Our mission at CivilPolitics.org was to educate groups and individuals who are trying to bridge moral divisions by connecting them with scientific research in this domain. We provided a platform that enables an exchange of evidence-based best practices, hypotheses, and ideas among partners. Note that as of 2020, we are no longer an active organization, but are still happy to answer emails and keep this site up as a resource.
1) Education on scientific research for non-academics – We host scholarly articles that relate to bridging moral divisions and also attempt to distill this research into concrete recommendations that have the most support (e.g. these two recommendations). We previously consulted with organizations to tailor our recommendations to any particular situation, and many of the results of those engagements are listed here.
2) Learning from partner organizations – There are many organizations doing valuable work bringing people together in their community and we seek to learn from their experiences. We routinely interviewed organizations as to their best practices and share their wisdom with others. We also helped with program evaluations and the combined qualitative and quantitative evidence from field work serves to also inform our understanding of the research as our best recommendations are supported both by academic studies and field experience.
3) Supporting new research – We published academic articles and collected data that is used by others to understand morality better, with an eye toward work that can specifically help bridge moral divisions. Our data collection platform, YourMorals.org, still collects data from hundreds of thousands of people each year, educating the public while also providing data for numerous moral psychology studies.
Our hope in providing this platform is to create a loop between researchers and practitioners, which will enable the evolution of effective, evidence based approaches to improving relations across divisions that have a moral dimension. While we do not bring people together ourselves, we are hopeful that our work can help some number of interested people and organizations bring people together more effectively.