Many public debates become polarized, degenerating into a pattern of mutual suspicion and name-calling that preclude communication or compromise. The debate over animal research has typically followed this path. To understand how polarization might be avoided, we examine the factors that helped prevent it in one local controversy: Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1980s. These factors include the personal style of the leader of the main animal protection group, the financing for the group, the group's ability to win a symbolic (...) victory in the form of a relatively toothless city ordinance, and, especially, the relative avoidance by both sides of rigid ideological posturing in favor of "casuistic" argumentation about specific cases and policies. (shrink)