Some insights speak to the ways we can connect with people with disagree with, and how this process isn’t as painful as we imagine. Others look at the effects parents have on children, teachers have on students, and plant and animal life have on all of us. One insight is simply about an easy way you can reconnect with someone, today. 

The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they inspire you to reach out to others and model the kind of goodness you hope to see in the world.

1. We’re missing out on important happiness insights by overlooking Indigenous cultures

Does having more money make you happier? Research findings on this question have been mixed, with some studies suggesting it doesn’t and others suggesting it does—and the more money, the better.

But a 2024 study by Eric Galbraith of McGill University and his colleagues, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a new perspective on this debate. And their research—based on smaller, rural, often Indigenous communities—is also a reminder of the people who are often left out of world happiness surveys and other psychological research, and what we can learn from them about well-being.

In the study, Galbraith and his colleagues surveyed almost 3,000 people in 19 small communities (mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America) about their life satisfaction, then compared their answers to their level of wealth. Since most didn’t live in a cash-based economy, their income was calculated based on the value of their assets.

Galbraith and his team found that people from these communities were very satisfied with their lives—6.8 on a scale up to 10—even though most of them lived on less than the equivalent of $1,000 per year. To put that in perspective, people in the 2022 Gallup Poll (used to create the 2022 World Happiness Report) weren’t generally that happy until they made at least $25,000 a year.

The researchers also found that living in a particular village mattered for life satisfaction, and it had nothing to do with the wealth of that village. This means other, non-economic factors likely contributed to the villagers’ happiness—like, perhaps, living in a more interdependent community, being closer to nature, or experiencing lower inequality.

Whatever the reason, these findings add more evidence to the debate about the role of money in life satisfaction—and hint at other lessons happiness researchers (and all of us) could learn if psychological research were more inclusive.


“Small-scale societies living in close contact with nature, on the fringes of globalized mainstream society, offer distinctly valuable perspectives [on the link between wealth and satisfaction],” the researchers write.

2. Old friends are an untapped source of connection and well-being

Given the pain of loneliness and the meaning we derive from relationships, you would think we’d be doing all we can to stay connected to others in life. But a 2024 paper reveals a big missed opportunity for connection: old friends.

How big is that missed opportunity? Across six studies with over 2,500 participants from the U.S., U.K., and Canada, Lara B. Aknin and Gillian M. Sandstrom found that fewer than one-third of people sent a message to an old friend when given time to do so—even though they said they would be happy to reconnect and thought their friend would appreciate it, too.

Why? According to surveys, the biggest barriers are worries that our friends won’t want to hear from us or that it would be awkward. These barriers are hard to overcome. Aknin and Sandstrom tried and failed to ease people’s hesitations by reminding them how much they’d appreciate such a note themselves, encouraging them not to listen to their second thoughts, and framing the message as an act of kindness. It turns out that old friends feel like strangers to us, potentially activating all our misgivings about talking to someone we don’t know.

“People are generally interested in connecting, but prefer that the other person initiate,” the researchers explain. At the same time, their research suggests, we overestimate how willing other people are to be the ones to initiate, putting us in a bind.

However, one tactic did work. If people started by sending a few messages to current friends and acquaintances—basically, practicing the act of reaching out—they were more likely to contact an old friend.

This paper adds to research suggesting that our assumptions get in the way of our connections in life. For example, we overestimate the discomfort of expressing gratitude, and we underestimate how much much compliments and small kindnesses mean to other people and how willing they are to help us.

If you find it strangely hard to get in touch with someone after time has passed, you’re certainly not alone. But old friends might just be the low-hanging fruit of more connection in life—and they’re only a short “hello” away. 

3. A simple 20-second practice can have lasting benefits for stress and mental health

Many of us lead busy, stressful lives that put us at risk for burnout. Though different well-being practices could help—like mindfulness meditation or gratitude journaling, for example—we may think we don’t have time for them.

But what if you could feel significantly better from just 20 seconds of a simple practice? Findings from a new study published in Behavior Research and Therapy suggest you can. Just 20 seconds of self-compassionate touch daily can calm your nerves and improve your mental health.

In this study, led by Eli Susman (a former Greater Good Science Center research fellow) and his colleagues, 135 young adults were randomly assigned to practice either self-compassionate touch or a dexterity exercise 20 seconds a day for a month. Self-compassionate touch involved placing a hand over your heart and the opposite hand over your belly—though people were told they could try other self-soothing touch. The dexterity exercise involved touching various fingers to your thumb in a particular pattern. Participants were also encouraged to pick a “cue” to help support their practice—something they did every day that might prompt them to do it.

Before and after they began practicing, participants filled out questionnaires measuring their self-compassion, positive feelings, anxiety and depression symptoms, and stress. The researchers also measured how much people adhered to their practice over time.

When analyzing the results, they found that among people who practiced at least 28 days of the month, those in the self-compassionate touch group had greater self-compassion, and they experienced less stress, anxiety, and depression, in comparison to the tapping group.

As the researchers concluded, “Daily micropractices have the potential for augmenting single-session interventions and for offering help when more time-intensive approaches may be less accessible.” In other words, you don’t need an hour a day to make a difference in your well-being. Even 20 seconds of self-compassionate touch—and perhaps other brief practices, as well—may do the trick.

4. We feel better emotionally when we’re in biodiverse places—not just basic “green spaces”

Spending time in “green spaces” or natural settings increases our well-being and may be especially important for urban dwellers. For example, people feel less anxious, stressed, and depressed walking in a forest versus a cityscape, and people who live near “green spaces” within a city have better mental health.

But what elements of “green space” promote well-being the most? A new study published this year in Scientific Reports suggests one possible answer: biodiversity.

In the study, led by researcher Ryan Hammoud of King’s College, London, almost 2,000 people around the world used the Urban Mind App to record their physical surroundings and assess their well-being in real time over two weeks. Three times a day, they reported on where they were and if they could see any trees or plants, or see or hear any birds or water—indicating how diverse the environment was. They also reported how confident, relaxed, happy, connected to others, and energetic—and how stressed, down, anxious, lonely, and tired—they felt in that moment.

After analyzing the data, researchers found that people had greater mental well-being in spaces where they could see or hear natural elements, and this effect lasted up to eight hours. This was true regardless of a person’s age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, or education, pointing to the everyday benefits of being exposed to nature, even briefly.

But people who experienced more biodiversity in natural environments had even greater well-being, above and beyond the effects of being in nature alone. In fact, for every additional natural element in someone’s environment, like a duck or a stream, researchers found an average 0.91-point increase in mental health scores (on a scale up to 50 points).

This suggests that ecological diversity within urban spaces is important for people living there. City planners should take note if they want to promote better mental health, say Hammoud and his team:

“[Our] study highlights the importance of protecting and promoting natural diversity in our cities,” they write. “This means moving away from monocultural pockets and parks of mown grass . . . towards polycultural spaces which mimic the biodiversity of natural ecosystems.”

5. Learning to be more forgiving improves your mental health, no matter where you live

Forgiveness can be a difficult concept to get behind. Holding a grudge sometimes feels easier or more empowering—like a form of revenge, or even vindication. But studies consistently report that grudge holding takes a toll on well-being, while forgiveness builds resilience, reduces stress and ill will, and helps us move on constructively.

Two large studies in 2024 contribute to current research by finding that forgiveness has mental health benefits for people across the globe, and can be taught through community programs as well as individual practices.

The first study recruited almost 4,600 people living in places where there had been civil conflict or unrest in the recent past: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ukraine, Colombia, and South Africa. Study participants were given a forgiveness training workbook on the REACH framework developed by Everett Worthington. Based on surveys before and after, the researchers found that practicing forgiveness reduced people’s unforgiveness, as well as their symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The second study found that forgiveness practices can also be effective when deployed at the community level. Researchers tested a community-wide forgiveness campaign at the Universidad de Sinú, a private, nonreligious university in Monteria, Colombia. Professors incorporated forgiveness-related content into their course materials, and the entire campus community was invited to engage in voluntary forgiveness-promoting activities for four weeks. The campaign included lectures, online discussions, videos, webinars, and physical installations, like a “forgiveness tree.” 

Survey responses from nearly 2,900 students from before and after the campaign showed that they were more willing to forgive family, friends, roommates, and teachers afterward. Students also reported a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of forgiveness, and, again, decreased symptoms of depression and anxiety.

While these are not the first findings that illustrate the advantages of forgiving over holding on to animosity, they suggest that learning to forgive can help people from all different backgrounds. Keeping in mind that forgiveness does not imply that you endorse someone’s harmful behavior or want to reconcile with them, forgiving past harms is a learnable way to buffer against the risk of feeling depressed and anxious—wherever you live in the world.

6. Empathy is passed down across at least three generations

Parents play such a meaningful role in their children’s well-being and the people their children become. In particular, a 25-year study published in Child Development this year showed how empathy can be passed down through three generations: from parent to child to that child’s future children.

First, researcher Jessica Stern and her colleagues measured mothers’ empathy for their 13 year olds during a conversation. Next, when the teens were 13 to 19 years old, they measured teens’ empathy for their closest friends during another conversation. Later, the researchers followed the teens into parenthood up until their own children were three to eight years old. At that point, they surveyed the second generation’s empathy for their children, asking about how they provided supportive responses when their children were distressed. Finally, the second-generation parents completed questionnaires about their own young children’s empathy.

The results? Teens who received greater empathy from their moms tended to show greater empathy to their close friends. In turn, those teens went on to have greater empathy for their children after becoming parents—and, in turn, their children tended to have greater empathy for others.

These findings suggest that empathy is “paid forward” across relationships and over time. Teens whose moms are sensitive, emotionally engaged, and supportive learn how to be the same for their close friends. What’s more, the researchers say, caring for a close friend as a teenager may act as a “training ground” to help strengthen teens’ empathy muscle into adulthood when they become parents. And from there, the cycle continues.

This study focused on mothers, but another 2024 study reminds us that fathers matter, too—in particular, that fathers’ sensitivity to their children’s needs seems just as important to children developing a healthy attachment style as their mothers’ sensitivity.

Empathy is key to cultivating and sustaining social connection across the lifespan. While it might be more common to hear about trauma passed down through generations, this research sheds light on the opposite phenomenon, where positive qualities like empathy can pass from parent to child to grandchildren—and likely beyond.

7. Humble teachers help students learn and feel accepted

“Classrooms are meant to promote learning, but often students feel reluctant to reveal what they do not understand in school, to the detriment of learning,” write Tenelle Porter, Mark R. Leary, and Andrei Cimpian in a 2024 paper. This is especially true for girls, who tend to be more reluctant than boys to show their confusion and ask questions at school.

How do we help all students admit what they don’t know—in other words, show “intellectual humility”—so they can learn better? The paper by Porter and her colleagues found that one powerful way to do that is for teachers to model intellectual humility themselves.

In a study at two high schools in the Midwestern United States, the researchers surveyed around 300 students about four of their classes. Specifically, they wanted to know if the students thought their teachers were intellectually humble: owned up to their mistakes, acknowledged they had more to learn, and were open to different ways of doing things.

The results suggested that when students saw a teacher as more intellectually humble, they were more comfortable expressing intellectual humility in that class themselves, felt more accepted by the teacher, and were more interested in the class overall. Not only that, the more humble they thought their teacher was, the more their grades improved from the first to the second semester.

Across four other studies, surveying both high school and college students about hypothetical teachers, the sense of acceptance students felt from humble teachers seemed to be key in inspiring their own humility.

Importantly, these benefits were stronger when teachers were showing rather than telling—modeling humble behavior rather than just reminding students to engage in it.

Doubt, confusion, questions, and mistakes are all an important part of the learning process, and anything that helps students tolerate them better is valuable. This study also serves as a reminder that who teachers are, and how they act around their students, matters a great deal—sometimes even more than the explicit lessons they teach.

8. Exposure to inaccuracies can “inoculate” kids against future misinformation

In our era of misinformation, what’s the best way to prevent children from picking up inaccurate information online? Is it smart to try to limit kids’ access to spaces where they could read fake news and other potentially misleading information?

A new paper, published this fall in Nature Human Behaviour, suggests it may be better to help children learn to think critically about the information they see.

Across two studies, researchers asked children ages four to seven to listen to a variety of animal facts, which were paired with pictures (to allow kids to determine whether the fact was true). Some of the children heard only statements that were true, but the other half heard incorrect information mixed in with real facts—such as “Zebras have red and green stripes.”

Next, children heard a sentence describing an alien species called a “zorpie.” They were told that every zorpie has three eyes and were given 20 pictures of zorpies they could click on to lift their glasses and reveal their eyes.

Children who had heard some incorrect facts earlier were also more skeptical of this new fact about the aliens—they clicked on more pictures to essentially fact-check the statement they heard.

The more inaccuracies they had heard in the original set of animal facts, the more extensively children tended to engage in fact-checking the new information about aliens. There was some (but not conclusive) evidence that children’s age made a difference—older children were especially likely to do more fact-checking if they had previously seen more incorrect information.

This study builds on prior work aiming to help teens and young adults detect misinformation, suggesting that we could start teaching this skill as early as elementary school. The researchers point out that learning to identify incorrect information may be more productive than stopping children from having any exposure to incorrect information, which would be difficult or impossible anyway. They write that efforts to prevent children from believing misinformation “should focus on helping children develop a broad skill set for evaluating information, rather than attempting to control their information diets.”

9. Having a conversation with someone we disagree with isn’t as awful as we think

We need to communicate with each other if we are to solve society’s pressing problems. But 2024 research suggests that we imagine disagreement to be more unpleasant than it actually is—which might contribute to us feeling confrontational and preferring to stay in silos with like-minded peers.

Three studies led by Kristina Wald found that people underestimate how positive conversations that include disagreement can be. She and her team asked people to imagine a conversation with a stranger who disagreed with them on a controversial topic like gun control or climate change, and then had a different group of people actually engage in those kinds of conversations.

The researchers found that people predict conversations with a stranger will be far less pleasant when they disagree rather than agree—but they actually end up enjoying their conversations quite a bit, and more than anticipated, whether they agree or not. People also like, feel liked by, and feel more connected with conversation partners than expected, regardless of agreement.

Why do we overestimate how unpleasant disagreements are? Another 2024 study led by Erica Bailey suggests that the internet may be to blame.

When her team asked people to recall a recent online debate, roughly half referred to a contentious one and characterized it as negative. But when university students were describing their own debate experiences in general in the past year, they primarily remembered in-person conversations with family and friends. They characterized these interactions in more emotionally nuanced ways, including feeling positive afterward. Surveys also found that we believe other people have more conflict in their lives than we do—suggesting that disagreement is also less rampant than we think.

“Three forces—the salience of online debates, the amplification of negative content online, and a negativity bias in human information processing—have together warped perceptions of how debate actually occurs among everyday Americans,” the researchers write.

In sum, these two papers provide important insight into “false polarization,” the widespread perception that society is gripped by contentious ideological conflict. If we have the courage to get past our assumptions, we might find that engaging in these dialogues is more constructive and enjoyable than avoiding them—and society may benefit.

10. There are research-tested ways to preserve democracy

During this presidential election year, U.S. political divisions were bitter and deep. But a mega-study published in October by the journal Science points to a way forward.

The study’s two primary authors—sociologists Jan G. Voelkel of Cornell University and Robb Willer of Stanford University—collected more than 250 proposed solutions “designed to decrease American partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes” from 400-plus scholars and activists.

A panel of experts narrowed the field to the 25 most promising contenders, spanning a wide range: Some involve hearing the message that all voters share common economic interests or common moral values. Others involve watching a video of two people bonding despite their political differences, or an animation about how democracy allows politically diverse people to work together. In one activity, people play a trivia game that encourages bipartisan teams to cooperate.

The researchers then engaged more than 32,000 participants to test how these activities and messages could change attitudes in three important areas: partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices like lying or vote suppression, and support for political violence. Of the 25 solutions, 23 reduced partisan animosity. But only six reduced support for undemocratic practices, and only five cut support for partisan violence.

The one that stood out as most effective was developed by researchers at UC Berkeley and MIT. Theirs used a simple question-and-answer format, with text and images only. They asked participants to what extent most people on the other side of the divide support undemocratic actions. Many people believed that their opponents were strongly hostile to democracy. But then they were given recent public opinion data that showed opponents’ support for democratic values and practices actually was much higher.

That one turned out to be the top-ranked solution for reducing anti-democratic attitudes. It ranked third in reducing support for political violence, and seventh in easing attitudes of partisan animosity. It also was among the most effective in reducing support for undemocratic candidates.

“People should be very happy to hear that voters on all sides really do support democracy,” says UC Berkeley political scientist Gabriel Lenz. “They think it’s important. And that’s really reassuring.”

Our favorite parenting books of 2024 provide parents and people who support parents with scientific insights and guidance on how to cultivate children’s thriving across early childhood through adolescence. They range in focus from how to view adolescence as a period of promise, to how to nurture resilience in Black kids, to how to counteract harmful pressure on boys. Our selected books also cover important parenting topics like understanding children’s temperament, motivating young people, and fostering a secure attachment—the loving parent-child bond. All these books underscore the ways children’s individual well-being is intertwined with community well-being. 

The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens, by Ellen Galinsky

How is it that adolescence continues to have a bad rap despite decades of developmental science telling us otherwise? The Breakthrough Years author Ellen Galinsky, president and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute, included over a thousand adolescents (nine to 19 years old) and their parents in her research for the book, which began in 2015. One of the questions she asked these young people was: “What would you like to tell the adults of America about people your age?”—and they had five main answers.

• Understand adolescent development rather than viewing it in a negative light. Research suggests that parents who use positive words to describe the teen brain have teens who tend to have greater well-being.
• Listen and talk with them, not at them. She provides practical tips for parents, like listening more than talking and taking their perspective—a “when I was a child” rather than a “now that I’m an adult” mindset.
• Don’t stereotype them. Age discrimination and focusing on what is statistically “normal” rather than the variations that are possible among individual kids is harmful for adolescent development.
• Know that adolescents are trying to understand themselves and their needs. Important needs in adolescence are a sense of belonging, support, autonomy, respect, challenge, competence, identity, self-exploration, purpose, and a way to contribute.
• Know that they are drawn to learning. For example, young people are learning about goal-setting, perspective taking, communicating, collaborating, problem solving, and taking on challenges.

“The Breakthrough Years is not a typical book about adolescents because it’s not a bad-news book, but it’s not a good-news book, either,” writes Galinsky. “Because I am a parent and grandparent . . . I’ve written it as a real-news book—with news you can use.”

The Breakthrough Years is like a mic drop that provides a thoroughly researched argument for a rebrand of this amazing time in the lifespan. It sheds light on adolescent experiences that transform the doom-and-gloom “Just wait until…” warning that parents hear into a promise for something imminently wondrous.

Raising Resilient Black Kids: A Parent’s Guide to Helping Children Cope with Racial Stress, Manage Emotions, and Thrive, by Erlanger A. Turner

Raising Resilient Black Kids is a workbook that guides parents to explore how best to answer questions like “When should I talk with my child about race?,” What information should I bring up?,” and “How can I help my child cope when they see racism?” Written by Erlanger Turner, a psychologist, researcher, and founder of Therapy for Black Kids, it begins with research on the impact of racism on children’s well-being. Turner explains that racial stress is systematically embedded and pervasive in the everyday lives of Black children and teens, from racial discrimination in schools to racialized community violence and police brutality. He describes multiple ways racial stress can affect kids: emotionally, behaviorally, cognitively, and socially.

Raising Resilient Black Kids highlights the importance of parents tending to their own well-being because, of course, racism can affect their mental health, too. Turner provides coping strategies for parents based on cognitive-behavioral therapy, like becoming aware of your triggers, observing your thought patterns, noticing your emotions, and trying out strategies in advance to cope with racial stress, such as deep breathing.

Turner explains three ways to increase Black children’s resilience. First, he provides guidance to parents on racial socialization, which involves families communicating about race, interacting with people from different races to prepare kids for bias and discrimination, and instilling pride in their racial identity and culture. Next, he describes how parents can nurture children’s activism to foster their sense of agency and empowerment. Finally, he shares mindfulness and “soulfulness” strategies to nurture children’s resilience to racial discrimination, like reading spiritual texts, praying, hiking, making art, or listening to uplifting music.

Raising Resilient Black Kids integrates opportunities for parents to reflect on key insights with thought-provoking journal prompts, case studies of real-life parenting scenarios, “Ask Dr. Earl” answers to common parent questions, and easy-to-follow tools and resources. “This book will improve your understanding of the psychology of racism and your ability to help your child navigate racism to reduce difficulties that may shape their social and emotional development,” explains Turner.

Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture , by Niobe Way

If you look at many statistics, men are suffering—especially from loneliness and alienation. As a group, they have fewer friends and sources of intimacy than ever before, and their health and happiness are declining.

Why is this? According to developmental psychologist Niobe Way, the problem lies in how we raise boys in American culture. The expectations we put on them to be stoic and self-reliant are thwarting them from growing into happy, healthy, socially connected men.

Way has been interviewing and studying boys and young men for decades, following their relationship trajectories and well-being over time. In an earlier book, Deep Secrets, she reviewed her research showing that boys express a need for close same-sex confidants and intimate relationships, just as girls do. Yet those friendships often flounder as boys grow older, leading to a crisis of connection.

In Rebels With a Cause, Way examines how society’s beliefs help create this crisis. She uses the term “boy” culture to describe our culturally based, warped sense of what it means to be a “man,” and how we directly and indirectly place more value on “masculine” qualities than “feminine” qualities—e.g., thinking over feeling, stoicism over vulnerability, competition over cooperation.

By giving boys the message that “real men” shouldn’t feel, cooperate, or be vulnerable, we deny them their full humanity, argues Way, making it harder for them to form the healthy, caring relationships they need to be happy.

“If we raise them to go against their nature by not valuing what they want and need, they will struggle . . . and the consequences will likely be dire not only for them but for everyone else as well,” she writes.

Way makes an impassioned plea for us to stop putting these pressures on boys. By listening to the boys themselves, as she has done, we can help them—and us—enjoy fuller lives.

Parenting With Temperament in Mind: Navigating the Challenges and Celebrating Your Child’s Strengths, by Liliana Lengua and Maria Gartstein

Each child enters the world with their own innate temperament, which includes characteristics like fearfulness, impulsivity, or being easily frustrated. The same parenting approach might yield very different responses from two children in the same family with different temperaments. Liliana Lengua and Maria Gartstein, the clinical psychologist and parent duo behind Parenting With Temperament in Mind, dive deep into the science of temperament to help parents identify and understand their child’s own temperament characteristics and the behaviors associated with them.

Their book illuminates the brain and body systems underlying temperament and helps parents see that children with different temperament characteristics will not only respond differently to the same situation; they will actually experience it differently. From this strong scientific foundation, Lengua and Gartstein lay out four principles of parenting—be present, be warm, be balanced, and be consistent—and how they can be tailored for different temperament characteristics, from fearlessness to inflexibility.

The book illustrates that one size doesn’t fit all. With a fearless child, having a close relationship with a parent who is warm and responsive while setting consistent limits can help protect them from risky choices. An inflexible child, however, might benefit from a parent balancing validation and structure to slowly and gently encourage deviations. Parenting With Temperament in Mind provides readers with clear practices and tools to support them in using these principles, from breathing tools to help them regulate and be present to sample plans and scripts to offer consistent behavioral management. 

The book flows beautifully between explaining the latest science, providing wisdom and anecdotes from Lengua’s and Gartstein’s own parenting experience, and offering practical tips and practices to parents. These resources will help parents with children with challenging temperament characteristics feel both seen and supported.

Lengua and Gartstein leave the reader with a note of encouragement: “Children with temperament characteristics that increase their risk for developing problems can be supported in ways that bring out the best of their qualities and in ways that build their social and emotional competence as well as their joy and well-being.”  

10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation―And Making Your Own Life Easier, by David Yeager

In 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, developmental scientist and author David Yeager explains that our commonly held notions of adolescence and puberty are wrong.

The common view is that young people need wiser adults to tell them what and how to think because they don’t realize the consequences of their impulsive and risky behaviors. But that interpretation is mistaken. Instead, we need to understand their motivations—in particular, how puberty primes young people to gain social status and respect, because evolutionarily it was necessary for survival. Only then can we support them to realize their full potential. “They want the same dignity and respect that we have as adults—and what’s irrational about that?” asks Yeager.

Adolescents find themselves in a dilemma: trying to fulfill their intrinsic need for status in a society that often diminishes them. The solution? Yeager introduces the “mentor mindset” for parents, teachers, and coaches. This kind of mentorship expects adolescents to strive toward achievable high standards while providing strong support, which offers a genuine path to earning status and respect. Yeager explains that earned prestige is highly motivating, and adolescents naturally work toward sustaining it.

Yeager highlights important keys for the mentor mindset. Mentors are transparent in consistently and clearly communicating their beliefs in adolescents meeting high standards with the right resources. They ask authentic questions, which nurtures understanding and collaboration. They promote a nuanced view of stress—it can be a positive source of energy, challenge, and growth, or it can be threatening and debilitating. They nurture purpose by linking what young people are currently doing to something bigger, which is also personally motivating and meaningful. Finally, mentors acknowledge the importance of belonging and help adolescents find ways to foster it.

Yeager combines research with fascinating stories of the impact of mentor mindsets on young people. He provides scenarios for adults to reflect upon and offers recommendations for how they can put key insights into practice. “All of us—every teacher, parent, manager, or anyone else who interacts with a young person—can become the kind of people we truly aspire to be when our mentoring, both official and unofficial, improves the lives of young people long after they leave our care,” writes Yeager.

Raising Securely Attached Kids: Using Connection-Focused Parenting to Create Confidence, Empathy, and Resilience, by Eli Harwood

It’s estimated that 50% of people had a secure attachment with their parents as children. In Raising Securely Attached Kids, therapist and mom of three Eli Harwood offers hope. “The good news is that no matter what kind of attachment experience we grew up with, whether it was secure, avoidant, resistant, or disorganized, there is solid data that we can put in the work to learn how to be a safe haven and secure base for our children,” she writes. 

This accessible book lays out the latest research on attachment theory, helping parents understand attachment patterns—how a securely attached child is able to “reach and receive” when they are upset, while a child with disorganized attachment might “shut off or blow up.” Harwood illustrates what a secure attachment relationship looks like at each developmental stage, from holding our infants close to being a secure base for our teens.

With a vulnerable and compassionate tone, she lays out how connection is the foundation for parenting and how meeting children’s need for connection can encourage cooperation. For example, “calm problem solving and compassion” are tools that can help us foster cooperation, whether it’s avoiding battles when it’s time to brush teeth to dealing with teen individuation. Ultimately, this helps children grow up to be confident, empathic, and resilient.
 
Harwood extends parents grace, acknowledging the realities of real-world parenting and offering tools to heal generational attachment patterns. The book weaves clear research summaries, stories from her own parenting experience, practical tips and developmentally appropriate scripts, and wisdom from parents and parenting practitioners together into an approachable and loving resource for parents.

She ends the book with a touching set of wishes for parents’ relationship with their children, which begins, “May your children know that your arms are a safe haven for their tender needs and distressing moments.”

Most looked eager to share or hear the opinions of their peers, though of course they also had other topics on their minds. From my vantage point, I saw no outward signs of triumph or despair. The sun had risen and it was another day at school.

I teach at Pacific Ridge (PRS), an independent school in North San Diego County. Last summer, members of the administration presented a plan for how we would greet the coming U.S. elections. This was part of a larger theme for the school year, which Bob Ogle, our head of school, called “Challenge and Care.”

Students, families, faculty, and staff at PRS are politically diverse. So our purpose was to promote students’ civic engagement while attending to the needs and experiences of everyone in our community. Instead of broadcasting our own partisan opinions, faculty and staff would encourage students to listen to competing views and come to their own conclusions.

By emphasizing respect for differences and curiosity over self-righteousness, the culture at PRS fosters what researchers call intellectual humility. Ideally, this means that students are “more willing to learn about opposing perspectives and are better able to engage in conversations about controversial topics.” As Darcia Narvaez and other developmental psychologists have noted, this degree of flexibility and openness to others’ perspectives also contributes to moral imagination and mature moral functioning.

This effort to stay neutral about politics felt new to me, as someone who had previously taught at a progressive middle school in San Francisco. But over the first few months of the school year, I saw its wisdom more clearly. Especially now that the election is over, I’ve come to appreciate the challenge to care for students in this particular way.

Encouraging participation

PRS is a Harkness school, meaning that most classrooms are defined by an oval table where students and teachers sit together seminar style. The expectation is that everyone is a participant in the discussions that emerge, and students quickly learn that this requires both stepping up and sharing the air. The balancing process of Harkness pedagogy takes patience for all of us. Yet the regular practice space builds students’ confidence while holding them to a high bar.

Before each formal Harkness discussion, I typically ask students to set goals for themselves, then we reflect afterward on how we did. There are opportunities to give other students a shout-out to celebrate their unique contributions, and together we settle on an area of improvement for the group as a whole next time. The idea is to make these debriefs as nonjudgmental as possible so that everyone feels safe and able to keep making progress.

In their four-part Integrative Ethical Education Model, Narvaez and Tonia Bock emphasize that the first step to supporting students’ moral character development is “establishing a caring connection” with each student, which “allows mutual influence for mutual benefit.” This can happen in many ways. But community practices like Harkness discussions integrate both depth and levity, so that students know they are challenged and cared for.

In my eighth-grade English class this fall, we also took on a collaborative pen pal project with students and teachers at St. George’s College in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Part of our purpose was to investigate the role of bias, censorship, and propaganda in news media and the literary texts we read (ours was Fahrenheit 451). Simultaneously, the project was an opportunity to dialogue across differences with curiosity and respect.

Using Google Docs, students shared a total of four letters with their pen pals detailing their own media uses and what they observed about politics in their home countries. It was fascinating for students at PRS to learn how their Argentinian peers saw their political system as distinct from the U.S. And they wrote their final letters the day after the November 5 election.

After the election

That first morning after we finally knew the result of the presidential election, I started class with a journal prompt. My students entered the room quietly; whatever they were feeling, it seemed that most expected a normal day of class.

Continuing safe and familiar routines is one way to regulate intense emotions, along with subtler hues of confusion when the wider world feels disrupted. But I wanted to mark the historic moment and show them that we could begin to pause and reflect as a community—that it was worth doing so today. So, in any order that felt right, I asked them to write about these questions:

• What do you know so far about the election results?
• How do you feel?
• What do you want to understand better?
• What do you want to ask or tell your future self four years from now?

My goal was to give students space to reflect and to create a time capsule of sorts. I wanted to challenge and to care for them. And, almost immediately, they started writing. I hoped the open-ended questions would slow down their thinking and prompt deeper curiosity.

Listening to the sound of their keyboards, I felt my own strong emotions and intention to stay grounded, to be resilient for them and for myself. It wasn’t easy on little sleep and amid the jarring sense that everything had changed. But the morning sunlight shone brightly through the windows of my classroom, and the students kept writing. I felt strangely anchored by their ability to carry on. I hope my presence also signaled to them that we were in this together, whatever the election means and whatever the future holds.

After seven minutes or so, I let the students know we would have some time for a brief Harkness discussion. I reminded them of our school policy that teachers would not share how we voted, but they could share anything they wrote. My challenge, and our shared purpose, was to create space for respectful dialogue where they could learn from each other, and where we all might understand more clearly what had just happened.

The discussion started slowly when one brave student spoke of the fear they felt about the future. Others voiced more academic questions about the margins in particular battleground states, and together we worked to interpret the electoral map. No one said directly who their family had voted for. And there were no arguments or instances of name calling.

For the most part, I sat quietly and let students talk to each other. Their conversation was respectful, curious, and open-hearted. They also seemed careful not to veer into statements that might hurt someone else who had a seat at the table.

In a post-election reflection, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein emphasized the choice between contempt and curiosity. Both are possible responses when the shock of difference presents itself. And right now, many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are tempted to choose contempt.

We might ask ourselves what future we help to create when we choose contempt. What becomes possible if we choose curiosity instead?

The sun will keep rising. The students will keep coming to school. The question is: How will we meet them, and what can that change?

Educating students to become good people who contribute to their communities and the world is complex—and our favorite books of 2024 reflect that. If you are imagining a better future—one that keeps at the forefront sustainability, equity, inclusivity, or citizenship oriented toward the common good—these are books for you. There are books for educators who have a poet’s soul, or agree with Shakespeare that “all the world’s a stage,” and one for educators who look to the wisdom of Indigenous peoples for guidance on the way forward. We’ve also included a book for young people, to help them cultivate the inner skills needed to build a better world.

We hope you will find on this list something that will support, perhaps challenge, but always inspire you in the new year.

Equity Now: Justice, Repair, and Belonging in Schools, by Tyrone C. Howard

“In almost three-quarters of a century since the Brown decision was rendered, the dreams, hopes, and wishes of a country built on freedom, justice, and equal opportunity have been deferred for many and outright denied for others,” writes Tyrone C. Howard in his new book, Equity Now: Justice, Repair, and Belonging in Schools.

In a nation that promises fairness, justice, and happiness for all, why is it that so many children have been forgotten and denied the opportunity for a first-class education?

To answer that question, Howard emphasizes the historical issues that led us here and how the stakeholders involved in educating students can build a more equitable school system using different resources, strategies, and practices. In the process, he delineates the difference between equality and equity, while emphasizing the impact and importance of both. He also contextualizes our current educational system through the framework of justice, recognizing and repairing past harms, and belonging.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the question of “what does equity look like in action?,” Howard makes it clear that the strategies discussed in this book can be applied to every district and school in their own complex ecosystems.

While this book is intended for school leaders and practitioners, it remains relevant for any school personnel who are determined to achieve educational equity. —Emily Brower

Imagination: A Manifesto, by Ruha Benjamin

Don’t let the title fool you. Imagination: A Manifesto isn’t quietly inspirational. It packs a punch.

With expertise in innovation, tech, and education, sociologist Ruha Benjamin draws on interdisciplinary research and an array of scholarly voices to help us envision “new systems of education that cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity.” From personal stories to international examples of artistic and technological ingenuity, she challenges us to think about future scenarios where everyone can thrive, interdependently.

To set the stage, however, she exposes what she terms the “dominant imagination” (i.e., the status quo in the United States), and she doesn’t shy away from frank discussions of racism, classism, stereotypes, and entrenched social and economic hierarchies within schools and beyond.

Yet Benjamin’s purpose is “to seed our imaginations,” and she urges us to take Toni Morrison’s words to heart: “Dream a little before you think.” In fact, you will find an array of project-based activities and prompts for facilitating learning experiences with your colleagues or students. One group activity involves codesigning a collaborative game that primes groups to dream about alternative futures, while a sample discussion prompt reads: “There’s plenty of hype abut artificial intelligence. What are the possibilities and dangers of these promises?”

I finished this book sobered by its hard truths yet emboldened to critically and collaboratively question the role of education in society—with a sense of curiosity and play. —Amy L. Eva

Magnificent Minds: The New Whole-Child Approach to Autism, by Suzanne Goh

We at Greater Good know that if you are reading this, you are likely committed to creating inclusive classrooms and schools. But what does that look like in practice? As educators, how can we make sure that the autistic children we teach are not known for their challenges and deficits, but for their strengths and abilities, and are able to bring their whole, human selves into the classroom?

In Magnificent Minds, Suzanne Goh, M.D., first asks caregivers to shift to a more holistic understanding of autism—to truly understand the ways in which many systems (including neurobiology, physiology, emotions, behavior, and family units) come together to make up the autistic experience. Goh then provides specific strategies to assess the autistic child’s current and potential needs and abilities—and help caregivers think through the best ways to support autistic children based on their own, unique ways of being.

Although this book is primarily written for parents, the framework is one that educators can—and should—use in their schools and classrooms. As Goh says, “The information [here] is for anyone who wants to create more opportunities for autistic people to experience greater health, well-being, and joy.” It is imperative that we let go of our deficit-oriented views of autistic children and instead see each and every one of the children we work with as whole—through a lens of strengths, abilities, and possibilities. —Mariah Flynn

Mindfulness and Self-Compassion: Workbook for Kids, Volume 1, by Jamie Lynn Tatera

Do your students need help managing their emotions through the inevitable ups and downs of life? Are you looking for ways to help them self-regulate, rebound, and try again as they grow academically and socially? If so, you’ll love this new workbook by elementary school educator and certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher Jamie Lynn Tatera, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volume 1, with a forward by self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff. 

This book, created with a team of children who are quoted throughout, is alive with colorful drawings, comics, and activities that provide a fun and engaging way to teach mindfulness and self-compassion skills to a young audience. Children are introduced to resilience habit animals who join them on a quest through the lands of connection, freedom, mindfulness, acceptance, sensations, curiosity, friendship, and forgiveness. Along the way, they discover their “tricky” emotions and learn skills to navigate their inner terrain compassionately. 

While this workbook is written with and for children, it is best completed with an adult guide, making it easy to adapt to a classroom or homeschool setting. Given that a growing body of research indicates that practicing self-compassion is a productive way of approaching distressing thoughts and emotions that engenders mental and physical well-being, the adults might even learn a little something themselves! —Margaret Golden

Poetry Comics, by Grant Snider

Poetry Comics is an invitation to wonder. This beautifully illustrated picture book by Grant Snider is structured by season, offering vibrant, whimsical one-page comics that celebrate the rhythms of the year: the freshness of spring, the freedom of summer, the crisp, colorful changes of fall, and winter’s first snowfall. Introspective, funny, and relatable for both kids and adults, Snider’s comics capture the beauty in simple activities and small moments, transforming them into daily experiences of awe.

