Building Kindness and Connection Across Cultures

Catalog description

Human beings are preternaturally collaborative, prosocial, and empathic. These abilities have allowed our species to thrive, but also evolved in an ancient social world much different than ours: in which virtually everyone we came in contact with looked like us, depended on us, and was accountable to us. At one level, modern society is more connected than ever. At another, it places new barrier - such as anonymity, otherness, and competition - in the way of true human connection. As a result, empathy has eroded; growing polarization, alienation, and animus within and between cultures are merely some of the resulting problems. Social scientists are working to recuperate social connection, using everything from virtual reality to meditation to narrative arts. In Connecting Better Across Cultures, students will explore those techniques at both a scientific and experiential level. This seminar will build on a class teach (Psych 15N: "Becoming Kinder," see Stanford Video here and an op ed on the course here), but will situate its themes in a fundamentally inter-cultural space. We will review the science of empathy and prosociality, and their opposites: cruelty, hatred, and indifference. We will focus especially on when, how, and why people from different nations and backgrounds find it difficult to empathize with, understand, or care for each other - and tour cutting edge research on breaking down these intercultural barriers.