With the holiday season just around the corner, families and households will soon be gathering to give and receive gifts. Many will also be sending donations to communities in crisis, and organizing charity events and food drives to help others.
How curious are you, really?
Curiosity, the search for understanding, is about more than just learning new information for trivia night. When you direct it toward exploring yourself or others in a deeper way, it can become a force for connection and transformation in your life.
Walking can increase our sense of connectedness with the earth and motivation to take climate action, which might be an important aspect of our well-being.
On this podcast, we explore the intersection of environmental well-being and our own well-being, where taking care of ourselves and the planet are one in the same and feeling good is not only possible, it’s helpful. We find the links between crisis, hope, happiness, and action.
By PETER T. COLEMAN, DOUGLAS P. FRY | Greater Good Magazine
A multidisciplinary team of researchers is discovering what makes some societies more peaceful than others.
Given the grinding wars and toxic political divisions that dominate the news, it might come as a surprise to hear that there are also a multitude of sustainably peaceful societies thriving across the globe today. These are communities that have managed to figure out how to live together in peace—internally within their borders, externally with neighbors, or both—for 50, 100, even several hundred years. This simple fact directly refutes the widely held and often self-fulfilling belief that humans are innately territorial and hardwired for war.
The international community has struggled with a similar attention-to-peace deficit disorder. In fact, the United Nations has been attempting for decades to pivot from crisis management to its primary mandate to “sustain international peace in all its dimensions.” Yet by its own account, “the key Charter task of sustaining peace remains critically under-recognized, under-prioritized, and under-resourced globally and within the United Nations.”
Science could play a crucial role in specifying the aspects of community life that contribute to sustaining peace. Unfortunately, our understanding of more pacific societies is limited by the fact that they are rarely studied. Humans mostly study the things we fear—cancer, depression, violence, and war—and so we have mostly studied peace in the context or aftermath of war. When peaceful places are studied, researchers (much like the U.N.) tend to focus primarily on negative peace, or the circumstances that keep violence at bay, to the neglect of positive peace, or the things that promote and sustain more just, harmonious, prosocial relations. As a result, we know much more about how to get out of war than we do about how to build thriving, peaceful communities.
In response to this gap in our understanding of how to sustain peace, an eclectic group of scholars started gathering together in 2014. We are psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental scientists, political scientists, data scientists, and communications experts, who are interested in gaining a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of lasting peace. We also share an appreciation of the benefits of using methods from complexity science to better visualize and model the complex dynamics of such societies, and as a platform for communicating with one another across such different disciplines to develop a shared understanding of stable, peaceful societies and of peace systems.
Peace systems are clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and anthropological and historical cases of such non-warring social systems exist across time and around the globe. None of the five Nordic nations, for instance, have met one another on the battlefield for over 200 years. Other examples of peace systems include 10 neighboring tribes of the Brazilian Upper Xingu River basin, the Swiss cantons that unified to form Switzerland in 1848, the Iroquois Confederation, and the E.U.
The mere existence of peace systems challenges the assumption that societies everywhere are prone to wage war with their neighbors—and what we have gleaned from studying these societies is promising.
Our journey to date has been circuitous but fruitful. It began with a dive into the published science on peacefulness, which helped us to identify some of the more influential scholars in this area. We then surveyed this group to identify their sense of the most central components of achieving lasting peace (74 experts from 35 disciplines responded), and then invited the respondents to a day-long workshop to make sense of the findings. Next, our core team worked with this information to develop a basic conceptual model of sustaining peace.
The focus of our model is simple. It views the central dynamic responsible for the emergence of sustainably peaceful relations in communities as the thousands or millions of daily reciprocal interactions that happen between members of different groups in those communities, and the degree to which more positive interactions outweigh more negative. That’s it. The more positive reciprocity and the less negative reciprocity between members of different groups, the more sustainable the peace.
In other words, peace is not just an absence of violence and war, but also people and groups getting along prosocially with each other: the cooperation, sharing, and kindness that we see in everyday society. Sustaining peace happens through positive reciprocity: I show you a kindness and you do me a favor in return, multiplied throughout the social world a million times over.
