Some people think that people can vary in how humanlike they seem. According to this view, some people seem highly evolved whereas others seem no different than lower animals. Using the sliders below, indicate how evolved you consider each of the following individuals or groups to be.
It seems unthinkable to deny that any group of people is fully “evolved.” Yet in one of Kteily’s studies, Americans (who in this case were mostly white) rated Arabs at only about 75 percent evolved, and Mexican immigrants as about 80 percent. Those who rated Muslims as less evolved were also more likely to support anti-Muslim immigration policies or the torture of Muslim detainees. During the 2016 Republican primaries, those who viewed Mexican immigrants as less evolved also endorsed statements by candidate Donald Trump such as “People are coming from all over that are killers and rapists.”
Dehumanization silences empathy at the most basic levels. Imagine you could watch a person’s brain in real time while someone else receives painful electric shocks in front of them. Within a fraction of a second, you could tell whether the victim and observer were part of the same group. If they were, the observer would produce neural mirroring; if not, that mirroring would be blunted or nonexistent.
Conflict worsens the situation. Sports rivalries, ethnic clashes, and everything in between flip empathy on its head. The psychologist Mina Cikara studies “schadenfreude,” or enjoyment of others’ pain. She’s found that Red Sox and Yankees fans activate parts of their brain associated with reward when watching their rival team lose, and that people smile when imagining misfortunes befalling outsiders they dislike.
This work might seem to imply that we can’t help but empathize with insiders and not care about outsiders, dooming us all to some degree of prejudice. For extremists like Tony, empathy would be forever out of reach.
At twenty years old, Tony would have agreed. His life was defined by hatred. He appeared on The Montel Williams Show as an avatar of white supremacy. He figured he’d be dead or in jail within a decade. But over the next several years, he met three people who changed those odds. The first two were his children. At twenty-three, Tony had a daughter; at twenty-four, a son. On the outside, life remained tumultuous. The Canadian Human Rights Council brought a lawsuit against Liberty Net and ordered Tony to appear for a hearing. He sparred with lawyers all morning, and during lunch ran the six blocks to the hospital to witness his son’s birth. Soon after, an ugly breakup left Tony a single father of two.
He decided to avoid following in his father’s footsteps. “Instead of being the type of dad I had, I tried to be the kind of dad I would have wanted.” Tony doted on his kids, and in exchange they offered him connection he hadn’t felt in decades. “It’s safe to love a child. They’re not capable of rejection, or shame, or ridicule.” Being an active single father also cast Tony in a new light. “I got lots of praise heaped on me. It’s not fair—if I was a woman I wouldn’t have gotten that. But I enjoyed it.” This was 180 degrees from the villain Tony was used to playing. A stranger who might have punched him for his beliefs instead patted him on the back for raising his kids. This gave Tony a chance to see himself differently.
Kids were also expensive, and Tony worried that his public bigotry would make him unemployable. He decided it was time to leave the skinhead movement, and “went dark,” steadily lowering his profile. He put his tech savvy to use as a financial consultant for Internet start-ups. He still loved raucous parties, but he swapped his old Aryan punk shows for Vancouver’s rave scene. On weekends, he dropped his kids off with their grandparents and embarked on twenty-four-hour “escapes,” fueled by electronic music and tablets of ecstasy. His old friends had moshed and brawled; his new ones swayed and hugged. “It was the polar opposite of what I’d been into before.” On some nights he would return home, still high, and listen to Skrewdriver’s hard-charging white-power anthems, filled with melancholy.
