Listening can become surprisingly political
On The Listening Tube, Bob Woodley and I talked about politics, polarization, strangers, curiosity, echo chambers, and the strange little mechanisms that can make people willing to talk to one another. But the thing I kept returning to was much simpler: what happens when you listen without preparing to respond?
For years, I expected conversations about politics to become confrontational. Instead, after hundreds of encounters with strangers, I found something I hadn't expected. People often say things I disagree with. Sometimes they say things that trigger me. But underneath the disagreement, there is frequently an emotion, an aspiration, a fear, a hope, or simply a desire to be heard.
That became part of the experiment.
The artwork gives us a reason to begin. The questions create a structure. But the listening is where the encounter actually happens.
Key Takeaways
David Deighton describes how experimentation led him toward face-to-face conversations about political polarization.
His three questions are designed to approach politics without beginning with an argument.
Listening involves noticing one's own reactions and looking for emotional commonality rather than trying to defeat another person's position.
The single Word-Title at the end of the three questions often reveals an aspiration or hope that wasn't obvious in the preceding answers.
Public artworks can function as invitations or “gimmicks” that give people a reason to begin a difficult conversation.
The Grand Canyon installation explored the physical metaphor of an echo chamber and the limitations of our individual worldviews.
David identifies curiosity as an important condition for listening.
The conversation also explores why strangers can sometimes be easier to talk with about politics than people we already know.
For David, listening can give another person a space in which to articulate conflicts they may not otherwise have an opportunity to express.
Detailed Exploration
The experiment began with a taboo
I didn't begin with a fully formed method.
It took several years of experimentation before I arrived at the work I'm doing now. I wanted to investigate how we might discuss something that had become almost taboo without immediately turning the conversation into a confrontation.
I chose politics.
The United States was becoming increasingly polarized, and I wanted to know whether someone from the left could actually speak with someone from the right without the conversation becoming an argument.
There are communication models that describe how this might happen. But reading about something and actually doing it with a stranger are two very different things.
So I went out and tried it.
I began approaching strangers and asking whether they would talk about politics.
What surprised me was how rarely the encounters became confrontational.
Listening begins with noticing yourself
One of the things I discovered was that the difficult part wasn't necessarily what the other person was saying.
It was my reaction to what they were saying.
Someone would say something I disagreed with. Sometimes it would be an opinion. Sometimes it would be something I believed was factually wrong. And I could feel myself becoming triggered.
If I stayed inside that reaction, I wasn't listening anymore.
So I began trying to let that reaction pass.
Instead of thinking, How do I answer this? I started asking myself whether there was something underneath the disagreement that we shared.
Maybe the person was angry.
Maybe I was angry too.
We might be angry about completely different things. That doesn't matter. The emotion itself can become a small point of contact.
That became part of my bridge.
Three questions create a different kind of political conversation
The structure I use is deliberately simple.
First:
How would you describe the political system of the United States of America?
Then:
How would you describe your feelings or reactions to the current state of U.S. politics?
And finally:
Politics in the United States...
The person finishes the sentence.
I listen to the answers rather than preparing my response.
Then comes what I consider the hardest question:
Give me one word that brings all of your answers together.
That word becomes important.
Someone may have given three answers filled with frustration, disagreement, or negativity, and then arrive at a word that expresses hope or aspiration.
I didn't expect that when I started the project.
I'm still not entirely sure why it happens.
I'm an artist, not a sociologist or linguist, so I'm interested in the phenomenon rather than claiming to have explained it. But the pattern has become one of the things that keeps me experimenting.
The unexpected importance of the final word
The Word-Title often seems to contain something that isn't obvious in the answers that came before it.
A person may describe everything they believe is wrong with American politics. Then, when asked for one word, they may arrive somewhere completely different.
The word can express what they hope America could become.
That interests me because it suggests that our descriptions of the present aren't necessarily the whole story.
We can be deeply dissatisfied with where we are while still imagining something better.
For me, that final word can leave a person with something that belongs to them. It isn't a conclusion I've given them. They found it themselves.
And that matters.
Art can be the excuse to begin
I've sometimes referred to elements of the work as “gimmicks.”
I don't mean that in a dismissive way.
The artwork gives us an excuse to start.
Imagine encountering two empty chairs in an unusual place. One says Democrat. The other says Republican. Nobody is sitting in either chair.
You might wonder why they're there.
That curiosity creates an opening.
The same thing happens with the installations in National Parks and other public spaces. Someone sees something that doesn't seem to belong there and asks what it is.
The conversation can begin before anyone has decided that they're going to have a political conversation.
And that is important because beginning is often the hardest part.
The artwork becomes a story that travels
The artwork doesn't have to remain where I put it.
Someone might encounter an installation at the Grand Canyon and later tell a friend:
I was at the Grand Canyon and this artist had this strange installation there. This is what it meant. What do you think?
Now the artwork has become a story.
That story can become another invitation to conversation.
So the artwork isn't necessarily the final object. It can be a mechanism for carrying an encounter somewhere else.
That possibility interests me more than whether every individual installation “works.”
Some pieces work better than others.
That's part of experimentation.
The echo chamber can become physical
At the Grand Canyon, I created an installation involving a museum case containing an abstract sculpture.
The case itself became the important part.
I used the transparent enclosure as a physical representation of an echo chamber or worldview. From inside our own worldview, it can appear much larger and more open than it actually is.
Then I introduced another, much smaller enclosure—a glass spice jar containing another small figure.
The question became:
How does this echo chamber enter the other one and communicate?
And then I stopped.
There wasn't supposed to be an answer supplied by me.
The question was the artwork.
People would stand there and think about it.
