[P]eople in the exhausted majority have no narrative. They have no coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action. When they get one I suspect it will look totally unlike the two dominant narratives today.
– David Brooks, The New York Times
Rising political polarization has led to growing distrust in our civic institutions and in each other, dividing friends and families, exacerbating an already toxic media environment, and deepening government dysfunction. It may be tempting to believe these issues can be addressed by enacting a certain policy or winning a certain election.
But our problems are deeper and more pervasive than anything that can be addressed in a single election cycle. What is needed, therefore, is not just a new policy but also a new political vision—one that reawakens our sense of mutual obligation and common purpose.
That’s the aim of the Beacon Project. Drawing on state-of-the-art methods in behavioral science, and housed in an organization with a track record of producing paradigm-shifting insights, the Beacon Project is a 5-year “narrative moonshot” seeking to change how we think about our rights and responsibilities in the modern world.
In November 2024, More in Common received a generous grant from the Templeton Foundation to advance the first stage of the Project. Over 18 months, we will execute four efforts:
1) Agency, Justice, and American Potential. In this report, we explore a unique dividing line in American politics: a belief in the power of individuals to transcend negative circumstances. We test how Americans’ beliefs on this topic have changed over time and in relation to other democracies, and propose new ways of transcending false binaries.
2) “Am I the Asshole?”: A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas. In this project, we use AI to analyze the “Am I the Asshole?” repository on Reddit—the world’s largest repository of moral dilemmas—to explore beliefs about everyday obligations.
3) Mapping Beliefs About Civic Duty. We will use a statistical technique called topic modeling to map everyday Americans’ beliefs about civic obligations, then create an interactive website where the public can explore how these beliefs vary across geography and demographics.
4) Building Community. We will create a biweekly online speaker series that attracts scholars and practitioners to our work, building a cross-disciplinary intellectual community. The speaker series will culminate in a Spring 2026 in-person convening of approximately 25 scholars to share research relating to moral obligation.
Overall, the project will recenter questions of moral obligation in public discourse and help create a new moral framework that can speak to the complex challenges facing the world today.
Dr. Daniel Yudkin is a Senior Advisor at More in Common and a Visiting Scholar at the Wharton School. His award-winning research has appeared in numerous scientific journals, and he has written for outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.