Next, we started gathering together all the relevant science on positive or negative intergroup reciprocity. For example, studies on Mauritius, the most peaceful nation in Africa, have found intentionality in how members of different ethnic groups speak with one another in public. Mauritians of all stripes tend to be respectful and careful in their daily encounters with others. This even translates to differences in how journalists and editors report the news, and how teachers, politicians, and clergy take up their roles in society. These findings suggest that the citizens of this highly diverse nation do not take their peacefulness for granted—they recognize that it must be cultivated and protected.
We then organized these variables by three levels (individual, group, and society) and by their dominant effects (promoting peacefulness or preventing violence). Here are the elements we found promoted peace and nonviolence in individuals (the micro level):
| EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS) | EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS) |
|---|---|
Motives
Cognitions
Affect
Behavior
|
Motives
Cognitions
Affect
Behavior
|
Here are the factors that promote peace and nonviolence on the family and community (or “meso”) level:
| EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (COMMUNITY ELEMENTS) | EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (COMMUNITY ELEMENTS) |
|---|---|
|
|
And, finally, at the macro level of society and internationally, we found these qualities that promote positive intergroup interactions—and those that prevent or mitigate negative relations:
| EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (MACRO ELEMENTS) | EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (MACRO ELEMENTS) |
|---|---|
Effectiveness and resilience of civil society
|
|
We then began to map the effects that each of these variables have on positive and negative group interactions, and on the other variables in the system. This is called causal-loop diagramming, and entails synthesizing the findings from hundreds of studies on dozens of variables to understand one simple dynamic: how they increase the chances that members of in-groups treat members of out-groups positively and inclusively rather than negatively and exclusively. This visualization gives us a coherent, birds-eye view of a larger system of peace dynamics.
At this point, our in-house astrophysicist, Larry Liebovitch, went rogue one long weekend and decided to mathematize this model (I believe with the aid of lots of caffeinated soda), developing an algorithm that captured its core dynamics. This allowed us to build a computer simulation that invites us (and you) to play with the different variables in the model to see how increasing or decreasing them might change patterns in this complex system.
Through this work, we’ve found that sustaining peace can be understood as a high ratio of positive intergroup reciprocity to negative intergroup reciprocity that is stable over time. In fact, this is exactly the type of interpersonal dynamic that researchers have found to lead to more thriving, stable marriages and families. This simple micro-dynamic of peacefulness has allowed us to begin to connect the dots between the multitude of variables investigated in thousands of studies across dozens of disciplines relevant to sustaining peace. This more basic and comprehensive approach to thinking about peace offers scholars, policymakers, and the public a sense of its complexity and simplicity, as well as (with the aid of the math model) insight into how particular policies and programs may result in intended, unintended, and even quite harmful consequences.
In parallel to building the math model, Doug Fry and Geneviève Souillac went back into the tomes of ethnographic studies that they had compiled over decades on peaceful societies and peace systems, and with their students coded for variables that they had found through previous research to be prominent in these societies. This allowed them to conduct a comparison study between 16 peace systems (such as the Nordic countries since 1815 and the Orang Asli of Malaysia) and 30 non-peace systems.
During this time, another subgroup of the team began developing new ways of measuring trends relevant to sustaining peace. The most promising of these forays to date has been working with data scientists on the development of two types of word lexicons: one for peace speech and one for conflict speech. This has been done by employing machine learning and natural language processing methods to comb through millions of newspaper articles published within highly peaceful and highly conflictual societies. The goal of this initiative is to fill the gap that currently exists for metrics that allow us to better track and therefore promote positive peace.
Finally, we have also been engaging directly with peaceful communities and those struggling to find peace. This has entailed building local partnerships and holding dialogues between our scientists and community stakeholders.
This work began in the Basque region of Spain, a society recently emerging from civil war and hungry for peace, but currently involves working with diverse sets of stakeholders living in Mauritius and Costa Rica. This has taught us about the critical importance of local understanding of some of the key variables.
For example, religious differences can be a source of great divisiveness in many communities. However, in Mauritius, a highly religious nation with large populations of Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, religiosity is tempered by tolerance and taboos around proselytizing, as well as a general belief in the value of spirituality, no matter the denomination. Such contextualization of variables highlights the limitations of the current inclination to employ top-down, one-size-fits-all indices to track and rank national peacefulness, and the need for more locally informed methods.
