Attention! Beware orchestra pits
It’s what you can see that will hurt you
Every day extremists are playing us for chumps, and every day, without realizing it, we’re letting them. For over forty years, they have been strategically manipulating social media, the press, Congress, and the American people to distract us from seeing what We the People can do to take back our country.
Roger Ailes, former Fox News Chairman and media consultant to Republican candidates, captured the essence of the strategy in a 1980s interview with broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff1:
Roger Ailes: Let’s face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes and attacks. That’s the one sure way of getting coverage. . . It’s my orchestra pit theory of politics. You have two guys on stage and one guy says, “I have a solution to the Middle East problem,” and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news? . . .
Judy Woodruff: So you’re saying the notion of the candidate saying, “I want to run for President because I want to do something for this country,” is crazy.
Roger Ailes: Suicide.
Extremists have been throwing themselves and their enemies into orchestra pits ever since in a concerted effort to capture our attention, ramp up our amygdala, and drown out our reasoning—all so we think and act in ways that are in their interest, not ours.
How can extremists wield so much power when they are few and we are many?
Research conducted in 2018 by the citizen-led nonprofit More in Common found that the vast majority of us (87%) hold a wide range of views across the political spectrum that are more flexible and pragmatic than those held by the 13% on the more extreme ideological wings.2
Although that 13% has probably grown larger and more authoritarian over the past six years, it is still dwarfed by a quieter, more pragmatic, and exhausted majority. Yet most of us fear otherwise. According to another More in Common study, most people overestimate the percentage of those in the other party who hold extreme views by twice as much!3 This suggests that extremists are not only hijacking our attention, they’re making us afraid of one another in order to divide and conquer us all.
Two psychologists, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, authors of Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It, give us insight into how.4
In one of their experiments, they ask people to watch a video of two groups tossing a ball back and forth. One group is wearing black T-shirts, the other white. A voiceover asks them to count how many times the players in white T-shirts pass the ball. After about 23 seconds, a large “gorilla” walks through the two groups from one end of the screen to the other, pausing briefly in the middle to face the camera and thump its chest before walking off.
When the ball tossing stops, another voice over comes on: “The correct answer is 15 passes. But did you see the gorilla?”
Half the people miss it.
The actor wearing the gorilla suit was stunned, having told the experimenters beforehand, “No way! People are going to see me. I’m a 400-pound gorilla!” Afterwards, when experimenters rewind the tape and show it again, those who miss the gorilla are shocked. “I missed that?”5 As focused as they were on counting how many white shirts were passing the ball, they never saw the gorilla coming or going, a result repeated many times. Simons points out:
“Looking isn’t the same as seeing. You have to be focusing your attention on something to be aware of it.”
How can we see each other for who we really are?
If we are ever going to put an end to existential elections, we will need to pull our attention away from dagger-tossing extremists and focus on the unseen 400-pound gorilla in our midst: that much larger, quieter majority that holds a wide range of more flexible and pragmatic views.
Two researchers at Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond, did just that: focused on how a large, randomly selected representative sample of registered voters think about the issues when brought together in one room. On three occasions between 2019 and 2023, they assembled hundreds of people—once in person and twice on Zoom—to talk directly with one another about our most contentious issues: immigration, healthcare, the economy, foreign policy, climate policy, and voting laws.6 On each occasion, after competing experts briefed participants on the pros and cons of different proposals, the participants broke into small groups to discuss the issues.
Surveys taken before and after show what happens when informed citizens discuss contentious issues directly with one another without extreme partisan voices dominating the conversation: extreme proposals lose support while more moderate proposals gain support, even overwhelming support, with proposals on the right losing the most support from Republicans and those on the left losing the most support from Democrats. Fishkin and Diamond’s conclusion?
“When Americans take the time to talk to each other in a civil, evidence-based way, they learn to listen to each other and often change their views dramatically, depolarizing across partisan divides.”
In each of these experiments, participants were exposed to a wide range of evidence-based proposals, then given an opportunity to talk through their different views without extremists drowning out their voices. These conditions closed the social distance across groups separated by class, party, and race, and opened the mental space within groups by exposing them to information and views they rarely hear. By temporarily remaking the space between us, Fishkin and Diamond’s lab made it possible for people across groups to do something they rarely do: learn, think, and change together.
But what about real life?
Creating those conditions in real life is much harder and takes a lot longer, because most of us live in insular, isolated groups, consuming media riveted on extremists and their orchestra-pit antics.
What we can do, as a start, is pull our attention away from orchestra pits long enough to reach out to people within the more pragmatic, flexible majority, so we can see one another for who we really are.
Don’t work too hard, though.
Just get together over a cup of coffee with someone different from you and talk about your everyday lives. Get curious. Focus on building a relationship, not an airtight case.
It is only a beginning, but it is a necessary one.
On that beginning, we can build.
Stay tuned for how.
Please let me know what this post sparked for you. And if you (or people you know) are doing things to remake the space between us, tell us your story in Comments.
Tim Dickinson, “Roger Ailes’ Keys to Campaign Success,’” Rolling Stone, June 6, 2011.
More in Common, “The Hidden Tribes of America.” https://www.moreincommon.com/our-work/publications/
More in Common, “The Perception Gap.” 2019. https://perceptiongap.us
The Selective Attention Test Video. https://rb.gy/50y1h9
Listen to Simons talk about the experiment at https://rb.gy/t1yj3s
James Fishkin and Larry Diamond, “This Experiment Has Some Great News for Our Democracy,” New York Times, October 2, 2019, and James Fishkin and Larry Diamond, “Can deliberation cure our divisions about democracy?” Boston Globe, August 21, 2023.