Ending the crisis of contempt in America begins with self

A nationwide survey found a solution to America’s division, polarization and contempt. A vast majority of Americans value treating each other with dignity. The founders of the Dignity Index say change starts with the individual.

A new poll known as the Dignity Barometer produced statistics that indicate a big shift in American sentiment, said Tim Shriver, one of the founders of Dignity.US and the Dignity Index. It was not the fact that 94% of Americans agree that everyone should be treated with dignity in a way that honors their inherent worth as a human being. Neither was it that more than 70% are dissatisfied with the way people treat each other nor that 74% are just exhausted by the divisions in our society. It was also not the finding that nearly as many people are worried about America’s division as they are about the cost of living. At 83% and 86% respectively, that scale of concern indicates that the country’s polarization is its own “kitchen table crisis,” according to Dignity.US.

What signaled the shift, Shriver said during a webinar, was the data regarding how people perceive how they treat each other. Despite nearly total agreement that everyone deserves dignity, only 31% of people said they think people treat each other with dignity when they disagree, while nearly 60% of people think that in those moments they treat each other with contempt. “This is the big signal shift in the data from our point of view,” Shriver said. “It’s not just divisions but it’s divisiveness. It’s treating each other with contempt that reveals the big gap.”

But Dignity.US also sees it as an opportunity and found optimism amid the survey results. If Americans are treating each other with contempt, but think dignity is so important, then there’s an opportunity for change and growth at the individual level.

Shriver said overcoming this “dignity gap” is not an easy thing to do, but knowing it exists coupled with the fact that people want to change opens a path forward. “There’s a gap, my friends, between who we want to be and who we are. There’s a gap between what we believe and how we act,” Shriver said. “At the highest level, to us, this is the open door for a movement.”

What is Dignity.US?

The existence of contemptuous rhetoric across American society in recent years is not contested. Shriver said at the Dignity Barometer’s introductory webinar that the organization seeks to create an “emerging field of dignity” to challenge and enable people to overcome the “culture of contempt” that has overtaken American politics and interpersonal behavior. Its goal is to create and foster alternate cultures of dignity in the United States.

“We think of this as a field, not a program. We think of this as a movement, not an intervention,” said Shriver, the CEO and founder of UNITE and co-creator of the Dignity Index. “We think of this as a challenge to our country. Not just a challenge to our politics or to our institutions, but a challenge to each and every one of us.”

Originally founded by Shriver, Tami Pyfer and Tom Rosshirt in 2018 as UNITE, Dignity.US has existed in its current iteration since 2022. Its most well-known entity is the Dignity Index, which is a method to score particular language or rhetoric along an eight-point scale from contempt to dignity. The index is now a means for the organization to work with schools, municipalities, state governments, and faith leaders to “promote the idea that we are all called to a kind of fundamental human dignity.”

And the Dignity Barometer is its first effort to measure the general public’s fears and concerns as well as the relationship between them. Within those sentiments, it sought to determine if Americans have a commitment to the notion of “dignity,” which they define as “treating (people) in a way that values their inherent worth as a human being.” The survey found that Americans absolutely do and that they’re optimistic that a more dignified and less contemptuous country remains possible.

Optimistic even if contempt is costly

While the data was clear on the value of dignity and the concerns over divisions and divisiveness, there was also quite a bit to be optimistic about, said Pyfer, the former education advisor to the Utah governor and chief impact officer for Dignity.US. The results of the poll reminded her of a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher who visited the United States in the 1830s, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

One of those findings is that 72% of people think it’s possible to heal America’s divisions. And, within that, a specific element that Pyfer found telling was that people who engage more regularly with people they disagreed with were more optimistic about being able to heal divisions. Among those who do not engage with opposing views, she said, “the number went down. They’re not as optimistic.”

Within that optimism was a surprisingly large awareness of the cost of contempt that showed itself in several ways. More than 90% of respondents said that when people treat each other with contempt, it makes it hard to talk and close to impossible to solve problems. Another 88% of Americans said that using disrespectful labels increases the chance of violence.

One cost Pyfer encountered often in higher education was that people living in a culture of contempt become afraid to speak their mind or express their opinions. The poll found more than 50% of the country stopped discussing issues they cared about with family or friends because they were afraid of what people would think or how they would be treated.

“When we live in a culture of contempt, we’re afraid to say what we think. And if we’re afraid to say what we think, we can’t talk to each other. And if we can’t talk to each other, we can’t solve problems,” she said.

But the poll also found people know that dignity can offset such costs. Whether the setting is family, work, school boards, or with elected officials, Pfyer said, dignity builds trust and contempt hurts it. “There’s a wide agreement that when we treat people with contempt, it is not good. But where contempt tears us apart, dignity brings us back together again,” Pyfer said, noting “87% of the country believes that dignity can repair and bring us back together again.”

Closing the dignity gap

“So, we are not living up to our own values,” said Tom Rosshirt, an author, former presidential speechwriter, and co-founder of the Dignity Index. “This creates an opportunity … there’s potential energy in that.”

There are two ways to close the dignity gap, he said, and to have America live up to its values. The first is rather straightforward: to use more dignity and less contempt. That is not always easy to do, nor to keep front of mind, Rosshirt said, but those changes will have to start at the individual level.

The other is “a lot trickier,” he said, and it comes down to self-awareness. In the poll, 77% of respondents said that they always or most of the time treat others with dignity, while only 47% say others always or most of the time treat them with dignity. “We give ourselves a better grade than we give to others,” Rosshirt said.

And maybe that’s because each individual is, in fact, better than other people, but it could also be because most folks do not notice their own contempt. “It’s hard to see our own contempt,” Rosshirt said. “If we can’t see our own contempt, we can’t correct it. And if we can’t correct it, nothing’s going to change.”

That inherent bias about our own behavior might be a blind spot to progressing towards more dignity and less contempt in society.

In the study, however, the authors embedded another little test by asking the same question twice to determine if there was another solution inherent in the very act of talking about dignity. When people were asked whether it’s possible for the country’s divisions to ease, the percentage of folks who said yes rose by 4% from the beginning to the end of the survey. When asked how much impact they thought they could personally have in easing divisions, the number who said a very or fairly big difference rose by 9%.

“When people reflect on dignity and contempt,” Rosshirt said, “they can often see a path to change with a role for themselves.”