Amid the rapid growth of bridging organizations (there are over 500 such orgs now in the US), some former proponents are dropping out.
Recently, a founder of a campus bridging organization told me they no longer support the strategy because data from their program and the field at large show fairly dismal results. A range of bias reduction interventions—including a wide variety of programs that aim to reduce bias and violence through dialogue and bridging initiatives—report minimal success. For example, a 2021 meta-study found that the average long-term change in participant feeling very small, and only intuitively accessible by comparing the results to broad change in feeling from cold to warm toward gay people in the US between 1984 and 2016. The average across 418 studies that covered a wide range of bias types, including race, ability, immigration status, and religion, was just one sixth the size of the bias reduction toward gay people.
There are other issues with the strategy too, including that, even if a program manages to change its participants’ feelings, it might not change their actions – that's called the “principle-implementation gap.” In some cases, it can even make resultant communities less equitable, not more.
I’ve been a longtime proponent of bridging interventions myself (such as the Powering Pluralism Network at Aspen Religion & Society Program), and am not ready to give up quite yet.
If you dig into the data, it’s clear that some types of bridging interventions with certain conditions work better than others. But for the resources of time, talent, and treasure being poured into these types of programs, it is still a disappointingly small result. It begs the question for all of us who are in the field, whether we’re practitioners or funders: Does dialogue work truly make a difference?
In order to answer that question, we’ll have to review all the outcomes, expected and not, of bias reduction interventions.
We’ll have to ask additional questions such as: What relationships are formed during these programs, and how do participants carry those connections forward? What actions might they take in the future because of these experiences?
My guess about dialogue work is that it is necessary but not sufficient to reduce violence in the long-term and at wide social scales. Additionally, I think it’s impact is positive, but showing up differently than expected. It seems to me that bridging strategies like cross-difference dialogue programs have minimal effect on most people that go through them. But for a minority of participants, they spark something much bigger and more impactful than the program initially intended. And maybe that’s where program implementers, pro-democracy movement-builders, funders, and evaluators should be spending more time and attention.
Here’s what I mean:
Everyone I know who’s working at pro-democracy organizations has a story of how they ended up doing whatever it is they do, whether their issue is structural voting reform, disinformation and misinformation, multi-faith neighborhood organizing, peacebuilding, restorative justice and reconciliation, hate-crime prevention, or civic education.
This is anecdotal of course, but so many folks I’ve met in pro-democracy work came to this work through broader, lighter-touch bridging programs like cross-partisan or interfaith dialogue programs; the same programs that appear to have minimal effect on most participants.
While the primary desired outcomes of bias and behavior change for dialogue programs remain minimal, these longer-term secondary outcomes may be where real impact lies.
Coming back to that question of whether dialogue work is all it's cracked up to be, what the data and my anecdotal evidence show together is that we’re going to need to take a wider view. The meta-study I mentioned at the top doesn’t address unexpected outcomes like the impact of a small number of program participants who go on to found other types of organizations. This means we’re missing a lot of the story.
At Cohesion Strategy, one of our services is an evaluation method called Outcome Harvesting. This method doesn’t just ask, “did the project work as expected,” but more expansively: “what happened,” and “how do people behave differently now because of their experience.” These broader questions help program implementers explore the gap between principles and implementation. This method can examine both immediate outcomes and long-term changes, asking critical questions about the effects of bridge-building work. To properly evaluate and improve programs, this wider view is necessary.
This approach helps ensure that our work in bridging divides and promoting pluralism continues to be the most effective and long-lasting, continuously evolving and improving. At Cohesion Strategy, we walk alongside leaders and organizations in the field to support effective improvement, and to discover and name unexpected positive outcomes.
That’s our current view at Cohesion Strategy. What do you think?