By helping students enter the framework of other cultures, schools can let them see how cultures and subcultures evolved differently because of different circumstances and different choices. By coming to see cultures as modes of adaptation and to appreciate the functions of different customs, especially if this is combined with a wide range of personal experience, students may come to accept quite varied ways of life.
Finally, parents, schools, and universities can teach children to recognize in themselves and others the psychological processes that lead to destructive acts. To realize that seeing others as of lesser value or blaming them might represent devaluation and scapegoating is significant progress. Further progress is achieved by learning to catch oneself devaluing others or deflecting self-blame to others and by acquiring the capacity to become an observer not only of others’ but of one’s own psychological processes.
Avenues for change
Social change requires highly committed citizens. Groups of citizens can set for themselves such goals as building playgrounds, renovating neglected neighborhoods, or helping the homeless, as well as cultural or business ventures with members of other groups or nations. They can spread information and ideas. We need a vision of long-term change and specific, small ways in which people can contribute. Most people will do nothing unless they lose the feeling of powerlessness through the understanding that small changes are not only important in themselves but part of an evolutionary process.
Language and ideas
Ideas can be destructive or prepare us for caring and benevolence. Negative realities like dangers to the environment, scarcity of resources, the threat of nuclear winter, and the state of the world economy all suggest our inescapable global interdependence.
Language shapes experience. Those who destroy often use euphemisms. The language of nuclear policy creates illusions: by referring to shields, umbrellas, deterrence, and “defense,” it implies a security that does not exist.21 A language true to reality will motivate people to join in efforts to eliminate the potential of nuclear destruction. Presenting to people the realities of torture and atrocities will motivate them to work against their practice.
Writers, artists, the media, leaders, all citizens
Books, films, and other cultural products sometimes have substantial influence on whole societies. The films Dr. Strangelove and The Day After shaped and mobilized the public spirit. A BBC television report on starvation in Ethiopia resulted in a worldwide effort to help. The novel (and film) Gentlemen’s Agreement brought anti-Semitism to the public awareness in the United States. Artists, writers, reporters, and others who work in the public domain can make powerful contributions to social change. We must engage them and discuss with them the individual and cultural bases of violence and benevolence and their potential to shape public awareness and influence policy.
National leaders have tremendous potential to shape attitudes and lead people to action. John F. Kennedy, in creating the Peace Corps, inspired a generation of Americans. Those committed to positive change should engage politicians and other influential public figures in an exchange of ideas about the origins of antagonism and positive connection.
A vision of the future, ideals that are rooted in the welfare of individual human beings rather than in abstract designs for improving “humanity,” small and intermediate goals along the way, commitment, and the courage to express ideas in words and actions – all are essential to fulfill an agenda for a world of nonaggression, cooperation, caring, and human connection.
a There are exceptions, however. The peace movement in the United States includes few blacks. For black people, concern about nuclear war may be overshadowed by immediate economic and social problems. Until their basic material and psychological needs are met, individuals and groups may be less inclined to concern themselves with the evolution of caring and nonaggression in general, unless they can see in it hope for themselves.
b As I have noted, physical proximity alone does not increase acceptance. For example, foreign students’ evaluation of their host nation may become more negative over time. However, they start out with highly positive evaluations and perhaps unrealistic hopes and expectations. It may also be that evaluations turn more negative if the students experience no crosscutting relations or close contact. American students evaluated the French less positively after a year-long stay. They usually lived in apartments with other Americans. In contrast, American students in Germany maintained more of their initial positive evaluation of Germans. They lived in student dormitories with German students and reported greater ease in establishing contact with both students and nonstudents.4
While contact is important to reduce negative beliefs, not all contact improves group relations. Certain conditions contribute to “positive exposure": equal-status contact between the members of interacting groups; cooperation between them to fulfill shared goals; intimate rather than casual contact; and authorities or the social climate approving of and supporting the intergroup contact.5 Other research shows that information about another group that prepares people for contact can improve the effects of contact. When casual contact (e.g., between Israeli tourists and Egyptians) reinforces the existing stereotypes, preparatory information can reduce the negative effects.6 In addition to information that stresses the positive characteristics of the other group or explains the roots of “negative” characteristics in their cultural history, communication that brings to the fore their shared humanity and personalizes them (perhaps through the “stories” of real individuals) may be of great value.
That contact alone is insufficient to create positive relations but can strengthen devaluation was demonstrated in the real (rather than romanticized) history of the evacuation of children from London in World War II.7 The children removed from the city were mostly poor, innercity children. Their hosts in the countryside were all well-to-do. In spite of their initial desire to be helpful, without being prepared for the experience many reacted with aversion to these verminous children with poor habits of hygiene, cockney accents, and often religions different from their own, some of them Jewish. Given