Fatherhood mellowed Tony, but it didn’t change his beliefs. He saw caring for his children as his best shot at supporting the white race: a bigoted version of “Think global, act local.” Yet his animus toward black, gay, and foreign people mattered less to him. “The ideas were still in my head, the questions were still in my head…but it was like, ‘So what? Look at what my kids are up to, they’re fantastic.’ ”
Tony’s most stubborn prejudice was against Jews. That domino fell after he met a third person. To better himself, he took classes on everything from public speaking to mindfulness. One of his teachers was Dov Baron, a leadership trainer. Tony and Dov shared British roots, bonded over their shared love of Monty Python, and became fast friends. Dov offered one-on-one counseling, and a mutual friend bought a session for Tony. Midway through their conversation, Tony apprehensively copped to his skinhead past. Dov smiled and said, “You know I’m Jewish, right?” Tony was mortified, but Dov comforted him. “That’s what you did, but not who you are,” he told Tony. “I see you.”
Tony spent the next half hour crying in Dov’s office. “Here was this man who loved me and wanted to heal me, and here was I, a person who had once advocated for the annihilation of his people.” Tony felt he didn’t deserve a shred of compassion from Dov, but Dov extended it nonetheless. This cracked Tony open. He’d created a surface of hatred to cover his shame and loneliness. Once someone accepted him warts and all, he no longer needed it.
Tony began exorcising his past, opening up about his history, and accepting responsibility for the pain he’d caused. He feared that his clients would abandon him after learning what he’d done, but only a few did. At a party, he weepily described his gay bashing to a group of gay men; one cursed him and walked away, two became close friends. In Tony’s first ever act of hatred, he had vandalized a Vancouver synagogue. Recently, he went back there to confess and listen. Over and over again, he saw shades of Dov: People did not minimize what he had done, yet they were willing to see Tony as more than his past.
A few years ago, Tony traveled to a Holocaust museum. In the past, he would have taken to its exhibits “like a lion looking to pounce” on any fact he could dispute. Instead, he lingered for hours, looking at pictures of the dead, reading each of their notes, examining each of their mementos. That night in his hotel room, he lay down and felt something heavy on top of him, like one of those lead X-ray aprons. “I could feel it moving up my chest and into my throat, and boom, out it came: the insight that my denial of their pain was a denial of my own.” He wept through the night, filled with a feeling he’d long kept at bay.
HATRED BURIES EMPATHY but does not kill it. Tony’s conversion highlights a powerful way to get it back.
In 1943, a race riot seized Detroit. World War II had transformed the city into a weapons factory, and people poured in from around the country as manufacturing boomed. Housing became scarce. Black workers were excluded from housing projects and often paid triple the rent whites did. When the city earmarked a new project for black tenants only, whites burned crosses outside it. As summer arrived, racial tension boiled over. On June 20, blacks heard that a white mob had thrown a woman and her child off the Belle Isle Bridge; whites heard that blacks had raped and killed a woman on the same bridge. Neither event had actually occurred, but the imaginary mobs spawned real ones. They clashed, and in the next thirty-six hours, thirty-four people died, hundreds were injured, and thousands were arrested.
It was a national disgrace and a low point for American race relations. But there was a glimmer of hope: whites and blacks who had worked or studied with members of the other race were far less likely to join in the riots, and more likely to engage in peaceful behaviors, such as sheltering other-race individuals from violence.
The psychologist Gordon Allport noticed this, and saw a trend: The better people knew outsiders, the less they hated them. This was true elsewhere as well. Seventy-five percent of residents in all-white housing projects said they would dislike living alongside blacks, but only 25 percent of white residents in mixed projects actually disliked having black neighbors. Sixty-two percent of soldiers in all-white platoons opposed integrating the armed forces; among whites who had been in a mixed platoon, that number was 7 percent.
In his magnum opus, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport reasoned that bigotry often boils down to a lack of acquaintance. Its antidote was just as simple: Bring people together, and they’ll awaken to their common humanity. A similar thought led Mark Twain to quip, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” In psychology, this idea came to be known as “contact theory,” and it caught fire. Allport’s book, published in 1954, became a bestseller; he delighted in spotting it at airports and malls alongside beach novels. Thanks to him, optimists everywhere came to believe that hatred was a misunderstanding and that contact could fix it.
