The recent crisis in the Israel and Palestine conflict has added fuel to the already heated debate over free speech in our politics and on college campuses. Does the scientific literature having anything to tell us about the health of public discourse in these domains? A recent paper by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Yihong Huang titled “Breaking the Spiral of Silence” holds some answers. It looks at how the attention we pay, or don’t pay, to who stays silent in a debate can exacerbate self-censorship.