Even a cursory glimpse at our causal-loop diagram of the science on sustaining peace gives you a sense of the highly complex nature of the system of drivers. We have found that there are many different paths to peacefulness through both our review of the science and our conversations with community members living in peace. In fact, most of the societies that currently rank as highly peaceful—the Nordic nations, New Zealand and Australia, Costa Rica, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Qatar—came to peace through very different processes and maintain it through distinct means.
However, when our team systematically compared a sample of peace systems with a randomly selected comparison group, we discovered that peace systems tend to share certain commonalities:
Ultimately, we have found that when these different peace variables align and reinforce one another, virtuous cycles are often created that become more resistant to changing conditions. This, we suggest, is the essence of sustainability.
There is still much to learn. We recently launched a short video and a public website that provides an overview of the project and the team, which includes a map locating contemporary societies sustaining peace, an interactive version of the causal-loop diagram that allows users to explore the evidence behind it, and an interactive version of the mathematical model that encourages users to plug in values and play with the model.
In the end, it is vital to remember that peace exists today in pockets all around the globe, and that the more we study and learn from such societies, the higher our chances of building a global peace system for all. Peace is possible—and the more we understand, the more probable it becomes.
By JEREMY ADAM SMITH, KIRA M. NEWMAN | Greater Good Magazine
Campus leaders across the U.S. are implementing strategies for better relationships, dialogue, and understanding across divides.
Most colleges and universities provide an opportunity to meet people who have different faiths, politics, identities, and life experiences. If the campus culture fosters belonging, this diversity exposes students to new ways of thinking. It expands students’ outlook about the world around them, and even changes the way they see themselves. That is what the college experience should be all about!
But this diversity can also present enormous challenges, especially in today’s climate of worsening division and polarization—whether it’s about mask protocols or vaccinations for COVID-19, or demands for the campus to do more on racial justice. Global issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict can find their way onto an American campus and lead to interpersonal conflict across individuals and groups. Sometimes that conflict isn’t productive, and becomes harmful or violent—arguments turn into lawsuits, property damage, or worse.
A 2017 survey of more than 3,000 college students, conducted by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found that 61% of students believe that “the climate on their campus prevents some students from expressing their views.” It’s not just students who are experiencing these ruptures on campuses across the country—so are faculty, staff, and administrators.
This is why the Greater Good Science Center created the Bridging Differences course with a special emphasis on higher education. The goal of the course is to teach research-based strategies for better relationships, dialogue, and understanding across divides—and though we created it with campuses in mind, the course is relevant to anyone navigating conflicts and differences.
We’ve heard from campus leaders across the country that a course like this is timely, beneficial, and necessary. Out of these conversations, we surfaced five times when campus leaders succeeded in building bridges between antagonistic groups. We hope they’ll provide you with some inspiration for building bridges, wherever you live and work.
Four students debate the art piece at Linn Benton Community College.© Josh Stickrod for The Commuter, a weekly student-run newspaper in Albany, OregonA few semesters ago, Linn Benton Community College in Oregon put up a public sculpture by a local artist that depicted two naked men holding each other. It sparked a controversy on campus—the local newspaper wrote about it, the Board of Education and parents got involved, and students were split into two factions.
“Some people thought it was very bold and in support of the LGBTQ community,” said Mark Urista, who teaches public speaking and argumentation. “Others thought it was inappropriate and a threat to their morals and values.”
When a big donor threatened to stop contributing to the school, “it turned into a full-on crisis,” Urista said.
Like most community colleges, Linn Benton has a very diverse student body, and it sits between two politically divergent counties: Linn County, which has voted for a Republican U.S. president since the 1970s; and Benton County, which has voted for a Democratic U.S. president since the 1980s.
“I thought it would be such a great topic for my argumentation class, but tensions were so high that I wasn’t sure if I should bring it up,” Urista said. “After one of my classes, two students came into my office and said, ‘We think the artwork is inappropriate and we want to debate it in class.’”
For Urista’s class, students must be prepared to argue both positions. Then, on the day of the debate, students flip a coin to decide whether they are for or against the topic—in this case whether the art piece should be kept up or removed, and why.
Before the debate, the two students created arguments that supported their own beliefs about why the art piece should be taken down. But they also pushed themselves to consider why it should stay up—even though this was in opposition to their views.
On the day of the debate, the two students flipped a coin and had a spirited debate. By the end, the whole class got out of their seats and applauded—it was one of the only times in Urista’s career that he’d ever seen a response like that to a debate.