In the book, multiple comics appear called “How to Write a Poem,” which are especially aligned with the practices we share in Greater Good in Education. In each comic, Snider illustrates the process of writing poetry, offering prompts like: “Sit still. Keep quiet. Wait”; “Put it in your pocket. Forget it”; “Set out NOT to write a poem”; and “Start to notice connections in the wonder of nature.” Snider’s poems invite children to bring their whole selves into the creative process, and illustrate what it means to live in the world with more wonder, gratitude, mindfulness, and self-awareness.

When I read “How to Write a Poem 1” with my own eight-year-old daughter, she rushed from the room to grab a pencil and paper to write her own poem, and I couldn’t help thinking that this book would be an excellent way to bring more joy and playful learning to an elementary-level poetry unit—and an inspiring gift for a classroom teacher, school librarian, or parent. —Lauren Lee

Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies, by Shannon Leddy and Lorrie Miller

To truly transform our educational system into one that centers individual, collective, and planetary well-being, we need to look beyond the Western model of education that is grounded in age-old—and, many would argue, outdated—ideas such as time as a limited resource, the foregrounding of competition, and nature as an objectified “commodity that must be exploited.”

Enter Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies. This beautiful book offers educators a lens that shifts our current paradigm of education—one that is stressing our teachers and students beyond their capacity to cope—to one that is grounded in Indigenous and Slow pedagogies that connect us to each other and the Earth, focus on students’ gifts, provide the care and time for deep learning, and “endow us with responsibility to seek sustainability and balance as we develop our collective future.” 

Using the four quadrants of the Medicine Wheel as a framework, scholar-artists Shannon Leddy and Lorrie Miller describe what education looks like when we consider the spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual aspects of ourselves and life. For instance, the spiritual quadrant shows us how to “begin and proceed on our journeys.” The emotional quadrant “offers us space to find the courage to do better.” The physical quadrant focuses on balance and healing, and the intellectual on “the interconnectedness of all things and ideas.”

The authors emphasize that they are not offering lesson plans, but rather a “new way of learning together.” While they call for decolonizing ourselves and our curriculum and pedagogies, they also proffer that Western thinking doesn’t need to be entirely dismissed. We shouldn’t “relinquish factuality and rigour,” but we need to “consider [them] in holistic ways.”

This book should be read with Slow pedagogy in mind—because time is what is needed to deeply reflect on the ideas and possibilities presented. Having an “inner life” is imperative to this work. Indeed, as the authors claim, “this is part of who we are as human beings.” They urge readers to “think of a time when you allowed yourself to dwell in meditation, in reflection, in being that resulted in you feeling connected and replenished.” Then, ask yourself, “How might you use this learning to enrich your teaching?” —Vicki Zakrzewski

What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good, by Joel Westheimer

If you kept a diary from your first year of teaching, what might you discover? Joel Westheimer, professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, found stories of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and other indignities in his own first-year diary. But he also found something that may now be missing from the lives of many teachers today: the freedom to rely on one’s own professional judgment and space to explore with students what it means to be a good person and good citizen.

Educators can all agree that it’s important to teach the next generation to care for one another and our communities. In fact, this may be the reason why we got into the field of education in the first place. What Kind of Citizen? explores the forces that often work against these goals, such as the prevailing focus on standardization and test preparation in American schools and lack of professional autonomy for teachers.

Through his personal experiences as a teacher and decades of research, Westheimer invites us to reflect upon the type of society we hope our schools and teachers will help build. Westheimer believes that it’s essential to teach students how to ask questions, explore multiple perspectives, and engage in discussion around controversial issues. Practices like these are essential to empower the next generation to bridge what divides us. The book reminds us that “the kinds of schools we need and want are possible” and offers us a path forward in building them. —Lauren Lee

Why Theatre Education Matters, by Thalia R. Goldstein

Over the years, I have often been amazed that I chose to do my undergraduate degree in theatre. The craft was fun and joyful, but it didn’t offer job security, and, in the end, the lifestyle didn’t suit me. But then I read Why Theatre Education Matters: Understanding Its Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Benefits by Thalia R. Goldstein, and it started to make sense: Theatre gave me the space to explore what it means to be a human being—a passion that I have carried into my work to this day. As Goldstein writes, “Psychology and theatre are basically two different ways of answering the same question: Why do people do what they do?”

In a time when arts education is often on the chopping block, Goldstein makes the case that the arts, specifically theatre, can make a major contribution to a school’s mandate to support the social and emotional skills and well-being of students—especially high schools that struggle with a dearth of developmentally appropriate SEL curricula.

The book is structured around eight “Acting Habits of Mind,” which Goldstein discovered in her study of several public and private high school theatre programs. Habits of Mind, in general, are mental models for how we engage with the world and solve problems, and are often social or emotional in nature. Acting Habits specifically offer ways of “approaching the world that works in acting classrooms” and include things like body awareness, considering others, thinking collaboratively, and reflection. For each Acting Habit, Goldstein offers classroom examples of activities and practices for developing the habit, along with the science behind the habit, much of which comes from SEL research.

Goldstein also provides creative and fun ways for educators of every subject who use, or want to use, “drama-based pedagogies” to help deepen their students’ understanding of themselves and others—a skill so needed in today’s fraught world. “Because,” as Goldstein writes, “theatre is necessarily about the vastness and variety of human experiences, [and] students need to be able to think about people they have never encountered in real life, people whose lived experiences are far outside their own lived experiences, and how they would think about, react to, and engage with the world.” Theatre opened the world to me, and for that—and this book—I am deeply grateful. —Vicki Zakrzewski

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments—complete with toys, space, and companions—learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs—featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires, and ergonomic driving levers—are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.

As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks, and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.

But humans didn’t evolve to drive either. Although our ancient ancestors didn’t have cars, they had flexible brains that enabled them to acquire new skills—fire, language, stone tools, and agriculture. And some time after the invention of the wheel, humans made cars.

Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?

The new destination of joy

Concepts from introductory psychology textbooks took on a new, hands-on dimension in our rodent driving laboratory. Building on foundational learning approaches such as operant conditioning, which reinforces targeted behavior through strategic incentives, we trained the rats step by step in their driver’s ed programs.

Initially, they learned basic movements, such as climbing into the car and pressing a lever. But with practice, these simple actions evolved into more complex behaviors, such as steering the car toward a specific destination.

The rats also taught me something profound one morning during the pandemic.

It was the summer of 2020, a period marked by emotional isolation for almost everyone on the planet, even laboratory rats. When I walked into the lab, I noticed something unusual: The three driving-trained rats eagerly ran to the side of the cage, jumping up like my dog does when asked if he wants to take a walk.

Had the rats always done this and I just hadn’t noticed? Were they just eager for a Froot Loop, or anticipating the drive itself? Whatever the case, they appeared to be feeling something positive—perhaps excitement and anticipation.

Behaviors associated with positive experiences are associated with joy in humans, but what about rats? Was I seeing something akin to joy in a rat? Maybe so, considering that neuroscience research is increasingly suggesting that joy and positive emotions play a critical role in the health of both human and nonhuman animals.

With that, my team and I shifted focus from topics such as how chronic stress influences brains to how positive events—and anticipation for these events—shape neural functions.

Working with postdoctoral fellow Kitty Hartvigsen, I designed a new protocol that used waiting periods to ramp up anticipation before a positive event. Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop. They also had to wait in their transport cage for a few minutes before entering Rat Park, their play area. We also added challenges, such as making them shell sunflower seeds before eating.

This became our Wait For It research program. We dubbed this new line of study UPERs—unpredictable positive experience responses—where rats were trained to wait for rewards. In contrast, control rats received their rewards immediately. After about a month of training, we expose the rats to different tests to determine how waiting for positive experiences affects how they learn and behave. We’re currently peering into their brains to map the neural footprint of extended positive experiences.

Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism. They performed better on cognitive tasks and were bolder in their problem-solving strategies. We linked this program to our lab’s broader interest in behaviorceuticals, a term I coined to suggest that experiences can alter brain chemistry similarly to pharmaceuticals.

This research provides further support of how anticipation can reinforce behavior. Previous work with lab rats has shown that rats pressing a bar for cocaine—a stimulant that increases dopamine activation—already experience a surge of dopamine as they anticipate a dose of cocaine.

The tale of rat tails

It wasn’t just the effects of anticipation on rat behavior that caught our attention. One day, a student noticed something strange: One of the rats in the group trained to expect positive experiences had its tail straight up with a crook at the end, resembling the handle of an old-fashioned umbrella.

I had never seen this in my decades of working with rats. Reviewing the video footage, we found that the rats trained to anticipate positive experiences were more likely to hold their tails high than untrained rats. But what, exactly, did this mean?

Curious, I posted a picture of the behavior on social media. Fellow neuroscientists identified this as a gentler form of what’s called Straub tail, typically seen in rats given the opioid morphine. This S-shaped curl is also linked to dopamine. When dopamine is blocked, the Straub tail behavior subsides.

Natural forms of opiates and dopamine—key players in brain pathways that diminish pain and enhance reward—seem to be telltale ingredients of the elevated tails in our anticipation training program. Observing tail posture in rats adds a new layer to our understanding of rat emotional expression, reminding us that emotions are expressed throughout the entire body.

While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot—or paw, in this case.

Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.

Rat lessons on enjoying the journey

We’re not the only team investigating positive emotions in animals.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp famously tickled rats, demonstrating their capacity for joy.

Research has also shown that desirable low-stress rat environments retune their brains’ reward circuits, such as the nucleus accumbens. When animals are housed in their favored environments, the area of the nucleus accumbens that responds to appetitive experiences expands. Alternatively, when rats are housed in stressful contexts, the fear-generating zones of their nucleus accumbens expand. It is as if the brain is a piano the environment can tune.

Neuroscientist Curt Richter also made the case for rats having hope. In a study that wouldn’t be permitted today, rats swam in glass cylinders filled with water, eventually drowning from exhaustion if they weren’t rescued. Lab rats frequently handled by humans swam for hours to days. Wild rats gave up after just a few minutes. If the wild rats were briefly rescued, however, their survival time extended dramatically, sometimes by days. It seemed that being rescued gave the rats hope and spurred them on.

The driving rats project has opened new and unexpected doors in my behavioral neuroscience research lab. While it’s vital to study negative emotions such as fear and stress, positive experiences also shape the brain in significant ways.

As animals—human or otherwise—navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behavior. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating, and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain. That’s a lesson my lab rats have taught me well.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This year’s favorite books give us a chance to do just that. They provide many lenses from which to view our current situation, make better decisions around our personal happiness, and make our relationships and our communities healthier. Whether you need an understanding of how your mind works, ways to combat loneliness and isolation, reasons for hope, some more happiness and meaning in life, or tips for less contentious conversations—with loved ones and across social and political divides—reading these books can help you find your path toward a better tomorrow.

Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion, by Daryl Van Tongeren

More and more Americans are leaving religious institutions. Their reasons may be diverse, but no matter what drives them to leave, many find it tough to navigate a life post-religion—especially given the sense of belonging, certainty, and stability many religions provide.

Done, by psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren, offers a way forward for them. Based on extensive research, Van Tongeren reveals why people choose to leave religion behind, what challenges they may face, and some of the rewards they may encounter, including a spiritual practice more congruent with their values.

Unlike other books, Done doesn’t just offer stories—though there are stories that illuminate the text. It also provides cutting-edge research exploring this topic in depth and valuable, evidence-based tips for those who are seeking guidance.

Whether you are leaving religion entirely, trying to forge a new spiritual identity, or seeking to understand someone else’s choice to leave, the book shows how it’s possible to still have a meaningful life post-religion. And it provides insight for all of us, regardless of religious affiliation.

“By understanding other people who have left their religion, we can gain a better understanding of some of the deeper needs we humans share and how we address core questions of being human,” writes Van Tongeren.

Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection, by Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman

What makes love work? To understand what happens when we put our relationships under the microscope, we can turn to psychologists John and Julie Gottman, pioneers in the field of couples therapy.

For nearly 50 years, the Gottmans have been studying how to build and maintain strong relationships. They developed the Gottman method of therapy by observing thousands of real-life couples. One of their best-known principles, to “turn toward bids for affection” (or respond positively when our partner tries to connect with us), remains a touchstone for therapists. 

In Fight Right, the team draws on their research to teach couples themselves how to deal with challenges—everything from day-to-day bickering to arguments that threaten to tear relationships apart. The Gottmans distinguish between “perpetual” conflicts, which they say represent 69% of conflicts and are based on values and personality, and “solvable” conflicts—and offer practical tips for addressing both kinds.

An important finding from research: The first three minutes of an argument often dictate the outcome. When we become too overwhelmed or “flooded,” we should take a break and return to the conversation later. Communicating gently, avoiding blame, and expressing our needs all help our conversations move in the right direction.

Fighting, it turns out, is not the problem; it’s all about how we do it.

Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being, by Yuria Celidwen

Many people in modern times are seeking individual happiness. But focusing only on oneself is limiting and ignores our capacity to nurture collective flourishing—the well-being of all living beings and our environment—that is at the heart of Indigenous sciences and traditions, explains Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen in her book, Flourishing Kin.

Flourishing Kin sheds light on the complementarity between Indigenous science and Western science, which together can offer solutions to societal challenges like loneliness and disconnection, climate change and environmental degradation, othering and injustice, and dehumanization and genocide.

Celidwen shares key principles to collective well-being like kin relationality—our capacity to view all living beings as our relatives. Heartfelt wisdom is a principle that focuses on our capacity for emotions like gratitude, compassion, awe, and reverence, which spur us to act in ways that promote the greater good. Another principle, ecological belonging, refers to our awareness of being part of the Earth and our commitment to stewarding the natural world.

Celidwen weaves together research and stories of her life experiences and her ancestors’ wisdom, and offers practices to foster deeper meaning and reveal the interdependence of our well-being. “Flourishing Kin is intended to be a book held within the heart, body, mind, and Spirit,” she writes. “By this I mean that it is not a book of ideas. It is a book of stories, emotions, perceptions, sensations, and all sorts of invitations to sense, dream, dance, sing, imagine together.”

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, by Jamil Zaki

It can be easy to slip into a worldview that assumes people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest, explains psychologist and empathy researcher Jamil Zaki in his book Hope for Cynics. Zaki begins the book by confessing his predisposition to cynicism and how he learned to change.

Some of us may be wary of hope because, at times, it feels gullible, risky, and downright wrong—like we’re ignoring the world’s problems. Cynicism, on the other hand, seems clever, safe, and moral. But Zaki tears down these myths about hope and cynicism. In fact, he argues, cynicism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and an obstacle to activism and social change.

“Cynicism is not a radical worldview. It’s a tool of the status quo,” explains Zaki. “This is useful for elites, and [for] propagandists [to] sow distrust to better control people.” If we’re cynical that anything or anyone can change, we’ll be less likely to act to change things.

Hope for Cynics offers “hopeful skepticism” as an alternative to cynicism—not a naive one, but a wise one. It involves not just being open to people being good, but also to data and adapting our beliefs and behavior.

The book offers practical ways to nurture a habit of hopeful skepticism, like balancing your media consumption, which typically emphasizes negativity, with news stories that focus on solutions.

“Hope is practical,” says Zaki. “It gives people a glimpse of a better world and pushes them to fight for it.”  

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, by Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein

Have you noticed how easy it is to take good things in our lives for granted—or how bad things seem to not bother us as much over time? That’s because of “hedonic adaptation”—our tendency to derive less enjoyment from happy experiences and less sting from painful experiences as time passes.

In Look Again, neuroscientist Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein explain how hedonic adaptation works and how it affects us, for good and bad. One big problem: It’s hard to notice or care about things that aren’t new or novel, including ongoing social problems (like poverty and discrimination). It can also stop us from enjoying the things we love—even our close relationships.

“The good things in life (whatever your fancy—amazing food, great sex, expensive cars) will trigger a burst of joy if you experience them occasionally,” they write. “But once those experiences become frequent, daily perhaps, they stop producing real pleasure.”

To work against hedonic adaptation toward the good, the authors suggest things like taking breaks from whatever you enjoy (to make it seem new again), changing your routines to surprise yourself, focusing more on experiences than possessions, and more. By following their tips, you might find ways to savor the joys of life more fully and enjoy stronger, longer-lasting relationships.

Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict, by William Ury

Sometimes, conflicts seem insurmountable. We look at societal issues and political polarization, and it’s hard to see a way forward.

But negotiator William Ury has had firsthand experience helping to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts—like “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the civil war in Colombia. In his book Possible, he lets us inside his process of negotiating these kinds of stalemates, allowing us to find both greater hope for the future and skills we can use in our own lives to resolve long-standing disagreements and feuds.

One important negotiating tool he promotes is not getting too focused on the positions each side takes, but seeking the underlying goals and interests causing a conflict. For example, while political opposition parties may take a position for or against higher taxes, their interests may be more similar, such as access to health care or a more stable economy. Openly recognizing this can help move things along.

Other skills he offers include listening to and never dehumanizing the “other side,” looking for commonalities between fighting parties, avoiding “I win, you lose” scenarios, and engaging a wider community of people affected by the conflict (to encourage both sides to negotiate).

“If we can embrace and transform our conflicts, we can learn to live and work together. If we can do that . . . there is no problem, large or small, that we cannot address,” Ury writes.

The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It, by Lorraine Besser

Many of us consider “the good life” to be one filled with happiness and meaning. But recent research suggests another pillar of a life well-lived: psychological richness. This kind of life entails seeking challenging, novel, and complex experiences that engage our minds and stimulate deep emotion—or, put more simply, pursuing what’s interesting to you.

In The Art of the Interesting, Lorraine Besser explains the benefits of aiming for an interesting life. Being curious and open, she argues, can improve our sense of connection to others and our feelings of agency in the world. It can help bridge divides by toning down our tendency for black-and-white thinking, and can even help us participate more in activism.

Besser offers concrete tools for engaging with the world this way, such as tapping into your natural curiosity, planning less, and not shying away from challenges. The rewards of doing so are many, she argues—not only for us individually, but for the world.

“You’ll find your best possible life by tapping into your passions, learning what resonates with you and to what degree, and by recognizing what you need to enhance your life and when you need it,” she writes.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

According to the World Health Organization, one in seven 10 to 19 year olds around the world have a mental health disorder. This alarming rise in mental illness in young people clearly needs urgent explaining—and addressing.

In The Anxious Generation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the disappearance of play-based childhoods and ubiquitous cell phone use among children are to blame for these trends, including young people’s increased risk of depression and suicide. And he provides ample research to back up this claim—from observational, lab-based, and large-scale population studies.

Play, he argues, is necessary for healthy child development, helping kids learn to cooperate and manage conflicts with others. Yet many parents keep their kids inside or only allow supervised, structured play, so that kids don’t learn the skills they need to form close relationships.

With smartphone use on the rise, it’s harder for kids to have the kind of meaningful, face-to-face connections they need, too. “In this new phone-based childhood, free play, attunement, and local models for social learning are replaced by screen time, asynchronous interaction, and influencers chosen by algorithms,” he writes.

Fortunately, Haidt also offers potential solutions. By delaying when kids have access to smartphones and social media and creating opportunities for free play, he argues, we can turn things around and help improve our children’s well-being.

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, by Rhaina Cohen

Many more Americans are living alone these days, often not by choice. This makes them susceptible to suffering loneliness, economic hardship, and the burden of caring for children alone.

While many of us consider family or romantic partners our first line of defense against these stressors, journalist Rhaina Cohen’s book, The Other Significant Others, explores another, unconventional option: deep, committed friendships. Her book shares stories of people who’ve created this kind of intimate partnership with friends and how they overcame hurdles—like parental expectations, misunderstanding from others, and legal issues—to create intertwined, shared lives.

Loving friendships are different from romantic partnerships, argues Cohen, yet still provide some of the same benefits—stability, community, and intimacy. And they don’t necessarily interfere with having a romantic partnership, too, as long as the friendship partnership is seen less as competition for affection than an extension of community—and worthy of nurturing and protecting.

Cohen’s book upends cultural views that assume a sexual relationship is necessary for partnering with someone, marriage is the highest form of commitment, and government benefits should be reserved for traditional families. Given our current loneliness epidemic and the number of marriages that end in divorce, it’s refreshing to read about people who have found a different way to meet their needs for intimacy.

The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong, by john a. powell

In The Power of Bridging, civil rights scholar john a. powell authentically weaves his personal story and decades of research into this easy-to-follow guide for building a world where no group or person has the right to dominate another.

To do this, powell breaks down four key terms: bridging, belonging, othering, and breaking. He explains what it means to truly belong or feel connected to people, and what it feels like when we engage in breaking, or denying the full stories, complexities, or humanity of those we consider “other.” He explains the “other” as people we see as different, less deserving, and of lesser dignity than us.

powell, himself, was part of a very loving Black family where community, belonging, and church ran deep. But, at age 11, he had a fallout with his family and church, which led to him feeling disconnected and “othered” by his community. Years of rupture and repair with his family offered deep lessons in bridging, which he shares in his book.

The book offers deliberative, practical tools to orient ourselves toward making bridging a possibility, choice, and practice. Each chapter ends with nuanced reflective questions, such as “What aspects of your identity align with dominant groups?” and “What social issues give you anxiety?” These act as tools to help readers build muscles for authentic connections with people they don’t see eye to eye with.

Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, by Maggie Jackson

Life is uncertain. We can never know for sure what the future holds. Yet living with that knowledge can cause anxiety and worry, making us want to push uncertainty away any way we can.

But, as Journalist Maggie Jackson argues in her book Uncertain, we shouldn’t fight uncertainty but learn to embrace it. Being able to tolerate uncertainty can help us avoid closing down our thinking too soon, take in new information, revise our perspectives, and avoid stereotyping others. The ability to just sit with not knowing is useful in everyday life, helping us to ask questions, learn, connect, and solve difficult problems.

Unfortunately, our culture often equates certainty with strength and power, rewarding those who appear sure of themselves in spite of their weaknesses and doubts. But, as Jackson shows through the research in her book, it’s people who know how to live with uncertainty and allow themselves (and others) to doubt who solve problems best and win out in life.

“Rather than being a sign of deficiency or weakness, wielding the cognitive tool of not-knowing is a mark of the persuasive arguer, the most capable student, the resilient physician and patient, and, by multiple measures, the nimble executive,” she writes.

Uncertainty, as it turns out, can be a superpower.

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, by Charan Ranganath

Have you ever left your wallet at home only to discover its absence when you needed to pay for groceries? This is the kind of gaffe that makes you wonder what’s happened to your memory, when you used to have such good recall. You may even worry you’re succumbing to dementia.

But, as neuroscientist Charan Ranganath argues in Why We Remember, this is the wrong way to think about memory.

“Although we tend to believe that we can and should remember anything we want, the reality is we are designed to forget,” he writes.

Ranganath’s book is full of surprising insights from research. For example, readers learn how memories change every time they are recalled, some of our cherished memories probably never happened, memory can be easily corrupted, and novel or salient memories take precedence over memories that are more mundane (like where you left your wallet).

The key to making memory work for you is understanding the neuroscience behind memory—which Ranganath communicates clearly and with humor. By recognizing memory’s limitations, we can both stop worrying about impending dementia and focus on improving our memory for the things that truly matter.

Some researchers have suggested that these two types of compassion are linked, although this might not always seem intuitive. After all, we can all probably think of individuals who are selfless and giving to other people, but who have trouble extending that same kindness to themselves.

This question matters because people who are struggling with self-compassion may wonder if this could impair their compassion for others. Additionally, we may be reluctant to set aside more time for self-compassion because we worry that doing so is selfish or self-centered when others are struggling, too.

However, if self-compassion and compassion for others are related to each other—as opposed to being competing forces—it might actually be the case that cultivating one type of compassion also feeds the other. If this is true, then practicing self-compassion could help us show up more effectively when others need help, too.

Overall, the evidence suggests that there’s a lot of variation in whether people’s compassion for themselves and others are aligned. That is, some people do treat themselves with the same type of compassion that they would extend to a friend, yet others struggle to do so. In recent years, psychologists have begun to investigate why our compassion for ourselves and for others can sometimes become out of sync—and pinpoint ways of increasing both types of compassion in tandem.

Do people treat themselves and others with similar compassion?

Self-compassion, originally studied in Western psychology by researcher Kristin Neff, involves three components: treating ourselves with kindness, seeing our mistakes and shortcomings as part of the common human experience, and approaching challenges and difficulties with mindful awareness.

According to Neff and her colleague Elizabeth Pommier, there’s good reason to think that compassion for the self and for others may be linked. After all, they write, “Self-compassion involves turning compassion inward, taking a compassionate perspective toward oneself in the same way that compassion is typically offered to others.”

As an initial test of this idea, the two researchers asked three groups of people—college students, American adults, and people with experience in mindfulness meditation—to fill out surveys of self-compassion, compassion for others, empathy, altruism, and forgiveness. The researchers found that adults and trained meditators who were more self-compassionate were also more compassionate toward others. On the other hand, self-compassionate college students weren’t more altruistic or compassionate toward humanity, but they were more willing to take others’ perspectives and more forgiving.

Why might self-compassion relate to our compassion for others? In a study published last year in the journal Mindfulness, approximately 700 people reported on their compassion for themselves and others, and also indicated how important different values were to them.

The researchers found that self-compassion and other-directed compassion were related to each other, and this was partly explained by the fact that people with higher self-compassion also gravitated more strongly to self-transcendent values: feeling benevolent toward others, valuing creativity and open-mindedness, and seeing the worth in all people.

In other words, one possible link from self-compassion to compassion for others is that being compassionate toward ourselves may relate to the values we uphold, and these values in turn affect how we treat others.

However, other research has not found a link between how we treat ourselves and how we treat others, like one paper surveying over 300 people on their self-compassion and compassion for others. Another study found that palliative health care workers who had more compassion for others showed less self-compassion. Why might that be?

Why do some people experience a disconnect between compassion for self and other?

Several new papers might help resolve these conflicting studies.

In a study published recently in the journal Assessment, researchers asked over 800 Spanish speakers from Spain to complete surveys of self-compassion, compassion for others, distress, and well-being. The researchers found that self-compassion and compassion for others were linked more strongly in people with higher well-being than in people with lower well-being. In fact, for people with lower well-being, these two types of compassion were not meaningfully linked. The researchers found a similar pattern of results when looking at depression, anxiety, and stress: For less distressed participants, their compassion for self and others were linked, but for distressed participants, those links were smaller or nonexistent.

In other words, when people are doing well, they tend to treat themselves with the same kindness that they extend to others—but when they are experiencing distress, they may struggle to do so.

Other research suggests that how authentic we are may also help explain the link between the compassion we have for ourselves and for others. In this study, published in the journal Current Psychology, researchers asked 530 Turkish-speaking participants to report on their self-compassion, their compassion for other people, and their feelings of authenticity (as measured by their agreement with statements such as “I am true to myself in most situations”). The researchers found that, for some of the facets of compassion, people’s compassion could be best explained by a combination of both their self-compassion and their authenticity. In other words, people who had higher self-compassion tended to be kinder to others if they also felt relatively authentic.

Taken as a whole, these studies seem to suggest that, when people are at their best—when they feel most authentic and have higher well-being—their compassion for themselves and for others seem to be in sync. However, when people may be dealing with stress or difficulty in their lives, that appears to be when they experience a disconnect between how kind they are to themselves and to others.

What happens when our compassion for self and others isn’t aligned?

Interestingly, it often appears that when this disconnect occurs, people are still compassionate toward others but have trouble extending that same compassion toward themselves. For example, in one of the original studies on this topic, the researchers review data suggesting that “individuals who were high in self-compassion reported being equally kind to themselves and others, but that people low in self-compassion reported being kinder to others than themselves.”

It’s possible that, when we’re struggling, it’s easier to maintain our compassion for others than our compassion for ourselves. According to the researchers of the paper published in Assessment, one reason for this may come from patterns established in early childhood (in other words, our attachment style). Individuals who grow up in households where they receive inconsistent messages from their primary caretakers can go on to develop a “preoccupied” attachment style later in life, where they view others positively and try to seek the approval of others, but they may have negative views of themselves. As a result, the researchers explain, these individuals may end up feeling compassion toward others, but have difficulty extending this same compassion to themselves.

Does increasing one type of compassion also increase the other?

If the two types of compassion go together, it’s possible that increasing one type could also impact the other. A study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology sought to test this idea.

In one of the experiments, 240 college students were asked to complete either a neutral activity or one of three trainings focused on self-compassion, other-focused compassion, or loving-kindness meditation (which incorporated both types of compassion, as it involved practicing kindness toward themselves, others they know, and all of humanity). Here, people first watched a 15-minute educational video introducing the topic they would be meditating on, and then completed a 15-minute meditation. The researchers found that all of the three trainings increased self-compassion and also increased compassion toward other people.

This study bolsters the idea that self-compassion and compassion for others are linked, since training people on just one of these skills may also increase the other type of compassion.

Although compassion for the self and for others aren’t always the same, the concepts seem to be two sides of the same coin in some ways. When people are feeling their best, their compassion for themselves and others seem to be in harmony, and data suggests that boosting one type of compassion can potentially impact the other.

When working toward a more compassionate society, it may be especially important to make sure that we emphasize both types of compassion, without losing focus on one or the other. Additionally, for those of us who might be hesitant to make time for self-compassion, it’s important to note that self-compassion allows us to be more resilient, meaning we can ward off burnout and support others more effectively. As Neff explains, “The compassion we cultivate for ourselves directly transmits itself to others.”

In these moments, we often feel a sense of admiration or amazement, a feeling of smallness in the face of something so immense that it leaves us speechless. Maybe this is because we are ourselves 70% water, or because the sheer scale of the sea puts us in perspective, reminding us of our connection to something much larger. This range of feelings—referred to as “awe”—has been extensively researched by psychologists.

Being near natural bodies of water, especially the sea, has proven health benefits. This effect has been dubbed “blue health.”

Scientists have offered a number of explanations for these benefits. Being near water often means we do more physical activity, while natural surroundings also have a restorative effect on our mental well-being and social lives, meaning they also have mental health benefits. Furthermore, blue spaces can improve overall environmental quality, which brings indirect health benefits.

The origin of life itself

Life on Earth began in the oceans. In addition to being a vital source of nutrients and resources, the sea is therefore our biological point of origin.

Our sweat and tears share the sea’s salty composition, and there is a surprising similarity between how elements of the sea and our bodies work. Applied to natural surroundings more generally, this link even has a name: biophilia.

The biophilia hypothesis is one of the three main theories that explain humans’ attraction to the sea. The other two are the theory of psychophysiological stress recovery and attention restoration theory. These ideas are not mutually exclusive, and all three contribute to the sense of well-being that the sea gives us.

Be it walking on the sand, in a boat on its surface, diving beneath the waves, or just observing or meditating on it, the sea allows us to set our mental struggles to one side and to feel free. It can help us to find what psychologists call “restoration,” and this sense of well-being is something we often struggle to find on our own.

Blue health can be a powerful tool in reducing stress and improving our moods. Our connection to nature helps us to put our own worries in perspective—it restores our attention by warding off the preoccupations that dominate our attention in our daily lives.

Sea, sport, and disability

Many people with disabilities or injuries that prevent them from walking or moving easily on land can bathe in the sea. It can offer them a moment to close their eyes, breathe, and perhaps even feel a sense of bodily freedom or autonomy.

For this reason, water sports (especially in the sea) can play a huge role in promoting psychological well-being for disabled people. Boats, equipment, and activities can be adapted to include everyone, no matter their abilities.

From specialized sailboats and diving therapy to yoga and meditation on stand up paddle boards, there are many activities that can help people to connect with the sea and feel its benefits.

Not only do they bring physical and emotional well-being, these activities also allow a person, regardless of their limitations, to experience the freedom and connection that the sea can offer. The sea belongs to everyone, and we all deserve to feel its immense, transformative power.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But there’s another reason: Parents who have a child with a disability—as about 17% of U.S. parents do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—are also often criticized for how they parent the child. Those whose children have so-called invisible disabilities, such as autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, are also sometimes accused of causing the associated behavior issues through faulty parenting, according to Danielle Peters, a therapist who specializes in parents of children with disabilities.

These judgments and criticisms end up being a significant source of stress. Stanislawa Byra of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, recently studied how mothers’ reactions to them might affect their psychological well-being. She found that choosing to let go of the hurts caused by criticism or ignorant comments—though it can be challenging—can make a difference. Parents can’t change how others behave, but forgiveness can offer them a useful way to respond.

Two kinds of forgiving

In a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing, Byra documents that mothers who forgave a transgression—a specific instance they recalled when someone hurt them because of their child’s disability—had better psychological well-being overall.

The study surveyed 174 Polish mostly married mothers of children with disabilities, including intellectual, physical, and autism spectrum.

Forgiveness is easier said than done, of course. Byra’s study considered two types of forgiveness. A person may decide to forgive a transgression—or they may successfully forgive in a way that lessens their negative feelings about the transgression. The research used evidence-based questionnaires, the Emotional Forgiveness Scale and the Decision to Forgive Scale, to identify each of these forms of forgiveness related to a transgression that the participants described.

Mothers who had decided to forgive and those whose negative feelings had diminished had well-being scores still higher than their peers who had not forgiven. There was only a small bump in well-being among the moms whose feelings about the incident had shifted when compared to those who had simply decided to forgive. That’s good news because deciding to forgive can be easier than meaningfully forgiving.

Many things to forgive

Byra also explored the kinds of offenses that seemed easier to forgive. She found that when offenses came from people with whom mothers had valuable relationships, they were more often forgiven. A meaningful apology from the offender was also correlated with forgiveness—and, with it, well-being. This can be helpful to know for non-parents who may later regret too-freely-offered opinions.

Byra observed that self-forgiveness is an important factor, even though it’s not included explicitly in this study. For therapist Peters, self-forgiveness seems to be the biggest help for mothers, who often blame themselves for contributing to their child’s genetic condition and for being an imperfect parent.

The research may touch on that issue indirectly, Peters observed. Judging remarks hurt the most because parents, particularly mothers, can internalize them as true, she said. Forgiving an offender might help challenge that tendency.

“If forgiving others is associated with recognizing what they said was not accurate and reintegrating that person into the parents’ support network if appropriate, I could see how it would contribute to parental well-being,” Peters said.

Forgiveness can also be part of a general mindset that leaves behind defensiveness or denial about a child’s limitations.

“I have found that the most peace comes when there is acceptance around who the child is today, no matter who they might become and the life they might lead,” she said. “Often that acceptance comes with forgiving others’ comments and opinions.”

On the day of her meeting with her boss Dan, Sarah feels anxious. She knows he’s expecting her to accept the role, but she decides to be honest about her concerns. Taking a deep breath, she says, “Dan, I’m excited about this opportunity, but I want to be upfront. I’ve been feeling anxious about whether I’m truly ready to lead. I’m worried that I might not be able to handle it.”

For a moment, there’s silence, and Sarah wonders if she’s just made a huge mistake by admitting her fears. But Dan surprises her. “I appreciate your honesty, Sarah,” he says. “It’s normal to feel nervous when stepping into something new. Leadership is something you grow into, and we’ll provide the support you need along the way.”

In today’s digital age, where much of our lives are spent online, living authentically—being true to who we really are—is both challenging and important. It’s challenging because in order to be authentic, we have to be vulnerable—willing to take a risk to share personal information. And it’s important because, according to research, being vulnerable and authentic helps us believe in ourselves, build better relationships, boost our self-confidence, and improve our physical and mental health. In Sarah’s case, she realized that openness didn’t make her weak—on the contrary, it gained her the reassurance and support she needed.

We can all unlock these benefits if we take steps to integrate vulnerability and authenticity into our daily life.

Benefits of vulnerability and authenticity

Being vulnerable sounds scary, but research suggests that it has many benefits, including the following.

Greater mental and physical well-being. When we live authentically, our actions align with our true beliefs and values. When people are allowed to be themselves in the various roles they play—like employee or parent—they can connect more deeply with these roles and experience greater well-being as a result. For instance, one study found that individuals who experienced higher levels of authenticity reported better physical and mental well-being, including lower feelings of stress, less depression, and fewer physical symptoms.

Improved relationships. Vulnerability and authenticity play a critical role in building and maintaining healthy relationships. Vulnerable individuals strive for openness and honesty in close relationships, and openness is essential for developing intimacy and trust. People feel closer to each other when they share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

When you are open about your own struggles and vulnerabilities, it often encourages others to do the same, creating a more empathic and supportive community. Sometimes we’ll discover that someone else has felt the same way we do, which fosters a sense of closeness and mutual understanding.

For example, research on people with mental health concerns found that those who were vulnerable with a good friend felt less ashamed of themselves than those who didn’t feel comfortable being vulnerable with a friend. More vulnerable individuals also really wanted to be with their friends.

Enhanced empathy and compassion. Being vulnerable can often include showing greater empathy and compassion for others. Empathy is the process of sensing or imagining another person’s emotional state. It includes experiencing the same emotion as another person or recognizing the emotions of others.

When we acknowledge our own vulnerabilities with kindness, we are practicing self-compassion—and research suggests that self-compassionate people are more empathic and compassionate toward others. When you forgive yourself for any mistakes or shortcomings, it becomes easier to understand and forgive others.