Allport stressed that contact would not always work. In some cases it could make things worse—for instance, whites who merely saw more blacks, but didn’t get to know them, might perceive them as a threat. Time has proven Allport right. The visibility of immigrants in the United Kingdom fueled a nationalist wave that crested with Brexit. In Canada, Tony used the presence of immigrants to whip up white aggression. Even moderate people can be driven toward prejudice by the wrong type of contact. In a recent study, the political scientist Ryan Enos planted Latino passengers on a Boston commuter train at the same time each morning for ten days. White commuters who had been on a train with Latinos grew less tolerant of immigration than they had been before, or than passengers who took the very next train.
Even when contact doesn’t hurt, it might not help. “Goodwill contact without concrete goals accomplishes nothing,” Allport wrote. He laid out a recipe for how to make it useful: Bring groups together and give them equal status, even if one group has more power the rest of the time. Focus on their mutual goals. Make it personal; let people learn about each other’s idiosyncrasies. And support cooperation between groups through the institutions around them. Fulfill these tenets, Allport claimed, and contact could do wonders.
The theory might sound naïve—less rigorous science than Haight-Ashbury handholding. But it’s one of the most well-studied concepts in psychology. In a recent analysis of more than a quarter of a million people, the pattern was clear: The more time someone spends with outsiders, the less prejudice they express. Contact warms sentiments toward many types of outsiders. Imagine two straight, young, able white people born in the United States. Evidence suggests that the one who gets to know a diverse group will exhibit less bias toward black and Hispanic people, immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and Central America, elderly and disabled people, and the LGBTQ community than their more sheltered counterpart.
Contact can work even when people don’t seek it out. White college freshmen randomly assigned to black roommates are less prejudiced by spring than students with same-race roommates. It doesn’t take a school year to help people warm up to new groups, either. In one recent study, trans- and cisgender canvassers went door-to-door in Florida to discuss transgender rights. After meaningful conversations with trans canvassers, residents’ transphobia dropped substantially, and they remained more tolerant three months later.
THE PUNCH LINE is simple: Hatred of outsiders is ancient but not inevitable. When people work, live, or play alongside each other, divisions between them melt.
To understand why, remember that empathy is a choice, and conflict gives people great reasons to avoid it. When groups compete for scarce resources, they must circle the wagons and scrap for their side. As Tony puts it, “Multiculturalism and diversity are great when everyone’s doing well, but when you’re fighting your neighbor for a crust of bread in the street, all bets are off.” Tribalism becomes natural and—from evolution’s perspective—wise. A linebacker who feels the pain of a running back would have a hard time doing his job; a soldier would find hers impossible. As a result, people in conflict don’t merely misplace their care; they actively throw it away. In one series of studies, conservative Israelis reported that they would prefer not to empathize with Palestinians. This preference, in turn, predicted their actual lack of empathy, for instance when they read about a Palestinian child with cerebral palsy.
Even if callousness is a smart choice during war, it’s a terrible way to achieve peace. Contact remedies this by giving people reasons to care about outsiders. We crave connection and will work to keep social bonds strong. When an outsider joins the ranks of our friends or colleagues, empathizing with them aligns with that goal. The benefits compound: Empathy for one outsider can lead to caring for their entire group, as Dan Batson demonstrated in his study of AIDS victims. Contact also makes avoiding empathy harder. The sorrow and hope of a neighbor, friend, or colleague are often impossible to block out.
Contact can build empathy even in the toughest settings. After sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants dehumanized each other, but they did so less if they had friends on the other side of the conflict. White Americans who work or live with blacks or Muslims express higher empathy when members of these groups are profiled by law enforcement. Empathy, in turn, promotes solidarity. After the conflict in Ireland, people who felt empathy toward outsiders were more willing to forgive them; in the United States, white Americans who empathized with minority individuals mistreated by police were more likely to join Black Lives Matter protests.
