120 - Promoting better political dialogue and electoral engagement through argumentation technologies
What this challenge is about
Our broader vision is to reduce political polarization (especially in the time around elections) by promoting the development of better communicative skills (including how to better manage disagreements) and enhancing the positive experiences with political polarization.
Our focus is particularly on enhancing the communicative skills of citizens by examining the cognitive and procedural role of disagreement in the way we shape/or reshape our thinking. Specifically, a key goal (of Phase 2) is to understand better how to design argumentation technologies that help mediate the cultural stigma around disagreement and lift out the positive process of ambivalent thinking, with the goal to improve creativity, resilience, open mildness and acceptance of diversity of opinions.
The mid-term change we want to achieve it to test and trial an approach to political dialogue ahead of the General Election in 2024 (possibly January 2025) which will aim to improve peoples’ ability to engage in, and sustain, political dialogue across difference. The long-term change would the development of a bigger research programme combining social psychology and computational social science to map the impact of disagreement by exploring its introduction across different dimensions of dialogue (where it takes place, how it takes place, with whom, when disagreement occurs in a dialogue etc.), considering how it shapes the quality of it, the deliberative nature and the sustained capacity it has for generating acceptance of diversity of opinions.