Higher self-confidence. Self-confidence stems from accepting ourselves and recognizing our inherent worth. Living authentically involves embracing our strengths and weaknesses, which is fundamental to building self-confidence. According to psychologist Michael H. Kernis, authenticity is a critical component of healthy self-esteem, which in turn bolsters self-confidence.

When we live in accordance with our true selves, we no longer feel a strong need to conform to external expectations. This freedom allows us to take risks and pursue our goals with less fear of judgment.

More effective leadership. Authentic leaders “walk the talk,” keep their promises, and align their actions with their words. The combination of authenticity and vulnerability enhances leaders’ effectiveness by creating an environment where employees feel safe to be themselves and make mistakes.

Research suggests that authenticity increases employees’ trust in the leader and organization and encourages them to speak their minds. Authentic leaders build trust through transparency and integrity, and staying true to their values, which significantly enhances trust within their teams. Authenticity and vulnerability also improve team dynamics, facilitating better collaboration and communication.

Overall, the behaviors and beliefs of authentic leaders encourage greater organizational performance. An authentic leader can also model clear organizational values for employees. Employees who identify with the leader thus identify with the organization and are more willing to adapt to change and innovate in order to make their organization effective.

How to live vulnerably and authentically

If you would like to live vulnerably and authentically, try some of the following tips. 

1. Acknowledge your emotions. Recognizing your emotions is the first step toward accepting them, and accepting your emotions is the first step toward showing vulnerability. For example, you can’t be honest with someone about the hurt you’re feeling if you’re too busy avoiding it or covering it up with defensive anger.

This first step of acknowledging emotions is crucial, since suppressing or denying feelings can lead to emotional distress and mental health issues. Specifically, a study by James Gross found that people who denied their feelings actually felt worse after doing so. They also had more problems with memory tests, suggesting that the effort of blocking their emotions impaired their memory. By acknowledging your emotions, you become more attuned to your internal experiences, which is crucial for authentic self-expression.

2. Ask for help. Seeking assistance or support when needed is a powerful way to show vulnerability. It demonstrates that you recognize your limitations and are willing to rely on others, which can strengthen relationships. Researchers found that sharing positive events and asking for support can help make you more satisfied with your relationships and strengthen your links to other people.

3. Practice self-compassion. Self-compassion involves treating yourself with kindness and understanding during times of failure or difficulty. By practicing self-compassion, you acknowledge your vulnerabilities and respond to them with care rather than self-criticism.

One way to practice self-compassion is to turn to people to whom you feel close for help in dealing with emotionally difficult situations.

4. Engage in open communication. Engaging in open and honest communication with others is a fundamental way to show vulnerability. This means being transparent about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Research suggests that being open and honest when speaking with others encourages others to do the same in return and results in better relationships. Being honest about what you want and expect, even if it makes you feel exposed, can prevent misunderstandings and make your relationships more satisfying.

5. Model yourself on authentic individuals. For example, find that individual at your workplace who is engaged, enthusiastic, and energetic with respect to their job. Individuals find it easier to be engaged with their work when that work is authentically in line with their values, skills, and aptitudes. In that context, individuals have more energy to devote to their work, since they are not using it on concealing their true self.

Watching how an authentic person acts according to their beliefs in a situation that makes them vulnerable can inspire others to also act authentically. For example, an entry-level professional I know asked his colleagues to disclose their salaries. “If one of us discovers that we are being paid less, then that person can decide whether to ask for a raise,” he explained. After gaining everyone’s consent to sharing their salary, he did an incredibly vulnerable thing. “I’ll go first,” he said.

He went first, and because of his authenticity and vulnerability, every other manager also shared their salary.

In a world increasingly dominated by superficial digital interactions, embracing vulnerability and authenticity becomes even more important for true connection with others. As illustrated by Sarah’s experience, sharing our fears can lead to unexpected support and understanding, fostering connection and trust. By practicing vulnerability, we can cultivate deeper relationships, enhance our well-being, and navigate the complexities of our work life with confidence. Having the courage to act authentically and with vulnerability can even inspire those around us to do the same.

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But a new study identifies another influence on good leadership that we might not always think about: leaders’ home life. Researchers Jasmine Hu, Daniel Kim, and Klodiana Lanaj found that feeling appreciated at home inspires leaders to help others at work, too. In other words, for leaders to effectively support their employees, someone needs to fill their own “cup,” as well.

“Little research has investigated leaders’ personal lives and how their home life may impact how they feel and act at work,” Lanaj says. “Therefore, we wanted to take a more comprehensive look at leaders and investigate how life at home impacted their perceptions and behaviors at work.”

The study consisted of three experiments with a total of 103 full-time managers from high schools, and 116 leader-follower pairs and 109 leaders from various industries, like manufacturing and health care. In each study, leaders recalled a time when they did something beneficial for their family and their family members showed appreciation, and then they wrote a few sentences about what happened and how it felt.

“These types of [activities] help them savor the experience again in ways that amplify positive feelings associated with the experience,” Lanaj says.

In each experiment, leaders completed online surveys at various times throughout the day to assess how much they felt they made a positive impact at home, as well as their “need fulfillment” (how much their basic psychological needs for a sense of autonomy, competence, and connection were satisfied). In two experiments, leaders also evaluated their helping and empowering behaviors at work—for example, how much they showed concern and courtesy toward employees, as well as allowed subordinates to be involved in important decisions. In one experiment, randomly selected employees provided their perspectives on their leaders’ helping and empowering behaviors.

All three experiments found that reflecting on gratitude received at home helped leaders see the positive impact they made in their family, which fulfilled their basic psychological needs. This, in turn, motivated leaders to be more helpful and empowering to their employees at work, compared to leaders who went through the same experiment but wrote about mundane things like their possessions or meals.

“What we show here is that being engaged with family at home is enriching for leaders at work,” says Lanaj.

So, what does this mean for leaders? Despite the many demands of our job when working in a leadership role, it is important to remain present and grateful when in the presence of our loved ones at home. Clearly, work life and home life aren’t as separate as sometimes believed; having a successful life at home in which leaders feel recharged and appreciated appears to have a direct impact on the way they are engaged with their work and coworkers.

What does this study mean for family members of leaders? No matter how powerful a person may be at work, the love and trust of family members is still very meaningful to them.

As we approach Thanksgiving, gratitude only becomes more important to keep in mind. Appreciating people around us isn’t just a momentary gesture but can have a lasting influence on their lives.

The ones who can effectively balance these tensions seem to possess a key virtue: intellectual humility.

Psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren and colleagues define this virtue as “humility about one’s ideas, beliefs, or viewpoints.” At a personal level, this involves willingness to own our limitations, along with an openness to revising beliefs in the face of new evidence. Intellectual humility also helps facilitate respect toward people with differing views and caring more about learning than for proving we’re “right.”

This openness can be particularly difficult for leaders. Religious traditions consider humility a virtue, yet many expect adherents to boldly assert their teachings: what researchers call the “humility-religiousness paradox.” At times, strong beliefs can make it hard to acknowledge other perspectives or consider counterevidence. That’s especially true for clergy, who are expected to be exemplars of their faiths.

But religious leaders can also be exemplars of intellectual humility, thanks to their deep study of sacred traditions and texts, combined with how much human suffering they witness. Many also mediate conflicts and different perspectives among their congregants.

As psychologists and researchers, we are leading a research project on intellectual humility and religion in “real-world” settings.

Keeping an open mind

Think of Martin Luther King Jr. The preacher and activist listened to, learned from, and befriended leaders of many faith traditions—such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh—whose teachings he incorporated into the Civil Rights Movement.

Research backs up just how important this kind of intellectual humility is to interreligious dialogue and social justice work. Psychology research has found students at Christian seminaries who report more intellectual humility also tend to have greater commitments toward respecting diversity and fostering fairness and inclusion. For example, more intellectually humble leaders in training tended to say they are more committed to working against racism, sexism, and poverty.

Humility can also help religious leaders navigate difficult situations in their work. Research has found that the more intellectually humble someone thinks their religious leader is, the more likely they are to forgive that leader, particularly when it comes to conflicts over religious values. Congregants are also more likely to be satisfied with their clergy’s leadership if those leaders are intellectually humble.

Congregants often discuss mental health issues with clergy, but some religious groups are hesitant to recommend therapy or incorporate psychology into their work. In a study of nearly 400 religious leaders, however, more intellectually humble leaders tended to be more open to integrating psychology with ministry—meaning they may be more comfortable offering spiritual support while also helping congregants access professional mental health support.

Painful questions

On the other hand, clergy’s role can sometimes be in tension with intellectual humility.

Being intellectually humble means being open to new understandings, to deepening or revising beliefs. Religious leaders who are more aware of the possible limitations of their beliefs are less likely to consider themselves superior to other people, according to a study of about 250 clergy.

The researchers of that study, however, also found this kind of awareness can lead clergy to experience anxiety and doubt their connection with God.

Sincerely questioning religious beliefs can be stressful for anyone. It’s all the more true for the head of a congregation, someone members look to as an example of firm faith. This challenge is especially acute in communities or situations where leaders are expected to maintain certainty about their beliefs and where questions or revisions are discouraged—which can intensify shame, fear, and isolation for people wrestling with their faith.

That’s not the full story, though. Like any virtue, humility has many dimensions, and some can help buffer the anxiety that comes with questioning beliefs. According to the same study of U.S. clergy, cognitive humility—being humble about your ideas—is less likely to make you feel insecure if you display humility in other ways, as well, whether it’s through respect for other people or having self-awareness.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Practicing intellectual humility can be even harder for clergy who are female, people of color, or anyone else who might be discouraged from holding a leadership position.

These people are more likely to have their authority challenged and are often expected to be subservient. Women, for example, tend to be taught a submissive version of humility: modest, deferential, and quiet. According to psychology research, women tend to underestimate their own intelligence, while men tend to overestimate theirs.

To overcome those stereotypes, female leaders may feel the need to be especially assertive. But the same actions that would be considered confident in a man could be seen as arrogant for a woman. Displaying healthy humility, on the other hand—openness, awareness, respect for others—can be seen as being “soft” or indecisive. An intellectually humble leader might invite multiple perspectives on a congregational decision, whereas some members might expect that leader to forcefully promote their own vision.

Theologian Choi Hee An argues that sexism makes intellectual humility nearly impossible for women to practice within religious groups where intelligence itself is seen as a sacred privilege and power gifted to men from God and where women are typically barred from leadership roles. It is hard to have healthy humility in an area where one has not had any empowerment, such as a setting where you haven’t been encouraged to think for yourself or exercise meaningful decisions.

There is no winning for a religious leader in these contexts. She is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

Given these challenges, we are currently studying what kinds of skills and mindsets can help religious leaders practice intellectual humility. But it depends not only on individuals but also their surrounding communities and congregations—which can either reward or punish humble leaders.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But do those two factors matter so much for longevity when you consider other ones, like your age or gender, or whether you’re a smoker or drinker or have a chronic health condition? How much does life satisfaction and purpose protect your health? A new study aimed to find out—and their answer reveals the power of purpose in shaping human life.

“Purpose in life remained significant in all of our analyses, while life satisfaction didn’t,” says lead study author Frank Martela of Aalto University, Finland. “That suggests that purpose is the more reliable predictor of longevity.”

Purpose vs. satisfaction

In this study, researchers drew on data from almost 6,000 adults who’d participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study between 1994 and 1996. These middle-aged participants had reported on their physical health, overall life satisfaction, relationships, and work status. They’d also provided information about their weight, chronic diseases, alcohol use, and smoking habits.

Finally, they reported on their sense of purpose by saying how much they agreed with statements like “I live life one day at a time and do not really think about the future”; “I sometimes feel as if I have done all there is to do in life”; or “Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.”

By using national databases, the researchers knew that 1,857 participants had died before 2022. So, by looking at all participants’ life-satisfaction and purpose-in-life ratings, the researchers could run some analyses to see if higher purpose and satisfaction were tied to living longer.

What they found was illuminating. Without considering any other factors, a person’s life satisfaction was not related directly to how long they lived. On the other hand, people who reported having a stronger purpose in life were more likely to be alive in 2023 than people who didn’t.

For Martela, this meant having purpose in life could be more relevant for your longevity than life satisfaction—which may be dependent on other things.

“You might think that there is a confounding variable to explain this, but life satisfaction wasn’t significant for longevity, while purpose in life was,” he says.

How purpose might extend life

To get at when purpose and life satisfaction may be relevant for influencing one’s longevity, Martela and his colleagues ran several additional analyses.

First, they considered a participant’s demographics—a combination of their age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, and more, all of which may affect mortality. For example, women and married people tend to live longer, while African Americans and less educated people tend to live shorter lives, in general.

They found that, no matter one’s overall demographics, purpose in life still mattered for longevity. They also found that people benefitted at all ages from both greater purpose and life satisfaction, though the oldest participants tended to benefit slightly more than younger participants from having purpose.

Next, his team considered a person’s health risks. Here, they found that, even if a person was at risk for an early death (from being a smoker or suffering from a chronic illness, for example), they lived longer if they had greater life satisfaction or purpose in life. The association was weaker, but still significant.

When they considered people’s own self-reported health, though, the relationship between having a purpose in life and longevity held, while the relationship between life satisfaction and longevity did not. This suggests your life satisfaction may be closely tied to how healthy you feel, says Martela.


“It’s hard to be satisfied with your life if you struggle with your health. So, whether your health is good or bad can have a significant impact on how satisfied you are with your life,” he says. “However, you can have a strong purpose, no matter your health status.”

In a final analysis, Martela and his colleagues tested how a person’s life satisfaction affected the role of purpose on longevity, and vice versa. They found that purpose was still important, no matter one’s life satisfaction—but life satisfaction wasn’t significant if someone had low levels of purpose. This supports the conclusion that purpose is more helpful than life satisfaction for extending one’s life.

Why would purpose in life affect longevity this way? Martela suggests that since purpose involves striving for something meaningful, it’s more active than life satisfaction, which is more of a passive assessment of one’s life situation. Additionally, he thinks purpose might be a kind of coping mechanism, allowing people to get through hard times better than life satisfaction.

That doesn’t mean having life satisfaction isn’t important to longevity at all, he says. But their research suggests that its importance may depend on other things, like your general health, ethnicity, gender, or health risk factors. Purpose in life, on the other hand, may be less dependent on these things, and so worth cultivating for its own sake.

Fortunately, there are ways to deliberately find one’s purpose, even in midlife. And, since we have these tools at our disposal, we should consider developing a sense of purpose at any age, says Martela.

“We should not only focus on life satisfaction but also think about questions related to purpose when we think about our lives,” he says. “A life of purpose can energize and give hope even during those moments when the conditions of one’s life leave one unsatisfied.”

While there might be many steps we can take to encourage connection, on both individual and societal levels, a big new study suggests there is one step anyone can take right now to blunt the pain of isolation: giving thanks.

Gratitude around the world

College of Charleston researchers James B. Hittner and Calvin D. Widholm collected 26 studies of gratitude and loneliness involving nearly 10,000 people around the world—from the U.S. to India to Portugal to Nigeria. Participants averaged 35 years old but largely ranged from college-aged to middle-aged adults. Then, Hittner and Widholm conducted a “meta-analysis” of all the studies together, which can provide stronger evidence for a finding than one study alone.

Their results suggest that grateful people tend to be less lonely—no matter their age, their gender, or whether they live in the U.S. or elsewhere. If someone was above average in gratitude, they had a 62% chance of being below average in loneliness.

So why would gratitude, a positive emotion where we recognize the benefits we receive from other people in our life, help us be less lonely?

This meta-analysis cannot prove that gratitude reduces loneliness rather than vice versa, because it’s only based on correlational surveys. But several other studies have found that gratitude practices like writing gratitude letters or simply saying thank you can lessen loneliness. And, to Hittner, this seems like the more likely explanation.

Loneliness, research suggests, is ultimately about how we perceive our relationships and whether they measure up to what we want. And “if one is grateful, then what that should be facilitating are richer, stronger social relationships,” says Hittner.

How gratitude alleviates loneliness

Why? If we’re gratitude-minded, we tend to be more tuned into the good things in our lives—so we’re more likely to notice when our partner makes us a cup of coffee in the morning, or a coworker goes out of their way to help us finish a report.

That’s important, because part of the hallmark of loneliness is a distorted way of thinking where we hone in on negative feedback from other people and worry that they are judging us. Rather than staying home and isolated, as the lonely sometimes do, gratitude may actually help us seek out the support we need.

Another explanation might be the way gratitude inspires us to action, starting with thanking the person who helped us—a gesture that can strengthen the relationship further. Or we might pay it forward and help someone else, which could bolster a completely different relationship.

More broadly, gratitude just feels good—and when we feel good, we are generally more open to the world, to new perspectives, and to new relationships. One study found that grateful people were more “psychologically flexible,” able to nimbly cope with adversity and act in service of their values and sense of meaning in life.

Hittner believes that this openness to taking in new ideas, meeting new people, and having new experiences is one good antidote to loneliness. He also suggests that anyone who is teaching or sharing gratitude practices might encourage people to focus their appreciation on relationships to get an extra anti-loneliness boost. And researchers who are testing gratitude practices should measure the benefits for loneliness, as well.

“Loneliness is such an important outcome, and it correlates with depression and anxiety,” says Hittner. Aiming your gratitude at other people could be a natural way to support your mental health.

Saying thank you is not a small thing. Getting thanked makes students feel valued and reinforces the kind and helpful things they do that they are being thanked for. And the act of causing someone to feel valued and happy makes students feel happier themselves. Research suggests that students who practice gratitude tend to have lower stress, anxiety, and depression and feel more satisfied with their life and relationships.

A school that makes thanking a regular practice can go a long way toward creating the kind of culture in which students and educators thrive. A number of schools in Hawaii are leading the way.

The GiveThx program

GiveThx is a nonprofit program I cofounded that strengthens student and educator mental health, belonging, and social-emotional skills using gratitude science. Born in Oakland, California, high schools as a way to increase belonging and mental health, the program is intentionally simple in the theory behind it: If a school builds a shared gratitude practice, then it can improve its culture, which leads to greater student and staff belonging and mental health, conditions that nurture personal and academic growth.

How does it work? First, a school defines the behaviors they expect from their community. For example, Lāna’i High & Elementary School in Hawaii drew upon a locally developed set of values they call TORCH (tenacious, observant, respectful, compassionate, honorable) and the Hawaiian Office of Education’s Nā Hopena A’o framework that articulates values and qualities of the indigenous language and culture. The set of behaviors they identified included akahai (kindness), kuleana (responsibility), and anhonui (patience).

Once those behaviors are identified, GiveThx allows school community members to write digital thank-you notes to each other related to those themes.

The goal is to both highlight and shape the school’s culture—the set of expected behaviors that governs how a group of people want to treat one another and themselves. If a school believes a behavior is worth thanking someone for, then the behavior can be considered a part of the school’s culture.

Culture determines a school’s climate, which can be thought of as how people feel. Culture is a root cause of mental health challenges like stress, anxiety, and disconnection because how we treat each other and ourselves has a huge impact on our well-being. Students who don’t feel like they belong, lack self-esteem, or feel unwelcome at school are at greater risk of chronic absenteeism and find their motivation to learn undermined. To make permanent shifts in school climate, to create a place where all students and staff have the mental health and belonging to support their personal and academic growth, an intentional, shared gratitude practice can help.

As another example, Hau’ula Elementary School on Oahu started their year focusing on lōkahi (connection). They defined what the behavior looked and sounded like as a staff and spent a month trying to thank 50 acts of lōkahi to build a shared understanding of the term and deepen connection as they started their work that year. Analysis of the thank-you notes helped refine how they defined lōkahi by surfacing examples that led people to thank each other for it. Principal U’ilani Kaitoku shared that that practice allowed the staff to “experience firsthand how our words and the intent behind them can renew, strengthen, and build positive relationships.”

Gratitude lessons for your school

Building a shared gratitude practice can have a profound impact on a school’s culture and the emotional health and belonging of students and staff. Educators looking to get started should consider a few recommendations.

1. Choose behaviors to appreciate. School leadership can start by analyzing what already guides the school and come up with a list of behaviors they feel complement and synthesize existing frameworks, culture, curriculum, or community values. You can finalize the list with staff, or even include students in the process.

For example, while a term like grit may resonate for one community when describing how they want their students to approach academics, another may find the term ganas a better fit. Terminology matters.

Be sure to include behaviors outside of academics or good behavior—not just effort or helping others. For example, patience is a non-academic behavior that nonetheless supports academic success and relationships. So are koa (courage) and mālama (caring).

Recognizing non-academic behaviors creates an environment where more students can see themselves as valued community members and develop a sense of belonging, increasing their well-being and desire to be at school. When asked about receiving notes, Julio*, a fifth-grade student at Sunset Beach Elementary School, said, “I love feeling that someone appreciates me for who I am.”

2. Talk about valued behaviors with students. In this process, it helps to define what the set of expected behaviors looks and sounds like in student-accessible language with students themselves.

Schools often start with a single behavior as the theme for a month, such as kuleana (responsibility). The staff first spend a few minutes at a staff meeting defining what the term looks and sounds like before facilitating the same activity with students. This can be surprisingly difficult to do. Naming things people would say or do that the group believes qualify as kuleana and not something else is hard. The effort, however, builds a more precise, inclusive, and shared understanding of what counts and what does not.

For example, do acts of kuleana only include things done at school? A student who did not do their homework for the next day because they were responsible for taking care of siblings while their parents worked would be excluded in a community that only values academic examples of responsibility.

Co-defining terms with students using examples and language they can understand and find culturally relevant and inclusive increases student buy-in, access, and opportunity to feel valued by the community. Stick the group definition of kuleana on the wall for the month, and you have a working set of criteria for everyone to calibrate around as they practice thanking others for the specific behavior when they see and hear it.

3. Make time for students to write private notes. When building a schoolwide gratitude practice, one strong recommendation is to emphasize written expression, using one-to-one thank-you notes. Doing so removes the audience, mitigating anxiety around public expression and helping youth navigate social boundaries more easily. As a sixth grader at Sunset Beach Elementary School on Oahu said about writing notes, “You can thank someone for something they did and no one else can see it.”

GiveThx recommends that teaching and non-teaching staff spend five minutes a week sending notes and writing reflections, while students spend five to 15 minutes doing the same, along with doing mini-lessons on gratitude science and best practices.

Identifying existing routines like staff meeting openers and student advisory periods that have dedicated time to integrate gratitude practice into is the key to making the practice sustainable. For example, some schools have a homeroom opener every “thankful Thursday.” You could also set a collective goal—to do something like thank 100 acts of responsibility together in a month.

Also, encourage the participation and the thanking of non-teaching staff like office staff, custodians, and cafeteria workers. Students often find supportive relationships with adults who aren’t their teachers at school. Facilitating this connection using gratitude strengthens the relationships and the support students feel from them. It also includes an often marginalized group of individuals, increasing their sense of belonging and well-being, which improves overall school climate.

If students seem isolated or don’t know who to thank, our lesson on direct and indirect benefits invites students to thank people they don’t know well by considering things those people do for the class instead of the students as individuals. You could also facilitate a gratitude wave practice, where all students take turns thanking a single student.

When fifth grader Julia* at Sunset Beach Elementary receives notes from others, it gives her the feeling that “I am not alone and I have friends that enjoy my company.” Sixth grader Julio* puts it another way, saying, “I feel very grateful when I receive a thanks note because it gives me a good feeling to be loved. It helps me make friends.”

Schools where staff and students share responsibility for their culture with regular gratitude practice have the opportunity to create a welcoming learning community defined by inclusion, belonging, and emotional health. Easy to overlook, a simple thank you can create the type of school climate where everyone can thrive.

*Students’ names have been changed

The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, was published October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“One of the hardest things for groups of people who face stigma, including previously incarcerated people, is that other Americans don’t perceive their experiences very accurately,” said Jamil Zaki, the paper’s senior author and a professor of psychology in the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. “One way to combat that lack of empathy for stigmatized groups of people is to get to know them. This is where media comes in, which has been used by psychologists for a long time as an intervention.”

Studying how narrative persuades

The paper incorporates Zaki’s earlier research on empathy with the scholarship of his coauthor, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who has studied the pernicious role of racial bias and prejudice in society for over three decades.

The idea for the study emerged from a conversation Eberhardt had with one of the executive producers of the film Just Mercy, which is ​​based on the book by the lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson’s book focuses on his efforts at the Equal Justice Initiative to overturn the sentence of Walter McMillian, a Black man from Alabama who in 1987 was sentenced to death for the murder of an 18-year-old white girl, despite overwhelming evidence showing his innocence. The film vividly portrays the systemic racism within the criminal justice system and illustrates how racial bias tragically impacts the lives of marginalized individuals and their families, particularly Black Americans, as they navigate a flawed legal system.

It was around the time of the movie’s release that Eberhardt, who is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, the William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business, and a faculty director of Stanford SPARQ, published her book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (Viking, 2019), which grapples with many of the same issues as Just Mercy.

On her book tour, she met with many different people, including one of Just Mercy’s executive producers. He approached her with a question originally posed to him by former U.S. president Barack Obama, who had recently watched the film at a private screening. Obama wondered whether watching it could change the way neurons fired in people’s brains.

“I told this producer we don’t have to sit and wonder—this is a question that we can answer through rigorous research,” said Eberhardt. “This paper is a first step in that direction.”

Eberhardt connected with Zaki, and together they designed a study to examine how Just Mercy might change how people think about people who have been pushed to the margins of society.

To measure how watching the film might shape a person’s empathy toward formerly incarcerated people, the researchers asked participants before and after they watched the movie to also watch a set of one- to three-minute-long videos that featured men who had been incarcerated in real life. Participants were asked to rate what they thought these men were feeling as they shared their life stories. These ratings were then measured against what the men actually told the researchers they felt when recounting their experiences.

Opening minds and hearts

The study found that after watching Just Mercy, participants were more empathic toward those who were formerly incarcerated than those in the control condition.

Their attitudes toward criminal justice reform were also swayed.

The researchers asked participants whether they would sign and share a petition that supported a federal law to restore voting rights to people with a criminal record. They found that people who watched Just Mercy were 7.66% more likely than participants in the control condition to sign a petition.

The study underscores the power of storytelling, Eberhardt said. “Narratives move people in ways that numbers don’t.”

In an early study Eberhardt coauthored, she found that citing statistics on racial disparities is not enough to lead people to take a closer look at systems—in fact, she found that presenting numbers alone can possibly backfire. For example, highlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system can lead people to be more punitive, not less, and to be more likely to support the punitive policies that help to create those disparities in the first place.

As Eberhardt and Zaki’s study has shown, what does change people’s minds are stories—a finding consistent with a previous study Zaki conducted that found how watching a live theater performance can impact how people perceive social and cultural issues in the U.S.

The psychologists also found that their intervention works regardless of the storyteller’s race, and it had the same effect regardless of people’s political orientation.

“When people experience detailed personal narratives, it opens their mind and heart to the people telling those narratives and to the groups from which those people come,” Zaki said.

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

Our challenge globally in this context is how to create the conditions where we can provide high-quality, compassionate care for patients and high-quality, compassionate support for health care staff.

This requires that we develop and sustain a culture of compassion throughout health care organizations. But this doesn’t only fall to individual health care professionals; it is the job of health care leaders and workplaces to spread and model compassion.

The power of compassion

Compassion is a powerful practice in health care, as evidenced by hundreds of studies internationally. When health care providers practice compassion, benefits include faster recovery for patients after surgery, longer lives for patients diagnosed with lung cancer, better outcomes in long-term disorders such as HIV and diabetes, and better results in the treatment of mental health problems. There are also significant associated cost savings. Moreover, being compassionate improves the well-being of health care staff, resulting in lower levels of anxiety, stress, and depression. When we are compassionate to others, both they and we benefit.

Beyond individual interactions with patients, though, there are also benefits when the cultures of health care organizations are compassionate.

Culture is a consequence of the behaviors of everyone in an organization—every interaction every day is an opportunity to shape the culture. But the role of leaders is particularly powerful. The last 100 years of research on organizational culture finds that leadership is the most important factor in shaping organizational culture. What leaders pay attention to and model in their behaviors shows what they value and by extension what employees should value.

International data, gathered over the last 20 years, find that compassionate leadership has wide-ranging benefits not only for patients but also for staff and organizations:

• Compassionate leadership makes staff more engaged and satisfied, resulting in better outcomes for organizations, including improved quality of patient care and financial performance.
• Compassionate leadership tends to go hand in hand with more effective management of organizational change, mitigating the negative effects on staff well-being and morale.
• People who work in supportive teams with compassionate team leadership and clear goals have dramatically less stress.
• In hospitals where staff report the absence of compassionate leadership, staff also report greater work overload, less influence over decision making, and less quality improvement.
• Staff who are treated with compassion are better able to direct their support and caregiving to others. This results in higher-quality care and more satisfied patients.
• Workplaces where staff generally report the absence of compassionate leadership tend to see less satisfied patients, poorer-quality care, and more avoidable patient deaths.

For example, Berkshire Health, a British health care organization focused on mental health, community health, and those with learning disabilities, has been retraining all its staff in compassionate leadership for the last five years. They now have the highest staff engagement and the lowest staff stress of any organization in the English National Health Service. The care they provide, and their financial performance, are both rated as outstanding by the national audit body.

Compassionate leadership in practice

How then do we create the conditions in health care organizations where staff will be (even more) compassionate to patients, each other, and themselves? In other words, how do we develop compassionate cultures?

Leaders in health care must recognize that compassion is the core work value (if not life value) of virtually all of those who work in health care. They are called to their professions by a desire to help alleviate the suffering of others. To the extent that leaders mirror this core value, those working in health care will be more engaged and less likely to quit, even in stressful working environments. So, leaders must embody the four behaviors of compassion in their leadership:

1. Attending: This means having the courage to be present with those we lead. Being present means being here and now and letting go of other distractions. Being present with those we lead enables the other element of attending: listening or listening with fascination. Compassionate leaders take time to listen to the challenges, obstacles, frustrations, and harms colleagues experience, as well as their successes and joys. This means listening (for example) to maternity staff telling you there are not enough qualified midwives in the maternity unit to deliver safe care for mothers and families. Attending provides a powerful base for the other three behaviors of compassionate leadership and is a prerequisite for understanding.
2. Understanding is having the courage as a leader to be curious and explore and understand the situations those we lead are struggling with. It implies valuing and exploring conflicting perspectives rather than simply imposing our own understanding, especially if from some remote, hierarchical position. For example, when health care staff are struggling to meet the targets imposed on them in relation to waiting times in the emergency room, leaders may need to understand how chronic work overload affects cognitive functioning, the ability to improve quality, and the capacity for helping others. Attending and understanding create the conditions for empathizing.
3. Empathizing involves mirroring and feeling colleagues’ distress, frustration, joy, and other emotions, without being overwhelmed by them and becoming unable to help. Virtually all of us as humans are hardwired to empathize—to put ourselves in the other’s position and feel with them. Leaders must have the courage to empathize, for example, with the nurse on her third 13-hour night shift in a row, who is exhausted and depleted. She has not had time to take her rest break, feels guilty because she could not spend sufficient time with an elderly patient in distress, and now feels afraid to drive home in her exhausted state. Empathizing as leaders gives us the motivation for the fourth, critical element of compassionate leadership: having the intention to help.
4. Helping or the intention to help is fundamental to compassionate leadership. Indeed, compassionate leadership can be understood as more a motivation than an emotional orientation—the motivation to help those we lead. Helping those we lead to do their jobs more effectively is the key task of leadership. This involves taking thoughtful and intelligent action to support individuals and teams by helping them ensure they have clear direction for their work; helping them to remove the obstacles that get in the way of doing their work effectively (like chronic excessive workloads, conflicts between departments, or unnecessary bureaucracy) and providing the resources, people, and services they need (like staff, equipment, and training).

The same four behaviors that constitute compassion underpin effective leadership because they are the basic human behaviors that enable us to connect with each other and build a sense of trust and belonging—an antidote to stress and loneliness for health care workers and leaders. And these are behaviors that can be practiced in all our interactions—not only in leadership contexts.

Start with self-compassion

One thing that can help leaders adopt these behaviors is having the courage to practice self-compassion. Where leaders practice self-compassion, those they lead go on to provide better-quality and more compassionate care to patients. Self-compassion is being present with ourselves—knowing when I am feeling overwhelmed, anxious, angry, hurt, ashamed, or inadequate. Self-compassion requires we accept rather than reject such feelings in order to cultivate curiosity about them and understand them. Rejecting or denying our feelings distances us from ourselves and therefore hinders our ability to connect authentically with others. Self-compassion is asking:

What am I feeling?
What do I need?
How can I get those needs met?

This is not narcissistic self-indulgence, but caring for ourselves in the same way we would care for a dear friend who was suffering. After all, each of us is as deserving of love as every other human being on the planet. When we connect deeply, courageously, authentically, and compassionately with ourselves, it enables us as leaders to connect more deeply, courageously, authentically, and compassionately with all of those we lead, indeed with all of those we interact with in our lives.

A movement toward compassion

In Wales, national leaders are convinced by the evidence and have committed to developing compassionate leadership across all of health and social care within 10 years, with the resources and supports to enable this. This includes compassionate leadership training, and compassionate systems, structures, policies, strategies, teamwork, and cultures. They, along with others such as the Irish Health Service Executive, are also working with the Global Compassion Coalition to support the development of compassionate leadership in health care worldwide. In fact, initiatives in many health care organizations around the world are combining to create a social movement for compassionate leadership in health care. Compassionate leadership is also a key element of the World Health Organization’s strategy for primary care.

Compassionate leadership is not some soft-cushions, scented-candles approach to leadership, however. Compassion involves leaning toward pain and difficulty. Compassionate leadership therefore involves leaning in to dealing with difficult behaviors (aggression, discrimination, harassment, poor performance) and doing so with compassion—attending, seeking to understand, empathizing, and helping, perhaps using coaching models and agreeing on clear objectives for behavior change with those involved. It involves having difficult conversations and giving clear and constructive negative feedback. It involves dealing openly and courageously with conflicts, particularly the damaging chronic conflicts that so jeopardize health care team effectiveness and thereby patient safety. Compassionate leadership requires courage and wisdom in equal measure to transform the cultures of health care organizations so that they can deliver better health care and outcomes for those they serve.

Compassionate leadership must be at the heart of local, regional, and national health care efforts to nurture cultures that provide high-quality, continually improving, and compassionate care for patients and staff. Leaders must have the courage to shift from traditional hierarchical leadership approaches to compassionate leadership. This requires a sustained shift in mindset and behaviors by leaders in health and care (and other public sectors) to deliver and sustain this culture change. For the sake of patients, service users, staff, and communities, such sustained courage and commitment to developing compassionate leadership is essential.

That’s the second question we posed to our circle of scholars, writers, and thinkers in the aftermath of the 2024 United States election. (The first question asked where we can go from here, and we published those answers yesterday.) Some find hope in potential common ground, others in their own communities and in points of resistance to the new president’s agenda. While not all those answers will resonate for you, our own hope is that they will spur you to look inside and ask yourself: What gives me the feeling that better things can come of this moment?

Annalee Newitz: Joy is a form of resistance

By 8 p.m. on election night, the backyard I share with my housemates was full of nerds and writers and artists and weirdos (complimentary) and engineers and archivists, plus some slightly feral teenagers who decided to make everyone meringues and walk around serving them as if our humble little gathering were a soiree at a museum. Instead of spending the night doomscrolling, I had decided to invite friends over to hang out and eat pizza.

This seemingly frivolous choice was based in part on research I’ve done over the past four years while I wrote Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

As adrienne maree brown argues in Pleasure Activism, sometimes joy is the greatest form of resistance. It’s also one way to cut through the violent manipulation of propaganda and form genuine relationships with each other.

Researchers who study disinformation online often refer to a strategy called “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” where a group of operatives—or one operative with a lot of bots—amplify lies across social platforms. The goal is to create the illusion of consensus, as if there is a whole chorus of people who agree that, say, trans people are “groomers,” or America’s history of slavery no longer matters in the present.

When I interviewed Alex Stamos, former head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, we talked a lot about his experiences tracking Russian propagandists who used this strategy on Facebook during the 2016 election. A great way to spread fake information is by using fake people. AI only makes this process easier.

It made me wonder: If disinformation thrives in an environment of coordinated inauthentic behavior, how do we create a dramatically different kind of media environment? In other words, what does uncoordinated authentic behavior look like? 

At my election night party, we talked about politics, but we also talked about our families, our cats, and what we’d been reading lately. We made plans to see each other again, to help each other with projects, and to loan each other books or movies we’d loved. 

The scene was disorganized and silly, but it was also a powerful example of authentic social connections forming through face-to-face encounters. Especially at a time when many of us are struggling to trust our neighbors and communities, it was a balm.

And that’s what gave me hope when I woke up to see that Trump had definitively won. Before we can take action and resist authoritarianism, we need models of a public sphere that isn’t rife with coercion and lies. And why shouldn’t a backyard party be one possible model? It’s a group chat that isn’t shaped by algorithms, polluted by AI mirages, or surveilled by a corporation.

This should be the horizon we stretch toward as we imagine new ways to communicate, online and off. The resistance starts in spaces where we can tell the truth about what is happening to us, without fear that our words will be stolen, mutated into someone else’s property or propaganda.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and science fiction author whose latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Arlie Hochschild: The common ground is there; we just need to unearth it

What makes me hopeful are the hidden empathy bridge builders I have met, many blue-collar men who live within Trump-dominated regions in the South and Appalachia where I least expected to find them. The ones I came to know were not trained or hired, or affiliated with any formal program, but in their personal lives. They invisibly contribute to the greater good.