For decades, scientists and practitioners have tried to bottle the lightning of contact. In Hungary, the Living Library School Project offers people the chance to converse with living “books”—individuals from marginalized groups such as the Roma who have agreed to share their stories. The Parents Circle brings together Palestinians and Israelis who have lost family members to the conflict, in hopes that their common grief can overcome their differences. And Seeds of Peace brings teenagers from Palestine and Israel together in a two-week summer camp in Maine. Students are split into “color war” teams that cut across ethnic lines. Teammates bunk together and compete with other teams throughout the camp. By focusing adolescents on their new team identity, Seeds of Peace points them away from older divisions. Even months later, campers report warmer attitudes than non-campers toward people on the other side of the conflict.
Recently, psychologists examined about seventy contact-based programs like these. Many succeed in building care and camaraderie between groups. At least some of these benefits lasted up to a year afterward. But as Allport realized, contact doesn’t always work. And when it does, it’s not always clear why. To use it effectively, psychologists must isolate its active ingredients. Allport’s rules of engagement are a great start, but they are in sore need of updating.
Emile Bruneau is leading a new charge to sharpen the science of contact. He always yearned to understand how other people saw the world, in part because he struggled to understand his own mother. Shortly after Emile’s birth, Linda Bruneau began hearing taunting, menacing voices: in the sound of a plane flying overhead, or coming from the television, or from nowhere at all. To Linda, these voices were as loud, clear, and real as any person’s. As Emile grew, Linda descended further into schizophrenia.
Emile entered neuroscience in the hopes of learning more about his mother’s mind. Early on, he encountered a study that astonished him. Neuroscientists had scanned the brains of people with schizophrenia. Whenever the person in the scanner heard voices, they pressed a button, allowing researchers to chart where hallucinations originated in the brain. They found that imagined voices activated the same brain areas that process sound. Biologically, they appeared indistinguishable from real hearing. To Emile, this was redemptive. While he was growing up, schizophrenia was blamed on patients’ families, a view that had torn his apart. But here was a different perspective entirely. “I realized it was a biological condition…and something that’s biological is much more tractable….You think, ‘This is terrible,’ but there’s something you can do.”
Emile also traveled widely, often ending up in places riven by violence. He spent months in South Africa shortly after the fall of apartheid. He visited two journalist friends in Sri Lanka, landing hours before the Tamil Tigers attacked Colombo. Turmoil in each of these places was unique, but it also shared common themes. Most important, it warped otherwise good people. In South Africa, Emile got lost during a biking expedition and emerged from the forest hungry and bruised. An elderly woman nursed him back to health, asking nothing in return. Then apartheid came up, “and racist shit started pouring out of her mouth.” It was as though she had splintered into two selves.
To Emile, conflict looked a lot like schizophrenia: stranding people in versions of the world that are real to them, but not to others. He began to suspect that clashes between groups might attack the brain like a psychiatric disorder. And if it was biological, it should be treatable. He set out to examine current treatments, traveling to Belfast to volunteer for a contact-based program that brought Catholic and Protestant boys together for three weeks. “All of them bunked together in an enormous gymnasium, spending their days designing murals, playing music together.”
“It was a colossal failure.” The boys were friendly enough toward each other during the three weeks, but on the last day two kids got in a fistfight, which quickly exploded into an all-out brawl between Catholics and Protestants. Students who had played together an hour before snapped back into their old identities in seconds. As Emile broke up a fight, he heard one boy scream at another, “You orange bastard!” It dawned on him that the boy was referring to William of Orange. “The epithets they were throwing at each other were six hundred years old. I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is deep.’ ”
He also realized that contact programs tended to throw the kitchen sink at conflict. They clumped together dozens of activities and discussions. Emile felt that a more precise approach could identify exactly which pieces of contact helped the most, when, and in what ways. “What are the primary ingredients that allow a program to work? How do they interact with each other? Which interventions work best for which type of people?” These questions sound simple, but the research didn’t address them.
