EXERCISES AND ASSESSMENTS BY CHAPTER
Below are a set of exercises and assessments that supplement each chapter. These are designed to help deepen your understanding of specific concepts introduced in the chapters in a variety of ways.
I encourage you as you finish each chapter of the book to visit this page and read through the corresponding appendices.
You may work through the exercises and questions right away, or just skim them and revisit them as you continue along in the book. But they are designed to be a “tool-kit” to carry with you as you work to apply the lessons from this book.
**Click the boxes below to access all the resources associated with each chapter.**
CONCLUDING TAKEWAYS
We have traveled together from normal, healthy types of polarization to pathological, from mechanical theories of change to complex and nonlinear, and from standard approaches to problem solving to five modes of radical re-landscaping.
The concluding chapter offers two final elements of The Way Out.
First, it offers a North Star of sorts. A vision of what life looks like in today’s more politically tolerant communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Second, it distills the main actionable insights from the research shared in the book into a simple set of New Rules for The Way Out.
That is, a sequence of eight “IF X, Then Y” behavioral rules to practice and follow when finding yourself trapped in a pathological pattern of polarization in your family, workplace, community or nation.
These new rules do not offer a fixed recipe for depolarizing your life, but rather offer the ingredients for making such a change possible. The rest is up to you.
