Hence the need for Citizen Councils like the one that met last month to tackle immigration, he says. Nielsen and Josie Valdez from the city's Office of Diversity created two groups: one consisted of immigrants (two of them undocumented), the second was made up of what Nielsen called "longer-term residents," including members of the Utah Minuteman Project as well as people in favor of reforms such as amnesty. In the third week the two groups then met together — but not before each received a tutorial from Nielsen about "cognitive biases" and the "architecture of the brain."

The idea was to get everyone to see that we often retreat into emotion and logical fallacies, and that if we could learn to really look for shared values we could discuss even immigration with mutual respect. And we might be able to come up with a solution that has eluded Congress.

That was the idea, anyway. Nielsen is the first to admit that his first experiment wasn't a total success. For this first citizen council he wasn't able to pick people completely at random (no money and no time). And he picked a super-charged issue that required much more than the dozen or so hours allotted.

"What's he trying to do?" 84-year-old Minuteman Phil Morgan asked Minuteman director Eli Cawley during a break at one of the meetings.

"He's discussing techniques of communication in order to ... " Cawley began.

"In order to set us up?" Morgan wanted to know.

This is for people who believe in theories, Cawley answered, then summed up Nielsen: "He's an academic. That's what you have to expect."

Morgan wasn't convinced. After the meeting he told a reporter that he felt that Nielsen was really trying to change the Minutemen's minds about immigration. "I'm too old for that," he said.

The weekend after that, the two groups — the immigrants and the nonimmigrants — met together to dialogue and deliberate. Cawley later wrote Nielsen that he thought the process was helpful "as a way to disengage emotionally and psychologically from the often adversarial postures." But all in all it was a failure, he said.

"The stultifying nature of the techniques which enabled discussion in the first place, giving precedence as they did to accommodation and commonality" were part of the problem, he wrote. "Encouraging as it did mutual respect rather than antagonism and contention, this process of amelioration succeeded merely in obfuscating the real issues in the national debate rather than permitting the panel to come to grips with them." The result, Cawley said later, was "a squishy middle."

Democracy itself, Cawley says, gives too much power to what he calls "the mob."

Nielsen feels that the dialogue he fostered that day worked but only temporarily. The same thing happened when he once had a dialogue in Utah County about same-sex marriage and civil unions. After the third immigration meeting, he says, he was depressed. He's also lost sleep over the whole venture.