Emile decided to try to answer these questions himself. Over the years, he’s explored the corrosive effects of conflict on empathy, and teamed with peace-building organizations to probe how and when contact works. Emile doesn’t reinvent the wheel; his partners know their conflicts better than he ever will. He takes their template, tinkers with the materials they produce, and tests which version works best.
Sometimes, Emile’s answers contradict conventional wisdom. Gordon Allport believed that contact was most effective when groups came together under equal status, even if one group was richer or more powerful the rest of the time. Most conflict resolution programs stick to this principle, for instance ensuring that Israelis and Palestinians are given similar airtime during discussions. Each side is encouraged to listen closely and take the other’s perspective.
People from majority or high-power groups often walk away from these sit-downs with a warmer view of the other side. Minority or low-power individuals, though, often don’t. They already understand the majority’s perspective, because they have to in order to survive. In a recent interview, the comedian Sarah Silverman summed up this feeling. “Women are so keenly aware of the male experience because our entire existence had to be kind of through that lens. Whereas men have never had to understand the female experience in order to exist in the world.”
Minority individuals, Emile thought, might be weary of perspective taking. Instead of fetishizing equality, contact programs could respond by promoting balance. If one group is silenced the rest of the time, perhaps they should be given greater status when the groups come together, a chance to be heard by the more powerful side. Instead of perspective taking, they might benefit from “perspective giving.” To test this idea, Emile set up shop in a public library in Phoenix and paired Mexican immigrants and white U.S. citizens who had never met. In each pair, one person was assigned to the role of “sender” and wrote a short essay about the hardships facing their group. The second person, the “responder,” read and summarized the essay, and passed their reflections back to the sender. Each person then described how they felt about their partner and the ethnic group they represented.
White Americans responded to contact just as Allport would have predicted: After playing the role of the responder, they felt better about Mexican immigrants. Mexican immigrants, though, felt worse about white Americans after listening to the complaints of this richer, more powerful group. They felt better about whites after playing the role of sender. Emile reran the study in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, setting up video chats between Palestinians and Israelis. Israelis—like white Americans—felt best about Palestinians after hearing their stories. Palestinians, though, felt best about Israelis after telling their own stories and having an Israeli listen to them. Contact worked best when it reversed the existing power structure, rather than ignored it.
Emile has dissected hatred around the world, but lately he has focused on home, and the growing white nationalist movement in the United States. The “alt-right” has become increasingly emboldened, and more openly hateful. In August 2017, they assembled with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue commemorating Robert E. Lee. The demonstration turned violent, and an alt-right activist drove his car through a crowd of counterprotestors, injuring many and killing counterprotestor Heather Heyer. The scene looked like the West Bank, not an American college town.
At the height of his WAR period, Tony McAleer’s empathy for outsiders atrophied. Today’s white nationalists follow suit. They dehumanize outsiders, rating Muslims as only about 55 percent evolved on Nour Kteily’s scale. They exhibit blunted responses to others’ emotions and find violence a reasonable means for advancing their beliefs. It’s easy to fear alt-right proponents and even easier to write them off as hopeless bigots. But Tony’s story demonstrates that lost souls can still reclaim their humanity. Can we engineer circumstances that will help them?
AFTER RENOUNCING WHITE supremacy, Tony discovered an online journal titled Life After Hate, full of stories like his own. People chronicled their experiences with hate groups and how they got out. Tony became an active contributor. In 2011, he and other contributors were invited to an extraordinary meeting. Google Ideas (now Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet) brought together about fifty “formers”—ex–hate group members—to discuss strategies for preventing extremism. “It was nuts,” Tony remembers. “You had IRA members sitting across from Jihadists and neo-Nazis. These are people who would have tried to kill each other before.”
Despite their obvious differences, people at the meeting shared common stories. Many had used hatred to cover wounds from their childhoods. Many had escaped it after finding new meaning, especially through parenthood and friendships with forgiving outsiders. “Over and over, same reasons in, same reasons out.” Tony realized that his struggles were not unique. And that meant he could guess what might help other people find a way out of hatred, too.