In my new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right—based on field work in the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the nation—I met a man who had been a 12-year heroin addict, entered a recovery program in rural Pikeville, Kentucky; and became a counselor who took joy in helping other addicts recover. Then he attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, and there reached across the racial divide to Black addicts and made plans to get them to join him on rock-climbing expeditions. Another man, a minister and college teacher, reached across the political divide to conspiracy-minded far right ministers in the area.

The people I have met and interviewed during my seven years doing ethnographic research complicate the narrative of division in our country. If we look closely, we can find and build on surprising common ground. Climate change is a potential cross-partisan issue. Researchers at Yale, Stanford, and Monmouth Universities have found that nationwide, a majority of voters in both parties agree on many actions to mitigate it. Should the U.S. “set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public heath,” Yale asked, even if “the cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase?” Eighty-seven per cent of Democrats and 56% of Republicans answered “yes.” “Should the U.S. participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do?” A majority in both parties said “yes.”

A Pikeville-based, pro-Trump Republican businessman, now rejoicing in the recent election results, reminded me of yet more hidden common ground. He had long been pro-coal but added, as he drove me around the valley holler where he had been born and grew up, “I’m not a climate denier.” At one point, he pointed to a mountain flattened by mountain-top removal, saying, “I’d love to see solar panels and windmills on top of a lot of our mountains here.” In Republican West Virginia, more people now work in solar energy than in coal.

Many bridge builders are young, answering the call to actively “do” democracy—to reach across our class, regional, and partisan divides—instead of simply “live in” it. My own California-based granddaughter has been going door to door in Phoenix, Arizona, getting to know people of different views. And anyone learning to “do democracy” is adding to the greater good.


Arlie Hochschild’s latest book is Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rjse of the Right. Some of this response is adapted from her piece with David Hochschild, “More Republicans Than You Think Support Action on Climate Change” (New York Times, 2018).

Tami Pyfer: We’re creating a dignity movement

What gives me hope in the midst of the country’s difficult and divisive times is the positive response I’m seeing to our work at UNITE with the Dignity Index—and what that can mean for our country.

The Dignity Index is an 8-point scale that my colleagues Tom Rosshirt, Tim Shriver, and I designed and tested in Utah during the 2022 midterm elections, which rates the language we use when we disagree or in moments of conflict. We believe that contempt increases division, while dignity eases division, and so we created the Index to measure them. Levels ONE to FOUR reflect contempt: “Those people are ruining everything. Those people are evil.” The very bottom level of the scale is the language of political violence, when I am dehumanizing others.

The top four levels of the scale, FIVE to EIGHT, are the dignity levels of the scale, where even in disagreement you can say, “You know, they have a right to be here, too.” At a SIX, you start to look at the things you have in common and find ways to move from separating yourself from others to working together. At SEVEN, you’re able to say, “Maybe I made a mistake; maybe I was wrong. Let’s find out what we don’t agree on and let me learn from you.” And at the top level of the scale, we are able to see dignity in everyone.

What gives me hope is that most people don’t want to be part of creating or condoning a culture of division and contempt. People start to score others’ language and almost immediately and reflexively turn the scale on themselves—sometimes realizing that they are using contempt. Once they understand what the language of contempt looks like, they want to learn how to be part of the solution—changing the way they think about, speak to, and act toward others.

I’m inspired by the way the Dignity Index is being applied around the country. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has taken the Dignity Pledge and is working to bring the Dignity Index to public and higher education institutions in his state. A group of female elected officials in Utah has adopted the Dignity Index in their work as mayors, city councilwomen, and school board members. A college professor in Nevada has incorporated the Dignity Index in her college courses, and training on the Index is happening on other campuses in more than a dozen states. We’ve been asked to bring the Index to the workplace, from small businesses to global corporations.

We are creating a dignity movement! Once you learn to recognize dignity and contempt in your language, you can’t unlearn it. Dignity is a practice that can be applied in families, the workplace, in education, and in government and community organizations. It gives me hope and excitement because of the way it’s deeply impacting people who see the power of dignity to transform our relationships, and to ease divisions, prevent violence, and help us solve our problems.


Tami Pyfer is the VP external for Project UNITE, lead trainer, and co-creator of the Dignity Index.

Tania Israel: What gives me hope? You do!

I spent the months leading up to the election engaging with Americans across the political spectrum. I listened to them from the stage, in bars, on the phone, and at their front doors. I heard from people who are happily married across political parties, who are reaching out to repair relationships strained by differing views, who appreciate their neighbors despite contrasting yard signs. What I glean from these conversations is that Americans are more thoughtful, complex, and caring than we imagine them to be.
 
My anecdotal experiences may not convince you, especially if you’ve been consuming news and social media coverage of ignorant, hostile extremists. Fortunately, I have research on my side. Consider the following evidence.
 
We have more in common than we realize:

• Two-thirds of Americans do not fall into either end of the political spectrum. This “exhausted majority” is tired of division, recognizes complexity of issues, and supports compromise.
• Our negative feelings about people on “the other side” are fueled by misperceptions. We overestimate the distance between our views, the demographic differences between party members, the willingness of people in the other party to circumvent democratic norms, their support for political violence, and the dislike and dehumanization they feel toward us.
• Americans share core values, such as service, patriotism, and bipartisanship. We agree on government accountability and representation, as well as protecting Constitutional liberties and fair application of laws. Furthermore, we all desire free and fair elections, support equal rights, and do not want government officials to abuse their power.

 
Americans are taking action to combat division:

• 500+ organizations are engaged in the bridging movement. Through innovation and dedication, they are working to strengthen social cohesion and our democracy. You can learn more and join the movement by signing the Listen First Pledge.
• Although social media can amplify conflict, 53% of Americans across political affiliations have changed the way they use social media in order to be less divisive and more constructive.
• Researchers are creating and testing ways to reduce division. In a megastudy of brief, online interventions, 23 of 25 reduced partisan animosity. Some also reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence. Correcting misperceptions about the other side was an effective approach.

 
To be sure, this is not the whole story. There are, indeed, people who are misinformed, aggressive, and corrupt. But most of us are not. Most of us are tired of division. Most of us reject violence. Most of us strive for our families to be healthy, our communities to be safe, our lives to feel meaningful.
 
What gives me hope? You do! I trust that you can incorporate the information above to correct your misperceptions of people across the political divide. I know that you can see beyond a T-shirt or a hat to discover three-dimensional humans sporting slogans. I believe in your ability to cultivate curiosity and compassion that will help you broaden your mind and open your heart. I recognize your potential to envision and embody a resilient, connected America. And that gives me hope.

Tania Israel, Ph.D., is a professor of counseling psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and award-winning author of Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide (APA, 2020) and Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation (Greenleaf, 2024)

Mónica Guzmán: These three hopeful things dwarf my fear

I have fear for the overall health of our society and our country. But my hope has dwarfed my fear.

My hope stems from my work, which places me in many politically mixed rooms and makes me look through lenses informed by that. Borne out by research, these three things in particular give me hope.

First, research tells us we’re not as divided as we think on most issues. Our political climate is rife with misperceptions and exaggerations that, as soon as you get a little closer, you realize are just not real. We have enormous capacity as humans to understand each other, if we allow ourselves to break out of the cycle where we judge each other more and engage with each other less.

I see lots of evidence that there is more exhaustion and awareness of the fact that when we only surround ourselves with people who share our instincts, we also then share their blind spots. People are tired of myopia. The key perception gap study in 2019, which has been replicated in many ways, shows that when people on either side of the political divide look at the other, they assume that people hold more extreme views than they actually do. We get each other wrong. For example, when Democrats are asked how many Republicans believe that properly controlled immigration is good for the country, they think about half of Republicans believe that, but it’s actually 85%.

Secondly, another study last year showed that people consistently underestimate how enjoyable conversations that could include disagreement can be. They keep thinking it’s going to be horrible and painful. When they actually do it, often they say, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad. We actually laughed and I kind of liked it?” We forget that disagreement can be fun.

Thirdly, our politicians who are rolling up their sleeves and doing the real work give me hope. There are lots of politicians who are work horses, not show horses. But it’s the show horses taking all the attention and the work horses getting lost in obscurity. The organization Starts With Us did a well-conducted survey about how the media tends to over-amplify the extremes and ignore a lot of great stuff in the middle.

If you look closely at the reality, you see Governor Spencer Cox, who was the chair of the National Governors Association from 2023 to 2024, a huge working group of governors. Each chair of the association gets to decide what initiative they want to focus their term on, and Cox led a national campaign called Disagree Better. He got lots of elected officials to make ads for local and national TV on how they’ve worked together to do something concrete in their communities. We talked about this and more research that gives me hope on my podcast, A Braver Way, with American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Yuval Levin and Washington Post columnist Amanda Ripley.

Mónica Guzmán is senior fellow at Braver Angels, the host of A Braver Way podcast, and author of I Never Thought Of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

Marc Freedman and Eunice Lin Nichols: Intergenerational collaboration is a short bridge to hope

Americans are living in the most age-diverse society in human history, with a quarter of the population under 20, a quarter over 60, and the rest in between. At the same time, we’re arguably the most age-segregated nation in history. Our institutions, infrastructure, and policies are literally designed to separate us—often for the sake of efficiency—with young people in schools, middle-aged people in workplaces, and older adults in senior centers, retirement communities, and nursing homes. 

This segregation could spell disaster, and many think it will. But we both began our careers as young people dedicated to collaborating with elders. These intergenerational interactions transformed our thinking, our work, our friendships, and our lives. It’s why we can’t help but see hope in all the ways people bridge the generation gap every day. 

In fact, vast majorities of Americans of all ages agree with us. They believe intergenerational collaboration—“cogeneration”—will help us better solve our problems and reduce divisions in our society. This bit of good news comes from a nationally representative survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. But that’s not the most interesting part of the survey. 

It turns out the greatest interest in intergenerational collaboration comes from young people, and Black and Hispanic people of all ages. In fact, Gen Z respondents were nearly twice as likely to be motivated by the opportunity to work across generations as members of the Baby Boomer and Silent generations. In these divisive times, the deep passion on the part of young people to work cogenerationally gives us great hope for the future.

We see hope in Citizen University’s Youth Collaboratory, a program that equips high schoolers to build civic power for the greater good. These young civic leaders told us they’re eager to work across generations for change. Sure, they see obstacles—unintentional tokenism, too few opportunities to collaborate, and not enough time to build relationships and trust—but they’re committed to working together to overcome these challenges and get things done.

We love the way Stoop Stories, a New York City organization, uses documentary film to tell stories of older and younger neighbors getting to know one another. At a time when the two age groups are increasingly lonely and isolated, it’s a way to capture and inspire intergenerational connection and strengthen community, too.

We’re encouraged by organizations like Third Act, a national nonprofit launched cogenerationally by environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben and climate activist Vanessa Arcara to organize Americans over 60 to work with younger generations to “safeguard our climate and democracy.” 

Of all the things that divide us, we believe intergenerational connection is the ultimate “short bridge,” in the words of UC Berkeley professor john a. powell. Crossing it brings opportunities to transcend the more difficult divides of race, culture, and politics.  

We are convinced that a rising generation of young Americans will work side by side with older people to co-create a better world. Together, we’re ready to make the most of our increasingly multigenerational future.

Marc Freedman and Eunice Lin Nichols are co-CEOs of CoGenerate, a nonprofit working to bridge generational divides.

Niobe Way: Humans are born to care and connect

As a society, we have a crisis of connection—but my hope comes from knowing we’re born with the ability to solve this problem.

Since 1988, I’ve been doing research on social-emotional development with young people ages 12 to 19 of many different identities: boys, girls, non-gender-conforming, Black, white. If you listen to boys ages 12 to 14, they’re very clear about wanting deep, emotionally connected friendships—to not be laughed at when they feel vulnerable, to not just play football or video games with someone. Sometimes they have those friendships; sometimes they don’t. But this very strong desire for deeply connected relationships is consistent across race, ethnicity, and social class.

A few years later, why do late teen boys start to distance themselves from the relationships they need for their mental health? The masculine ideology in our culture that privileges everything we’ve deemed masculine over everything we’ve deemed feminine: like self, autonomy, and stoicism over sensitivity and relational intelligence. The culture perpetuates a cartoon character of boys that isn’t based on what real boys want and need, creating mental health problems, suicide, violence, mass shooters.

But boys teach us something very important: that we have natural capacities to build meaningful relationships with each other and with ourselves. Young boys remind us of our natural relational intelligence: the capacity to listen with curiosity, ask questions, and try to understand somebody else’s thoughts and feelings in a deep, meaningful way.

For example, if you listen to boys, they talk about how they sometimes cover over their feelings and look mad, but they’re not mad; they’re just sad. I’ve heard many boys ask their moms, “Why do you smile when you’re feeling sad?” They can look at another human and understand that there is a complex emotional world underneath the person in front of them, and they understand the complexity of their own internal worlds.

These relational questions we ask each other are so important, beyond just helping individuals feel connected. Once you ask a question, you cannot hold on to a stereotype. When you hear an answer, you begin to see yourself in the other, and that’s what we mean by common humanity.

I feel hopeful because it’s easy to change the culture. We’re changing culture all the time. We don’t have to teach boys or anyone else these skills; they’re born with them, and we just have to nourish them.

There’s such an urgency now, and young people are getting louder about what they want and need. I have hope that they will help us change the culture. If we can hear what they’re teaching us and then act on it, we’ll be able to get where we want to go.

Niobe Way, Ed.D./Ph.D., is a professor of development psychology at NYU who’s been studying social-emotional development among adolescents for almost 40 years, and author of Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.

That’s the question we put to a range of scholars, writers, and thinkers whose perspectives we deeply respect here at the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center—and here are their answers. As you’ll see, most of them emphasize striving to be our best selves even in the face of division and adversity, and trying as much as possible to take the long view. Tomorrow, a different set of contributors will be tackling a second question: What is giving you hope right now for the future of our society in the aftermath of the election? While not all of their ideas will resonate with you, our own hope is this dialogue will help all of us find a way forward.

Eboo Patel: Keep doing what matters to you and the world

I’ve been hearing dozens, maybe hundreds, of people tell me what a catastrophe it will be if this candidate wins or that candidate wins the presidency—“a death spiral of democracy” is the phrase I frequently hear.

At first, I felt like my role was to convince people that there was not going to be a catastrophe—that there was not going to be a death spiral of democracy—and I’d try to share some sociological wisdom. I’d tell them about the strength of our institutions, the long history of our nation, and so on.

But then I stopped and realized that what matters now is not sociological wisdom but spiritual wisdom.

I remembered the story of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was tending his garden one day when someone walked by and asked, “What would you do if you knew the world was going to end before sunset?” He replied, “I’d continue tending my garden.” There is a similar hadith of the Prophet Muhammad: Even if you know the world is going to end, plant the seedling in your hand. I imagine that the deep spiritual wisdom of these two stories is also found in Judaism and Hinduism and Buddhism and other faith traditions.

What these stories boil down to is this: What you are doing is sacred, and it makes a difference. Even if the world is going to end, the wisdom of the sages says to keep doing your meaningful work because in that work is part of the saving grace of humanity.

I believe that whichever candidate has won, we’re not looking at the death spiral of democracy, in part because so many people in America will keep doing meaningful things that add up to a strong democracy. They’ll keep showing up at the food bank. They’ll keep coaching Little League. They’ll keep mentoring kids. In each of those small acts, I think, is the work of democracy. That’s the work of civilization. That’s the work of grace.

Something you are doing is meaningful. It may seem very small, but don’t let that dissuade you from recognizing how meaningful it is. I believe that is the message Saint Francis and the prophet Muhammad have for all of us.

In the weeks and months after the election, there will be time for strategizing and sociologizing. But I think in the immediate aftermath, I would recommend that your first reflection be a spiritual reflection: What am I doing that is meaningful to me and to others—no matter how small or mundane—that I want to continue doing?

Eboo Patel, Ph.D., is the founder and president of Interfaith America and an author, speaker, and civic leader who believes that religious diversity is an essential and inspiring dimension of American democracy. 

Scott Shigeoka: Practice curiosity as an act of love

Fear and hate come up for many of us in the wake of an election cycle. Not only do these negative emotions threaten our well-being and relationships, they can sometimes put us down the path of othering or dehumanizing people—even our loved ones—because they voted in a different way than we did.

This doesn’t just happen on social media or at political rallies; it can hit a lot closer to home, too. At a family dinner last week, a friend told me, her siblings yelled expletives and hateful slurs at each other because of their differing views on politics. They are no longer talking to one another, even though they’ve shared decades of deep love.

We must practice curiosity if we want to transform our fear and hate. Thankfully, this is a trait that we are all born with—the desire to understand others more deeply. When we are curious, we are more engaged and flexible when considering others’ diverse perspectives, and we’re better able to see people as unique humans, which makes us feel less threatened by our differences. It’s no wonder curiosity plays a critical role in promoting our well-being.

Curiosity doesn’t mean agreeing with views that clash with your own, but it does mean challenging the assumptions you have about people who hold those views. What that looks like in practice is coming from a place of genuine questioning devoid of judgment, and asking for firsthand experiences: What personal stories in your life contributed to the formation of your views? You can also interrupt your prejudice by, believe it or not, imagining whether another person prefers broccoli or carrots. This helps you see that person as an individual, appreciating that they have unique tastes and preferences, rather than seeing them strictly in terms of their group identities.

While we can simultaneously be curious and hold someone accountable for their wrongdoings, we should never strip away their dignity in the process.

This all explains why, after years of exploration and digging into the research, the best idea I have seen about how we can love better is for us to practice curiosity. Whether it’s our family, friends, colleagues, or even a stranger we disagree with, practicing this vital skill transforms our fear and hate into something much more productive. It invites us to turn toward someone and say: I want to understand you more. Tell me about yourself. I’m genuinely curious about you not because I want to change you, but because I want to see you in your full humanity, to care about you, to love you.

Scott Shigeoka is the author of Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World and the Bridging Differences fellow for the Greater Good Science Center.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Work to promote your values in community

After almost two decades of following and reporting on the science of a meaningful life, I don’t believe that building a more inclusive, cohesive, and compassionate society is primarily a personal or interpersonal task.

Which is not to say that individual-level change is a waste of time—it is absolutely worthwhile. Cultivating traits and behaviors like empathy, trust, humility, and gratitude are the work of our lifetime, and that work matters to ourselves and the people around us. But based on a combination of research and life experience, I don’t believe that personal change translates into the kind of social change America needs.

For many of us, it will be tempting right now to turn inward in a self-centered way, indulge continuous distraction, or in our grief embrace a very dark vision of humanity. That is exactly what we must not do.

And so the first step, I think, toward building “a more inclusive, cohesive, and compassionate society” is to remind ourselves of our core values and re-commit to them, preferably in a community context—and then support each other in upholding those values, and then work together to spread them and translate them into public policy.

That’s going to take a long, long time, and there will be many defeats along the way, as there always have been. When Trump was elected in 2016, I wrote a letter to my then-12-year-old son. These words were true for me back then—and they’re still true for me now:

I hope that you will try to be part of the good, always, as much as possible. Learn to talk with people, to ask questions, to listen, to build bridges between different kinds of people and help them to work together. This is something you can do no matter what jobs you take. You can speak up against fear and hatred, and try to build bridges with people, wherever you are, in whatever work you decide to do. This is about who you are and who you want to be.

This is work that involves a lot of failure. Believe me, son: There are times when you will fail, when you’ll be defeated. I have failed, I have been defeated.

Last night, we were defeated. So what are we going to do with that? We’ll do what we have to do: try to learn from our mistakes and try again. And we’ll keep trying to cultivate curiosity, love, kindness, gratitude, and forgiveness, when everyone else seems filled with hatred and fear.

I love you, and we’re going to be fine. Let’s talk about what you and me can do together to make this world a better place.

Love,
Dad

Jeremy Adam Smith is the editor of Greater Good magazine.

Mylien Duong: Get to know other humans

For almost four years now, my daily work at the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI) has been devoted to helping people complicate their image of “the other.” And as part of that work, I’ve engaged across political divides myself. I’ve talked with people who disagree with me about the role of race in America; the purpose of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; legal rights and restrictions for trans youth; and the morality of early-term abortion. I’ve had these conversations with complete strangers from the opposing political party. 

Gradually, over the course of these conversations, something began to shift for me. The sense of “the other” dissipated and was replaced by real people with real lives: Stephanie, a single mom of three from Pennsylvania. Vince, a retired corporate lawyer with great restaurant recommendations. Daniella, with the goofy golden retriever. For the first time in my life, I understood why “the other side” thought and voted the way they did. I learned that, no, these individuals were not driven by hate or misinformation. I found that, for the most part, people wanted what was best for their families.

These realizations aside, I still think our democracy needs reform. Campaigns rely too much on outrage, parties are too often at gridlock, and there’s not enough progress on agenda items that the majority of Americans do agree on. On this point, I’ve found agreement across the political spectrum. This election season, I’m part of a group of 20 or so Americans organized by Bridging the Gap founder Simon Greer. We are liberal, conservative, and everywhere in between. We meet every week on Zoom to discuss the election and the contentious issues on the ballot. We have some vehement disagreements. The one thing we all agree on? We’re tired of demonization, and we think the national discourse is too often dominated by extreme views.

By nature, elections are divisive. Some Americans will feel exuberant or relieved; others will be angry and dejected. Rather than relying on the media narrative of what the “other party” is really like, perhaps ask yourself: How many Republicans and Democrats do you really know? And if it turns out, as it did for me, that you have almost no meaningful contact with people of the opposing party, there are incredible organizations that can help you to bridge that gap.

Political reforms are critical, but we also need to build an electorate that sees the problem in the system, not in their fellow citizens. 

Mylien Duong, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and senior director of research and innovation at the Constructive Dialogue Institute, a nonprofit devoted to equipping the next generation of Americans with the mindsets and skillsets to bridge divides. 

Linda R. Tropp: Be a good neighbor, even (and especially) to those who are different

The 2024 U.S. presidential election has been one of the most contentious and consequential elections of our lifetimes. So, if you’ve felt anxious and stressed about the election, like me and many other Americans, know you are not alone: More than two-thirds of Americans report that the 2024 presidential election has been a significant source of stress, with more than 7 in 10 expressing concerns about the future of our nation.

With so much emphasis on the high stakes of this election, it can be all too easy for us to forget, or inadvertently abdicate, our own roles and obligations to each other as neighbors and fellow citizens. Here, I don’t mean the responsibilities we have to others in a legal sense, or to the formal institutions that keep our country running. Rather, I mean for us to reflect on who we want to be, and how we want to be, as we live and engage with others in our local communities.

Perhaps I’m simply invoking my Midwestern roots here, but I believe most Americans not only want to have good neighbors, but to be good neighbors. As our society has grown more divided and diverse, we are increasingly called upon to engage with people who differ from us in some ways. Bridging differences, then, involves the daily practice of being neighborly, regardless of who those neighbors happen to be.

Unfortunately, though, when we consider bridging differences, we can often get trapped by fear and threat in relation to people whom we see as different from us—in terms of their racial or ethnic backgrounds, the languages they speak, the religions they practice, or the nations from which they come. In turn, when we feel fearful and threatened, we lean toward avoidance, and we may even act in less welcoming ways toward those whom we see as different.

For me, a big question is: Is this how we want to live? As an alternative, we can be inspired by the writings of Brené Brown and consider what “we” could be if our best selves showed up. And I would add: How can we create communities where we enact our best selves? 

In practice, this will likely mean acting in neighborly ways to create more neighborly communities, even (and especially) when our neighbors appear to be different from us in some ways. We can learn to override our initial instincts toward avoidance to cultivate new habits. We can choose to become the vessels of goodwill we would like to see and experience in our communities through making friendly eye contact, smiling and saying hello as we walk down the sidewalk, or striking up a conversation with someone different. We can get involved by working together with others to address local challenges and achieve shared goals, to make our communities better places to live for everyone.

James Clear describes creating new habits in the following way: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. May we apply this insight toward cultivating habits that help us to become the neighbors we wish to be, and to create the communities in which we wish to live.

Linda R. Tropp, Ph.D., is professor of social psychology and faculty associate in public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as coauthor of When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact and Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups.

Manu Meel: Choose nuance, not outrage

Here are four concrete steps that we can take toward a better and more pluralistic society in the wake of the election.

One, accept the outcome no matter who wins.

Second, and more importantly, we can’t treat our colleagues or neighbors, especially those we disagree with, as our enemy. We live in a very polarized time, where we conflate disagreement with a fundamental difference in values. But, in fact, if we reach out to the people we most disagree with, we’ll find that their lived experiences, their compassion, and their general understanding can help us craft a common ground to understand each other. This is the most important thing after the election: to reach out to the people we disagree with and establish a level of understanding, not with the purpose of compromise or agreement, but for the purpose of understanding why.

If we do this, we can take a huge step toward stitching our civic fabric together, which actually absorbs people who have different ideas and values. If we really want to make the most of our diversity, we have to meet people who are different from us. Not with rage, but with nuance and understanding; that’s the only way we go forward.

Third, we need to engage with information that is based on sourced materials. We forget that when we are engaged in dialogue and discussion, we are often referencing the opinions of political pundits when we should be referencing our understanding of the facts and who we are as people.

Finally, we live in the outrage industrial complex, where outrage sells and nuance doesn’t. We love to interact and share outrageous takes, instead of nuanced takes. So on social media, especially in the immediate aftermath of the election, we should be very focused on rewarding productive, nuanced disagreement, productive conflict, and productive conversation. The algorithms are going to boost what we interact with, but we control what we interact with, and we have the power to dominate the conversation with nuance and understanding.

Manu Meel is co-founder and CEO of BridgeUSA.

Carol Graham: Become a nation of debaters

The first and essential step we can take now is to come together more as a society to speak with each other and not at each other, trying to listen and understand the other side. We need to think about peacefully constructing new ways of organizing and discussing, and part of it has to start in youth.

We no longer have debating teams in high schools. But a good debater is an example of a good citizen. You do not win a debate if you don’t know what the other side is saying. You need to listen to them and have an explanation for why you think they’re right or wrong.

At a certain level, we have to become a nation of debaters who listen to each other. If you want to make a case for a certain strategy or policy or social change, you need to take the points and the opinions and where people are coming from on the other side into account.

In this endeavor, an active role for civil society is important. By civil society, I mean private citizens, NGOs, community organizations, and other organizations that bring people together for discussions, social interactions, and even peaceful protests.

People tend to be much less divided at the local and community level than they are in big national political debates. In these arenas, people often accept that they share more than they disagree on. We can start in places where we are less divided and show that we can work across the aisle and achieve some consensus and forward progress.

President Trump is going to have to contend with the other half of the country. You can’t govern and leave half the country behind; it just doesn’t work. The only way we’re going to make progress is to accept that a victory does not mean, well, this half won and that half lost.

It’s challenging, and there’s no magic bullet. We wouldn’t have had an election like this if we were united and in good shape as a country. Accepting that it won’t be easy—and it will require some humility on both sides—is probably a start.

Carol Graham, Ph.D., is a senior fellow in economics at Brookings, College Park Professor at University of Maryland, and a Gallup senior scientist.

Kurt Gray: Tell your story

In our divided society, we’re often tempted to win people over with facts and statistics that support our side. But this rarely works to persuade others or bridge divides. With statistics supporting every position, we’ve grown skeptical, dismissing them as “fake facts” or “fake news.”
 
That’s why, to better bridge divides, we need to share personal stories instead of facts. 

There is something uniquely powerful about storytelling. Our minds evolved telling stories around the campfire; we read fiction to immerse ourselves in the stories of others—they have a truth beyond a mere statistic. So sharing with people the personal experiences that explain your political convictions—especially your stories of suffering—goes a long way toward helping people understand where you’re coming from.

People dismissively shake their heads when someone on the other side recites the statistics behind their position on guns or abortion. But they nod along when that person explains how a loved one was hurt in a mass shooting or suffered from an abortion or an unwanted pregnancy.

As a moral psychologist, I’ve seen how stories can create understanding in my research. In every study we’ve run, people get more respect from others when they share experiences of harm, rather than trying to convince with facts—in part because they help people seem more rational. We all understand the reasonableness of trying to protect oneself from harm. Even if you believe that handguns are generally dangerous, you can appreciate the gun-rights position of someone who has used a gun in self-defense.

Stories are the most powerful when they revolve around suffering, because pain, worry, and fear are experiences all humans have in common. These stories of vulnerability help bridge the gap between minds: We might recognize—in the abstract—that other people can feel like we do, but hearing their concrete experiences of harm allows our imaginations to resonate with their inner life.

Telling your story—and listening to the stories of other people—can be hard advice to follow because our society is so politically segregated. So where can we start? First, before you venture out into a new place, be prepared: Know that just deploying facts isn’t going to change anyone’s mind or help you connect with people who don’t share your background or perspective—you are just going to be wasting your time. On social media, you can stop sharing facts and statistics to try to convince other people—that is not productive. Instead, you can share your story and firsthand experiences. And in any circumstance, remember that your goal shouldn’t be to win an argument—because no one ever really “wins.” Instead, you should strive to build understanding and share more of yourself.

Kurt Gray, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina and author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.

Kayla DeMonte: Invite people in

While we don’t know how the next four years will ultimately unfold, we know one thing for sure: For many of us, the last several months have sharpened a feeling of being disrespected and misunderstood by half of our fellow Americans.

Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the presidential election, the fact is that our democracy depends on an electorate who trusts each other to act in service of the common good. And even for those who believe we need to entirely rebuild our current systems, whatever comes next will involve all of us—those you feel aligned with and those you don’t.

Several civic thinkers have recently reflected that, for many people, a sense of social connection is ultimately more of a motivator than political ideology. That while, of course, we remain guided by our beliefs and values, one of the deepest human needs is to be part of a group—to not feel on the outs of our community. I heard it summed up best on Mónica Guzmán’s podcast, A Braver Way: “The fear of social death can feel greater than that of physical death.”

We are tribal not because it is our nature to hate one another, but because it is our nature to seek love from one another. Our progress as a country is dependent on us finding ways to tap into this need in a way that helps us move forward. We cannot “policy” our way out of this problem. It is a culture problem. And that gives me hope. Because it’s not up to a single candidate to solve it. We can do it. And we must do it.

Here’s one place to start: Find a way to help people feel valued, invited, and respected in civic life. If you are in a role where you steward or influence others in some way, fantastic. You have power to make this happen. And even if you are not, you can take on this role. Anyone can do this. Whatever the next civic event or gathering or opportunity is that you plan to attend—whether it’s a town hall put on by your city councilmember, a workshop at the library, or a volunteer clean-up at your neighborhood park—INVITE others to join you. People you don’t normally engage with in these settings. Ask for their opinions. Show them that their participation is valuable and important. Reflect together. Repeat.

A culture where more of us feel welcomed and appreciated as members of civic life is not the answer to all of our problems, but it will be the foundation for solving them.

Kayla DeMonte is the chief program officer at Citizen University, a national organization working to build a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship across the U.S.

I never thought about this question before the 2024 Olympic Games. I was so impressed by track-and-field sprinter Noah Lyles, who appeared to be his own personal hype-man. He clinched the gold in the men’s 100 and 200 meters at the 2023 World Championships, which only four other sprinters have ever done.

In June on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Lyles shared his Olympic ambition to win four gold medals, which no one had ever done before: “Everybody knows Usain Bolt. . . . Yeah, I want to be faster than that. . . . Now you’re going on to Mount Rushmore, now you’re the greatest of the great.”

Bold words, but I loved it! I was inspired by his work ethic. Many people, however, were rooting against his success at the Olympics, as suggested by social media comments like “I love team USA but I can’t stand this guy” and “Praying he loses so he will be quiet.”

Sports is not the only arena where this backlash occurs, but it provides an interesting space to explore the question of why publicly confident people can generate mixed reactions. Not only can success in sports be objectively measured in times, touchdowns, points, batting averages, scores, goals, blocks, etc., it’s also an industry where confidence is encouraged because of its link to athletic performance, potential to intimidate the competition, and of course sheer entertainment value.

So what dictates too little, just enough, or too much confidence? When does it motivate us, and when do we feel the need to hate on people who are publicly confident? Perhaps the answer to this Goldilocks conundrum has more to do with us than them.

Comparing ourselves to others

We develop our identity (who we are) and self-concept (what we believe about ourselves) through various processes, one of which is social comparison. Social comparisons involve evaluating and judging ourselves in relation to both known and unknown others. It’s a habitual and automatic process that largely operates at the subconscious level.

What we are cognizant of at the conscious level are the emotional effects of that comparison. The emotional effects can vary depending on if it’s an upward comparison, where we perceive the person to be better off than us, or a downward comparison, where we perceive ourselves to be better off. While not always, upward comparisons tend to elicit negative emotions (frustration, envy, discouragement) and downward comparisons more positive emotions (gratitude, hope, happiness).

Hearing an athlete speak confidently about their past or predicted future success would likely trigger an upward social comparison. For upward comparisons, psychologists suggest there are three common responses: inspiration, benign envy, and malicious envy.

Inspiration is when you view the person’s success as positive and motivating for your own personal circumstances. In contrast, feelings of benign envy may start out as frustration, but produce a similar impact as inspiration, motivating you to reach a comparable level of achievement as the person. Malicious envy, on the other hand, never moves past the negative emotions and can play out as an attempt to lessen the status of the other person through criticism, condemnation, or denigration. Australians refer to it as “tall poppy syndrome,” where people are attacked for their success and achievements, essentially cutting down the tall poppy.

One form of envy encourages us to rise to the level of the upward comparison, while the other compels us to cut them down, but both involve an effort to protect our own self-concept.

Consider how we respond to underdogs. Oh, how we love a classic underdog story! The plight of someone defying the odds stacked against them, determined to be successful. While underdogs in sports may be far superior athletes to us, they elicit emotional responses similar to downward comparisons, like hope and sympathy. This happens largely because many of us identify with underdogs, recalling when the odds were stacked against us at one point or another in our lives. Symbolically, underdogs represent our belief or hope in a meritocracy.

But what happens to public opinion when our underdog becomes a top dog? There are many examples of this in sports. Take Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, who has as classic an underdog story as any. He was born into a working-class family, where his mother worked seven days a week as a cleaner and a cook to buy soccer shoes for him as a kid. When he was 15, he was diagnosed with a potentially career-ending heart condition. Ronaldo was a public darling when he was signed to Manchester United in 2003, but as his competence, career, and confidence grew, public opinion shifted for some. An analysis of Premier League players who received the greatest number of abusive tweets between August 2021 and January 2022 found that Ronaldo topped the list with a whopping 12,520!

Motivate or “hate”

So what determines which path we take when faced with upward comparisons?

One factor has to do with our perception of how much control we have over our lives, or our self-efficacy: our belief in our capacity to meet our goals. There are many factors that influence our self-efficacy—for example, experiencing success and failure as a child or adult, having or not having supportive people in our networks who encourage us, and seeing or not seeing people similar to us succeed.

I mentioned that I was inspired by Lyles. To be clear, I will never be able to run as fast as him, even if a locomotive engine was pushing me, but I can run my own race, within the lane of my profession, and strive for excellence. That was what he sparked for me, as did so many other Olympic athletes. I’m also someone who has a high level of self-efficacy. As opposed to negative feelings, when I heard him speak confidently about his intentions, I was inspired.

For benign envy, although we may not like someone’s success, when we feel we can control our own destiny, we are more likely to be motivated to level up. But we are at risk of choosing the path of malicious envy when we feel we have less control over our life outcomes.

The other factor affecting our response has to do with how we see the other person: our beliefs about how much they deserve their success. When we feel that the person deserves the success, even if it’s frustrating to us, we are more likely to be motivated by it than to try to cut them down.

It can’t be overlooked that deservingness is at play in criticism of successful people who seem to have benefitted from privilege to get to where they are. This has been a longtime point of contention with Division I college athletes, for example, who not only get the best athletic training, coaching, and resources in college, but also (for some) made it there thanks to costly private schools and club teams in high school, a double layer of privilege. Indeed, data collected by The Flat Hat, a College of William & Mary student publication, highlighted that on average athletes at the College came from “more socioeconomically privileged backgrounds” than non-athlete students.

However, other times, perceptions of deservingness are really about bias. For example, Black male athletes in general are stereotyped as being more arrogant and less hard-working than white male athletes. Thus, a confident Black male athlete is more likely to be perceived as arrogant and their success undeserved. Shannon Sharpe, former tight end and former co-host of the Fox Sports Show Undisputed, commented about the racial bias in sports, using Tom Brady as an example: “There’s no possible way that a Black quarterback could do some of the things that Tom Brady did and get away with it. But here again, I say sports are a microcosm of society…”

Female athletes don’t fare any better in biased perceptions of deservingness, especially if their athleticism and confidence rub up against socially constructed scripts of what it means to be a woman.

Haters don’t gotta hate

There’s an opportunity for us the next time we feel compelled to criticize someone who is publicly confident: Ask ourselves why. Is this person doing harm to others? Is there a lack of concrete evidence of their success? Or does their confidence make us feel uncomfortable? The last question is a hard one and requires a great deal of introspection and vulnerability.

