What Is Civil Discourse? 5 Identifying Characteristics

You’re engaged in a conversation on a contentious topic with a spouse, your uncle, colleague, or a random person on social media. You sense the conversation is devolving, but aren’t quite sure how you got there. 

How do you know if a conversation is truly civil — and how can you ensure you’re practicing civility, even when you fundamentally disagree?

Civil discourse contains a number of notable characteristics that separate it from its opposite — contempt, shouting, insults, and unwarranted accusations. Knowing the characteristics of civil discourse can help you to not only practice it, but to avoid people or situations that do not respect civility. 

Civil discourse is a skill that we can all develop, and improves our relationships and our lives overall. By engaging in conversation with courtesy instead of contempt, we can maintain healthy relationships, form new ones, and expand our understanding — and yes, we can do this without compromising our own perspectives, opinions, or beliefs.

Here are 5 identifying characteristics of civil discourse:

1. Civil discourse is partner-focused, not opponent-focused.
   
   Debates are set up in a state of opposition, with each person representing sides in a battle that they seek to “win”. Civil discourse does not take this approach. Civil discourse views the person opposite you as a partner in sharing, discovery, and inquiry, not as someone to defeat, dominate, prove wrong, or rule over. In civil discourse, you’re partners in discovery and sharing, not opponents in debate.
    
2. Civil discourse avoids accusations and character attacks.
   
   Because civil discourse views the other party as a partner and not an opponent, the shape of the discourse avoids things like character attacks, attribution of malice, or accusations. It remains in respectful and polite territory, and does not assume the worst of the other party or seek to humiliate them. 
    
3. Civil discourse is genuinely inquisitive/curious. 
   
   While civil discourse can involve sharing a hard opinion, it fundamentally contains a stance of open inquiry and exploration, such as asking why your conversation partner holds their views, in order to learn and understand. Even if you think you already know what your conversation partner thinks or why, asking questions will reveal their perspectives, help you both find truth, and paint a broader picture. Civil discourse asks why someone thinks the way they do, instead of proving them wrong. It comes from a place of wanting to learn, understand, and grow — even if we never end up changing our own views.
    
4. Civil discourse assumes good faith. 
   
   Civil discourse assumes the other person is sincere in their beliefs, even if they are misguided, wrong, or uninformed. It seeks to understand why someone holds a view, rather than assigning malice. It resists the urge to treat disagreement as evidence of bad character — a necessary condition for engaging respectfully.  
5. Civil discourse tolerates disagreement without demanding change, agreement, or resolution. 
   
   Fundamentally, you don’t need to agree with or change your conversation partner. Civil discourse is more about asking questions and mutually sharing rather than reaching agreement or changing someone’s mind. You don’t have to give up your stance, change your views, or surrender your deeply held beliefs in order to engage in civil discourse. The outcome should be deeper understanding, a preserved or strengthened relationship, and the identification of common ground, if it exists (and it’s okay if it doesn’t!) — not changed minds.

How To Practice Civil Discourse

Whether you’re using social media, chatting with someone at a bar, or engaged in conversation with a colleague, the skill of practicing civil discourse will be endlessly relevant throughout one’s life, and there are endless forums to practice it. 

Here are a few ways:

1. Practice self-awareness while exposing yourself to different views. If you have any tendency to get inflamed or heated by a certain topic or perspective, exposing yourself to different views can help you to practice not only an awareness of this reaction, but also give you the opportunity to shift to a calm demeanor in the face of disagreement or challenging perspectives. Exposure to competing views can help you to practice taking a posture of curiosity over defensiveness and help to mitigate intense emotions. 
   
   The more you expose yourself to competing views over time, the more you can familiarize yourself with them and find a place of tolerance — but not necessarily agreement. The goal of exposing yourself to different views is not to agree, but to develop the skills that can help us to remain in healthy relationships with our fellow humans. Learning to respectfully disagree, moderate strong emotions, and stay curious — while not surrendering your own beliefs — helps keep relationships intact.
    
2. Ask questions and listen. Instead of just waiting for your turn to make your point, genuinely listen to the other person and ask questions about their life and experiences. Seek to understand how they came to their conclusions. 
   
   Maybe someone who wants tighter gun laws experienced a violent neighborhood, and genuinely believes such laws would help. Maybe someone who wants tighter immigration restrictions saw the culture and social fabric of their town fundamentally change when immigrants moved in. Ask them what they experienced and how they felt about their experiences, rather than making assumptions or accusing.
    
3. Join virtual events to practice listening and dialoguing. It’s abundantly clear that on social media, not everyone is operating under the principles of civility. So where can you go to practice? Joining events explicitly designed to foster and practice civil dialogue can help to strengthen your skills. Tools like AllSides Roundtables offer virtual conversations on topics that matter, in small groups of 4-6 people who have different views, and include a built-in conversation guide to ensure conversations remain civil. AllSides holds Roundtables weekly — check out opportunities here, or sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about upcoming events.

Learning the characteristics of civil dialogue can help us to practice it and broaden our worlds. By equipping ourselves with the skills to engage respectfully, we can learn about different people in a healthy way. Next time you find yourself in a place of disagreement, see if you can practice civility instead of damage.

Julie Mastrine is the Director of Communications and Bias Services at AllSides. She has a Lean Right bias.

This piece was reviewed by Andrew Weinzierl, Director of Research (Lean Left bias).