are intensified by distrust. People do not simply hear the other side as different; they often hear it as dangerous, irrational, or morally corrupt. More in Common’s Perception Gap research illustrates the problem clearly. Democrats and Republicans often imagine that their opponents hold much more extreme views than they actually do. This “perception gap” makes compromise look riskier and disagreement feel more threatening. BI’s summary of Leigh Thompson and Janice Nadler's judgmental biases in conflict resolution describes a similar dynamic: conflict encourages stereotypes, black-and-white thinking, and exaggerated images of the other side.

Improving understanding begins with cultural humility. This means asking what a statement or action means to the other person before deciding what it means about them. A phrase that sounds evasive to one group may sound respectful to another. A direct challenge may feel honest to one person and insulting to another. BI’s essay on communication tools for understanding cultural differences points out that people often differ in their expectations about context, responsibility, face-saving, and nonverbal communication. Cross-party conversations have similar pitfalls. A person may hear a word such as “freedom,” “equity,” “patriotism,” “safety,” or “justice” and assume that everyone else means exactly what they mean. Often, they do not.

Research and practice both suggest that better understanding is most likely when people have structured opportunities for respectful contact. The classic intergroup contact tradition, associated with Gordon Allport and later researchers, finds that contact is most helpful when people meet under conditions that support equal dignity, cooperation, and shared goals. A later meta-analysis by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp found that intergroup contact generally reduces prejudice. In practice, this means that cross-cultural and cross-party encounters should not be set up as debates in which each side tries to defeat the other. They work better when people tell personal stories, ask genuine questions, listen carefully, and look for the experiences that explain why others see the world as they do.

Good cross-cultural and cross-party communication does not require people to give up their convictions or pretend that all disagreements are misunderstandings. Some differences are real and important. The goal is to make disagreement more accurate and less distorted by fear. BI’s materials on active listening, dialogue, and small-scale reconciliation emphasize that people often need to feel heard before they can hear others. Once that happens, opponents may discover unexpected common ground, or at least a clearer understanding of what is truly at stake. In deeply divided societies, that kind of understanding is not a cure-all. But it is a necessary step toward cooperative problem solving, and the possibility of living together without turning every difference into an existential threat.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.