While sports was used to frame this article, the implications go well beyond sports to other industries, institutions, and spaces. Do we really believe that all brags should be humble? That we should appear shocked at our success in the public eye, despite the hard work we put into attaining it? That we should never toot our own horn? To respond yes to any of these questions conflicts with parallel rhetoric that encourages us to overcome imposter syndrome, own our successes, and be our own best cheerleader.

When we needlessly criticize successful people who are confident, a potential byproduct is that we discourage anyone from demonstrating confidence at all (for fear of chastisement) and we diminish public interest in pushing boundaries and innovating (both of which require an unshakeable belief in oneself). 

In 2018, when Snoop Dog was awarded a Hollywood star, he ended his acceptance speech by thanking himself and all the ways his efforts contributed to his success. It was a shock to hear in a society that sets unspoken norms that when you are awarded something, you’re supposed to thank everyone but yourself. Instead of criticizing him, many found his speech to be refreshing and honest. That gives me hope. I believe we can live in a society that loves and appreciates the underdogs, top dogs, and “snoop dogs” of the world without trying to tear any of them down.

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I’m not the only one who loves a good scare. Halloween attractions company America Haunts estimates Americans are spending upward of $500 million annually on haunted house entrance fees simply for the privilege of being frightened. And lots of fright fans don’t limit their horror entertainment to spooky season, gorging on horror movies, shows, and books all year long.

To some people, this preoccupation with horror can seem tone-deaf. School shootings, child abuse, war—the list of real-life horrors is endless. Why seek manufactured fear for entertainment when the world offers real terror in such large quantities?

As a developmental psychologist who writes dark thrillers on the side, I find the intersection of psychology and fear intriguing. To explain what drives this fascination with fear, I point to the theory that emotions evolved as a universal experience in humans because they help us survive. Creating fear in otherwise safe lives can be enjoyable—and is a way for people to practice and prepare for real-life dangers.

Fear can feel good

Controlled fear experiences—where you can click your remote, close the book, or walk out of the haunted house whenever you want—offer the physiological high that fear triggers, without any real risk.

When you perceive yourself under threat, adrenaline surges in your body and the evolutionary fight-or-flight response is activated. Your heart rate increases, you breathe deeper and faster, and your blood pressure goes up. Your body is preparing to defend itself against the danger or get away as fast as possible.

This physical reaction is crucial when facing a real threat. When experiencing controlled fear—like jump scares in a zombie TV show—you get to enjoy this energized sensation, similar to a runner’s high, without any risks. And then, once the threat is dealt with, your body releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which provides sensations of pleasure and relief.

In one study, researchers found that people who visited a high-intensity haunted house as a controlled fear experience displayed less brain activity in response to stimuli and less anxiety post-exposure. This finding suggests that exposing yourself to horror films, scary stories, or suspenseful video games can actually calm you afterward. The effect might also explain why my husband and I choose to relax by watching zombie shows after a busy day at work.

The ties that bind

An essential motivation for human beings is the sense of belonging to a social group. According to the surgeon general, Americans who miss those connections are caught up in an epidemic of loneliness, which leaves people at risk for mental and physical health issues.

Going through intense fear experiences together strengthens the bonds between individuals. Good examples include veterans who served together in combat, survivors of natural disasters, and the “families” created in groups of first responders.

I’m a volunteer firefighter, and the unique connection created through sharing intense threats, such as entering a burning building together, manifests in deep emotional bonds with my colleagues. After a significant fire call, we often note the improved morale and camaraderie of the firehouse. I feel a flood of positive emotions anytime I think of my firefighting partners, even when the events occurred months or years ago.

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Controlled fear experiences artificially create similar opportunities for bonding. Exposure to stress triggers not only the fight-or-flight response, but in many situations it also initiates what psychologists call the “tend-and-befriend” system. A perceived threat prompts humans to tend to offspring and create social-emotional bonds for protection and comfort. This system is largely regulated by the so-called “love hormone” oxytocin.

The tend-and-befriend reaction is particularly likely when you experience stress around others with whom you have already established positive social connections. When you encounter stressors within your social network, your oxytocin levels rise to initiate social coping strategies. As a result, when you navigate a recreational fear experience like a haunted house with friends, you are setting the emotional stage to feel bonded with the people beside you.

Sitting in the dark with friends while you watch a scary movie or navigating a haunted corn maze with a date is good for your health, in that it helps you strengthen those social connections.

An ounce of prevention = a pound of cure

Controlled fear experiences can also be a way for you to prepare for the worst. Think of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the films Contagion and Outbreak trended on streaming platforms as people around the world sheltered at home. By watching threat scenarios play out in controlled ways through media, you can learn about your fears and emotionally prepare for future threats.

For example, researchers at Aarhus University’s Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark demonstrated in one study that people who regularly consumed horror media were more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic than nonhorror fans. The scientists suggest that this resilience might be a result of a kind of training these fans went through—they practiced coping with the fear and anxiety provoked by their preferred form of entertainment. As a result, they were better prepared to manage the real fear triggered by the pandemic.

When I’m not teaching, I’m an avid reader of crime fiction. I also write psychological thrillers under the pen name Sarah K. Stephens. As both a reader and writer, I notice similar themes in the books I am drawn to, all of which tie into my own deep-rooted fears: mothers who fail their children somehow, women manipulated into subservience, lots of misogynist antagonists.

I enjoy writing and reading about my fears—and seeing the bad guys get their just desserts in the end—because it offers a way for me to control the story. Consuming these narratives lets me mentally rehearse how I would handle these kinds of circumstances if any were to manifest in my real life.

Survive and thrive

In the case of controlled fear experiences, scaring yourself is a pivotal technique to help you survive and adapt in a frightening world. By eliciting powerful, positive emotions, strengthening social networks, and preparing you for your worst fears, you’re better able to embrace each day to its fullest.

So the next time you’re choosing between an upbeat comedy and a creepy thriller for your movie night, pick the dark side—it’s good for your health.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Julia Minson at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government has spent decades as a researcher in a field she calls “the psychology of disagreement.” Minson and her colleagues have published numerous papers on topics ranging from negotiation to trust in the media to the concept of “conversational receptiveness”: language that shows people you are engaging with their perspective.

In a series of papers, they found that learning conversational receptiveness only takes a few minutes, and using it during tense disagreements can soften the words of your conversation partner. In other words, it’s “contagious”—when one person learns and implements it, it affects the people around them, therefore creating a ripple effect of better communication.

I spoke to Minson about her research and new insights, which are vital for today’s tense times.

Jenara Nerenberg: How do you define conversational receptiveness?

Julia Minson: Conversational receptiveness is using language to show your counterpart that you are actively engaged with their point of view. It’s a cousin to ideas like open-mindedness, perspective taking, and intellectual humility. But all of those things happen in your head, so your counterpart often can’t tell if you’re doing all this work in your mind to engage with their perspective or not. Conversational receptiveness is specifically using language—words and phrases—to convince your counterpart that you are paying attention and thinking hard about what they’re saying.

JN: Are words that convey conversational receptiveness the same across various topics and contexts?

JM: Yes, there are a finite set of phrases that people mostly agree on that signal engagement. That’s what’s nice about analyzing conversational data—transcripts of many, many conversations. In any conversation, there are of course [thematic] pieces that are specific to particular topics, like gun control or abortion or affirmative action. But there are words that are the same that pop up in all conversations—words that signal engagement and listening, such as “I hear you,” or “I understand,” or “we both want….”

The way we’ve been teaching this and making it easy for people to remember is the acronym HEAR. We take great pride in that this framework is experimentally validated—we know it works, and we know exactly how much it works.

The H is hedging—as in hedging your claims with words like “sometimes, maybe, perhaps, some people.” The idea is that you don’t change your message, but you make your claim with a little less dogmatism. So people are less tempted to counter-argue.

The E stands for emphasizing agreement, so words like “We both want to” or “I also think” or “I agree with some of what you’re saying.” It doesn’t mean that you’re compromising or changing your view or meeting in the middle, it just means that you recognize that most disagreements are multidimensional, so there are some things you agree on.

The A is acknowledgment, and that’s the one that is most familiar to people as it’s closest to things that are commonly taught in active listening, for example. It’s essentially taking the time to restate your counterpart’s perspective so they understand that you actually heard them. I like to remind people that there’s a good way to do acknowledgment and there’s a bad way to do acknowledgement. So the bad way is, “I hear you, but here is where I’m coming from.” So you say you heard but you didn’t do anything to demonstrate you heard. You have to demonstrate, like “I hear that this topic is really important to you because you feel like if we don’t address it, then these bad things are going to happen.” So you have to really show that you heard, and then you get to move on to making your own point.

And then the R is reframing to the positive, which is trying to get rid of some of the negation words, so avoiding “no, don’t, can’t, won’t” and then adding positive emotion words. So instead of “I could never agree to a project that wastes resources with no known benefits,” it’s “I would love to look for opportunities to evaluate the benefits of any potential projects.”

JN: Can you talk more about how conversational receptiveness is contagious?

JM: One of the things we’ve known for a long time is that people mimic the emotional content of language. So if I’m more positive and warm, that makes you more positive and warm—and if I’m more negative, that makes you more negative. And so one way you might think you can improve the quality of your conversations is to use a more pleasant tone, because if you’re being warm and pleasant, it is harder for your counterpart to start being a jerk to you because they’re fighting against all this wiring that makes people naturally mimic each other.

Mimicry does happen with receptiveness. This is important because you can imagine that the opposite might happen where one person might take advantage of another’s receptiveness and stomp on that person’s point of view.

And so people have more agency as a result [of practicing conversational receptiveness] because I’m increasing the chance that the other person will be more receptive to me, as well. The other point that’s important is that we went through a lot of trouble to disentangle “direct” versus “indirect” accommodation—direct is like monkey see, monkey do; I say a word, you say a word. With indirect accommodation, I don’t know if you mean it when you say it because you just heard me say it.

Indirect accommodation is when I say a different word from you, and that shows receptiveness—what that implies is that you’re not just saying receptive words, you are actually being more receptive [because you’ve internalized and demonstrated understanding rather than just repeating].

So we were very excited about those two pieces—that you can actually increase how receptive people are to you by being more receptive to them.

JN: Can you share more about what you set out to do with this new paper and what your findings were?

JM: In an earlier paper, we identified conversational receptiveness as a distinct linguistic style—and we knew we could train people in it, and their counterparts would evaluate them more positively, thinking they’re more trustworthy and reasonable. And so the question was: Beyond just liking someone better, would you actually treat them better?

In one of the studies featured in this new paper, we had people in a lab who disagreed with each other talk for about 20 minutes over multiple rounds of conversations. We found in our analysis of the data that the amount of receptiveness in their language converged over the conversation—and so it became clear that people were affecting each other’s receptiveness. They were converging toward a common average in each pair.

This new paper was about nailing this point and figuring out exactly what happens. So the studies are about pairing people up who strongly disagree on something and we train one side in conversational receptiveness—and by “train” I mean four bullet points of instructions, and it takes less than two minutes to read and internalize. Half of the people don’t get those instructions. The participants exchange messages with people they disagree with, and what we’re interested in are the messages that come back.

What we see is that the messages that come back in response to those who are trained are, in themselves, more receptive. And so that suggests that receptiveness changes behavior.

Let’s say you have two liberal participants trained in receptiveness who send messages to conservative counterparts who haven’t been trained. The conservative counterparts now sound more receptive [as a result of the conversation]. And then we take two different liberal participants [who are not trained] and they read the messages from those two conservatives, and they all have no idea that there’s any such thing as conversational receptiveness. What we find is that the liberals want to have further conversations with the conservative counterparts who two rounds ago had talked to participants who were trained in conversational receptiveness.

So it’s not just that the counterpart’s language changes, it’s that it changes enough that another human—who has no clue that anything is going on—notices it.

JN: Is one of your goals to implement and train people in this worldwide, or even in elementary schools?

JM: We’ve been using [the HEAR acronym] in the classroom with college students and master’s students. And I’m now putting together a high school curriculum. Elementary might be a little too early, but middle school and high school teenagers could very much benefit.

These issues are not just about polarization; they’re about disagreement on any topic with anybody. And it’s a skill set, so the more you practice it, the easier it becomes. I’d love to have this go into as many places as possible. And I think another place where this would be beneficial is health care, because that’s a space where there is a lot of conflict, and our health care workers get very little training in how to handle it (and almost none of it is evidence-based). So given how much time we put people through medical school, I think an hour of conversational receptiveness would be a worthwhile investment.

JN: What are your thoughts on how people can implement conversational receptiveness at home?

JM: Every disagreement when you are tempted to tell the other person how it is—just don’t. I think the HEAR framework applies so easily to so many situations. So take it and stick it with Scotch tape on your fridge. It might feel awkward in the beginning to find the right words, and people often say that. It can be hard in the beginning, and it doesn’t feel authentic because your authentic response is to argue. But I would rather have some inauthentic receptiveness than have you authentically fly off the handle. And it becomes more comfortable with time.

It’s useful to observe when you struggle, because you think, “Why is it so hard for me to acknowledge this person’s perspective?” And that’s an interesting moment of reflection. So I apply this to my kids, my husband, and my colleagues.

JN: How can people show conversational receptiveness online, especially on social media?

JM: I think the best way to avoid conflict on social media is to not disagree on social media—there’s just no reason to. There’s no reason to respond on Facebook; just call the person and have a conversation. I think social media is performative and riles people up, and that’s the structure of it. Talking face to face without an audience is much more likely to result in positive things. Conversational receptiveness, by definition, requires more words—it’s not going to fit into 280 characters. So I’d say just pick up the phone.

We’ve gathered articles, videos, and podcast episodes from Greater Good that offer tips and resources to help you manage that stress and work toward a more stable, collaborative society.

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Managing election stress
Building a better democracy
Bridging differences
Resources for parents and educators

Managing election stress

• Eight Questions That Can Help You Survive Election Stress: Americans are stressed out by their presidential election. These questions will help you check in with yourself—and perhaps boost your resilience.
• Seven Ways to Cope With Uncertainty: What should we do when everything feels so out of control?
• Eight Ways You Can Feel More Hopeful—Even in Dark Times: A new book makes the case that hope is the right response when we are facing difficulties in our lives.
• How Self-Compassion Can Help You Deal With Stress: According to new research, self-compassion may help people use more effective coping strategies and in turn feel better.
• Five Keys to Managing Intrusive Thoughts: Stuck in rumination? Here are some ways to break the cycle and move forward.
• How to Transform Stress Into Courage and Connection: Stress doesn’t always lead to fight-or-flight, says Kelly McGonigal. It can also activate brain systems that help us connect with other people.

Building a better democracy

• Why Is Democracy Worth Defending?: Here is the research-based case for majority rule and minority protections.
• Americans Still Have Hope for Democracy, Despite Everything: Americans remain hopeful about democracy despite fears of its demise—and are acting on that hope.
• Research-Tested Ways to Preserve Democracy: A new “megastudy” tested 25 tools and practices that can help counter anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity in politics.
• How to Restore Trust in U.S. Election Results: Faith in the U.S. electoral system has been declining, which undermines voting, political participation, and a healthy democracy.
• How Inequality Keeps People from Voting: Research suggests that more economic and racial equality means more voting—and more voting means more equality.
• What Are the Solutions to Political Polarization?: Social psychology reveals what creates conflict among groups and how they can come together.
• What Does It Mean to Be an Engaged Citizen?: Eric Liu discusses how to foster a shared civic identity in today’s polarized America.

Bridging differences

• 10 Tips for Getting People to Talk Across Political Differences: Our experience shows that people with widely different viewpoints on big issues can have discussions, find agreement, and collaborate.
• Eight Keys to Bridging Our Differences: 
There are many misconceptions about bridging differences, so we consulted with researchers and practitioners to clarify what it is—and what it isn’t.
• Five Ways to Have Better Conversations About Immigration: Some suggestions for moving forward when a difficult conversation seems to hit a dead end.
• Three Steps to Finding Agreement on America’s Toughest Problems: Our work suggests that collaborative problem solving is possible among people who strongly disagree with each other on important issues.
• How Talking About Abortion Can Help Opposing Sides: When people who disagree have dialogues about abortion, it helps build respect, understanding, and bridges to policy change.
• How to Talk to People You Disagree With (The Science of Happiness Podcast): We learn techniques for working across the aisle without compromising our values from a Democratic politician in one of the most conservative states, Oklahoma.
• Six Tips for Loving Your Enemies: Choosing love over hate can be difficult, but ultimately it may be the path to healing for ourselves and our society.

Resources for parents and educators

• Seven Tips for Talking With Kids About Politics: Half of American parents don’t discuss politics with their children. But research suggests parenting plays a crucial role in political views and participation.
• Can Social-Emotional Skills Strengthen Democracy?: A new study links student participation in SEL programs to voter participation later in life.
• How to Help Students Learn to Listen to Each Other’s Stories: Interview-based storytelling projects can build active listening skills that increase empathy and foster relationships.
• One Skill That Can Help Students Bridge Political Divides: Here’s how one teacher has tried to help students envision better outcomes for everyone, a skill researchers call “moral imagination.”
• Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election: The story of a group of sixth graders learning to bridge political divides after the U.S. election.
• How to Talk With Your Kids About Donald Trump: The GOP candidate is creating fear and confusion in children, especially kids of color. Here are three suggestions for talking with kids about race and racism in the media.
• 15 Practices to Help Kids Bridge Differences: Educators and parents can help students engage across differences at school, in their homes, and throughout their community.
• How to Inspire Students to Become Better Citizens: Educators can help boost civic engagement among young people.

If you want to help bridge these divides, we invite you to join the Greater Good Science Center’s 7-Day Campaign for Connection Challenge!

Once you sign up, you’ll receive a new science-based skill for seven days, designed to help you navigate the stress of this election season. Each email will include a step-by-step guide to practicing the skill, a reflection prompt, and ways to learn more.

Here are the seven skills, which research suggests can help foster understanding, ease stress, and create a stronger sense of connection with your loved ones and community:

• See the person, not the label. When we learn personal details about others—beyond their political labels—we view them with more warmth. By focusing on individual qualities and characteristics, we feel less threatened by people who might seem “not like us.”
• Expand your views and circles. Science suggests that forming friendships with people who don’t look or think like you is good for your health. A first step is seeking out information that can challenge your stereotypes and assumptions about other groups, such as by visiting places—or media—that expose you to new people and ideas.
• Find shared identities. We can better connect with people who don’t share our political views if we focus on other important identities that we have in common—for example, as Americans committed to democracy, freedom, community, and belonging.
• Practice perspective taking. Perspective taking can help us appreciate where others are coming from—all while holding firm to our own views. When you find it difficult to relate to someone’s viewpoint, try asking yourself, “What experiences might have shaped their views?” By considering this question—even if you don’t engage directly with the other person—you can broaden your perspective.
• Listen with compassion. Science tells us that if we want other people to understand us, we should start by listening more closely to them. When we listen, we are perceived as more trustworthy, and it encourages our conversation partners to be more open-minded, less defensive, and less focused on their self-interests.
• Try self-distancing. When conversations get heated, we can get so caught up in our thoughts and emotions that we can’t engage constructively. Self-distancing encourages you to view yourself from an outsider’s perspective and think about yourself in the third person—such as saying, “Jane is so angry” instead of “I’m so angry.”
• Identify common goals. Despite our differences, we’re more willing and able to put those differences aside when we identify a shared goal that we need to work together to achieve. Focusing on common goals can shift our perceptions of each other from adversaries to collaborators.

With the Campaign for Connection, our goal is simple: to make it easier for you to connect with others with empathy and respect, even if they see the world differently from you.

The challenge launches today, but you can continue signing up even past the election. Join us for seven days of meaningful actions that can help turn division into understanding and conflict into connection.

The concept, developed by political scientists Alia Braley and Gabriel Lenz and colleagues at MIT, appears to create a powerful impact with a relatively simple, data-based message: Voters on the other side of the divide are not as extreme as you think they are—and, in fact, most of them value democracy just as much as you do.

The Science study matched the Berkeley approach against 24 other ambitious potential solutions and found it had an overall impact that surpassed all the others. It was top-ranked in reducing voter support for undemocratic practices and also highly effective in reducing support for partisan violence and easing partisan animosity.

At the root of growing anti-democratic sentiment in the U.S. is mutual fear among both Republicans and Democrats that their political opponents intend to undermine democracy, Braley said. “If you want to stop democratic backsliding, you have to be sensitive to the fear and try to turn down the temperature. That could happen through policy decisions, or just through decisions on how you talk to the other side.”

Added Lenz: “What was so surprising about our study was just how eager both sides were to learn that their opponents value democracy. I expected people to be resistant to the idea—for example, I expected Democrats to resist the idea that Republican voters actually support democracy. But they seemed to be reassured.”

A grim overview of American democracy

The new Science megastudy opens with a survey of recent research that, taken together, presents a grim picture of the health of democracy in the U.S.

“The health of American democracy is under threat,” it says. “Although the U.S. clearly remains a democracy, featuring free and fair elections, many experts warn of the potential for the future decline of U.S. democracy.”

While voters profess to support democratic values and practices, the new study says, data shows that anti-democratic sentiments are widespread, especially among Republicans and conservatives. Distrust across the divides has grown toxic. A majority of voters in both parties are willing to vote for candidates who have violated democratic principles, including those who have lied about the real outcome of the 2020 election, clearly won by Democrat Joe Biden. Violent threats against elected officials are surging.

Although partisans on both sides share many attitudes, data reveals some significant differences: Democrats report higher levels of support for partisan violence and for segregating themselves from Republicans. Republicans report higher levels of support for undemocratic candidates and practices, social distrust, and opposition to bipartisan cooperation.

The study traces links between dysfunctional politics and a range of harmful impacts: poor mental health, strains in family relationships, avoidance of romance, workplace retaliation, and weak collective response to national crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which left more than a million Americans dead.

An unusual, but fascinating, political experiment

Against such a backdrop, the megastudy’s two primary authors—sociologists Jan G. Voelkel of Cornell University and Robb Willer of Stanford University—designed research to assess what approaches might help to improve the nation’s political health. They issued a broad call for ideas, and received more than 250 proposed treatments from 400-plus scholars across the social sciences, and from political practitioners, as well.

They assembled a panel of experts to evaluate the treatments, and that process narrowed the field to the 25 most promising contenders, including the Berkeley concept developed by Lenz, a professor of political science; Braley, a Ph.D. student in political science; and MIT computer scientists. Then they engaged more than 32,000 participants online to see what worked.

The models spanned a wide range: Some stressed a message that all voters share common economic interests or common moral values. Some showed participants a video of two people bonding despite their political differences, or an animation about how democracy allows politically diverse people to work together. In one treatment, participants played a trivia game that encouraged bipartisan teams to work together. Another featured “befriending meditations.”

The researchers then tested how these interventions changed attitudes about three primary areas of concern: partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and support for political violence.

The results were encouraging. Of the 25 treatments, 23 significantly reduced partisan animosity. But only six treatments significantly reduced support for undemocratic practices, and only five significantly cut support for partisan violence.

The Berkeley-MIT approach, focused on correcting misperceptions about opponents’ democratic values, stood out for its strong impact across those three concerns. It was the top-ranked intervention for reducing anti-democratic attitudes. It ranked third in reducing support for political violence, and seventh in easing attitudes of partisan animosity. It also was among the most effective in reducing participants’ support for undemocratic candidates.

​​The other top interventions were sophisticated videos. But the Berkeley approach used a simple question-and-answer format, with text and images only. Data was central to the approach: Participants were asked to what extent most people on the other side of the divide support undemocratic actions. Many people believed that their opponents were strongly hostile to democracy. But then they were given recent public opinion data that showed opponents’ support for democratic values and practices actually was much higher.

Even with such a low-tech approach, the data were persuasive.

In addition to Braley and Lenz, MIT computer scientists Hossein Rahnama, Dhaval Adjodah, and Alex Pentland also helped to develop the intervention.

The psychological dynamics that drive Americans apart

Lenz’s past research has focused on a deceptively simple truth about political behavior: Most people don’t follow politics closely. Instead, they fall in behind the direction set by the leaders of their preferred political party.

People on all sides fundamentally support democracy, the researchers said, but political leaders have tremendous power to undermine those values.

“We started with a theory: One of the reasons that democracy is backsliding is because a polarized electorate is afraid that the other side is trying to undermine democracy,” Braley explained. “And they’re afraid because, usually, there’s an aspiring autocrat who creates that fear. That leader says: ‘OK, the other side is stealing the election.’ Then people feel they have to do whatever it takes to save democracy. And so you have people voting in aspiring autocrats.”

In Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela, “people elected autocrats under the guise of democracy,” Braley continued. “And you see this happening in the U.S. Trump says Democrats are trying to undermine democracy, and that creates fear in Republicans who otherwise want to live in a democracy. But they’re giving leeway to Trump to overstep democratic norms. Likewise, that’s creating fear in Democrats who then could become less democratic, in kind.”

The Berkeley-MIT team found a way to reduce the fear that the other side poses an existential threat. In effect, their model short-circuits the feedback loop, slowing or stopping the anti-democratic spiral. When people see data that reassures them about the underlying good faith of their opponents, Lenz said, their own trust is reinforced.

How would the intervention work in real-life, day-to-day politics?

At every level of the political system—from national politics to community organizations—leaders can reinforce trust by constantly stressing that they support democracy and by recognizing that this is a value shared across the political spectrum.

That can also be an important consideration in the practice of bridging divides, a system of trust- and consensus-building that is being pioneered at UC Berkeley. The leaders of national and campus bridging initiatives have approached Braley and Lenz for advice on how to improve such efforts to reduce polarization.

“People should be very happy to hear that voters on all sides really do support democracy,” Lenz said. “Instead of support for democracy being narrow, it’s very broad-based. People love democracy. They think it’s important. And that’s really reassuring.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

While it’s hard to know how much cheating goes on in romantic relationships, as that information is self-reported and people who are engaging in extradyadic shenanigans aren’t always honest about what they’re doing, a 2023 study indicates that about 25% of marriages experience infidelity—and that just includes sexual affairs, not emotional affairs, which can be just as painful.

Still, focusing solely on sexual infidelity ignores the many ways people can betray their partner or partners. As famed psychotherapist Esther Perel writes in her 2007 book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, betrayal comes in many forms, including being neglectful, indifferent, contemptuous, asexual, demeaning, and insulting. The 25% figure also excludes financial infidelity; a recent survey indicates some 42% of adults in the United States have kept financial secrets from their partner—especially problematic as many couples say money issues are a major stressor in their relationship.

That doesn’t mean people can’t make their romantic relationships a safe place for truth-telling, which will go far toward avoiding betrayals of any kind. But it does mean we need to get comfortable with having uncomfortable conversations, not once but throughout the relationship.

Why we lie

Most of us are pretty upfront and self-disclosing in the beginning of a relationship in hopes of being seen as someone who is honest and trustworthy. And most of us want and expect honesty in our relationships, especially with a romantic partner. Over time, however, being honest with our loved one can take a back seat for many reasons, including anticipating that they may evaluate and judge us or, worse, reject us, especially if that has happened before. And so, the temptation is to stay mum—about how you really feel, what you think, and what you need, whether it’s something as seemingly benign as not wanting to watch their favorite streaming series with them or learn to play pickleball because they love it and you don’t, or something more significant, such as about how they touch or kiss you.

“The more we start to feel intimate with each other, and we become close, we worry about each other, and we are afraid of each other’s judgment and . . . we actually become less open,” Perel shares on the “Knowledge Project” podcast.

Research indicates that we’re more likely to lie in our romantic relationships than in other types of relationships, mostly motivated by a concern for our partner’s feelings—we don’t want to hurt them or cause them pain—and for the relationship as a whole. Too many of us buy into the “happy wife, happy life” mantra—a belief that if we can just keep our partner happy, then everything will be OK.

Being real with our loved one isn’t all that easy. Even though having uncomfortable conversations is a huge part of life, not only in our romantic relationships but also in our platonic, familial, and workplace relationships, most of us feel anxious about having them—and so we either choose to be less than honest so we can keep the peace and appear easygoing or opt to avoid having the uncomfortable conversation altogether.

How dishonesty backfires

While deceiving our loved one is a way to cope in the moment, “the extensive use of deception appears to be an indicator of overall relational distress,” writes researcher Tim Cole.

“Relationship breakdowns can be inevitable if partners aren’t working on the same page to create a shared reality, to be transparent, to give each other the benefit of the doubt and not exploit that benefit of the doubt, if they [aren’t] committed to an uncomfortable honesty as opposed to dishonest harmony in the moment,” says Kate Balestrieri, a psychologist, sex therapist, and founder of Modern Intimacy, which offers individual, couples, and group therapy as well as online coaching and therapy.

Dishonest harmony—just keeping our partners happy—shouldn’t be the goal, she says. That only perpetuates inauthenticity.

“The partner who is placating is not advocating for their own needs and they’re not actually getting curious about how to create a sustainable solution together,” she says. “Then they get resentful, and that resentment erodes trust and intimacy and care, and it can turn into deception, it can turn into infidelity of any kind, it can turn into contempt, defensiveness, and feeling like ‘my partner isn’t on my side.’ And that happens when we’re not being real.”

Her experience seems to confirm what the researchers behind a 2001 study, “Lying to the one you love: The use of deception in romantic relationships,” discovered: “Although successful deception may pacify relational partners, one’s own use of deception is associated with increased feelings of isolation and declines in intimacy.” That disconnects us from our partner.

Yet one 2018 study indicates that being honest really isn’t as challenging as we often fear, leading the researchers to conclude that “by avoiding honesty, individuals miss out on opportunities that they appreciate in the long-run, and that they would want to repeat,” such as promoting “meaning and long-term growth.”

How to tell the truth

So just how can people turn their romantic relationships into a safe space for truth-telling and keep it safe for all over the long haul?

Research and experts shed some light.

For example, a 2022 study found that as important as asking questions can be, the kind of questions asked can lead to more honest answers from your partner. That means asking questions in a way that shows you are truly interested and curious about your partner’s thoughts or actions, and not suspicious or mistrusting of them. If your partner thinks that they won’t be believed or respected, they’re more likely to be deceptive—after all, what would be the point in telling the truth if you weren’t going to be believed?

Using elaboration questions—“Tell me more,” “Could you tell me more about that?” “Why do you think that?”—as a way to better understand your partner’s viewpoint may go far in reducing resentment and mistrust, according to a 2010 study.

Perel urges partners to never lose their curiosity about each other. The more you realize that your loved ones are actually a mystery, no matter how long you’ve been together, and that you don’t know everything about them or your relationship, “the more likely you are to be curious about them as most of us are when we first are getting to know someone,” she says on the “Knowledge Project” podcast.

Perel suggests people have a separate email address that they only use to communicate with their loved one as a partner and lover, not to talk about parenting or the day-to-day realities of life, such as money or household issues. “They start to say different things they haven’t felt they could say,” she says.

While our curiosity can invite our partners’ honesty, we should also take care how we share our own truth. A 2022 study found that while being honest often can bring people closer together and improve intimacy, communication, and understanding, what is being disclosed and the way it is being disclosed could undermine both partners’ well-being and the entire relationship, especially if it is said bluntly. Instead, researchers found that sharing your truth with kindness and sensitivity is more likely to get the desired results.

Creating a safe space for honesty

Unfortunately, we aren’t really trained to be good communicators, Balestrieri says.

“The people in the relationship really need to be invested in prioritizing the relationship over the individual, and that includes themselves,” says Balestrieri. “That doesn’t mean not advocating for yourself, but it does mean recognizing that the system of your relationship is bigger than either one of you as individuals, and creating a safe space or a place in your relationship where you both can feel heard and seen and witnessed requires a few variables.”

One important variable is making a commitment to what’s called emotion regulation, including being able to recognize when your emotions are getting too big for the situation and thus getting in the way of your ability to have a coherent, collaborative conversation, she adds.

“If you no longer can have a collaborative conversation, you’re dysregulated. And dysregulation in relationships is the thing that renders people self-protective. Once you are being self-protective, you’re no longer prioritizing the relationship over self. And so, when you and your partner are being self-protective, that’s when you stop being seen, feeling heard, you stop feeling witnessed, you stop feeling like a place where you can come and lay down all your baggage and not be judged and be received.”

Balestrieri advises her clients to develop a practice of getting quiet and reflective with themselves, which can include journaling. That may help you focus on the kind of relationship you want and how close or far you are from that. It also can help you realize what are the actual risks of being honest with your partner, especially if they quickly get angry or become abusive, and what risks are based more on fear than on what has actually happened in the past.


She often has couples create a mission statement together—why are we together and not with someone else? What agreements are we making to support our visions together? When will we reevaluate those agreements, how often, and why?

Sometimes, however, your partner just may not want to put in the relational work required. As frustrating as that can be, she says, working on what’s in your own control can help. “Just making changes of how you show up can affect the system of the relationship, which evokes change organically.”

Tamara Thompson, a New York-based marriage and family therapist, writes that by holding ourselves accountable for how we show up for our partner, we can create emotional safety in our relationships.

She suggests reinforcing your commitment to the relationship and that you are willing to make things better; thanking them for sharing their feelings and being vulnerable with you even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything they say; and being consistent with what you say and do, which goes far in establishing trust.

As someone who works with couples who have already given up on their union, New York City–based divorce lawyer and author of If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late James J. Sexton is clear—relationships need attention if you want them to be happy and healthy for the long term, he says in an interview with Business Insider. Paying attention will help you realize what you need in the relationship. But, again, if you’re not creating a safe place to hear each other, you’re inviting problems and even more deception, including infidelity.

“The deception is happening because every time that there’s an honest sharing, it results in attacking,” he says, a common pattern he’s seen with clients experiencing infidelity because they feel they don’t have another choice to get the intimacy they want.

If we truly want to be told the truth, there’s one thing we can do, Sexton says—“refrain from reacting aggressively when confronted with unsettling information.”

“If you want a safe place in your relationship, you have to be that safe place,” Balestrieri says. “We are all messy, we are all imperfect, so all we can do is be the kind of partner we want to be. And get real.”

The research, published today in JAMA Health Forum, found that when thousands of Medicare patients were treated by such doctors, they were far less likely to need preventable hospital admissions and emergency room visits. In addition, the patients’ annual medical payments were nearly 10% lower on average.

“The bottom line is that the more altruistic doctors are actually providing better medical care,” said coauthor Shachar Kariv, a Berkeley theoretical economist. “This means that we can, on the one hand, really improve medical care, and on the other hand pay less for it—if doctors are altruistic.

“Given that medical expenses are the single biggest fraction of U.S. gross domestic product, the implications are absolutely enormous.”

The paper appears to be the first data-based effort to explore the link between doctors’ altruism and patients’ health care quality and expenses. Health Forum is published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The findings come at a time when doctors and other medical staff are under increasing pressure from insurance companies, hospital systems, medical groups, and government medical agencies to tip their priorities toward profit or cost reductions.

As a result, the researchers reported, doctors may spend less time with patients or may order procedures that generate profit even if they’re not essential for the patient. That leads to significant disparities in care and medical outcomes, with evident advantages for the patients of altruistic doctors.

The researchers found that those patients had:

• 38% fewer potentially preventable hospitalizations;
• 41% fewer potentially preventable emergency room visits; and
• annual medical expenses that were more than 9% lower.

“Patients of altruistic physicians might have better outcomes because their physicians choose the most appropriate tests and treatments, and/or because altruistic physicians devote more time and energy to their patients,” the authors wrote.

In U.S. medical culture, altruism is a fundamental ethical value, holding that medical workers should put the patient before all other interests.

“There is an oath—they are basically swearing to do this,” Kariv explained. “What we expect from doctors is not what we expect from salespeople.”

The study, completed in August, covered more than 7,600 Medicare patients with an average age of 76, slightly more than half of whom were women. They were under the care of 250 doctors at 43 medical practices, all of them specialists in three common areas: internal medicine, family practice, and cardiology.

The doctors’ altruism was assessed in a brief online game in which they had to make a set of decisions to allocate a pool of money between themselves and another, anonymous person. Based on an evaluation of their decision making, 45 of the doctors in the study, or 18% of them, were classified as altruistic, while 205 were not.

Both groups featured a similar proportion of male and female doctors. One key difference: Doctors classified as altruistic were more likely to work in smaller medical practices.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers studied the patients’ Medicare claims, plus doctors’ own reports on how much time they spent with each patient, how many patients they saw in a typical three-hour period, and how much time they spent on patient care while at home.

The changes needed to encourage medical altruism

According to Kariv and other authors, the research raises critical questions about the short-term, profit-focused values and incentives that govern much of American medicine and shape day-to-day treatments provided by doctors to their patients.

Aggressive efforts to control costs and maximize profit may ultimately harm patients and raise systemwide costs, they suggest. Instead, a stronger patient-first focus might cost more upfront while producing lower costs and greater savings in the long run.

Kariv, the former chair of Berkeley’s economics department, has done a range of studies that look at how trade-offs shape economic behavior. For example, the trade-off between risk and reward underlies much economic decision making. Trade-offs can also shape medical treatment decisions.

“In this paper, we’re talking about the trade-off between my own well-being and the well-being of other people—a complete stranger, not my son or my wife,” he said. “It’s very true for medical doctors: They can prescribe you a medicine or a treatment and they will actually get financial benefits out of it.”

Doctors “are absolutely aware of this” as they make treatment decisions, he added.

How to increase altruism as a force in medicine? The authors say that broad social and economic change might be required, from medical school admissions and training to the financial rewards and penalties that shape doctors’ care decisions.

