Cool cognition paired with blind emotion are the predicates to effective change

From Forecasting tournaments, epistemic humility and attitude depolarization by Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Hal R.Arkes. From the Abstract:

People often express political opinions in starkly dichotomous terms, such as “Trump will either trigger a ruinous trade war or save U.S. factory workers from disaster.” This mode of communication promotes polarization into ideological in-groups and out-groups. We explore the power of an emerging methodology, forecasting tournaments, to encourage clashing factions to do something odd: to translate their beliefs into nuanced probability judgments and track accuracy over time and questions. In theory, tournaments advance the goals of “deliberative democracy” by incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, thus depolarizing unnecessarily polarized debates. We examine the hypothesis that, in the process of thinking critically about their beliefs, tournament participants become more moderate in their own political attitudes and those they attribute to the other side. We view tournaments as belonging to a broader class of psychological inductions that increase epistemic humility and that include asking people to explore alternative perspectives, probing the depth of their cause-effect understanding and holding them accountable to audiences with difficult-to-guess views.

Indeed.

The challenge is that there are three predicates to change. 1) The understanding that change needs to happen. 2) The determination of what change that should be. 3) Mustering sufficient motivation to overcome inertia, set aside the benefits of the status quo, and undertake the risks and unknowns attendant to all change.

Mellers et al findings are pertinent to 1 & 2. However, three is much more rooted in emotion than in cognitive awareness. You are taking risks and mustering the courage to turn a blind eye to the benefits of the status quo and undertake the unknowns of change is largely an emotional transition. To achieve change, you have to be cognitively effective (1&2) but you also need to be emotionally motivated (3).

Cool cognition and blind emotion are a difficult pair of horses to have simultaneously in the same traces.