That's one of the things I want the work to do. Not tell somebody what to think, but interrupt the normal flow of thinking long enough for another possibility to enter.
Place changes the encounter
The Grand Canyon itself is almost too spectacular.
I joked with Bob that the artwork was easily upstaged by the Grand Canyon.
But the National Parks have free-speech areas where people can gather for political, religious, conservation, and other forms of expression. Bringing art into those spaces became another experiment for me.
The setting matters.
You're outside. There is wind. There is weather. There are strangers passing through. There are people from different countries and different political cultures.
The physical environment becomes part of the encounter.
The conversation isn't happening in an abstract digital space.
It's happening somewhere.
Curiosity may be a condition for listening
Bob asked whether there is a particular kind of person who is more willing to listen.
My answer was curiosity.
The person who is willing to approach an unfamiliar artwork is already doing something important. They're asking:
What is this?
That question can be extended to another person.
Who are you?
Why do you think that?
What am I missing?
The curious part of us is willing to discover that our assumptions may be incomplete.
I think we could all use more of that.
Strangers can sometimes be easier than people we know
There is something interesting about talking to a stranger.
When we speak with someone close to us, we often think we already know what they believe.
We have a history with them.
We may even know exactly where the conversation is going before it begins.
With a stranger, there is less certainty.
That can create an unexpected freedom.
You're not necessarily trying to reinforce an existing relationship or defend an existing image of yourself.
You can simply listen.
And sometimes the absence of history makes it easier to encounter another person as a person.
Listening gives someone room to speak
I've had people become emotional during these encounters.
One example that stayed with me involved a mother who was no longer speaking with her son because they were on opposite sides of a political divide.
She was able to talk to me about it.
I was roughly the age of her son, and there may have been some projection in that encounter. But what struck me was that she had finally found a place where she could say what she wanted to say without being interrupted or judged.
That made me think differently about listening.
Sometimes listening isn't about resolving the disagreement.
It is about giving someone enough space to say something that they have not been able to say.
The inner conflict belongs to the person
When I ask the three questions, I don't tell people what their answers mean.
They have to work through that themselves.
That's part of why I don't think the questions are confrontational simply because they're about politics.
If I listen, the confrontation isn't between us.
The person has their own thoughts, contradictions, emotions, and unresolved positions to work through.
I'm providing a space for that to happen.
And sometimes that space is enough.
The algorithm makes the physical encounter more important
We spend an enormous amount of time inside mediated environments.
Social media platforms can keep us surrounded by people who think like us. Algorithms learn what holds our attention and continue feeding us material within that environment.
Our echo chambers can become smaller without us necessarily noticing.
That's why I keep coming back to the physical encounter.
A stranger isn't an algorithmically selected person.
They are actually there.
You have to listen to them.
You can't simply scroll past the sentence you don't like.
You have to remain present long enough to hear what comes next.
Curiosity is another way out of the echo chamber
The answer isn't necessarily to find better arguments.
Sometimes the first step is simply to become curious again.
Curiosity makes room for uncertainty.
It allows us to say:
I don't know.
Tell me more.
Where did that come from?
That doesn't require agreement.
It requires enough openness to allow another person to exist outside the caricature we may already have created for them.
From the Conversation
“I might get triggered, personally triggered.”
David describes the moment when another person's political statement produces an immediate reaction. Instead of allowing that reaction to end the encounter, he has learned to notice it and return to listening.
“I listen intently with all my senses.”
The questions are verbal, but David describes listening as something broader than processing words.
“Give me one word that brings all of their answers together.”
The final question turns the conversation inward. The participant has to decide what connects their own answers.
“The gimmick, the art installation, is also kind of a story.”
For David, the artwork can become something that participants carry into later conversations.
“If we don't do that, nothing else is working.”
The conversation returns repeatedly to a basic premise: before facts, arguments, or political persuasion can have much effect, people need to be capable of being present with one another.
Related Triptych Dialogue Projects
The recordings preserve the encounters that result from the questions. Each conversation becomes both documentation and material for further artistic exploration.
The Grand Canyon echo-chamber installation discussed in this episode connects directly to David's continuing exploration of perception, worldview, cognitive bias, and the spaces in which our understanding of the world is formed.
The conversation also touches on David's ceramic work and his interest in placing questions and messages into objects that may encounter people far beyond the original moment of their creation.
FAQ
What are David Deighton's three political questions?
David asks people how they would describe the U.S. political system, how they feel or react to the current state of U.S. politics, and then asks them to finish the sentence, “Politics in the United States...”
Why does David ask for one word at the end?
The final word asks the participant to bring their three responses together. David has found that the resulting word can sometimes express an aspiration or hope that wasn't immediately apparent in the earlier answers.
Is Triptych Dialogue trying to make people agree?
No. In this conversation, David describes looking for common emotional ground without requiring political agreement. The purpose is to create space for listening and encounter rather than to win an argument.
Why use art to start political conversations?
David describes the artwork as an excuse or invitation to begin. An unusual object or installation can provoke curiosity, and curiosity can make a difficult conversation easier to start.
Why does David talk to strangers?
Strangers do not necessarily carry the same assumptions and history as people we already know. David's experience suggests that this can sometimes create an unusual openness for conversations about politics.
What does the echo chamber installation represent?
The transparent case at the Grand Canyon became a physical metaphor for a worldview or echo chamber: something that can feel expansive from inside while actually limiting what we encounter.
What does listening mean in Triptych Dialogue?
For David, listening means more than waiting for another person to finish speaking. It involves being present, noticing one's own reactions, listening with the senses, and remaining open to what the other person is actually saying.
About the Host
Bob Woodley is the host and producer of The Listening Tube, a podcast built around conversations about current events, ideas, and the people behind them.