Along with his colleagues, Tony expanded Life After Hate into a nonprofit that now works to extract people from the dark place he once inhabited. “We stumbled through the wilderness and managed to get to the other side,” he says. “From there we want to go back and help people who are where we were.” It’s a textbook case of altruism born of suffering.
Life After Hate infiltrates Aryan, neo-Nazi, and KKK message boards and social media pages, reminding visitors that they still have options. Hate group members and their families reach out to them often; the week after Charlottesville, they received about a hundred calls. Tony and his colleagues connect them to counselors, tattoo-removal services, and a more hopeful future.
ONE CLOUDY JULY day, Tony, Emile, Nour Kteily, and I all gathered at Northwestern University for a day-long brainstorming session. Life After Hate wanted to learn more about empathy from the psychologists who study it, and we psychologists wanted to hear more directly from people like Tony. We all wanted to find solutions. It was an unusual meeting. First, Life After Hate members told their stories. Tony began. He had a soft, open face and wore a pink striped shirt, a shark-tooth necklace, and a bracelet made of spherical wooden beads. He looked a bit like a soccer hooligan turned folk musician.
Angela King followed him. She was a victim of intense bullying in school and, at some point, decided that the best way to stop being a target was to become the bully. She grew homophobic and racist and started committing hate crimes. She was arrested for the armed robbery of a Jewish-owned store and sent to prison. Her arms, legs, and chest were covered with swastikas; SIEG HEIL was tattooed on the inside of her lower lip. She expected prison to be a race war. To her shock, the first inmates to take her in were not fellow Aryans, but a group of Jamaican women. Over games of cribbage, they challenged her beliefs but also accepted her as a person. As she has recalled, “Aggression and anger and violence…were my reactions to anything and everything in my life. So, when I was treated with kindness and compassion, it was like being disarmed.”
Next was Sammy Rangel, a soft-spoken man with cropped black hair who looks like he might live at the gym. He has a similar story: abuse, then hatred, then redemption through contact with an understanding outsider.
Emile, Nour, and I then shared research on hatred and how to address it. We focused on nudges that make it easier for people to get to know outsiders and harder to stereotype them. We bounced strategies around the room for a while, but the Life After Hate members pushed back. “You’re trying to problem-solve this,” Sammy objected, “but in these interventions, you’re not a problem solver. That’s a trap.” Hate group members expect people to try to change their minds. In preparation they construct what Tony calls a “fortress of reason”: protection against any argument, through counterpoints, rhetorical tricks, or plain old threats.
To get past those defenses, Life After Hate begins in a different place. “The goal can’t be to change a person right away,” explained Sammy. “You first need to show genuine interest in them, listen to what they have to say, and then maybe after a while find something to hold on to.” Sammy here sounded like the legendary therapist Carl Rogers. Rogers felt that a psychologist’s most important job is to truly listen to their patient, full of curiosity and free of judgment. Hate group members are ready to be cast away by anyone who doesn’t agree with them, which is pretty much everyone else. Sammy, Tony, and Angela all once believed that everyone else should hate them. To puncture that shame, someone had to show them genuine empathy.
Tony made clear that empathizing with a hate group member is not the same as validating their beliefs. “You absolutely judge the ideology, the hatred, but you don’t judge the person.” Even that sounds like a tall order. Why spend any energy validating someone who’s covered in genocidal tattoos? No one is obligated to return hate with love. Tony’s friend Dov Baron and the Jamaican women who mentored Angela certainly weren’t. But in accepting them, these outsiders gave Tony and Angela a chance to feel compassion for themselves. That compassion washed away the anger that had sprung from their shame.
