Groups must have some trust in each other to adopt superordinate goals. Moreover, the strength of existing group identities and previous successes in achieving joint goals affect the extent to which intergroup cooperation reduces conflict and results in positive ties.3 However, joint goals can be wisely selected, starting with less demanding ones.
Preparation for interaction can increase acceptance of the other group’s values and perspective on life and acceptance of differences in everyday customs and behaviors that, even when they have little practical significance, have great emotional impact. Differences in culture can be a source of irritation, conflict, and mutual devaluation. People have different nonverbal cues or degrees of openness and emotional expressiveness, different rules of interpersonal relations and different work habits, beliefs, and values. Preparatory education in diversity and actual contact with different groups from an early age can make intergroup relations satisfying rather than frustrating.b
Learning by doing and steps along a continuum of benevolence
Starting with common everyday acts and moving on to acts requiring greater sacrifice while producing greater benefits, helping others can lead to genuine concern and a feeling of responsibility for people. To reduce the probability of genocide and war, helping must be inclusive, across group lines, so that the evolving values of caring and connection ultimately include all human beings.
We devalue those we harm and value those we help. As we come to value more highly the people we help and experience the satisfactions inherent in helping, we also come to see ourselves as more caring and helpful. One of our goals must be to create societies in which there is the widest possible participation in doing for others.
We need to greatly expand the opportunities of both children and adults to act on others’ behalf. We could provide children with the opportunity to visit sick children in hospitals (contrary to current hospital policies), to help older people, and to collect and send needed items to people in other countries. Both schools and community organizations could establish such projects and guide children to participate in them.c My experience with a number of relevant experiments suggests that children would willingly do a great deal in others’ behalf, given the proper opportunity, guidance, and some choice, so that their activities fit their inclinations.
Adults must also help others if they are to guide children and must themselves develop more the values of caring and connection. As I noted, many Americans are involved in volunteer activities.9 In England volunteering to donate blood is widely practiced.10 We ought to create wide-ranging opportunities for service to others and promote the spirit that leads people to use them, including cooperative activities in which we receive less than our partners. Cooperation connects people. Research with young children has shown that when they work cooperatively rather than competitively, with joint rewards, they like one another and children outside the group better.11
Business people and engineers can give up some profits to train unskilled youth. Many people could “adopt” teenage mothers (or fathers) and help them learn what infants require for healthy development. The helpers could impart skills and awareness of the infants’ needs and at the same time provide the mothers with desperately needed emotional support. Although concern with societal problems like unemployed youth and teenage parenting has long existed, the motivation to help might increase if people realized that, as they promote humanitarian ideals like greater justice and improved quality of life for many, their actions also contribute to a longterm evolution of caring and nonaggression. This makes such concerns relevant also to peace activists and human rights advocates.
How we help others is crucial. Helping can be divisive if helpers use it, perhaps unconsciously, as a means to elevate themselves over the people they help. Welfare recipients in the United States often feel diminished, powerless.12 We must strive to treat recipients of both government and private help with respect, as full members of the community. Only this way will helpers (and recipients) experience the connection to others that helping can promote.
Creating positive connections between groups
Much of the preceding as well as following discussion applies to relationships between both subgroups of societies and nations. Positive reciprocity, crosscutting relations, superordinate goals, and unilateral and mutual help are all important. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, starting with Freud’s dictum that anatomy is destiny, adds that social structure is destiny as well.13 Anatomy is less destiny than Freud thought; social structure more than we usually recognize. Change in individuals, unless it leads to changes in culture and social structure, will remain unstable and will not spread. Changes in individuals and societal institutions must be followed by changes in international structures.
Uri Bronfenbrenner, a U.S. psychologist who has studied the socialization of children in the Soviet Union, noted the mutual devaluation in the United States and the Soviet Union. The two societies’ attitudes toward each other were mirror images. While he was in the Soviet Union, his views of the country and its people were positive. A few weeks after coming home and after talking to people in the United States, he began to doubt his own experience.14 For change to persist and spread, groups need a minimum mass- of people sharing an attitude, of the culture expressing it, and of the institutions embodying it.
A first step is expanding contact between nations. Without real human contact, tourism has limited value. Tourists are likely to interpret the behavior of foreigners according to stereotypes, and strong devaluative stereotypes tend to be self-fulfilling. Real contact is important for the beginnings of positive connection.
Crosscutting relations that bring people from different groups to work and play together are also essential. Educational, cultural, and scientific exchanges between nations can provide such contact. Joint projects are a further step. Joint manufacturing and joint work in technology and science create positive ties and increase the cost of aggression. The world is already moving in this direction. The United