“Afterward, the students told me, ‘You know Mark, we aren’t fans of the art work but we do have an issue with censorship,’” he said. “‘If we took it down, it could open the door for other things to be censored, too.’”
The debate made such an impact that Urista and the two students decided to do another one with a larger audience. They recruited two additional students and hosted a well-attended campus-wide debate.
In the end, the students of Linn Benton were able to have a productive dialogue by embracing bridging practices such as perspective taking and giving, and by providing an avenue for students to argue both sides. The conversation led to a new policy for racy art work that warned students they would see something that might feel inappropriate to their culture or beliefs. They formed a Debate Club to tackle similar issues on campus, and administrators at Linn Benton Community College—all the way up to the president—made public statements about the need for understanding and relationships across differences.
Carrie Olinger (Bethel student) and Melvin Giles (co-facilitator of the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance)© Tenden BrekkeTanden Brekke works as the assistant director for community engagement at Bethel University, a private, evangelical Christian university. For more than 20 years, the university has run programs with Frogtown, a neighborhood in St. Paul just a few miles south of the campus.
While Bethel is predominantly a white and Christian institution, the Frogtown neighborhood is composed of people with a diversity of identities, including faith, race, and economics. Frogtown has also been negatively impacted by policies that have further marginalized people, especially communities of color and the poor. At the same time, Brekke said, Frogtown has emerged as a leader in addressing social injustices.
“Initially, there was some white saviorism at play with this engagement,” Brekke said. “It was this idea that ‘we need to contribute to the community because they need our help.’”
One of Brekke’s predecessors acknowledged the importance of combating that one-directional saviorship in favor of listening and coming from a place of humility. Through this process, they established a more mutual relationship, which transformed the community engagement program from “what can we do for them?” to “what can we do for each other?”
Through the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance, students work full-time in the Frogtown community during the summer to learn about urban agriculture, food justice, and environmental racism. This exposes many of them to communities they’ve never interacted with, and it expands their views. Sometimes, there is a conflict between students and community members.
For one student who felt challenged by Black elders, said Brekke, “it was empowering for that student to realize what it means to be white, to follow the leadership of people of color, and to claim their own voice in this process.”
It’s clear that students are taking away a lot from these community engagement projects, but Brekke said the trickier part is ensuring Bethel is also having a positive impact on the Frogtown community.
“We spend a lot of time trying to listen and being honest about what we can and can’t contribute,” Brekke said. “Bridging is also internal work because we have to be willing to ask ourselves what it means to be Christian, and be willing to be changed by others . . . which can feel exciting, challenging, and fearful.”
Before teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Howard taught a big introductory class on American politics at Saint Joseph’s University. It felt like a “normal” academic course for Lia until everything shifted during the 2016 presidential election season. Topics that hadn’t felt emotional before now created a visceral tension in the classroom.
“I’d write a quote from James Madison [and the classroom] would erupt into anger,” she said. “There was so much emotion in the room and it was qualitatively different to teach political science after the 2016 elections.”
That semester changed everything for her. She realized that the civic fabric for the country needed repair, so she transitioned from being a full-time faculty member to a nonprofit that works on constructive dialogue efforts.
Now at the University of Pennsylvania with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program, she’s teaching a class on political empathy and deliberative democracy. In the class, she’s pairing students and creating a space for them to have a dialogue about their diverse experiences of living in this country.
In one assignment, students go on a walking tour in Philadelphia with a peer and immerse themselves in the city. They have conversations about what they’re seeing and hearing, and what it’s bringing up for them.
In another assignment based on the book Our Patchwork Nation, students explore the country’s complex cultural and political landscape by “taking on” the views of people who are different from them. For instance, a student might deeply absorb the mindsets and behaviors of a community that is connected to the military, or those working in agriculture on rural lands.
Howard infuses mindfulness and wellness into the curriculum, and she’s trying to norm the conversations to ensure they’re productive. As she learned during the 2016 elections, teaching a course on politics is full of emotions—and students must develop individual techniques like self-distancing so they can self-regulate when activated by heated topics, and learn to communicate across differences with compassion. These are 21st century skills that students can take into their work and life.
“With the class, the purpose is to get students to see they’re connected deeply to other people,” she said. “They can’t just ‘turn off’ because they don’t agree, they have to try to listen, care, and be connected to each other.”
Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the social and political landscape of college campuses. Universities shifted classes online, debated mask and testing and vaccine policies, and aligned with or defied local and national regulations. Even at the administration, faculty, and staff levels, there was heated debate about what universities should do in response to the pandemic.
Jacqueline Young, a project manager at Howard University, said it has been a tense and difficult time for her campus and many others across the country.
“Some faculty had more power to push back and say, ‘I’m not coming back to teach and I’m going to go online,’” Young said. “While I felt like some staff members didn’t have as much of a voice that we could or should have.”
While everyone was hearing about COVID-19 protocols through initiatives like town halls, Young said, many sessions were done in silos—one call for staff, and another for faculty.
Like most campuses, even before COVID, there’s sometimes this unspoken and unconscious hierarchy that exists between faculty and staff. Even if you come together for a social event like a holiday party, the work that faculty, staff, and administrators do is not always integrated well.
“Being in academia and not being the Ph.D. person can make you feel like an outsider,” Young said.
Still, Young found ways to bridge on Howard’s campus between staff and faculty. She pitched an idea called “What’s Really Happening in the Virtual Classroom?” During the staff-organized session, faculty from across the university spoke about the challenges they were encountering while teaching in the virtual classroom, with the goal of learning from one another, building compassion and sympathy, and swapping best practices.
The program was successful at raising attention to needs across the university, from counseling to new technology. Something that came up from faculty that Young mentioned in particular: the need for more staff.
“It sparked a more public conversation about how the coronavirus was impacting teachers, students, and especially the staff who support them,” she said.
Young wants to see more bridging opportunities that bring together staff and faculty at universities.
“COVID exposed a lot to all of us about how we communicate,” she said. “Bridging should become a norm on campuses everywhere so people come together across their differences, which includes the occupation they hold.”
“I met yesterday with a group of college leaders who I greatly respect to discuss last week’s senseless killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota,” wrote the president of California’s Sierra College in June 2020. He continued:
The intent of the meeting was to determine what we could do, what steps we could take, to address the pain many of our students, staff, and faculty are experiencing. Pain caused by injustice in not only the case of George Floyd but other recent tragic deaths, including Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, among far too many others, that has created continual and compounded trauma for so many.
Later, the college released data demonstrating that Black and Brown students are disproportionately being called in for conduct by campus security. The college was effectively naming their participation in racist systems, and encouraging everyone across the campus to exercise their power to respond and enact change.
Megan D’Errico, an associate dean for Sierra College, has been involved with figuring out what kind of action to take—and she’s found that it starts with utilizing bridging skills like challenging our views and active listening.
As a result of that effort, the college launched campus-wide initiatives, such as shifting its hiring practices and devoting more resources to Black student success. They’re sitting down with Black students to hear their stories, and finding ways to amplify their voices. They are also synthesizing the data.
During a planning session to take an initial look at the stories and data they were gathering, D’Errico led an exercise she learned from the Bridging Differences course to challenge the views of faculty, staff, and administrators.
The exercise helped participants focus on individuality rather than group identity and supported them with challenging their unconscious biases. They became more curious and open before jumping into the work, and D’Errico said it was also a great way to get to know each other as colleagues in a deeper way.
When reviewing data for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, the bridging practice of challenging our views and assumptions is critical. This prevents the solutions from being too generalized, or based on stereotypes or stigma about a certain student population group.
The outcome of the planning sessions was a week of campus programming focused solely on Black student success. Throughout this effort, everyone is being asked: What can you do based on the role or position you have on campus? Whether they’re a part of student services to the faculty, or if they’re students themselves, everyone has a role to play to advance the mission of Black student success, D’Errico said.
These are just five stories of bridging happening in higher ed across the country. For this academic year starting last fall, the Greater Good Science Center has been bringing together more than 50 other leaders like the five mentioned in this story—from other diverse campuses including faith-based institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and private and state universities to community colleges. These stories demonstrate what so many are feeling on campuses everywhere—a complex and sometimes tense culture where bridging is a required act from all, including faculty, administrators, staff, and students.
What’s happening in higher education is a microcosm for society. If we can figure out ways to bridge effectively in these formative spaces, we might discover tools and insights into how heterogeneous groups around the world can work, live, play, and pray together.