One of the challenges facing our democracy is the way that our highly polarized politics isolates many people into “bubbles” of thought and logic. In these bubbles, reflexive reactions replace actual thinking and consideration. This makes it difficult (or perhaps even impossible) to change minds and to forge useful compromises.
Moving people out of their bubble is hard – and therefore quite rare. In nearly all the cases I know of, it is a process begun and finished entirely on a person's own initiative. The fascinating blogger Neo-Neocon has a wonderful series of posts that describe her escape from just such a political thought bubble. Read those posts and you'll gain an understanding of just how difficult that escape was.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a tool that would make it easier to puncture the bubble? That's just what a professor and graduate student team at the University of Illinois claims to have found, and they tested their tool (in part) by using people solidly in a political bubble. It's an incredibly simple tool: a difficult-to-read font. Seriously.
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