Repeat almost anything often enough and people will start to believe it. Like, for instance, the idea that we’re a hopelessly divided nation. Fact is, we’re probably not, at least not as much as most people think. The loudest, extremist voices on either side of politics might say so, but we, the real people with real lives, worries, ambitions and opinions, generally are not really that broken. We can thank traditional news media for promoting division and growing advertising revenue by building audience numbers with outrage, infotainment and melodrama and feeding us titillating images and stories that appeal to our emotions and capture our attention.

We can especially thank the internet for inventing programmatic ad revenue and for keeping us in the echo chamber where we see and hear mostly what appeals to our preconditioned beliefs. We hear often and loudly from people with extreme ideas who claim that they represent the thoughts of most other people. But the truth is that people are just not very good at judging what other people think. In public participation projects, we’ve often used a decision assistance tool that features electronic polling and pair sharing to help determine a community’s overall likes, dislikes, preferences and priorities.

In facilitating these groups, I’ll start by asking people up front what they think everyone else in the room thinks. I’ll do that before we start the objective scientific polling process that allows individuals to make private, anonymous comparisons and decisions. Those personal, anonymous preferences are then crunched by the computer alongside everyone else’s. The computer then spits out the actual preferences and priorities of the whole group. People’s earlier predictions about what their peers think are almost never right, and the actual group preferences are almost always a surprise, which then makes for great, healthy facilitated conversations and conclusions. So, the moral of this story: beware of what pundits tell you. They get paid to pundit, not to be right.