Yes, there is a productive way to reframe your holiday political debates

Here we are again, in the season of gathering with loved ones, eating holiday treats and, perhaps, getting into heated political debates with a relative at the dinner table. 

As a psychological anthropologist who has studied how people think and make decisions about social issues, I still haven’t figured out why we do this to ourselves — but I’m glad we do. Although they may seem fruitless, these dinner conversations are an important part of our larger public discourse and help shape how we think about social issues. How we talk informs how we think, and how we think informs how we act and ultimately, how we participate in democracy.

Throughout history, we’ve seen how reframing conversations can lead to systemic change. In the 20th century, leaders of the civil rights movement reframed the issue of racial hierarchy and changed the conversation. This led increasing numbers of people to question, and ultimately reject, laws and practices that disenfranchised Black Americans.

But today, these conversations tend to get stuck on individual circumstances or specific issues, such as critical race theory or mask-wearing. When we debate such things this way, we don’t change anyone’s mind or motivate people to think differently about the world and what might help improve it — all we do is upset family members for picking a fight again.  

What if we could debate in a way that leads to real change? Can we shift these dead-end, person-focused conversations to the broader, more sweeping themes that underlie specific issues and shape our American cultural landscape?  

For example, instead of talking about the neighbor’s substance use issue as a failure of will, we can reframe that to focus on our country’s lack of affordable health care and the anemic system that supports our mental health. When someone laments that another family in the neighborhood is being evicted for failing to make rent, we can bring up the bigger questions about why there is such limited availability of affordable housing and why many jobs fail to pay livable wages. 

Even though American mindsets have been dominated by individualism and the belief that social issues are a result of poor decisions and lack of hard work, and can be fixed by better choices or more effort, our research on American culture shows that people are starting to think more about issues such as racism and economic disparities as systemic problems. Since 2020, many of our national conversations from the COVID-19 pandemic to police violence have shifted — and so have ways of thinking. Continuing along this trajectory to establish real change will require us to be intentional about how we frame conversations — starting around the holiday table. 

To make conversations more fruitful, keep these four research-based framing strategies in mind:

Lead and connect with shared values: Believe it or not, there are some things that you and your father-in-law both believe in, such as values of justice, dignity, community, decency, opportunity and the power of problem solving. Evoking shared values early and often can help ground the conversation in a common sense of what the issues truly are and why they’re important to solve.

Talk about aspirations and the kind of country that we want: Rather than focusing on who is to blame for our nation’s problems, center the conversation on where we want to go and how we want things to be in the future — and what might need to change to get there.

Make it clear that where we live and what is accessible shapes our opportunities: Make it personal by laying out the ways that you and your family members have been affected by the opportunities and supports that you have or haven’t had access to. Sure, individual choices matter — don’t argue against this, because it’s true — but so do the environments around us that dictate which choices are available. 

Provide examples that show how change is possible: These can include examples that your family member can connect with, or local stories that illustrate that people can change systems and, when they do, it can improve the lives of everyone affected. You never want to end a conversation on the gravity of problems without offering potential solutions. 

I won’t pretend that shifting mindsets happens easily or quickly, or that one conversation will get an obstinate family member to understand the depths of systemic racism. But these conversations provide an opportunity to reframe ideas and reshape how we think about social issues.  

Fixing our social problems isn’t about winning an argument. It’s about finding new ways to converse that push us beyond seeing individual responsibility as the only answer. The first step in changing systems is getting people to understand that they matter. And we can do this by changing the conversation.

Nat Kendall-Taylor is a psychological anthropologist and CEO of the FrameWorks Institute.