People come home from a weekend of talks and panels convinced that something in them has shifted. The Big Brue, a new festival of ideas in the Somerset town of Bruton on 19 and 20 September, intends to check that claim rather than accept it. Attendees will be asked to fill in questionnaires and carry out simple tasks before and after the programme, to see whether they finish the event more open, more optimistic, more empathetic and more tolerant of views they do not hold. Speakers will be measured too.
The design comes from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist and educator who wants to turn the festival itself into an experiment. “We have set up a number of panels with strongly opposing views,” he told the Guardian. “We want to examine if the festival can change perception of conflict. Can conflict be generative rather than degenerative?”
Disagreement as the programme
The organising premise is that disagreement is worth engineering rather than avoiding. Panels have deliberately been assembled from people likely to contradict each other, under a programme theme of disagreeing agreeably, and the founders argue that a rural setting away from “the fray of the city” is a better place to try it.
The lineup includes a session on artificial intelligence with the former UK chancellor George Osborne, now working for OpenAI, and the writer Misha Glenny; the Reform UK MP Danny Kruger discussing migration and, in a separate session, appearing with his mother, Prue Leith, on family; and a “poetry battle” between the actor Dominic West and the musician Bob Geldof. Mariella Frostrup, one of four founders, describes the aim as a space “where ideas are presented and tested, where disagreement is welcome so long as it is agreeable, and audiences are participants as well as spectators”.
Lotto’s framing of the problem is that polarisation has produced views with very little nuance in them, which makes public argument feel brittle. “Because of the polarisation in the world, there’s so much pessimism and negativity,” he said. “It’s very extreme.”
The awe result the design is modelled on
He has run a version of this before, at a Cirque du Soleil performance, testing whether the wonder an audience felt changed how they treated other people. The measure was deliberately modest: an interviewer dropped pens in front of audience members before and after the show, and counted who bent down to help. Afterwards, people were more likely to pick them up. Lotto’s reading is that the crowd had become “much more pro-social than they were before” — a small behavioural signal collected in the real world rather than in a laboratory.
Where the measurement gets shakier
One planned task is finding the midpoint of a line. Lotto suggests the result could indicate “which side of the brain” a respondent is using, and might differ at the start and end of the festival. Line bisection is a real clinical instrument, but for spatial attention — it is best known for detecting unilateral neglect after right-hemisphere stroke. It is not a validated measure of which hemisphere someone is “using,” and a shift across a weekend of talks would be a fragile thing to interpret.
The remaining measures are self-reports of openness, optimism and tolerance, collected from people who know they are being studied, in a setting built to induce exactly those dispositions. Expectancy, and the wish to be the sort of person a festival of ideas is for, are difficult to separate from genuine change — which is the standard objection to before-and-after designs of this kind. The organisers say the point is to find out. What they will not have by the end of September is anything more than a hypothesis with a couple of days of data behind it, and the experiment is worth reading that way if it is reported later as a result.