Emile, Nour, and I believed that contact was a matter of changing people’s minds about outsiders. But people who had been in the trenches were telling us something else: Contact had changed how they viewed themselves. For the past fifteen years, psychologists have been studying “self-compassion,” people’s willingness to take a kind, forgiving attitude toward their own foibles. Self-compassion and empathy toward others might seem like two sides of the same coin, but they’re only weakly related, and sometimes not at all. A narcissist might forgive herself, but not others; a depressed person might forgive others, but not himself.
People who lack self-compassion often become rigid during conflict, for instance refusing to compromise during disagreements. Sammy’s, Angela’s, and Tony’s childhoods had exhausted their self-compassion, but contact brought it back. Does their experience translate to others? There is little research on this, but one recent study found that Israeli children trained in self-compassion exhibited less prejudice toward Palestinians. Nour, Emile, and I are now designing work to examine the role of contact in building self-compassion, inspired by Sammy’s, Angela’s, and Tony’s insights.
That day, I also realized how powerful contact with people like Tony must be for hate group members, by showing them that another life is possible. Imagine a member of the Latin Kings, or KKK, or WAR, who begins feeling doubt and calls Life After Hate. They meet Sammy. Sammy was almost killed by his mother and fled to live on the streets at eleven years old. He taped knives to his hands during a prison melee. He was once strapped down in solitary confinement and fed by a string held over his head like a fishing pole. The state of Illinois defined him as “incorrigible,” beyond reform. He is now a social worker and doctoral candidate.
Psychologists usually think of contact as involving at least two people, but Life After Hate suggests that encountering our own past and future selves can be just as powerful. A thirty-year-old cringes at her sixth-grade self’s embarrassing faux pas. She imagines her sixty-five-year-old self as weary and gray, but hopefully accomplished and satisfied. Both of these people are strangers to her. Hate group members might feel especially estranged from their future. As a young man, Tony didn’t think he had one.
Research shows that people who can vividly imagine their future self behave more wisely. In one study, researchers scanned subjects’ brains while they answered questions—Would they rather go grocery shopping or do laundry? Would they like to run a 5K next week?—and then again while they considered how their future self would answer the same questions. Most people activated different parts of the brain when imagining their current versus future selves, suggesting they saw their futures selves as someone else altogether. Others’ brain activity suggested they had a stronger connection with their future selves. These people took better care of their futures, for instance, by investing smartly. In another study, individuals shown digitally aged images of their faces were likely to save more for retirement. Making contact with their future selves convinced people to treat them more kindly.
By meeting someone like Sammy, hate group members can connect to a future they might never have imagined, in which they can care and be cared for again. Stories like his also remind us that people can change, even after a lifetime of loss and alienation. Toward the end of our meeting, Sammy talked about the term “formers,” which they had adopted at the Google Ideas meeting. “We call each other ‘formers,’ because we were all formerly in hate groups. But we also use it because everyone is forming all the time, into someone new.”
Conflict and hate can sap our imagination. In George Orwell’s 1984, members of each political faction come to believe that they have always been at war. Politics, race, and identity in America feel that way now. Millions of us probably can’t imagine a world where we empathize across all of these divisions. Like a camper invoking William of Orange to cuss out another, we accept that our history is an unending clash between groups, so our future must be as well.
In both cases we’re wrong, and simply remembering that can pave the way for greater peace. In one recent study, Carol Dweck and others drew on her mindset research to convince Israelis and Palestinians that just like individuals, groups are capable of change. They were reminded, for instance, of the Arab Spring and the formation of the European Union. Even six months later, both Israelis and Palestinians felt more positively toward the other side, more hopeful about the possibility of peace, and more inclined to make concessions in the service of that peace. A belief in change also makes contact more fruitful—for instance, increasing people’s willingness to cooperate with outsiders.
People who imagine a stronger, more connected version of their tribe might be inspired to make it a reality. When it works best, contact offers evidence for outsiders’ worth and helps us believe in our own. It might also allow us to imagine a future in which outsiders are no longer outsiders at all.