“Policymakers and leaders of hospitals, medical practices, and medical schools may want to consider creating incentives, organizational structures, and cultures that seem likely to increase, or at least not decrease, physician altruism,” they concluded.

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

However, new research is finding that these worries seem to be misplaced: It turns out that practicing self-compassion in stressful times may help us tackle problems more effectively.

Self-compassion in stressful times

Researchers suggest that self-compassion has three main components. The first involves self-kindness; that is, treating ourselves with the same kind of understanding and compassion that we might extend to a close friend. The second involves mindfulness, or being aware of what we are feeling, without letting our emotions overwhelm us. The third involves a sense of common humanity; in other words, seeing how our stressors are part of the shared human experience.

In the current study, published earlier this year in the Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers asked participants (including both college students and community members from Germany) to complete surveys during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, three times over six weeks in spring and summer 2020. In the surveys, participants reported on their self-compassion, their well-being, and how they coped with stress. In total, 430 participants filled out the first survey, and 264 participants completed the last survey.

To measure how they coped with stress, people were asked to indicate how much they typically used different coping styles. Some of these coping styles consisted of what researchers call “functional” coping, such as taking steps to deal with the problem or seeking out support from others. Others consisted of strategies considered dysfunctional coping, such as denying or disengaging from the problem, or engaging in substance use as a means of distraction. In addition, the researchers also asked participants to fill out surveys of their life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress.

The researchers found that people who reported greater self-compassion initially used healthier coping strategies at the time of the second survey, compared to people who were less self-compassionate. In addition to engaging in more functional coping, more self-compassionate people were less likely to cope with stress with less productive strategies, such as denying the reality of the situation, blaming themselves, shutting down, or turning to drugs or alcohol. In turn, they seemed to be doing better at the end of the study: They felt greater positive emotions and less stress and negative emotions.

In fact, the coping styles of more self-compassionate people seemed to help explain why they were in a better headspace at the end of the study, at least partially. The fact that self-compassionate people engaged in dysfunctional coping less often helped account for their lower stress and negative emotions.

This finding is especially interesting because many people who are hesitant to treat themselves with kindness may worry that doing so could cause them to become complacent about a situation, or fall into self-pity. However, the current study suggests that, if anything, the opposite seems to be true: People higher in self-compassion tend to be more likely to cope with problems in healthy ways. Instead of falling into dysfunctional coping strategies, the researchers suggest that “self-compassion facilitates an accepting and balanced attitude toward challenges.”

This research also dovetails with a previous study, which analyzed the results of 130 studies (with over 38,000 participants) and found that more self-compassionate people tended to report more healthy coping and less unhealthy coping (although in that case, there was less evidence of which caused which). This study also builds on prior research finding that writing about a stressful event in a self-compassionate way improved people’s mood (compared to just expressing their emotions). Additionally, it’s been suggested that self-compassion may be especially helpful if it breaks the cycle of rumination—that is, thinking over and over again about stressful events in an unhelpful way.

In other words, treating ourselves with compassion doesn’t mean ignoring the reality of stressful events. Instead, when we take a moment to show ourselves kindness, we may actually be setting ourselves up to approach stressors in a healthier and more productive way.

Doing so in limited circumstances, and with careful oversight and education, can help children gain the tools they’ll need to sort fact from fiction online, said Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology and lead author of a paper published recently in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Orticio argues that, given children’s natural skepticism and early exposure to the internet’s boundless misinformation, it is crucial for adults to teach them practical fact-checking skills. Instead of attempting to completely sanitize their online environment, he said adults should focus on equipping children with tools to critically assess the information they encounter.

“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context in order to set them up for their future, where they’re going to be in these contexts close to 24/7,” Orticio said.

Orticio and his colleagues used a pair of experiments involving 122 children ages four to seven to test how their level of skepticism changed in different online environments.

The first study exposed them to an ebook with varying degrees of true and false statements about animals. Next to a picture of a zebra, for example, some children were shown truths, like that zebras had black and white stripes. Others were shown falsehoods about zebras being red and green. Based on that information, they indicated whether the claims were true or false. A second study simulated search engine results and posed similar animal facts and fictions.

Next, children evaluated the veracity of a new claim within that same digital context, this time about an alien species called Zorpies. On a screen were images of 20 so-called Zorpies. One of the alien’s faces showed that it had three eyes; the rest of the Zorpies wore dark sunglasses that obscured their eyes.

Children were then asked to decide whether all Zorpies had three eyes. But before making their final decision, participants were allowed to fact-check the claim by tapping any number of the aliens, removing their sunglasses and revealing their eyes. Since children knew nothing about the aliens, their skepticism could only come from their assessment of how reliable this digital platform was.

Researchers found that the children who were the most diligent about fact-checking the Zorpies claims were also the ones who saw more false claims about animals earlier in the study. Meanwhile, those who had more reliable environments with fewer false claims earlier in the study did almost no fact-checking. A computer simulation confirmed that the children in the more unreliable environments were more likely to debunk potential misinformation.

“Children can adapt their level of skepticism according to the quality of information they’ve seen before in a digital context,” Orticio said. “They can leverage their expectations of how this digital environment works to make reasonable adjustments to how much they trust or distrust information at face value—even if they know next to nothing about the content itself.”

The project was born from an urgent need to understand how children are faring in an increasingly online world. Previous research has found that an estimated one-third of children have used social media by age nine, and that minors encounter health misinformation within minutes of creating a TikTok account.

Even platforms that are purportedly curated for young audiences, like YouTube Kids, have become spaces for toxic content and misinformation. That’s a particular problem, Orticio stressed, because parents may have the impression that these are safe places their kids can explore.

But as the new research shows, that may give a false sense of security and allow falsehoods and problematic content to go unchecked and be taken as true and acceptable.

“Our work suggests that if children have some experience working in controlled, but imperfect, environments where they have experience encountering things that aren’t quite right, and we show them the process for figuring out what is is actually true and not, that will set them up with the expectation to be more vigilant,” Orticio said.

Orticio knows that not every parent has time to constantly monitor a child’s media habits. Rather than trying to create the most sanitized corner of the internet, he said parents should have discussions with their children about how to check claims and to talk about what they’re seeing.

Having clear expectations about what a platform can and can’t deliver is also important.

“It’s not that we need to enhance skepticism, per se. It’s that we need to give them the ability to use that skepticism to their advantage,” Orticio said. “In our experiments, fact-checking was very simple. In real life, fact-checking is actually very hard. We need to bridge that gap.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

But there are barely any signs for our red-and-blue presidential candidates.

I did see 10 yellow yard signs staggered along University Avenue, a main street in our city of 120,000. It said, “Vote for Rubber Ducky, More Quack, Less Whack.”

To me, that prank captured how exhausted so many people feel about politics. A new study suggests that most people feel that way—and argues that this presents both a crisis and an opportunity.

Hidden tribes of America

More in Common is a nonprofit organization that tries “to understand the forces driving us apart, find common ground, and bring people together to tackle shared challenges.” You might recognize the name from its blockbuster “Hidden Tribes” report, which in 2018 identified seven distinct political groups within America. 

That report stipulates that five of the seven tribes, representing roughly 67% of the American public, make up the so-called “exhausted majority” fed up with the left-right divide. More in Common researchers argue that while partisans score political points, members of the exhausted majority are so frustrated with our politics that many have checked out completely, ceding the floor to more extreme participation.

Their framing has a sophisticated way of approaching polling, but some political scientists believe polarization in the American people, as we understand it, is a myth. 

“Politics is a remote interest for many Americans. Most Americans are busy living their lives, doing their jobs, raising their children, and having a little recreation. They don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics or absorbing political news,” says Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford University who is the author of 14 books, including Unstable Majorities. Fiorina has been studying representation, public opinion, and elections for 50 years.

Most Americans are exhausted by politics and don’t feel represented. But Fiorina believes our very political system is to blame. Politics in America has evolved into an era of “unstable majorities” run by a small “superpolitical” segment. He contends that polarization in the American people isn’t sustaining this group; it’s our very political system that is offering only two parties that are increasingly more partisan.

“The parties have sorted towards the extremes, each party has become more homogeneous internally on ideology and policy and more distinct from the other,” says Fiorina. Voter behavior has not changed much over the decades because the alternatives that voters face have not changed.

Fiorina explains that we’ve nationalized politics so that now Oregon Republicans and Ohio Republicans have exactly the same agendas; and New Mexico Democrats and Massachusetts Democrats have exactly the same agendas. “Texas money is going all over the country for Republicans and Hollywood money is going all over the country for Democrats, and so they are imposing national agendas on races where they probably don’t really fit the interests of the districts.”

And that’s why he believes political participation in the country is run on the extremes. “There are about 15% for whom politics are a consuming interest; these are the people who participate in campaigns, who give money, and comment on social media.”

Researchers refer to these superpolitical groups as “the wings.”

The wings that two-party systems fly on

“The fact is these people on the wings are influential, they pull the parties to the right and left,” explains Fiorina. “The fact that they are a small number, it doesn’t matter. Politicians weigh votes and these people’s votes weigh more.”

If you want to understand why someone might be part of the wings, there are three broad trends that run parallel to polarization, according to More in Common director of research Stephen Hawkins: a decline in institutional trust, a drop in sense of belonging and community, and a change in information systems, or increasing echo chambers enabled by cable news and social media.

Since the superpolitical get much more airtime and traction, we get a very inaccurate view of politics. If you look at the aggregate distribution of ideology or opinion in the U.S., it hasn’t changed since Jimmy Carter’s days in 1976. What has changed is the way the parties organize politics. It used to be that the Democrats and Republicans were both big heterogenous parties, making building cross-party coalitions easy.

“It is simply the case now that the Democrats have become a solidly liberal party and Republicans have become a solidly conservative party. Which has made solving any kind of issue in politics very difficult,” explains Fiorina.

The extreme wings have made moving the political needle impossible.

We are in an era of “unstable majorities”

In between the wings stand everyone else, who constitute the majority.

“The exhausted majority is a group that refers to two-thirds of Americans who feel frustrated by the political conversation, who are not ideologically oriented, but are more flexible in their political beliefs, who don’t feel well-represented by the political debate and are open to finding compromise in the political conversation,” says Hawkins.

“It’s a group that is quite varied demographically, it’s a group that is defined not by what it is, but what it is not, and it is not deeply enmeshed in ideological conflict and partisanship orientation. Instead it wants to see the country succeed, instead of one party succeeding.”

The U.S. is currently experiencing a historically unprecedented period of electoral instability. Fiorina’s research draws contrasts with earlier periods in American electoral history and explains how the sorting of the two major political parties into ideologically opposing organizations not only does not represent the larger electorate—it results in the inability of either party to forge lasting majorities.

This is partly by design. But political scientists say it’s a mystery how we evolved European-style parties into a two-party system. “We don’t fully understand how we came to this and we don’t really understand how to get out of this,” says Fiorina.

The architecture of our political decision making is one that does not permit for people to express moderation, they have to pick a camp, says Hawkins. “In other countries, with the exception of the U.K., there is far more capacity for political subcultures to manifest in voting. We aren’t really polarized, we just don’t have choices.”

A majority of the world’s developed democracies are parliamentary. That’s when a party or coalition of parties gets a majority of seats in the parliament, and chooses the chief executive, often called the prime minister. The U.S. is one of a minority of democracies that are presidential, in which voters elect the chief executive independent of the legislatures.

The U.S. is even more unusual in having two equally powerful chambers of the legislature, which are elected separately for different terms of office. The two-year term served by members of the U.S. House is the shortest among world democracies; elsewhere, four- to five-year terms are common.

Fiorina’s research shows that, because of these exceptional institutional features, a national election every two years can generate eight patterns of institutional control of the presidency, House, and Senate, and six of those eight patterns can lead to a divided, gridlocked government with an unstable majority.

Only two patterns can lead to full party control. Historically, we had a lot more of that; 1896 to 1930 was our era of Republican majorities, with the party often winning all three power centers. Then we swung to the era of Democratic majorities, with the blue party often winning all three power centers until 1950. After that, we entered into 40 years of divided governments that still got things done. But from 1990 onward, Fiorina contends we’ve been in an era of unstable majorities. “The result is not a 50–50 nation, but something more like a 30–40–30 nation,” explains Fiorina.

There have been exceptions. The 2016 elections generated a rare shift to a Republican presidency and Republican-run House and Senate, but that enabled a lot of real swings to the right that don’t represent most Americans.

Most voters are not party elites, and most voters are not very partisan at all. So they are increasingly dissatisfied with the choices the political system offers.

“With close electoral competition between two ideologically well-sorted parties, political overreach has become endemic, resulting in predictable electoral swings,” says Fiorina. “Parties attempt to govern in a manner that reflects the preferences of their bases, but doing so alienates the marginal members of their electoral majority, who then withdraw their support in the next election.”

Overreach is now a regular feature of politics today.

We aren’t polarized, but our system is polarizing

Fiorina has been studying the data on abortion opinion for decades. Most Americans actually supported Roe v. Wade when it was in place. Following a Trump appointment during his presidency, the Supreme Court reversed the decades-old decision that protected a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

He says, “There is a disconnect between the government’s agenda and what the country believes. Only the highly involved, for example, think abortion is an easy issue. But 85% of the country says it is complicated.” Fiorina says most data show there is much more common ground on issues than people believe.

Hawkins agrees that our political system is a binary. “We have a red and blue party and you have to pick one of those when it comes to voting.” Even if there are seven major cohorts of Americans in terms of their political beliefs, as his report explains, he says at the end of the day people have to cluster into one of three places: “Either they don’t participate or they pick the Republican or pick the Democrat.”

The rising importance of social issues, like abortion or same-sex marriage, has aggravated the polarization.

“As long as politics was about nothing but economics, the two-party system worked, but the social issues are harder to pick one side on,” says Fiorina. “We are in an era where politics is about everything, the personal is politics, and it’s become really difficult for a two-party system. How can two parties incorporate economics, social issues, foreign policy, they can’t. They can’t come up with something that appeals to the entire country.”

The upcoming election

So how is this going to play out in the coming weeks? Fiorina is pessimistic: “This election is ugly. The outcome is going to satisfy no majority.”

Even so, Hawkins believes Harris’s campaign is very much veering toward the center and toward the exhausted majority. “Her campaign is taking for granted that the progressive activists’ wing on the far left will show up and vote against Donald Trump, even if they think Kamala Harris is not sufficiently committed to policies of social justice—but the election is hinged towards whether she can win over more moderate votes.”

In analyzing the DNC speeches, Hawkins finds that there was very little mention of narrow group identity. For example, Harris has made very little mention of her gender and her race in her candidacy, unlike how Obama ran 16 years ago or how Hillary Clinton ran eight years later with “I’m with her.”

“So it seems they are focusing on her appeal as a policymaker, as a leader, someone who can solve problems of the economy and immigration, rather than trying to use the language of progressive activism,” argues Hawkins. “Yes, they are trying to reach the exhausted majority.”

Will that be enough to make a difference? At this point, it’s hard to say. But it may plant the seeds for something down the road that will help energize a majority of voters, instead of just making them feel tired.

There have even been numerous urgent calls by governments and policymakers to address it. However, it should also be noted that some researchers have questioned whether we really have the credible data to back up such claims. 

But even if there were enough evidence of a loneliness epidemic, I think it’s important to consider what that would mean about loneliness itself. For example, would it mean we should strive to eradicate it from our individual and collective lives, as we would a virus or disease?

Psychologist James Hillman had concerns about what I like to call the “loneliness as pathology” perspective. He said “solutions” like Prozac, or even socializing in “recovery groups,” can reflect the idea that we should “abolish” loneliness.

But what if, as Hillman went on to argue, loneliness is an inevitable part of being human? Wouldn’t we be trying to “cure” something that’s as much a part of our journey as death itself? He put it this way:

If loneliness is an archetypal sense built into us all from the very beginning, then, to be alive is also to be lonely. Loneliness, therefore, will come and go as it chooses in the course of a lifetime, quite apart from our efforts to deny or avoid this reality.

In different ways, I have spent most of my career researching loneliness. I’ve carried out hundreds of interviews and observed the plethora of ways it can show up in people’s lives, from childhood and into deep old age.

Numerous case studies of human suffering have led me to believe that loneliness may not be so much a “single feeling” but simply a label we give to a medley of human experiences and unsatisfied appetites that revolve around a sense of disconnection that may well be inevitable from time to time.

In my recent book, All the Lonely People: Conversations on Loneliness, I presented an array of examples of the different ways in which loneliness can present. The conversations are drawn from a range of projects and interviews I’ve conducted over the years, that each offer a glimpse of a particular shade of loneliness. I have given my interviewees pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. 

Jake: The loneliness of childhood

As with adulthood and later life, encounters with loneliness are frequently a part of children’s lives. Sometimes they are brutal encounters and sometimes more subtle or fleeting. 

Jake’s story is an example of one of the more extreme shades of loneliness that can take hold in childhood. He was 10 when he participated in a study a colleague and I conducted about children’s experiences of foster care. Jake was removed from his parents due to abuse and neglect in early childhood. He had been in seven different foster homes, and nobody had yet shown an interest in permanently adopting him because of particularly challenging and complex behavioral issues. He was living in a foster home with Trudi, his foster carer, and her dog Zak. Jake told me:

Maybe I would feel safer if I were, like, adopted or something, but I’m in foster care, see, which is why the social worker comes around and checks on me, ’cos they, like, own me, or something. The problem is that nobody wants to adopt me so I can live there all the time without having to move to new homes.

Jake’s loneliness stemmed from a complete lack of belief or faith in loving, caring adults. He simply hadn’t found a loving family or a place to call home, a secure base upon which to anchor himself. Understandably, he’d given up trusting adults and no longer allowed himself to get close to them.

But I learned from Jake’s story that, even against the odds, we can find unlikely pathways out of loneliness. Jake’s pathway was his relationship with Zak, the family dog.

I don’t mind being really close with Zak, ‘cos he won’t get rid of me. I do feel really safe with him. . . . I think he’s my friend because he wants to be and not just because he has to be.

Zak was a six-year-old golden retriever. He was calm, gentle, and had a sort of caring wisdom about him that some dogs exude. We quickly realized that Zak’s role was paramount in helping Jake to feel less alone in the world and in helping him learn to trust Trudi.

Jake opened up to us about the important role Zak played as the only living creature on Earth who could help him feel less alone, especially in relation to his lack of control over having a place to call home.

I used to hide in the living room with Zak when there was a knock at the door. I used to worry it was the social worker coming to take me away. I didn’t feel safe without him and, when I was with him, just holding his ears, I felt relaxed and I wouldn’t have the big thumping feeling in my body.

Jake told us that he often felt afraid and alone at night, and the intensity of his feelings frequently prevented him from sleeping. He described how, one night, he had wandered into the dark hallway in his pajamas and peered through the banisters into the kitchen below. He saw Trudi’s silhouette. She was doing the washing up and Zak was sitting beside her.

Trudi had been talking to Zak. Jake hadn’t found it odd that she was talking to the dog—after all, he talked to Zak more than anyone. Zak was, in fact, the only one he really trusted. It wasn’t the fact she was talking to the dog that made his heart thump. It was what she said that was so powerful, for him. What he heard made him feel a deep thumping in his body; his heart was pounding so hard that he almost shook.

Trudi had told Zak that she “liked having Jake around.” She said that she thought he was a “lovely boy” and that she “hoped he would be around for a long time to come.”

“Nobody has ever said that about me,” Jake said. It excited and terrified him in equal measure to think that Trudi felt that way about him. Jake had never experienced what it felt like to be wanted before. He had never experienced the sense that someone wanted him around, cared about him, or liked him. And, strangely, hearing it in secret, eavesdropping in the hallway, made it all the more credible.

Trudi wasn’t saying it to make him feel better. How could she be? She didn’t even know he was listening. But what she said to Zak that night shook the lonely little boy’s world and opened him up to the idea that it just might be possible to be wanted in this world.

Alex: The loneliness of adolescence

Compared to Jake, Alex was a 13-year-old teenager living in a relatively privileged home in the sense that he had a loving family and a stable home environment. In our conversation, he talked about what might be considered a more “everyday” experience of loneliness which stemmed from the fact that he was afraid to reveal himself to the world.

He said that he often tried to hide, to blend in, to melt into the background, and as a consequence of not being seen, he experienced a sense of loneliness.

When I was little, I was the exact opposite. I could say whatever I liked, and I didn’t care what people thought of me or whether they liked me. I don’t know where it all started. But it did. I’m scared that people won’t like me if I show them who I am.

“OK, so, how does that connect to your feelings of loneliness?” I asked him.

“Because nobody really gets to know me. Nobody really knows who I am,” he answered. “That’s a bit lonely, isn’t it? There are so many opportunities where I could share things about myself, but I don’t because I don’t think they’d want to know.” He offered me a recent example from his school life.

He was in an IT lesson and his teacher had set the class an exercise that involved telling the rest of the class what kind of music you liked, via a PowerPoint presentation. Pupils had to state their favorite band or artist and explain why they liked it. He said:

It was so hard for me to actually say what I liked that I told her I never listened to music. I lied to her so that I didn’t have to say what I liked. She ended up telling me what she liked, and I put that on my PowerPoint and didn’t have to reveal anything about myself.

I asked him if he knew, at the time, what his favorite sort of music was. “Of course, I knew,” he replied definitively. “I like stuff, lots of stuff, but I just couldn’t risk telling people because I was so afraid of being judged.”

Will: The loneliness of heartbreak

Sometimes, loneliness inevitably stems from an obvious experience of loss. For example, I talked to Will, a 21-year-old man, about the loneliness he was experiencing in the aftermath of a recent heartbreak.

“I’m telling you, she became someone else in the space of a week. Cold. Callous. Unresponsive,” he told me.

“And I feel like I metamorphosed from someone she loved into a traumatized nuisance that she would rather see the back of, because it simply made her feel guilty and bad about herself to even look at me.”

“You’ve seen the film Ghost, right?” He looked at me for confirmation.

“Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, 1990?” I replied. “Yes, I’ve seen it a few times.” Satisfied with my response, he nodded and continued.

Will was a bit of a film buff and in the course of our interview, various film plots offered him metaphors that helped articulate how he was feeling. “Well, then you’ll know the plot line of that film, which really sums up how I feel right now. It’s the whole part where Patrick Swayze is murdered and becomes a ghost. And the woman he loves, Demi Moore, simply can’t see him any longer—he’s invisible to her because he’s a ghost and, in a literal sense, I suppose, he is dead to her—and there’s this whole sad plot line where he is no longer visible to the woman he loves.”

“That’s exactly how it feels to me, as though I suddenly turned into a ghost and Melissa just…stopped seeing me. Does that sound crazy?”

It didn’t sound crazy to me. I remembered the times in my life when partners I had deeply loved had suddenly stopped seeing me as someone they loved too and transitioned into a person I no longer recognized, almost overnight.

Will’s story raised some of the unique features of loneliness often associated with something like heartbreak. The psychologist and therapist, Ginette Paris, has suggested that we resort to metaphor when we are trying get to know the unfamiliar. People have used metaphors such as “being blotted out of a masterpiece and replaced as easily as I was painted in” or “being lost in a harsh, barren desert” to describe heartbreak.

The Jungian analyst, Aldo Carotenuto, once wrote that when someone breaks our heart there is an immediate collapse of a psychological order. We lose who we were for our lover, who we were with them, and who we were to them. Every relationship is different, so nobody else can ever really know exactly what it’s like to lose what you’ve lost. It’s an experience for which there are no reference points in the external world. And what could be lonelier than that? 

Ray: The loneliness of losing someone to dementia

There are phases of life that seem to create unique clusters of circumstances that give rise to particular types of loneliness and disconnection. My colleague Chao Fang from the University of Liverpool and I have written extensively about our efforts to listen to older people’s experiences. 

Our work has identified that, if we live long enough, we are more likely to experience a series of inevitable losses that often bring about a profound sense of loneliness. These may be the loss of meaningful long-term relationships, our health and fitness, or our careers, roles, and identities. Each person’s experience of these losses is unique.

Ray, for example, was 78 and had been married to Pam for most of his life. “We’ve been married over 50 years, you know—well, 54 to be exact—but Pam has dementia now. That’s why we moved to this retirement community,” he told me.

From this point in the conversation, the essence of Ray and Pam’s loneliness started to reveal itself. “This was supposed to be the community for us, for her,” he told me, “the place where she could hold on to the things she loves.”

As he spoke, I began to appreciate just how hard it must be for him to come to terms with the fact that he was slowly losing his wife, watching her become increasingly alienated from the world around them.

“Pam used to belong to a book group—it was such an important part of her life,” he continued. “Well, at first, she laughed about it, but now she cries at the same time. You know, she taught all those children, over, gosh, goodness knows how many years teaching…35 years teaching, and she taught all those children to read and write—and now she can’t even read herself, and she can’t write.” As he said this, I noticed a tear rolling down his left cheek.

“It’s so cruel to her that she is no longer able to do the things she earned a living doing…that she loved doing.” He stared off into space and I waited for him to gather himself. “So, she belonged to a book club,” he continued, “well, she’s tried the book club here, and she gets so…how best to describe it? Frustrated. Because she can’t complete a sentence. Frustrated. Because she hasn’t been able to read the books. The font size is too small,” he said, incredulously.

“There are all these little things that gradually rob her of the things she loves. We’ve tried audiobooks, but she falls asleep as soon as she starts listening to the thing.” Ray then said something that touched me:

In some ways, I just feel she’s a bit like a leper, really, because no one actually wants to get close to her.

He started to cry. “She’s a lovely girl, lady, old lady…you know?” He wept openly then. 

I feel very lonely. . . . Shall I tell you what the real hell of it is? It’s just sitting here, like you’re already mourning somebody you’ve lost, yet you’re still living with them—it’s sad, but it’s true.

Ray had identified a key feature of spousal loneliness that has been associated with dementia—that the onset of loss and grief begins a long time before their spouses actually die.

Learning to live with loneliness

Stories of everyday loneliness like these are valuable because they help us to appreciate that loneliness has many guises and isn’t really a universal phenomenon. When somebody tells us they feel lonely, we know almost nothing about their experience until we have heard the story of their loneliness and the unique circumstances that give rise to it. The feeling is really just the tip of the iceberg. Stories help us to discern what loneliness looks like and how it is lived.

Stories of loneliness can also help us to appreciate that it is a part of most people’s journey through life. We all have stories like these inside us, whether we have shared them or not. Perhaps accepting this reality makes more sense than seeking to pathologize what may be an an inevitable human experience.

In fact, we may do more harm than good by stigmatizing and pathologizing loneliness, creating a sense of shame around it that forces people to compartmentalize the experience, mask it, or drive it underground.

Of course, this is not to say that we should take loneliness lightly. It is a challenging and difficult part of life. But this is where stories come in. In stories, we have the opportunity to share our loneliness with others, unburdening ourselves, and no longer keeping our loneliness exclusively to ourselves. An essential component of the suffering in loneliness is often the fact that we are alone with our loneliness. In my experience, stories of loneliness hold great value for both listener and storyteller, fostering empathy, compassion, and connection.

Ultimately, the answer to loneliness may well be found in learning to live alongside it, as opposed to denying its existence or seeking to eradicate it.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Can this be changed? Yes! 

In our book, Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School: Partnering to Overcome Inequity, we describe how families and educators can partner to support children in recognizing and believing in their strengths and assets and building a positive sense of self. The insights we share include research on identity safety and courageous contributions from 29 youth, caregivers, and educators—and can help you take steps toward that goal in your school or community today.

Partnering for safety and belonging

When we talk about affirming students’ identities and cultivating identity safety, we are referring to identities like race, gender, age, and appearance, as well as sexual orientation, social class, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. Research by social psychologist Claude Steele and educator Dorothy Steele found that when a child’s identity is undermined, their confidence erodes and it hurts their performance. For example, this might happen due to bullying, harassment, exclusion, or negative stereotyping.

Most importantly, they found that when a child’s unique identity is validated and valued, they feel a sense of belonging and do better in school.

This kind of focus on identity safety complements “strengths-based” practices that draw from students’ strengths and assets rather than focusing on their deficits or limitations. For example, University of Arizona researchers highlight the “funds of knowledge” and expertise that all families and communities possess. They explain how these provide children with a wealth of knowledge and skills and support a positive sense of self. Indeed, research suggests that a strengths-based approach has tremendous potential for overcoming inequities.

While many schools are implementing identity-safe and strengths-based practices, we need to broaden this work to include families. The importance of family-school engagement is well-documented. It is especially important for children and families who face stigma based on race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and neurodiversity, often compounded by adverse childhood experiences and significant educational disruptions. School-family partnerships can help us overcome inequities, equalize status, and amplify the voices that need to be heard.

Tools for building confidence in students

What does it look like to affirm children’s identities and positive qualities? Children need to hear many messages to shape a positive sense of their identity. We can do this by highlighting their strengths, honoring who they are as individuals, and making sure they have access to inspirational role models, especially ones who share their identities.

For example, Jesús Mena grew up in Texas near the Mexican border, where most families were migrant workers. He only had one Chicano teacher in 13 years of schooling—Mr. Perez, his chemistry teacher. Jesús explained, “I was scared about going to college. I chose to major in chemistry. Why? Because my only Chicano teacher was Mr. Pérez.”

That initial inspiration gave him the confidence and courage to attend and graduate from college. Jesús became a chemistry major and eventually a chemist. His experience demonstrates the inspiration that role models serve.

It’s also helpful to listen, express interest in, and be curious about children’s lives. For example, Menominee educator Paula Rabideaux recalls her daughter’s experience:

One day, a teacher said to my daughter, “I heard you have a Powwow on your reservation this weekend. Are you going?” My daughter looked at her, amazed; no one had ever asked about anything Indigenous. “Yeah, there is,” she replied. The teacher continued, “If you go, maybe you can tell me about it next week.” It made my daughter’s day, giving her an uplifting feeling that the teacher cared. From then on, my daughter loved this teacher and got an A in her course. To this day, she is her favorite teacher. With Native students, there is no secret to culturally responsive practices; the main ingredient is relationships.

Caregivers have tremendous power to support their children in a similar way. For example, college student Sameer Jha recalls the experience of telling his parents that he was gay:

My parents always promised they’d love me no matter what . . . they were 100% supportive. They clarified that anyone who didn’t support me wouldn’t be part of our life anymore. It was incredibly courageous of them and the right thing to do.

Identity safety flourishes in an environment that:

• enhances children’s capacities to build agency and caring, empathic relationships; and
• supports children in navigating adversity and emerging more resilient as they encounter life’s inevitable challenges.

When their identities are validated, children become more empowered to assert their worth and advocate for equity and fairness for themselves and others. This is especially true when they inevitably experience negative messaging. Lenore Harris recounts an experience when her son advocated for himself:

There were only two Black boys in his class. His teacher continuously used the other young man’s name. When my son, Emmanuel, complained to me about it, I suggested we talk to the teacher. However, he felt confident to speak with the teacher on his own behalf. After he spoke with her, he told me, “I didn’t lose my temper or raise my voice. I stayed calm and said, ‘You keep calling me by so-and-so’s name, and I don’t like it. My name is Emmanuel.’ And she said, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.’ So, I told her, ‘I know you didn’t mean to do it. But you keep doing it. I think it’s racist because we are the only two Black kids in the class. You call everyone else by their name, but not me and him.’” He was able to advocate for himself in such an impressive manner, making me very proud of him.

Fostering home-school partnerships

While practices like these can be done at school or at home separately, home-school partnerships are important. They allow educators to learn about each student and their unique family background and allow caregivers to discover additional ways to support their children.

We can begin by creating a caring and welcoming climate for caregivers at school. There are many ways large and small for families to be involved with us. For example, we can invite them into the classroom for special activities and encourage them to share cultural traditions, knowledge, and expertise. We can also offer opportunities to volunteer and participate in decision making and school governance. Trust is built in every interaction between educators and families. Here are two effective practices.

Listening tours. Listening tours are sessions where caregivers can share ideas, concerns, and questions individually or in groups. The goal is to foster dialogue where educators gather information about what caregivers feel or think in general or about a specific topic (for example, the special education intake process or the multi-lingual learner program). When listening tours are done thoughtfully and without judgment, educators learn about their community and what is on the minds of families.

Louise Bay Waters, a former principal, shared the power of a listening tour she organized with Afghan families:

Through these initial listening tours and ongoing parent conversations, I discovered sadness among many immigrant parents. They were proud of their children’s growing English but alarmed at the loss of their native language. They worried that they could not support their children academically without the ability to communicate. However, their deepest fear was losing authority. How could they ensure their children respected the teacher? How could they protect them from drugs or gang activity if the children no longer respected them, their culture, or their language?

As a result of the listening tour, she instituted a Language Academy, offering primary language instruction in many languages. Many immigrant families participated.

Working groups. An identity-safety working group can support, analyze, and strengthen home-school partnerships by involving caregivers, educators, students, and community members. Some of its most important purposes are to affirm the many identities present in a school and support students’ academically and socially. A working group can also foster pride and cultural humility, help everyone counteract negative stereotypes, and involve families to celebrate the school’s rich diversity.  Additionally, it helps everyone learn and grow together and positively influence school policies, practices, and governance to be inclusive.

Tips for facilitating working groups:

• Become familiar with the community to develop trusting relationships.
• Co-create norms for working together and agendas with the communities’ needs in mind.
• Respect diverse opinions and invite all voices to participate.
• Set goals, monitor progress, and celebrate successes!

Working groups can embody the spirit of identity safety and empower a collaborative schoolwide identity-safety effort. We describe two successful examples in our book.
 
First, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Brockton District in Massachusetts, teams of bilingual-bicultural parent/guardian volunteers, paraprofessionals, counselors, and nurses staffed a multilingual call center, providing support and access to desperately needed medical, counseling, and food services for families, staff, and students, as it was one of the most COVID-19–impacted cities in the state.
 
Another example is the Wolfe Street Academy in Baltimore, Maryland. They work in close partnership with the University of Maryland School of Dentistry to respond to students’ dental needs. Interns from the University of Maryland’s Dental School receive invaluable experience and Wolfe Street Academy’s students and families are co-powered in supporting the school’s dental health and well-being.

We can create a caring and welcoming school environment by co-powering and co-partnering with families. We can do this by using a strengths-based approach that fully supports each child in feeling safe and having a sense of belonging, value, competence, and confidence to speak on behalf of themselves and others.

Together, we can dismantle inequities, foster empathy, and work to create spaces where everyone feels identity-safe—especially as we become a more richly diverse populace.

Instead, you give in when they beg for more iPad time. Or maybe they promise they’ll do their homework after just a few more YouTube videos, and it’s easier to agree than have another argument. Now you’re not only exhausted, you feel like a bad parent, too.

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Concern over how—and how much—their children are using media is a common source of parental guilt, which makes sense given the reputation of screen use as a frivolous waste of time, with no intrinsic value. So even if people are on their screens for a great reason—to relax, for example, or otherwise manage their moods—they are inclined to feel guilty about it. And this guilt undermines any stress-reducing benefit they might have otherwise enjoyed.

But as unpleasant as this guilt is, the good news is that those feelings, if you listen to them, can help encourage healthier choices for you and your kids.

Parental guilt over child screen use

Studies, including from my own media research group, have found that screen media use is among the most common tools that people of all ages use to decompress, relax, and enjoy themselves.

But parents worry about their kids’ screen use and for good reason. Without adequate management, screen time can too easily get out of hand, raising concerns about negative outcomes, such as compromised sleep, increased obesity risk, reduced academic performance, and mental health challenges.

So here’s the dilemma. Well-meaning parents set various rules to protect their children from the harms associated with too much screen time. But research shows that most parents break those rules. If a child is sick, why not let them play several hours of video games? Maybe you plop your child in front of the TV to keep them busy while you sort laundry or hop on a work call.

So what happens when you break your own rules—especially when those rules are in place to protect your children? You’re primed to feel guilt, and because guilt is its own form of stress, this dynamic sets up tension that can be unhealthy for both parents and kids.

The downside of parental screen guilt

The COVID-19 pandemic, when media use of all sorts increased among all demographics in the U.S. and internationally, gave my research team a unique opportunity to study the guilt that parents feel over their children’s screen use.

Our research considered how the sudden and substantial increase in screen use at the onset of the pandemic affected how parents felt about their relationships with their children. We surveyed parents in March 2020 and another group of parents in both April and May of 2020. We asked about their child’s amount of screen time, their feelings of guilt about their child’s screen use, the stress they felt about it, and how satisfied they were with their relationship with their child. 

We found that 73% of parents experienced at least some guilt, and 48% felt moderate to intense guilt over their child’s use of screens. So, parental screen guilt was quite common.

We also found that parents who felt more guilt about their child’s screen use also experienced greater stress about that screen use, and that greater stress was linked to feeling less satisfied with their relationship with their child. Importantly, parents’ initial screen guilt in April predicted higher stress about screen use in May, but initial screen stress in April did not predict screen guilt in May. What does this mean? Screen guilt was, in fact, increasing stress, and not the other way around.

What about the amount of time kids spent on screens? Is that the reason why parents felt guilty and stressed? It turns out: not really. In our research, we found little to no relationship between how long children used screens and parents’ screen guilt, screen stress, or relationship satisfaction. In other words, it was the feelings of guilt over children’s use of screens, regardless of the amount of use itself, that was problematic for the parents and, by extension, their children.

