I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left

This short video is a wonderful example of the idea that lies at the core of my talk: non-complementary behavior. As humans, we tend to treat others the way they treat us – kindness tends to beget kindness, and anger breeds more of the same. Breaking a negative feedback cycle is incredibly difficult because answering hostility with kindness runs contrary to our natural impulses. This video illustrates both the difficulty and the power of non-complementary behavior.

This story shows non-complementary behavior in another context: a successful deradicalization program developed by two Danish crime prevention officers. While most of Europe came down hard on people who traveled to fight in Syria, this Danish town responded more gently: “They made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and that when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society.” Although some deride this as the “hug a terrorist” model of deradicalization, the officers see their response as entirely practical. It’s more important to have an effective strategy to keep their town safe than it is to punish people for choosing a bad path.

This article is fascinating because it considers one theory about why it’s so difficult to engage across entrenched divides: "When considering an enemy, the mind generates an 'empathy gap.' It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes." This theory comes from Emile Bruneau, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT who studies intractable conflicts around the world. "I get that these are complicated problems," he said. "But if you trace even the biggest of these conflicts down to its roots, what you find are entrenched biases, and these sort-of calcified failures of empathy." It seems clear that overcoming these natural cognitive failures – and the growing national divide – we’ll have to be deliberate about cultivating empathy for our ideological opponents.

For anyone looking to better understand Westboro Baptist Church and my journey out of its ideology, this profile by New Yorker staff writer Adrian Chen is a great place to start. He spent the better part of a year digging into the question of exactly how my mind changed over time, and how people on Twitter helped make it happen.

This profile of Derek Black is another illustration of the power of kind engagement over hostile dismissal and accusations. Derek was raised in the white nationalist movement, and though our ideologies were extremely different, many hallmarks of our upbringings were the same. We developed a deeply Us vs. Them mentality; the sense that the masses were deluded and that our truth was the only hope; and a desire to help the world by spreading our ideology as far and as wide as possible.