Turning guilt lemons into lemonade

So, what can a parent do? Rather than berating yourself over perceived mistakes or misjudgments regarding media choices, it would be far more productive to find the value and deeper lessons in your screen guilt.

People feel guilt when they see their actions conflict with their internalized belief systems or standards of behavior. And as uncomfortable as guilty feelings may be, that guilt can be useful in helping you repair any harms you think you may have caused, particularly within relationships.

In other words, screen guilt can be useful information, nudging you to reflect on and adjust your own rules or choices. Was there a good reason to relax your usual limits on screen use, like when trying to comfort your child when they are sick? On the other hand, is your child suffering negative consequences, for example, not completing homework or getting exercise, because of leniency with screens? Or do you simply feel like a bad parent because you’ve internalized the belief that good parents don’t let their children use screens?

Such reflection can be an opportunity to consider not only how your family is using screens but, importantly, what guardrails you might need to put in place, or adjust, to support family wellness.

Although you might not hear this sentiment often, not all screen media use is bad. There is, in fact, evidence that screen use and content can contribute to a range of wonderful outcomes, including learning, social connection, inspiration, and, yes, relaxation and stress relief.

Although guilt may not be pleasant, if you take a moment to understand why you feel it, it can help guide you in creating not only a more balanced diet of media and real-world experiences for you and your family, but also more satisfying relationships with your kids.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What would help remedy this situation? Psychological safety is a belief shared among team members that it’s OK to take risks, suggest ideas, and make mistakes without fear of reprisal, ridicule, or other negative consequences. That safety is a goal worth pursuing: Studies have found psychologically safe workplaces enhance team performance and have higher-quality employee interactions, more job commitment, and greater information sharing.

But how psychological safety develops as a process in demographically diverse groups has been understudied. Now, a new qualitative study shows how interdependent, joyful, and spontaneous group-based play can lead to an increase in psychological safety in diverse work teams. The findings suggest managers and organizations might benefit from engaging in strategies to introduce more group-based play.

Adults at play

Published in the Journal for Organizational Behavior, the study zeroed in on how peer-group members influence the progression and maintenance of psychological safety over eight play sessions with 97 participants.

What did these sessions look like? In one, they played a game called “ABC Bodies,” that required participants and their partners to form the alphabet with their bodies. Another, called “Professor Know It All,” involved group members contributing individual words to build a coherent sentence to answer a question spontaneously posed to them by others in the session.

All participants were asked to use diaries to describe their emotions, feelings, or thoughts during the play activities, what they observed in other students, and how the context was similar or different from other learning experiences.

Through 78 diary entries, 56 interviews, and 70 hours of participant observation, the researchers found that group-based play disrupts exclusionary dynamics among demographically diverse adults. Play encourages them to shift from their own self-protection to rely on one another to complete a shared fun and whimsical task.

In an interview, a Black LGBTQ+ woman participant said, “It’s all about what you’re seeing and what’s funny at that moment. It spoke to me because it’s like every day I try to implement those principles of not really caring what other people think, just being me, bringing myself to the table and being OK with myself, like accepting of myself and others.”

The diary entry of a Latino woman said, “I think this class has exercises that might seem weird or uncomfortable, but because they are so weird and uncomfortable, I am sort of like ‘eh whatever.’ Everyone has to do it, so we are all weird together.”

And in an interview, one white male participant said, “When we’re playing, it kind of creates a sort of vulnerability. I’m just thinking about some people playing the mirror game last week. And it’s almost like before you know it, you’re doing something that is silly or not cool—something vulnerable. And there’s something about the mutual engagement or the mutual kind of like, ‘We’re all being uncool together.’”

Playing from me to we

According to the researchers, psychological safety is a by-product of group-based play because it shifts risk from the individual to the collective. Group play “enables diverse group members to have a greater willingness to (1) engage in relational risk-taking with each other and (2) support each other’s relational risk-taking,” the researchers explain in the study.

“In playing the interdependent, joyful, novel, and spontaneous games, diverse participants were able to redirect their focus from themselves and self-evaluation outwards toward their diverse partners and group members,” the researchers write. By moving away from the “ego-system” towards an awareness of each other in the broader “eco-system,” group members were able to recognize and experience their interdependence and connection with one another.

In other words, play had an equalizing effect and helped break down demography-based hierarchical distinctions. As one instructor described, “The games compel participants to give up relying on their statuses in order to navigate the play experience.”

The study’s findings have several implications. First, play for play’s sake can lead to psychological safety, which is associated with better individual performance and commitment. Second, play encourages dissimilar others to move away from self-protection in interpersonal interactions. Thirdly, managers and organizations can introduce weekly dedicated time for more group-based play activities into workgroups and project teams.

One in five TikTok users are children, and TikTok ranks as the most popular platform where users feel free to talk politics. Politicians inspiring viral cat memes makes politics even stronger fodder for children.

But how should parents talk to their children about politics—beyond spectacle, perhaps toward future participation?

Since 1964, American voters in the 18-to-24 age bracket have traditionally had the lowest turnout rates. How will these early social media exposures affect the participation of kids as they grow older? “Understanding how young people become predisposed towards democratic participation I think is one of the most important political questions of our time,” says civic engagement researcher Christopher M. Wegemer.

The nonprofit More in Common asked 60 American parents across the political spectrum how they talk to their children about politics. Most parents shared that they do not talk to their children under seven about political or social issues, because they feel their children are too young to understand. For parents with children older than seven, about half reported talking to their children about politics. This holds across political lines—Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to talk or not talk to their children about political and social issues.

The parents stressed that teaching their children strong moral values—particularly to treat others with respect—is more important than teaching them a particular political viewpoint. This finding mirrors the 2022 Pew Research Center survey, which found that only 16% of U.S. parents say it’s important that their children share their political beliefs.

“I simply try to slowly teach [my son] the importance of respecting others and being a good person,” said a Democrat and Black father of a three year old in the More in Common study. A Republican father to a 10 year old said, “I will discuss certain current events or topics with my child, but I will focus on teaching basic values such as kindness, respect, and fairness.” 

While most parents may not overtly be teaching their politics to their children, the research is resoundingly clear: Parenting has enduring effects on a child’s future politics and participation. Studies suggest that children primarily turn to their parents for guidance on how to assess news; volatile politics, as we are experiencing now, is an opportunity to enhance youth political participation; and early childhood attachment can be a strong predictor of a child’s political orientation at age 26. Here’s a breakdown of the research—and seven tips for discussing politics with your kids.

Parenting attachment style as political predictor

“Parents should be aware that their actions can have long-term political ramifications, even if they are not talking about politics,” says Wegemer. “The ways they interact with their kids, the types of contexts they are in, can fundamentally have political implications.”

Wegemer is just wrapping up a six-month study with high school students and their political conversations with different groups. He found that of the four types of people—teachers, peers, parents, and classmates—studied, “only discussions with parents predicted their later political motivation.”

In 2020, Wegemer and developmental psychologist Deborah Lowe Vandell investigated early childhood antecedents of adult political orientation. They conducted a survey with 814 adult participants of a longitudinal study by the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. The study picked mothers while they were pregnant with their kids and followed them from 1991 to 2018, with home visits to see how parents interacted with kids. The cohort was from Little Rock, AR; Irvine, CA; Lawrence, KS; Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Seattle, WA; Morganton, NC; and Madison, WI.

The data set was unique because of its extensive investigation of early childhood and its span of more than two and a half decades—and the study was the first to establish associations between attachment security in early childhood and adult political orientation.

“We found that young children who had authoritarian parents, a fearful temperament, or an anxious attachment were more likely to have conservative political orientation at age 26,” said Wegemer.

Attachment security–seeking strategies in childhood include verbal and non-verbal displays of emotion, exploration, and searching for the attachment figure. For example, avoidant children’s apparent indifference toward caregivers may manifest in adulthood as disregard toward authority or tradition as sources of security.

The results suggest that early childhood attachment security shapes how we process fear and security, which can in turn affect our politics in adulthood. Specifically, Wegemer found that childhood antecedents were differentially related to three aspects of political orientation: ideological conservatism, Republican Party affiliation, and Democratic Party affiliation.

Fearful temperament was associated with ideological conservatism, but not necessarily Republican Party affiliation.

Similarly, avoidant attachment predicted away from ideological conservatism, but was not negatively related to Republican Party affiliation even though anxious attachment was positively related to Republican Party affiliation. As Wegemer explains, “The Republican party in this election is very much harping on fear, capitalizing on people’s fearful disposition, aiming towards tradition, making America great again, rather than exploring new possibilities.” (The implication that political parties might target specific personality traits and dispositions further builds the case for parents to be aware that their parenting has long-term political impacts.)

Neither early childhood attachment nor temperament were predictive of Democratic Party affiliation.

“The question of understanding how young people develop politically is not necessarily partisan Republican versus Democrat, it’s about democracy versus authoritarianism.  It’s about how young people feel agency in our society. Political polarization and the animosity between the parties is not just eroding people’s faith in the parties but it is eroding people’s faith in democracy,” said Wegemer.

Children need support in assessing credibility

Add in social media and things get more complicated. Many children and teens have trouble assessing the credibility of online information.

According to a study published in 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas. A Stanford University study found that less than 1% of high school students in 2019 could identify the true source of a video alleging voter fraud in an American election, which was actually filmed in Russia. However, according to a separate Stanford study published in April 2022, high school students who attended six 50-minute lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to spot questionable websites.

For parents who think their children will learn these skills in school, think again. Only 14 states have some kind of media literacy laws in place, but many are vague and some simply require schools to include a list of resources on their website. The increasing censorship in schools makes things worse. In the last year alone, America recorded 3,362 instances of book bans in public school classrooms and libraries. Talking politics with students is becoming more and more risky for teachers.

“Teachers are nervous and hesitant to talk about social issues because they know there is disagreement and they don’t want to create disagreement or hostile environments in the classroom,” explains Laura Wray-Lake, a professor at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. “And that just perpetuates the divide even further. We are only hearing one perspective, especially on social media. They are getting their news from single sources, rather than hearing different perspectives.”

Volatile politics is an opportunity to enhance participation

In this vacuum of school resources and parental guidance around politics, the increasingly hostile political climate has coincided with measurable changes in how teens perceive marginalization and their own civic agency.

In a study published in the journal Child Development, researchers surveyed 1,433 students from 22 schools in grades 4 to 12, in the greater Los Angeles area, the suburbs of Minnesota, and rural West Virginia. They found that the students’ opinions of Trump predicted massive shifts in their sociopolitical development over the first year of his presidency.

“The Trump era was a volatile and highly politically polarizing time for the country,” says Wray-Lake, who conducted the study. “Some experienced it as a very hostile and marginalizing time and were attacked by Trump’s rhetoric and policies, whereas others were satisfied with political decisions.

“The biggest takeaway is that young Trump supporters and Trump detractors had different developmental experiences during the first year of the Trump era. In fact, these two groups showed change in opposite directions on several political beliefs.”

The researchers found that 63% of students either strongly disapproved, disapproved, or somewhat disapproved of Trump, while 24% either strongly approved, approved, or somewhat approved of him. Approximately 13% had no opinion.

Students who disapproved of Trump exhibited more race consciousness and awareness of inequality. These students were also more likely to report being threatened or harassed, talk with people of other racial or ethnic backgrounds, think about multiple sides of an issue, and believe that some groups in the U.S. do not have equal chances to participate in government.

In contrast, students who approved of Trump became less likely to support equal rights for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—but more likely to want to vote in national elections.

As for voting intentions for students who disapproved of Trump, there was a divergence based on race. White students who disapproved of Trump reported increased political action intentions, while Latino and Black students who disapproved of Trump reported greater declines in voting intentions compared to white students.

But overall compared to students with no opinion, Trump detractors and Trump supporters became more likely to believe they could get other people to care about a problem, contact someone in leadership, and make a positive impact in their community.

The study’s findings suggest that volatile political times may enhance youth’s engagement with politics across the political spectrum, and may reflect growing political divides, especially around acknowledging racism and other inequalities.

“For me, this paper also comes from a long-standing interest in how historical moments like elections shape adolescents’ development in lasting ways because they are coming of age,” says Wray-Lake. “They are thinking about their identity. Who they are in relation to the world. Who they want to be. What they believe in. What the research shows is that young people need education, support, and different viewpoints to develop politically.”

So how should parents talk to their kids about politics?

This handy guide from the Greater Good Science Center’s parenting director Maryam Abdullah offers seven tips.

1. Center your why. Talk about the civic values that guide your political thinking: Explain how what and who you vote for connects to these principles.

2. Nurture critical thinking around media. Here are some questions you could ask your kids after they see one-sided political news:

• Who created this message?
• Are they using facts, fear, or stereotypes?
• Whose voices are not being represented?
• What other media can I look to for multiple perspectives?

3. Use specific, individualizing language, not generalizations. If you disagree with something a politician says, then point out specifically why to your kids rather than using broad-brush language about a group of people. Finer details can help kids notice that communities are not monoliths.

4. Find common ground. We have a natural inclination to view ourselves as good and reasonable and others as not. Challenge your kids to ask what others value and how their views lead them to think they are good and reasonable, too.

5. Reconsider the jokes you tell. Disparaging humor about whole groups of people can normalize discrimination against them.

6. Check your body language and tone. Kids notice our subtle gestures and facial expressions. They’ll take cues from how you treat neighbors with differing politics.

7. Talk about when it’s time to take a stand. We have a responsibility to call out dehumanization by politicians. Talk to your kids about actions we can take to stand up for each other.

In most of these cases, the focus is on making it right with the person who was wronged. But recent research suggests that this important practice may also have benefits—even physical health benefits—to the person doing the apologizing.

Researchers surveyed 235 students at a large faith-based university in the U.S. The majority were female, and over 98% identified as Christians. These participants were asked to recall the most recent experience where they wronged another person and felt regretful and disappointed in themselves. They were asked if they apologized, and then they completed questions related to their self-forgiveness as well as their mental and physical health in the past week.

Self-forgiveness is defined by the researchers as “willfully abandon[ing] self-resentment and related responses, and . . . endeavor[ing] to respond to oneself based on the moral principle of beneficence.” In other words, recognizing you messed up but giving yourself some grace.

The study found that those who had offered an apology were more likely to have forgiven themselves. In turn, those who experienced self-forgiveness were also more likely to report both better mental health (in terms of less anger, anxiety, and depression) and better physical health (better sleep and less fatigue). The physical health benefits seemed to be triggered at least in part by the mental health benefits.


As one of the researchers, Jichan Kim of Liberty University, puts it, “If self-forgiveness helps you restore emotional well-being, then it is possible that you will also enjoy benefits in physical well-being.”

Interestingly, those who offered an apology and forgave themselves seemed just as mentally and physically healthy as those who did not apologize but still forgave themselves. So it seems that while an apology helps to bring about self-forgiveness, we can still benefit from self-forgiveness without one. In a case where we can’t apologize, such as when the other person isn’t in our life anymore or has passed away, it might still be worth working to forgive ourselves.

This study supports other research finding that self-forgiving people have better mental and physical health. These other researchers suggest that forgiving yourself may help alleviate negative emotions such as shame, guilt, and regret, lessening the risk of depression and anxiety while increasing life satisfaction and contributing to better health. When we make the mistakes in our relationships that are bound to occur, practicing self-forgiveness can be an important way we can maintain our relationships while also buffering our own mental and physical health.

The current study is limited in that it cannot show cause and effect, but only that apologies and self-forgiveness seem to go along with better mental and physical health—at least in mostly Christian young adults at one particular university. But it makes sense that it would be beneficial to accept ourselves more fully, despite our mistakes. 

As Kim suggests, “By self-forgiving, you are developing a view of yourself as imperfect yet with intrinsic worth that no one can take away from you.”

The retrospective cohort study, published online in September ahead of print in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined nearly 40,000 auto workers from three Michigan automobile plants.

“Among Black workers, we observed a strong protective association between greater workforce racial diversity and cardiovascular mortality,” the authors wrote. Results among white workers were mixed, with protective health effects in plants with less than 20% Black workers and either no effects, or harmful effects, in the plant with more than 20% Black workers over the follow-up period.

Professor Ellen Eisen, director of Berkeley Public Health’s Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Training Program, served as senior author on the paper. Although Eisen has spent most of her career studying environmental exposures in the workplace, she has also become interested in considering the workplace as a social determinant of health.

“I’ve started thinking more about the workplace as a social construct, and have studied the health effects of job loss as well as the impacts of racial composition and segregation of the workplace as measures of structural racism,” Eisen said in an interview. “I realized that we had the information to look at changes in racial composition over time, and treat it as a long-term exposure variable—similar to other environmental exposures.”

Study lead author Hilary L. Colbeth was a student of Eisen’s. She received her Ph.D. in epidemiology in May 2024 and is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis.

The researchers developed a quantitative measure of exposure to racial diversity—the percentage of Black workers employed in each plant each year. They then examined the cardiovascular mortality risk of each worker in relation to their average long-term exposure.

“I’ve been following a large population of UAW-GM auto workers for mortality outcomes since the late 1980s,” Eisen said. “The workforce was largely a white male population, with a growing number of Black workers over time.” The researchers leveraged longitudinal data from this cohort mortality study of hourly automobile workers in Detroit, Ypsilanti, and Saginaw, Michigan, from 1941 to 2015. The data included the percentage of white and Black workers at each facility in each year and cardiovascular deaths.

“Our results are consistent with literature documenting that social environmental indicators of support may have a strong effect on cardiovascular health in Black cohorts,” Colbeth said.

“In the Detroit plant, white GM workers were no longer the majority after 1967. Research suggests that white workers in a majority non-white work environment may experience heightened anxiety or status threat because they are unused to occupying a numeric minority status.”

The authors advocate development of interventions focused on workplace policies and practices to encourage social support, representation, and inclusivity to reduce harms from racial exclusions.

This article was originally published on Berkeley Public Health News. Read the original article.

The Empathy Award: Baby Reindeer (Netflix)

Baby Reindeer was, in my humble opinion, the most psychologically astute and troubling show of 2024.

Donny (Richard Gadd) works the bar in a London pub. When he offers a free cup of tea to a lost soul named Martha (Jessica Gunning), he has no idea what doors that act of kindness will open inside both of their heads. Martha, it turns out, has a history of stalking, and at first Baby Reindeer seems to be about how Martha victimizes Donny.

Then things get tricky, and Baby Reindeer becomes a ruthless examination of codependence, and of how people come to be locked into abusive situations. As the episodes peel the onions of their brains, we discover that two people who seem very different from each other actually have a great deal in common. Donny and Martha both feel invisible to the people around them, and, tragically, their antagonism toward each other helps them both to feel seen and important.

In the end, Baby Reindeer does something that I consider to be black magic: We arrive at a place of empathy for all the characters, where we understand why they’ve done what they’ve done, even when it was wrong—even when their actions are deservedly punished. It’s a remarkable, tough-minded achievement. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Find-Yourself Award: Extraordinary (Disney+/Hulu)

In the world of the comedy series Extraordinary, everyone gets a superpower by age 18—except for Jen.

Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 years old. She hasn’t gone to college, and she works as a clerk in a costume shop. She can’t make a romantic connection to save her life. Jen is estranged from her mother and sister, largely because she’s amazingly self-centered. While everyone else around her flies or turns invisible or reads minds or makes people orgasm by simply touching them, Jen is just…ordinary, and so in that context extraordinary. Jen is also incredibly smart and funny and fun and appealingly vulnerable.

So, what’s holding her back? That’s the question behind Extraordinary, one the episodes explore with surprising depth and compassion. As with other recent TV series like The Bear (discussed last year) or Somebody Somewhere (another one on this list), Extraordinary crosses the territory of grief. But Extraordinary is goofier and bawdier than both of those, and it’s a fantasy that skillfully uses superpowers as a metaphor for the search for identity.

Extraordinary isn’t actually a superhero show, though the idea of superheroes is the target of some of its satire. When Jen’s flatmate Kash (Bilal Hasna) decides to launch a superhero team, the results are slapstick ridiculous. Kash’s power is to turn back time, but instead of stopping crime he misuses it to prevent his girlfriend (Sofia Oxenham) from dumping him.

Everyone in this show is a work in progress, which is a huge part of its charm. Will Jen ever get her superpower? While season three hasn’t yet been confirmed, I’ve read that the signs and portents are promising. Stay tuned! — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Greater Goodness Award: Fargo (Hulu)

Fargo the series is based on the classic 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo, but not in a literal way. There are a lot of visual and situational callbacks to the movie. But the characters and conflicts are entirely different—not just between the series and the movie, but between each season of the series. It’s the moral scheme of the series that most aligns it with the movie, and helps each season align with the others.

At one pole, there is a police officer, usually but not always a woman. She is polite and humble and straight-shooting and purposeful. She’s Good with a capital “G.” She stares every situation in the face and tries to make it at least a little bit better than it is, because what’s the alternative?

At the other end of things, there’s a criminal, usually but not always a man. Evil in Fargo is charismatic. Evil makes long speeches, wears nice clothes, possesses an enormous amount of self-confidence, and makes the world much worse than it was.

And then there’s the rest of us. Small-time business owners just trying to climb that American ladder one more rung. Brothers who can’t get over childhood wounds. Husbands saddled with wives who make terrible mistakes; wives married to men who seemed like a good bet in high school.

In each season, one of those more-or-less ordinary people comes into contact with Evil, and the Evil changes them in some way. This is what each season is about: What choices do people make when confronted with Evil? Some start a downward slide into death or prison; some actually hold onto themselves, even if they can’t ultimately escape the consequences of their understandable mistakes.

In Fargo, Good matters. There are always consequences to our actions. “The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good,” says season three’s Evil, a bulimic mobster named V.M. Varga. “Because otherwise, who would care?” — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Emotional-Connection Award: Love Is Blind Mexico (Netflix)

Love Is Blind is an international reality-television series/social experiment that invites single men and women to find love and get engaged without ever meeting face to face, focusing on emotional rather than physical connection. In addition to the American version, there are shows in Brazil, Japan, and more.

The one I watch is the Mexican version, which to me is more than just entertainment—it’s a celebration of the universal human desire for connection, framed within the beauty of Mexican culture (food, places, cultural values, and more). As the series unfolds, it highlights that love is a deeply human experience, one that transcends borders, languages, and cultural differences—but that relationships evolve differently through language and culture.

In Spanish-speaking cultures, love progresses in stages: “Me gustas” (I like you), “Te quiero” (I really care about you and want to be with you), and “Te amo” (I am deeply in love with you). In contrast, American culture often follows its own stages, such as “I like you,” “I love you,” and eventually “I’m in love with you,” with each step representing deeper emotional commitment. While fewer relationships in Spanish-speaking cultures may reach “Te amo,” in the U.S., the pace and progression of love tend to follow a different path. It’s fascinating to see how relationships and feelings evolve both similarly and distinctly across these cultures, and what types of conversations different cultures have that allow people to create deep bonds. 

For me, building connections based on shared values is a powerful reminder that, regardless of cultural background or skin color, everyone desires love and connection in some form. In a world where division often dominates headlines, the Love Is Blind international versions offer a hopeful message that we all seek to love and be loved, regardless of where we come from. — Criss Cuervo

The Transformational Love Award: Our Flag Means Death (HBO Max)

In 1717, wealthy landowner Stede Bonnet’s midlife crisis took the form of buying a sloop, naming it “Revenge,” and abandoning his wife and family to become a pirate. Bonnet was an unorthodox (and not very good) pirate but still formed a close connection with the infamous Blackbeard, sometimes sharing a command, sometimes stealing from each other.

In Our Flag Means Death, David Jenkins wove these facts into a rom-com with heart (and some violence) that upends pirate tropes. The only one saying “arrr” is Bonnet, whose understanding of his newly chosen lifestyle is based on storybooks.

Blackbeard (Taika Waititi, also the director) is clad in all black leather, consciously choosing a look to support his reputation as a terrifying pirate, a “job” he’s starting to find tedious. In other words, Blackbeard is facing his own midlife crisis. After a meet-cute that includes a stabbing, he and Bonnet (Rhys Darby) develop a romance and find in each other the support to question their current life paths and the freedom to try new ways of being.

Blackbeard and Bonnet are not the only ones to undergo transformation during the series. Every member of the crew has a chance to shine. Gruff exteriors are exposed as self-protective armor. Characters who were hiding secrets are challenged to reveal themselves. Those who were overlooked or bullied end up blossoming when someone believes in them.

Our Flag Means Death has been praised for its radical approach to LGBT+ representation, namely that queerness permeates nearly every storyline while simultaneously being treated as no big deal. The show also has an ethnically diverse cast, and a writers room including multiple nonbinary writers of color.

Let this witty, moving, sometimes-beautiful, and sometimes-bloody adventure series restore your battle-weary heart. — Cianna Stewart

The Mindful-Romance Award: Outlander (Starz)

In Outlander, a World War II combat nurse named Claire is accidentally cast back in time to 18th-century Scotland. There she meets the dashing, well-muscled, red-headed Jamie Frasier, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Outlander is a romance, but to me it’s romantic in a very unusual way. Yes, there is rather a lot of very hot sex, especially in the first seasons, but the carnality of this couple goes way deeper than that. When, in the second season, the ever-heroic and manly Jamie reveals to Claire that he’s been keeping track of her periods, Claire is moved and grateful: It’s intoxicating to know someone you watch so closely watches you with the same care.

In another, much later, episode—when the couple is now middle-aged and Claire is probably post-menopausal—Jaime sees that Claire is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (even if he doesn’t have the language to call it that). Though she’s taken great pains to hide the symptoms, Claire is always in Jamie’s spotlight; he sees as much as he can of her, bad and good. Claire has been difficult, deceptive, and unreliable, and Jamie’s message to her is this: I see you, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, and we will get through this together.

Menstruation…mental illness…I submit to you that these seemingly non-romantic topics are the stuff of the toughest, most enduring romances, and that it’s their attention to each other that make Jamie and Claire so resilient. Outlander returns in November for the second half of its seventh season. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Community Award: Panchayat (Amazon Prime)

Set in the quaint village of Phulera in Uttar Pradesh, India, Panchayat—a word that means “village council”—is a humorous, heartfelt show that captures the simplicity and charm of rural life. The story revolves around the friendship of four council members: Pradhanji, the head (Raghubir Yadav); Prahlad, the deputy (Faisal Malik); Sachivji, the secretary (Jitendra Kumar); and Bikas, the assistant (Chandan Roy). Together, they navigate the amusing yet complex challenges of daily life in a typical Indian village.

In season three, the close-knit group faces growing difficulties as they confront a powerful political leader. Pradhanji is accused by his political rival from the village of misusing his power. The rivalry between them quickly escalates into a conflict between the village and the political leader, revealing the pettiness of local politics and personal vendettas that can often overshadow the true needs of a community. 

The season also focuses on Prahlad, who is mourning the tragic loss of his son. In one touching moment, he takes an elderly woman—fixated on securing a government-funded house, even if it means separating from her family—to visit his own unkempt home. Revealing his deep grief, Prahlad says, “I just wanted to show you how it feels to live in an empty house.” He then asks her, “Mother, who trades gold for bricks and stones?,” poignantly comparing family to gold. Touched by his words, the woman chooses to reunite with her family.

Panchayat stands apart from fast-paced, thrill-driven narratives, instead offering a more contemplative, slower-paced portrayal of the raw beauty of everyday life. The show invites viewers to pause, step away from their hectic routines, and reflect on the value of family, deep relationships, and especially male friendships. — Aakash Arvind Chowkase

The Happiness Award: Somebody Somewhere (HBO Max)

You’ve probably never watched a show as down-to-earth as Somebody Somewhere. Much of it feels improvised. Reader, this is a show wherein the characters casually fart in each other’s presence.

In the first episode, Sam (played by the incredibly expressive Bridget Everett) has returned to her tiny hometown in Kansas, lingering after her sister Holly has died. As we’re slowly introduced to her family, friends, and high school chums (many of whom she met singing in choir), we discover that not one of the characters is idealized and neither is the town. In many ways, their world is pretty messed up. There’s alcoholism, discrimination, and mental illness, but none of it is melodramatic or sensational.

I was very struck by the groundedness of the family’s grief. When Sam’s niece Shannon (Kailey Albus) asks to look through Holly’s clothes, Sam replies, “Dude, of course, anytime!” To which Shannon replies, “Awesome.” The scene that follows is so darn sweet, as Shannon picks out a T-shirt that says “Lez Zeppelin” (Holly, it turns out, was a lesbian) and they make use of leftover hair dye.

That dialogue and situation are good illustrations of the show’s way of seeing the world. There is sadness in Somebody Somewhere, but the show itself is not actually very sad. In fact, I would describe it as mainly being about Sam’s slow, deliberate, and (so far, as of season two) successful search for somewhat more happiness. When Sam reconnects with a high school classmate named Joel (Jeff Hiller), he invites her to join his “choir” group, which meets in a church housed in a semi-abandoned mall. There she finds a secret community of freaks and queers and artists who help her learn to sing again.

Somebody Somewhere returns for its third and final season on October 27. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Conscience Award: The Sympathizer (HBO Max)

“How did you become this?”

That’s a question Sofia Mori (Sandra Oh) asks the Captain (Hoa Xuande), who is the protagonist and narrator of The Sympathizer. This seven-episode mini-series combines spy thriller with dark comedy to tell the story of a North Vietnamese double-agent during the Vietnam War. The answer to Sofia’s question is revealed by the confession that the Captain is forced to write after he is captured by the North Vietnamese, which becomes The Sympathizer’s narration.

Through the Captain’s self-reflection, we learn that his “all for one and one for all” childhood friendships with his two “blood brothers” shaped the trajectory of his adult life. One of them, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), a South Vietnamese soldier, never learns of his allegiance with the North.

“I was cursed to see every issue from both sides,” says the Captain at the start of his confession. While his perspective taking does not prevent him from murdering those who threaten to reveal his identity, it does cause the Captain to come face to face with the injustices he commits wherever he goes.

In the end, the Captain reflects on the meaning and aftermath of his sacrifices—and is left to mine the depths of his conscience to understand what is most precious after all.
 
The Sympathizer is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is clear-eyed about the catastrophe of war for all people—that loss of any life is abhorrent. It underscores the absurdities of stereotypes and the disingenuous attempts of creating dehumanizing stories that pit one people as “worthy” against another as “unworthy.” These lessons will reverberate for many across the globe today. — Maryam Abdullah

The Loving-Difficult-People Award: Time Bandits (Apple TV+)

In 1981, the movie Time Bandits wowed critics and kids alike. It was dark and weird and original in a way that only a Terry Gilliam film co-written by Michael Palin could be.

The general setup of the series follows the original movie: Our main character, Kevin (Kal El-Tuk), is a friendless 11-year-old nerd whose room is overflowing with books, gaming figurines, and drawings of famous figures from history. His parents pay much more attention to the television than to him or his sister.

One night, a group of time-travelers (led by Lisa Kudrow) crash into Kevin’s bedroom, and he gets swept up in their quest to rob rich people through the ages while fleeing both the Supreme Being and Pure Evil (played by series creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement).

At first, the bandits are annoyed by Kevin constantly spewing facts, and he is annoyed with their robbing. Over time, however, they all come to appreciate and care about each other.

At the same time, however, Kevin never lets being dismissed by his parents or sister diminish the basic fact that he loves them. When things go awry, Kevin spends most of the series trying to get back to them, and his sister goes on her own adventure in an effort to find Kevin.

The original Time Bandits includes critiques of technology and religion, which Clement and Waititi bring back but with some twists. As the show goes on, the differences between Pure Evil and the Supreme Being become more hazy. What stays consistent through time and space is that knowledge is useful, kindness matters, and it’s possible to love people even when you don’t always get along. — Cianna Stewart

But the potential dangers go far beyond anxiety. A 2021 Pew Research poll found that a quarter of Americans have experienced severe forms of harassment online, including physical threats, stalking, sexual harassment, and sustained harassment, often tied to their political beliefs. And this does not include the additional harms caused by hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation, which are even harder to measure.

While many social media companies are developing community guidelines and investing in both human and algorithmic content moderators to help uphold them, these efforts hardly feel like enough to stem the tide of toxicity. And even when platforms succeed in removing problematic content and banning perpetrators, people who are the target of online hate or harassment remain extremely vulnerable. After all, it only takes a few clicks for a banned user to create a new account or repost removed content.

At UC Berkeley, researchers are reimagining how to support freedom of expression online while minimizing the potential for harm. By holding social media companies accountable, building tools to combat online hate speech, and uplifting the survivors of online abuse, they are working to create safer and more welcoming online spaces for everyone. 

“There are a lot of exciting things about social media that, I think, make it irresistible. We can have real-time collaboration, we can share our accomplishments, we can share our dreams, our stories and our ideas. This type of crowdsourced expertise has real value,” said Claudia von Vacano, executive director of Berkeley’s D-Lab and leader of the Measuring Hate Speech project. “But I think that we need to use tools to ensure that the climate is one where no one is silenced or marginalized or, even worse, put in actual physical danger.”

“Awful, but lawful”

The First Amendment limits the U.S. government’s ability to dictate what can and cannot be posted online, leaving it largely to social media companies to decide what types of content they will allow. Thanks to a 1996 federal statue called Section 230, social media companies also cannot be held liable for user-generated content, which means they cannot be sued for hate speech, libel, or other harmful material that users post on their sites.

As a result, “I think free speech is thriving online,” said Brandie Nonnecke, director of the CITRIS Policy Lab and Our Better Web project. “We say it’s awful, but it’s lawful.”

However, Section 230 also frees these companies to moderate user-generated content as they see fit. In fact, the law was included in the 1996 Communications Decency Act to encourage companies to remove pornography and violent content from their platforms.

“Everybody tries to blame Section 230 for why we have hate speech and harmful content online. But that’s actually false,” Nonnecke said. “Section 230 actually empowers platforms to moderate content without the threat of a lawsuit.”

Social media companies may not be liable for content posted on their platforms, but they still have a moral obligation to reduce the harms caused by their technologies, Nonnecke says.

In some cases, they may have a legal obligation, as well. While the specific content posted on social media is protected speech, the platforms themselves are not. If these technologies function in ways that are harmful—for instance, if an algorithm routinely encourages dangerous behavior—this could be considered negligent product design. In this case, the companies may be held accountable in the same way that car companies are held accountable for safety defects, or the tobacco industry was held accountable for misleading the public about the dangers of cigarettes.

In a 2023 Wired article, Nonnecke and Hany Farid, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and at the School of Information at Berkeley, describe a legal case in which SnapChat was forced to remove its Speed Filter, which let users record and share their velocity in real time, after it led to the death of three Wisconsin teenagers in a high-speed crash. The researchers argue that other social media companies should similarly be responsible for dangerous product design.

“The blood is on their hands,” Nonnecke said. “When it’s clear that they have built their platform in a way that incentivizes dangerous and harmful behavior, that has a real human cost, they should be liable for that.”

Measuring hatefulness

Even for platforms that are making a good-faith effort to moderate user-generated content, a fundamental question remains: How do we actually define hate speech? A statement that strikes one person as innocuous might be extremely hurtful to another. And without an agreed-upon definition of what counts as harmful, it is impossible to know how much hate speech is present online, much less how to address it.

The Measuring Hate Speech Project, launched by Claudia von Vacano and her team at the D-Lab in response to the 2016 presidential election, is helping to answer these questions. The project combines social science methodologies with deep-learning algorithms to develop new ways to measure hate speech, while mitigating the effects of human bias.

“The Measuring Hate Speech Project has the most granular level intersectional analysis of hate speech of any project that we have encountered,” von Vacano said. “A lot of people who work in this area don’t have social science training, and so they’re not necessarily thinking about bias and identities in the nuanced ways that we do. Because we are social scientists, we’re informed by critical race theory and intersectional theory, and we are bringing all that knowledge to the work.”

Social media companies are increasingly using algorithms to detect hateful content on their platforms, but these algorithms often reflect the biases of their creators—which, in the U.S., are primarily white men and others with a high degree of social privilege. Other platforms rely on user reports to flag problematic content that can similarly favor the opinions of dominant groups.

In these ways, poorly designed content moderation systems can end up harming the very communities they were meant to protect, von Vacano said.

“In [countries] where there have been laws passed to control for hate speech, we know that those laws have actually been used against the protected groups more than they have against dominant groups,” von Vacano said. “This is absolutely happening online, as well. So, for example, we see that groups such as the Black Lives Matter movement are more likely to be systematically censored.”

The Measuring Hate Speech Project uses a two-pronged method for assessing hate speech. First, annotators read sample social media comments and rate each comment for hatefulness. Rather than marking comments as either “hate speech” or “not hate speech,” the annotators are asked a series of questions about each comment. These include questions about the sentiment of the comment, whether it targets a specific group or implies that one identity is superior to another, and whether it advocates for violence, among other questions.

The responses are then used to train a deep learning algorithm, which can be applied to new online content to gauge the type and degree of hatefulness that might be present.

“The Measuring Hate Speech Project posits that hate speech is not a binary phenomenon—it’s a multifaceted, complex phenomenon,” said Pratik Sachdeva, a research scientist at the D-Lab who refined the tool alongside von Vacano. “Even calling something hate speech assumes that it has reached a certain threshold, but I think it’s more useful to think about degrees of hatefulness. There is a lot of nuance between being a jerk on the internet and being genocidal.”

Given the complex and often subjective nature of hate speech, the tool also asks each annotator detailed questions about their own identity. Sachdeva has used this information to analyze how a person’s identity influences their sensitivity to different types of hate speech. In a 2023 paper, he showed that annotators were more likely to rate comments targeting their own identity group as containing elements of hate speech. 

“My hope is that we can reshape how people think about content moderation, and also highlight the importance of deeply considering how we create machine-learning datasets for real-life applications,” Sachdeva said. “If you prioritize only people who are similar to you in shaping the data set, you’ll miss out on a whole spectrum of lived experiences, which are very important for how these algorithms operate.”

Supporting survivors

The goal of online content moderation is usually to remove any harmful content and, if appropriate, to suspend or ban the user who posted it.

But this approach ignores a key player in the interaction: the person who was harmed.

Inspired by the framework of restorative justice, Sijia Xiao wants to redirect our focus to the survivors of online harm. As a graduate student at Berkeley, she worked with Professors Niloufar Salehi and Coye Cheshire to study the needs of survivors and build tools to help address them. 

“An important aspect of my research is about changing the way people think about online harm and the ways we can address it,” said Xiao, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University after graduating with a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information in May 2024. “It’s not just about getting an apology from the perpetrator or banning the perpetrator. There can be different forms of restorative justice and different ways that we can help survivors.”

Through interviews and co-design activities with adolescents who had experienced interpersonal harm in an online gaming community, Xiao was able to identify five needs of survivors. These include making sense of what happened, receiving emotional support, feeling safe, stopping the continuation of harm, and transforming the online environment.

As part of her Ph.D. work, she created an online platform to help address these needs. The platform creates a community of survivors who can support one another and start to make sense of their experiences. It also helps survivors connect with outside resources and create action plans to help reduce the continuation of harm in their communities.

“My hope is that we can build a survivor community where people can share their experiences, validate each other, and feel inspired to take action to address that harm,” Xiao said. “It could also be used as a tool for content moderators, or even perpetrators, to understand survivors’ experiences. If perpetrators are willing to see things from the survivors’ side—to understand the impact they have on others—maybe they can transform their behavior.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

There are high schools that work well for all students and educators. They are the exception, but they exist, and we can learn from them. Unlike century-old schools operating under the industrial model of schooling designed to prepare the majority of students for rote work, these redesigned high schools are developed based on a large and growing body of modern research from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and other developmental and learning sciences known as the science of learning and development.

Our growing understanding of this science makes it clear that young people grow and thrive in environments designed to support individualized development, where they have strong, supportive relationships, and where their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive needs are met.

A recent Learning Policy Institute (LPI) publication that one of us coauthored, Redesigning High School: 10 Features for Success, highlights the evidence-based features of successfully redesigned schools that help create the kind of education many of us want for our children:

Below are three of the 10 features, all related to socio-emotional development, and examples of schools that have successfully implemented them. 

Positive developmental relationships 

Healthy and supportive relationships are the key to brain development, and research suggests that students thrive and learn best when their teachers know them emotionally and intellectually. However, creating the conditions for strong, developmental relationships means rethinking the prevalent factory-model school design where students move from one overloaded teacher to the next in 45-minute increments and receive numerous disconnected lessons daily. Effective schools are structured to support both building strong relationships and allowing them to develop further over time.

LPI’s report shares examples of these practices, including creating smaller learning communities, sometimes called “houses” or “academies,” within larger schools. These communities allow the same group of students to work together over multiple years. Another approach involves implementing structures for building stronger relationships over time, such as “looping,” where teachers stay with a cohort of students for multiple years, building strong relationships and a community balanced by trust, structure, fun, and mutual accountability.

Oakland International High School uses looping, along with cohorts, to support its diverse students, many of whom are new immigrants. An interdisciplinary team of four core-content-area teachers stays with a group of 80 to 100 students for two years (looping). In addition, the school assigns each ninth grader to an advisor—usually a teacher, but sometimes a school leader or other staff (for example, a counselor). Advisors and the interdisciplinary team of teachers work with the students for two years before they transition responsibilities to other staff who will work with the students for 11th and 12th grade. These looping and advisory structures have been especially important to the success of international schools, as they enable practitioners to provide personalized support to students who have a wide range of needs.

Another key element for building stronger teacher-student relationships is advisory systems, where groups of 15 to 20 students are placed together with a faculty advisor several times a week for ongoing academic and personal counseling and support. These advisory teachers advocate for their students and often serve as their advisees’ main adult point of contact. They gather information from other teachers about the young people’s needs and spearhead efforts to support them. Advisory teachers also build and strengthen relationships with families.

At Bronxdale High School in New York City, all students have an advisory class several times a week with activities that support social and emotional learning, academics, college and career readiness, and community building. Sometimes students strengthen academic skills like note-taking and critical reading strategies, and other times they explore opportunities for after high school or build a strong learning community while exploring essential questions: Who am I? What do I have to contribute? How can I impact my community? One guidance counselor explained, “Advisory is where the safe, supportive culture starts and then spreads through the whole school.”

Safe, inclusive school climate 

Strong positive relationships between educators and students are necessary, but for students’ full learning potential to be unleashed, they need to be in an environment that is both physically and psychologically safe, calm, and consistent—a place where they can experience trust and belonging, so they can take risks and thrive. Brain science reveals how important safety, predictability, and support are to learning. This is even more critical for youth who have marginalized identities or who have experienced trauma. When our bodies or identities feel threatened, the brain becomes flooded with cortisol, which undermines cognitive capacity and short-circuits learning.

Effective schools work proactively to create environments where all students feel safe and included. They are explicit about their school’s norms, expectations, and values. Traditional school practices, which often privilege a certain type of knowledge and sort students by these narrow definitions of ability, need to be transformed through community building, developing shared values or dispositions, and explicitly teaching social and emotional skills. Research finds that students who participate in social and emotional learning programs show improvements in their collaboration and problem-solving skills, as well as attitudes about themselves and school.

Teaching empathy and skills for recognizing emotions and resolving conflict peaceably, commonly called restorative practices, are cornerstones of a safe, inclusive school climate. In traditional high schools, disciplinary practices often differ from teacher to teacher, and the school is governed by strict rules and harsh punishments that often exclude students from instructional learning time through suspensions and expulsions and cause many young people to disengage. In restorative high schools, students are enabled to resolve conflicts and make amends through community-building activities, restorative counseling, and re-entry circles.

For example, in these settings, restorative practices such as community circles are held regularly. Students share what happened in a conflict, what role they played, and what could be done to make things right. In a conversation about circles, a student at Ralph Bunche Academy in the Oakland Unified School District in California—who had been expelled from his previous school—shared, “After two weeks [of community-building circles at my new school], I realized it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to be at a school! Like ‘We got circle today, I gotta go!’ I wanted to be in class, do projects, interact, be one of the first students called on. I felt good being up here!”  

This video about Restorative Circles at Fremont High School in Oakland, California, shows that circles can be a preventative tool through community building, a mediation tool for conflict, a support tool (as in a grief circle), or a strategy for intervention.

Culturally responsive and sustaining teaching 

Another aspect of creating an educational community in which young people can thrive and learn is ensuring that all students feel valued and seen for who they are. This requires an explicit commitment to culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, which promotes respect for diversity and creates a context within which students’ differing cultural experiences can be understood, appreciated, and connected to the curriculum.

Too often, students can feel dehumanized by their school’s culture, curriculum, or practices. In United States schools, there have been increased threats to students’ social identities (identities related to race, ethnicity, language background, immigration status, family income, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, among other things), creating toxic stress that undermines student engagement and learning. Educators must be intentional about the school environments they create and establish an environment where all students feel welcomed and safe to bring their multiple identities and experiences to the classroom and curriculum.

Culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy requires teachers to learn about and with students and families. These practices are not simply designed to build esteem in learners, as Zaretta Hammond establishes in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain; the strategies support information processing so students can engage in rigorous intellectual work. Creating supportive and collaborative learning environments leads to increased safety and intellectual engagement, especially when paired with relevant instructional tasks and assessments that have application to life outside of school. Hammond’s blog serves as a companion to her book, providing real-world examples of how to develop cultural competence and strategies to shift the mindsets of teachers and learners. 

Social Justice Humanitas Academy (SJ Humanitas), a small neighborhood high school located in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, serves primarily Latino/a students (96%) from low-income families (93%) and has a 97% graduation rate, which far exceeds that of the district and state. SJ Humanitas takes a culturally responsive approach to its curriculum by centering the experiences and strengths of the Latino/a community and other marginalized groups so students can develop a sense of identity and confidence that supports their perseverance and success.

A teacher who grew up in the community explained that she remembered “thinking about how ‘ghetto,’ or ugly, or dirty my community was, and just thinking about all the negative aspects of my community. What we’re trying to do is . . . flip that, and we’re trying to come from an assets-based understanding of our community, and what our kids bring to school, what our parents bring, and instead of focusing on all the negative things, we want to focus on the positives and how can we use those to help propel us forward.” 

LPI’s Redesigning High School report provides further details, examples, and tools for these three practices, plus seven additional: deeper learning, student-centered pedagogy, authentic assessment, well-prepared teachers, authentic family engagement, community connections, and shared leadership and decision making. 

Although redesigning high schools for personalization can be challenging, it is essential if we want all students to learn to their full potential. As a student at Vanguard High School in New York City (a member school of the New York Performance Standards Consortium) reminds us, “School should not be mass production. It should be loving and close. This is what kids need; you need love to learn.”

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View our other calendars!

• October 2024 Happiness Calendar for Educators
• October 2024 Happiness Calendar (Greek)

We also invite you to join our free community meeting for educators in October. Learn how the science of humility can help us improve relationships in schools and connect with like-minded educators from around the world. Register here!

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Health “coaching” alone is a $7.6 billion market in the United States, linked to the wellness and lifestyle medicine industries, as well as social media influencer culture. With ongoing shortages of physicians and mental health workers, many Americans see coaches as a more personalized alternative to traditional physical and mental health care.

Yet the profession is poorly regulated, which can make it a utopia for scammers; untrained people providing advice about health, psychology, and nutrition; and, in some cases, cult-like behavior, such as a coach encouraging customers to cut ties with family and friends.

And now that AI health coaching has entered the chat, these problems are likely to grow.

As a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in mental health and public health, I have observed coaching’s growing popularity and how patients’ interest appears to stem from a lack of affordable and accessible mental health care.

Coaches have the potential to fill a gap and work alongside therapists to assist clients. Many people seek coaching to help them make a big decision or hold them accountable for making progress toward a set goal—from launching a business to sticking to their wellness routines. Because the industry is unregulated, however, it’s important for people to understand its limits before using a coach’s services.

Why is coaching so popular?

In broad terms, coaches assist someone in creating a plan for achieving specific goals—for example, making a change in their career, diet, or relationships. It can be effective in helping people manage chronic conditions, such as diabetes, between doctors’ visits and to follow their treatment plan.

Amid COVID-19, physical and mental health care became more difficult to access, which may have contributed to coaching’s popularity. People who were already skeptical of the health care system have turned to coaches in hopes of one-on-one, specialized treatment.

Another contributing factor may be the rise of the gig economy, with coaching appealing to people wanting to be self-employed. Social media and the internet also have fueled coaching’s popularity by making it easier to research and receive health advice, regardless of whether that advice is accurate.

Is coaching therapy?

The simple answer is no. While resembling therapy, coaching does not require licensing, credentialing, or formal education. Practicing therapists, on the other hand, are required to be in good standing with the law, have years of training, are regulated by governing bodies and professional associations, and abide by licensing bodies’ guidelines to keep the client safe.

There’s a common stereotype that coaching is for “high-functioning” people and is oriented toward the future, while therapy is focused on the past and finding problems with people. As a licensed, practicing therapist, I think this could not be further from the truth. Therapists focus on helping a person process their past, focus on the present, and work toward goals in the future.

In my experience, I find that these falsities reinforce the stigma around mental health and keep people from getting appropriate help.

According to one academic study, 25% to 50% of people engaging with a life coach have mental health conditions that require a higher level of support. And even though many coaches are savvy in “therapy speak,” they often lack the training to recognize when the client’s needs are beyond what they should be providing.

Risks and regulation

One of the biggest concerns about coaching is that it lacks a central governing body to regulate and oversee members. The industry has taken some steps toward better oversight, and there is one established, accrediting body—the International Coaching Federation.

It is not a requirement, however, for people identifying as coaches to join this organization. Certifications can be provided by anyone or any program, but training is not standardized.

This lack of regulation means anyone can provide coaching, including therapists who lost their licenses for unethical conduct. It has also led to social media coaches and influencers spreading misinformation and confusion about mental health conditions. This is concerning because nonlicensed providers, including coaches, are legally not allowed to diagnose mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety, or provide treatment for them.

Another concern is coaching clients’ vulnerability to being scammed financially, mistreated, or given dangerous advice, such as abusive child-rearing suggestions. Coaching clients do not have the legal rights that therapy clients have, such as patient confidentiality.

Finally, life coaching relies heavily on positive psychology, which focuses on personal strengths and positive traits for happiness—in short, to look on the bright side and not focus on the negatives. Since its founding, positive psychology has come under scrutiny for debunked scientific claims of the therapy’s success. And while this approach works for some, others find that it is too individualistic, not giving enough weight to how external issues such as systemic racism can play a role in mental health.

What to look for

Ultimately, each person’s needs are individual, and a life coach might be helpful. However, there are some considerations to keep in mind during an initial consult:

• What training does the coach have? What’s their background? I recommend looking into their education and licensing, as well as any titles or certificates that you find unfamiliar.

• Is someone telling you that they can cure you or that they have a product that can fix your problem—a meal plan, diet, coaching course, etc.?

• Do they have research and evidence, not just anecdotes, to back up the claims they are making? If something is being touted as “tested” or “proven,” make sure you ask about the data.

• Is the person touting their service as the “only” way to get better? Are they making unrealistic claims, such as being able to cure someone of their trauma symptoms in one month? A credible life coach is not going to promise to completely change your life or cure you.

• Is there a formal contract with the services provided clearly laid out? Does this contract discuss limitations of services provided? Is there clarity around fees and charges?

• Is the coach willing to be flexible about their approach? Do they become defensive when you ask questions?

Life coaching has the potential to be an evidence-based, short-term practice, but potential clients need to carefully consider whether it is appropriate for them.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There is far too little reward for people who cross lines of difference, listen with curiosity to those we disagree with, humanize the “other,” and humbly acknowledge our blind spots as we learn from people who see the world differently. In fact, stepping out of line, even the slightest hint of questing political orthodoxy or ideological certainty, can have severe social consequences. This pressure has contributed to social isolation, undermined critical inquiry, and added to the fraying of our country’s democratic fabric.

That is why we work to cultivate the will and practice the skills for bridging gaps and crossing lines of difference to solve pressing problems, on campuses, in workplaces, congregations, organizations and communities. At this moment, this is counter-cultural work.

As we have taken this work to more and more places and see more and more people lean into it and apply it in their lives, we have found that sustaining it is not easy. To pursue bridge-building and embody it with the depth required to make real change, against serious headwinds, bridge-builders need the will to cross lines of difference and the skill to do it well. They thrive when they embrace and embody a deeper set of habits.

At a time of increasingly toxic polarization, where demonization of the “other” has become standard practice, it will take this more profound work of building new habits to move our communities in a different direction.

1. Know yourself and your purpose

Bridge-building starts with recognizing that we each have a unique perspective shaped by our experiences. We can do our best bridge-building when we commit to exploring what ignites a fire in our belly.

Consider 16th-century Sufi poet Rumi’s words: “Everyone has been made for some particular work, And the desire for that work has been put in every heart…Let yourselves be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”

When we connect to our deeper purpose, we can cultivate a strong back and soft front. Put differently, when we feel confident in what we deeply believe (strong back), there is no need to behave as if we are brittle; we can have a soft front. We can stand solidly in our beliefs and still be inviting.

Bridge-builders committed to being engaged with this deep awareness about themselves—their beliefs, faith, motivations, and unique purpose—are more likely to be prepared to cross lines of difference with a patient and persistent openness.

2. Believe in the power of listening

Learning to listen with humility and curiosity about the people we disagree with can change our lives.

That is a bold claim, but it’s true. As mere mortals, we can’t see the whole story, the full picture, all the solutions, or so many other important things. By genuinely hearing the perspective of others, we can fill out the blind spots in our own picture, narrative, or worldview. We don’t have to agree, but letting those deeply diverse perspectives work on us can open us up to deeper truths.

Over time, the experience of authentic listening works on each of us as well and makes other things possible. We also know the converse to be true. If we feel unheard or silenced, the likelihood is higher that we will act destructively, negatively or, at the very least, be unwilling to engage. Bridge-builders know listening is a superpower that, when intentionally practiced, can transform us, our relationships, and even the most deeply seated challenges our communities face.

3. Embrace complexity

Human beings have the powerful ability to recognize patterns. That trait is powerful. It allows us to do simple things, such as drink out of mugs daily, without needing to reassess their function. We don’t confuse mugs with our shoes. We know intuitively that shoes go on our feet and mugs meet our mouths. It also lets us identify and set out to solve global problems such as disease and despair.

While seeing and categorizing patterns helps us function smoothly, this is not necessarily as helpful when understanding an individual person. This sorting capacity may lead us to mistakenly believe we know how someone voted based on the color of their hat, someone’s gender based on their hair, or someone’s family history based on their religion.

But bridge-building starts with dropping those assumptions and being curious about the stories of the real people we are engaged with. People are complex, and if we forget this, we can begin to see others (and possibly ourselves) as monoliths who hold only one viewpoint, which is either correct or incorrect. The deeper truth is that people cannot be wholly defined by one position or belief.

4. Create a constructive and relational context

Even though conversations across differences can be one of the best ways to tackle challenges, bridge-builders rarely, if ever, square off in an issue debate to start. Importantly, when they seek to engage with a contentious issue, bridge-builders invest time upfront to create the context in which disagreements are constructive.

Put simply, the most effective bridge-builders believe in breaking bread together first. They start with learning more about one another’s values, worldviews, hopes, and dreams. In time, relationships can withstand more and more tension. So, we patiently build that trust through our genuine concern for others. We live in a fast-paced world, and instant reactions and responses are expected. Often, when someone says something that doesn’t land well with us, we feel compelled to reply at that moment.

Learning to separate the stimulus, what they said, from our response, how we react, can create a powerful pause. A quick reaction to someone we don’t know well is unlikely to have a constructive impact. Sometimes, the best we can do is refrain from unskillful action when triggered. And, because there is no statute of limitation on responding, we can catch our breath, grow the relationship, and, in time, get beyond the headlines to engage more deeply and have a lasting impact on the person when the time is right.

5. Use bridge-building to solve real-world problems

No one person or group of people has a monopoly on truth.

Bridge-builders disclose how they and others have come to believe what we believe. Truly transformative solutions can be found by unearthing experiences and insights and placing them in constructive conversation with beliefs different from our own. So, when bridge-builders encounter very different and challenging beliefs, they are oriented toward understanding how someone came to their views and why those beliefs are important to them.

This disposition also means we do not need to water down our ideas or strive for a “mushy middle” compromise. While attempting to bridge gaps doesn’t guarantee that we will find common ground, it does create the possibility where it may have previously seemed impossible. This becomes possible precisely because we are able to more clearly understand worldviews different from our own and the deeper motivations behind people’s stated positions.

Bridge-builders recognize that all parties involved need a path to move beyond how things have been done.

For example, throughout efforts to address challenges around criminal justice, two of the biggest stakeholders are often left out of the conversation: people who have lived and worked in prisons. For these people, bridge-building is not theoretical or rhetorical; it is a method of resolving actual deadly challenges. Seventy percent of people who have been incarcerated in the US experience recidivism within five years of their release, while the average life expectancy for people working in US prisons is only 59 years (approximately 15 years less than the average American). Effective bridge-builders know that profoundly understanding the varied experiences of people from many sides of the issue is only a first step; building common ground solutions gives us the greatest chance of transforming broken systems.

6. Cultivate a deep love

No matter why we build bridges, we can fundamentally disagree with someone and still respect and even love them. This work will not fully live up to its promise if it becomes reduced to an “improved technique” or “better messaging.”

It is certainly true that just practicing the techniques can open-up new possibilities and, in many cases, serve as a gateway to deeper, inward exploration and human connection.

However, the deeper foundation that must animate this work if it is to reach its transformative potential is a profound faith in people. Bridge-builders use listening to open their hearts and activate an abiding belief in every person’s dignity and awesome potential. May we always be in service to spark a deep love for other human beings, not just despite our disagreements but maybe even because of our disagreements.

7. Commit to lifelong practice

If bridge-building is an art that happens through constrictive, sometimes tense, engagement and interaction with others, there remains a question: How do I get good at it?

The truth is, as you develop the will, you can apply the skills you can learn in any basic training about listening, storytelling and feedback and then try it at work, dinner, or with a friend. By practicing this approach you can build new habits. You don’t have to be perfect at it or expect to succeed every time. Still, the truth is that just wanting to show up and be constructive in a tense situation where you are crossing significant lines of difference is not easy.

In addition to the skills if you can cultivate your capacity outside these difficult conversations that can help, as well. We think of that in three dimensions: spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Consider how you invest your time outside of your bridging work so that your body, heart, and spirit are well cared for and in the optimum place to undertake the challenging work of bridging. Like a high-performance athlete or team leader, you want to be at the top of your game.

8. Be ready for discomfort

In your busy life you might have limited time to learn the skills, build the habits and cultivate these deeper capacities. That is OK. Most importantly, this work requires a posture humble enough to recognize that bridge-building is a practice, not a destination. For bridgers that means discomfort as we stretch to engage those we disagree with.

While we must put into practice the bite-sized training, we aren’t expecting to get it right every time and have it all fall into place. We are almost always left with more questions for continuous self-reflection: Should I have pushed harder? Should I have opened up more? Did I hold back? Did I go too easy on the things I deeply believe in?

The work of bridge-building means considering those questions again and again. When we choose to engage the “other” to solve pressing problems, invest in relationships that cross lines of difference and sit in the tension of difficult conversations that means sitting with discomfort. Coming to see discomfort as a sign that we are growing and stretching rather than dreading that feeling and hoping it will go away and we will find simple comfort again is part of the bridge builder’s journey.

Bridge-builders want to solve challenges facing our communities and they want to weave the social fabric of our country together. And they believe that having the hard conversation ultimately saves time, builds relationships, and ultimately takes less of an emotional toll than keeping it bottled in, hoping to avoid the conversations or simply shouting down the opposition.

That’s work we can each commit to and practice every day. Sometimes it works, sometimes the challenge remains. But, each time, we learn about ourselves and about each other. Together we can build a culture where the heroes are the bridge-builders.

In other words, the landscape of religion is changing. People are walking away from religion and seeking new ways to find meaning, deepen connection, and experience a flourishing life. But why are people leaving, and what happens after they do?

In my recent book, Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion, I discuss these processes in depth. Whereas most other books in this area are autobiographical memoirs, Done weaves together cutting-edge data from empirical science with practical applications to directly help people who are experiencing religious change. Whether you have personally experienced a shift in your religious beliefs or behaviors, or know and love someone who has, learning more about these processes can help people navigate the change and build an authentic and meaningful life.

Why are people leaving religion?

The reasons why people leave are deeply personal, but research I’ve collaborated on suggests there are at least four primary motivations. First, some people leave because of cultural stagnation: They are getting more ideologically progressive, but their religious organizations are not. Often, people report intellectual reasons for leaving religion, or mention they simply outgrew their faith. Other times, respondents indicate that they cannot endorse the values of their previous religious organization, including their views on LGBTQ+ individuals, stances on gender or sexuality, or pervasive sexism and racism.

Second, some people leave because of religious or spiritual trauma or abuse. Some people have experienced this abuse firsthand, whereas others have witnessed people they love experience trauma. Still others have left organized religion because of abuses perpetrated at an institutional level (for example, by Catholic priests). For many, walking away is a bold act of courage.

Third, some walk away from their faith because of suffering. Many have been given “theologically thin” accounts for the existence of evil in the world or insufficient explanation for why adversity strikes. They cannot make sense of what they were taught and their life experiences, especially if their previous beliefs were framed in a just-world belief system, which teaches that people get what they deserve. After all, if life is fair, if something bad happens to me, does that mean that I’m bad and deserved it? Simplistic views of suffering can lead people to leave religion.

Fourth, some people no longer identify as religious because they find the label problematic. Some don’t like the term “religion,” and others no longer espouse the term “evangelical.” Especially after 2016, “evangelical” has taken on a new meaning. A recent poll indicated that more than 40% of self-identified evangelicals do not believe in the deity of Jesus (a longstanding central tenet of evangelicalism), suggesting that this has become a sociopolitical identity marker as well as a religious one.

And while there may be additional reasons why people leave, all of these reasons share a common underlying feature: They involve cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the disorienting feeling when our beliefs don’t line up with other beliefs or our actions. For many, what they believed could no longer fit with their experiences of the world. Although some are able to fit these discrepant beliefs into existing belief structures, if the discrepancy is too great, many will change their beliefs altogether.

The process of leaving religion

Just like the reasons for leaving religion are personal, so too is the process of leaving religion. Everyone starts from a different place, where religion means something different to each person. But for many, this process of leaving religion starts with religious deconstruction: People experience doubt around their beliefs, practices, and identity; begin to question their existing belief frameworks; experience a heightened sense of struggle and anxiety; and eventually revise their beliefs and identity into something that feels authentic. As one participant recounted:

When my great-aunt died I started to question my life, existence, and religion. I couldn’t understand why God would take away my aunt, among too many other things. I started to even question the existence of God. I eventually quit going to church, and thought about things on my own.

Many describe it as incredibly destabilizing, and it’s often lengthy and emotionally taxing. People can feel anxiety, guilt, anger, confusion, and fear, as well as awe, curiosity, and freedom. It’s a mixed emotional bag. And there’s no one single way to deconstruct, nor a rigid timeline for how long it takes. For some, it’s a years-long process, especially if religion was a central part of their identity for most of their life. One participant detailed this lengthy and emotionally challenging process:

I slowly watched my grandfather die of Alzheimer’s and Lewy body disease over the course of seven long and painful years . . . I stopped believing in a god. What god that I had grown up learning about could ever be real and allow those things to happen[?] This was seven years ago and I still haven’t been able to put myself back together.

Where people land when they revise their beliefs will play a large role in their future trajectory. If people revise their beliefs and identity and stay within the confines of a religion, they have undergone religious reconstruction. Although these beliefs are different, and their own identity has likely shifted, they haven’t walked away from religion. Many who reconstruct embrace more progressive or open views of religion; some switch religions entirely. Others report feeling more spiritually mature or say they have experienced spiritual growth. Although reconstruction can still feel destabilizing, it is often less so than it could be, as people reassemble some structures to provide them with security. For example, one participant captured this reconstruction, saying, “I don’t identify with or trust any churches, even though I still believe in God and Jesus.”

If people land outside of religion, they have experienced religious deidentification. They likely no longer identify as religious on at least one of four major components of religion. Some disbelieve in core tenets of their theological or religious worldviews. Perhaps they now identify as an atheist or agnostic. Others disengage from emotional connection with the divine or transcendent. Here, they may no longer experience a relationship with God, spirits, ancestor, or whatever they consider sacred and spiritual. Some discontinue following religion’s moral mandates on behavior that they once did. For example, they may abandon restrictions around food (like eating kosher) or sexuality (like purity culture or abstinence) and find new maps of morality. And others disaffiliate from their social communities that offered belonging. They may no longer attend mosque, church, or temple, and look for new sources of social support. For example, someone from our studies shared:

I was raised Catholic, but when I went to college I stopped going to church and realized that it was just no longer a part of my life. I replaced my time on Sundays by volunteering at animal shelters and found that to be more personally rewarding.

When people walk away, perhaps the biggest challenge to this process is a psychological phenomenon called religious residue. Religion is sticky. It lingers after people deidentify from it. People continue to think, feel, and act in ways that resemble their formerly religious selves. Put differently, even though people have moved on, religion persists. Your religious history matters, and it’s nearly impossible to simply walk away and make a clean break. Cognitively, religion has etched deep paths in people’s thinking, leading them to continue to think and behave in ways that are more strongly religious than people who have never been religious.

Behaviorally, religion often involves rituals that become habits, which are hard to change. Research has found that this residue shows up in values, morals, beliefs, and even how people spend their money. But it has also revealed that, with enough time, the residue decays. Eventually people adjust, though some residue remains.

Life after religion

After leaving religion, people often report a conflicting set of experiences. On one hand, they may feel more freedom and awe from seeing the world in a new way, untethered by their previous religious beliefs and identity. On the other hand, they may feel anxiety and fear from being untethered from such a security-providing worldview, and feel groundless and unmoored. They may feel anger toward their previous religious upbringing for decisions they made because of beliefs they no longer hold. They may feel guilt and shame for having believed, behaved, or identified in certain ways in the past. In short, they may experience a host of thoughts and feelings that can be hard to sort out.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of navigating life after religion is coming to terms with some of life’s biggest questions, or existential concerns. Each human has to find some way of making sense of deep, pressing questions: Who am I? Am I all alone in the world? What is the meaning of life? What happens after I die?

Because religion used to answer these questions, those who have left religion are uniquely predisposed to anxiety around these concerns. Having had the answers and no longer being able to rely on them to provide comfort and security, religious dones feel a unique sense of loss that those who were never religious do not likely experience—not just a lack of presence, but a palpable loss or absence. If they were raised in a high-control, authoritarian upbringing, they might not have had the opportunity to develop the skills required to assemble a coherent worldview that addresses these ultimate concerns. If someone simply told you what to believe, you might be looking for that again. For religious dones, existential anxiety is usually quite high, and it can be incredibly unsettling.

Of course, this also takes place in the backdrop of navigating relationships with people who may not understand someone’s religious change, and striving to find a new authentic identity apart from religion. These are formidable challenges.

Finding flourishing

Many people continue to find religion to be a source of strength and meaning in their lives. But for the increasing number of those who do not, there are still pathways toward flourishing after leaving religion.

Some people may find it challenging to relate to friends and family who do not share their nonreligious identity. Many feel excluded and hide their nonreligious identity. This can be particularly stressful if religion is extremely important to someone you’re especially close to, such as a romantic partner. In these situations, setting (and holding) boundaries, interacting with humility, and leading with empathy are key. Remember, you once held similar beliefs, so treat them with compassion.

Some work lies in crafting a life and identity after religion. Here, the goal is to go past being defined by what you are not, such as non- or anti-religious, and move toward a sense of self defined by you are. Consider your core values and strive to align your life around these values, so you can live them out with integrity.

And some, though not all, find new pathways toward spiritual connection apart from organized religion. Some find transcendent meaning in nature, the cosmos, or other humans, or by living with integrity.

The process of leaving religion can feel isolating and lonely—but you are not alone. And it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon hope. Indeed, my hope is that each person will find a meaningful and flourishing life, with or without religion.

Educators around the United States are grappling with this problem—and they’re coming up with solutions. For example, Lisa Thyer and Chris Wendelin, English teachers at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills, Illinois, are intentionally centering active listening skills in their classroom. In 2014, they created a yearlong project-based elective that focused on connection, empathy, and storytelling that could serve as a model for others.

In the class, students interviewed one another, their teachers, and other school community members, eventually compiling and publishing their stories in a book called 111th and Roberts: Where Our Stories Intersect. Chris and Lisa’s course was so successful that they offered it again the following year, and have been teaching the course every year since. One of the key lessons from that course is a simple one that might feel counterintuitive to some: The first step in learning to tell your own story is to learn to hear someone else’s.

Why is active listening important?

According to research, active listening is a key component in relationship building, conflict resolution, and empathy development. Contrary to the popular wisdom that empathy is built by imagining or supposing what life would be like in another person’s shoes, research suggests that interpersonal understanding comes from an ability to listen to others discussing what life is like in their shoes: Social psychologists Tal Eyal and Mary Steffel call this “getting perspective, not simply taking perspective.”

Active listening helps people feel more heard or understood, especially when compared to other types of listening responses such as simple acknowledgement or giving advice. This is especially important when listening to understand others with different identity markers and life experiences.

Listening to others’ stories is an excellent way to challenge dominant narratives or “single stories.” By engaging in deep listening, we can form a more complex, nuanced, and accurate perspective of any issue. One study looking at conflict resolution found that intergroup hostility was reduced if “members of the disempowered group spoke to an individual from the dominant group, and (critically) felt ‘heard.’”

Active listening in the classroom

I work with Voice of Witness (VOW), an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice.

VOW’s education program trains teachers and students to create space for deep listening and learning by harnessing the power of storytelling. Our storytelling projects help students become more active, empathic listeners as they conduct oral history interviews with peers, family, and community members. VOW’s online resource library offers free lesson plans that feature activities for building active listening, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking skills.

How could you launch a storytelling project in your own classroom? Start with these three steps, aimed at first developing your students’ ability to listen carefully to the story they are being told.

1. Introduce “safe and brave” storytelling. Start with a framing activity that sets the tone for a larger storytelling project and helps students generate their own ideas about what active listening might look like and what impact it may have on someone sharing their story. Ask students to imagine themselves in the storyteller role by presenting this prompt:

Imagine a deep, personal, or important story you have about yourself: a story about someone or something that has shaped who you are today. What would you need in order to feel safe and brave enough to tell your story?

Encourage students to answer this question as broadly as possible, considering the who, where, why, and how: Who would students feel comfortable telling their story to? Where would they tell their story, and what would the location need to feel, sound, look like? Why would students tell this story—what would they hope the listener would learn or do as a result? How would students want to feel while they were telling their story? What about afterward? How would students know their story was being truly heard and understood?

Allow each student to share a response to the prompt with the class, recording their answers on the board or a large sheet of paper. After collecting all student responses, spend time unpacking key terms in their responses.

For example, students may say they would want to tell their story to “someone who isn’t going to judge me” or “someone who is respectful.” You might pose questions such as: How do you know when someone is judging you? What does it look like or sound like when someone is listening to you respectfully?

To delve deeper into the importance of sharing and receiving personal stories, you may also choose to present the following principles for ethical storytelling for students to discuss. For each of these statements, ask: What do you think this principle means? How does this relate to sharing personal stories? How might this statement change how you would listen to another person’s story?

• To feel healed, a person needs to feel heard.
• To change minds, we need to complicate thinking.
• It takes as long as it takes.
• The end of the story is just the beginning.

These statements, which have been adapted from seven Ethical Storytelling Principles from Voice of Witness, can be explored with students more in depth using this lesson plan.

2. Practice paraphrasing and using nonverbal cues. Two fundamental active listening techniques to practice with your students are demonstrating nonverbal involvement and paraphrasing the speaker’s words in a way that accurately reflects their meaning.

As a quick warm-up activity, ask students to show you, without saying any words, that they are listening to you as you read or tell them a brief story. Halfway through the story, ask them to switch and now show you that they are not listening, noting that exaggerated or theatrical demonstrations are OK for this activity. Afterward, record students’ observations about body language—what nonverbal cues communicate interest and engagement, and which nonverbal cues communicate uninterest or lack of engagement?

Model paraphrasing with your students by asking a volunteer to tell a simple story. Use sentence starters like “What I’m hearing is…” and “It sounds like you’re saying…” to paraphrase what the student says. Remind students that the key to paraphrasing is to capture the speaker’s meaning in a way that “demonstrates unconditional acceptance and unbiased reflection.” 

When you model paraphrasing, try to be as objective as possible, avoiding adding your own interpretation or judgment with phrases like “I think you mean…” or “It was sad/funny/inspiring when you said…” However, if the speaker expresses sadness themselves, for example, it can be an effective paraphrasing technique to say, “I can understand why it was so sad when…”

After presenting these active listening skills, give students the opportunity to practice in partner pairs with storytelling prompts like the ones on this deep conversation starter sheet. Students may choose a question to ask their partner, then practice demonstrating nonverbal engagement and paraphrasing their partner’s response. Make sure to switch roles so every student has the chance to be both speaker and listener.

3. Demonstrate active listening through questions. A third, perhaps counterintuitive, component to effective active listening is the ability to ask questions.

Studies have found that people find listeners who ask questions to be attentive and responsive, helping the speaker to feel heard. It is important to note here that the goal of active listening questions is to “encourage speakers to elaborate on [their] experiences.” These questions should stay on the same topic, but ask for more detail or depth. Common question starters might include: “Can you give me an example of…?” “How did you feel about…?” “What else do you remember about…?”

You can encourage students to think about different types of questions and the types of responses they elicit with a question game. Set up the game by saying to your students: “We’re going to play a game today in which you’re going to ask me questions. The catch is that I have a secret rule that the questions need to follow—I’m looking for certain types of questions. If you ask me the type of question that follows the secret rule, you get a point. If the question doesn’t follow the rule, I get a point. I’m not going to tell you any more about what I’m looking for in the questions. You will need to guess what the secret rule is.”

You can do a warm-up round to introduce the game to your students. In the warm-up round, perhaps the rule is: “Question needs to have a yes-or-no answer” or “Question needs to be open-ended.” In the second round, the rule should be: “Question needs to stay on the same topic.” Questions that prompt for more elaboration should thus earn students a point.

As students continue their storytelling project, encourage them to continue asking these follow-up questions to demonstrate their interest and attention to the speaker. 

Explicitly teaching and practicing active listening techniques will give students skills with the potential to impact their relationships, careers, and overall well-being. As strong active listeners, students can have deeper, more meaningful conversations with the people closest to them, can actively build and strengthen community, and can communicate effectively from a place of understanding.