Stances
Social cohesion is a pathway towards thriving as a society
This is a pathway for people and communities to navigate complex challenges — and opportunities — with greater creativity, courage, and adaptability.
We define courage as the willingness to stay open to what one is feeling, including times when what one is feeling is unwanted and difficult; To be OK with being completely human, the muck as well as the beauty.
The components of this vision of social cohesion interact with, and are shaped by, each other in dynamic ways. For example, social psychology studies demonstrate that belonging without diversity can lead to echo chambers, amplifying existing insular opinions with less focus on facts. This corresponds to less innovation and out-the-box thinking . It can also be accompanied by othering and intergroup conflict.
Diversity without belonging and equity is similarly ineffective and can further exacerbate conflict. Studies suggest that diversity without belonging can increase communication barriers and affective polarization resulting from reducing others to binary a binary “us” vs monolithic “them.”
Finally, diversity and belonging (on individual and local community levels) without a safeguarding of equal rights and opportunities in a society contributes to the indignities and dehumanization of being second-class citizens. For example, consider the plight of African American soldiers who, irrespective of feelings of belonging in ethnically diverse battalions, returned from WWII to a US in which they could neither vote, nor drink from the same water fountains as brothers-in-arms with whom they risked their lives.
Social cohesion is ecoystemic
Being seen and understood is a basic human need
Dismissal and indifference incurs heavy social, psychological and physical costs.
“No crueler punishment can be devised than to NOT see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible...to say: You don't matter. You don't exist." — David Brooks.
Everyone has a story that matters, in which others can find vital inspiration
Bridging divides requires alleviating sense of belonging threats triggered by listening to opposing views
An important social psychology research insight (e.g. Cohen, Clancy) is that the willingness to listen to different, opposing perspectives and experiences — and, crucially, to feel and re-evaluate one’s own impacts on others, including inadvertent and even deliberate harm — is closely linked with feelings of safety in one’s sense of belonging and, by extension, sense of self. As long as listening to you threatens my place in my group, you will not be heard, whatever the argument. “This group fealty,” writes Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen, “is why exhortations to think more critically or to get more informed don't change people's views and often backfire.”
We find inspiring direction in the numerous replicated studies showing that openness to opposing views can be enduringly increased through stabilizing a sense of self apart from such group identity, for example through the types of values exercises described previously when thoughtfully tailored, targeted and timed. Such research guides projects like In Our Words as efforts to counter the intensification and calcification of high conflict. As opposed to more generative friction, however intense, high conflict is typically marked by a dangerous reduction of complex people and situations into simplistic binaries — usually a distinct “us” vs monolithic, dehumanized “them,” whether Black vs White, Republican vs Democrat, Straight vs Trans, etc. The way out of high conflict generally requires alleviating people’s belonging threats. Mechanisms for this are chiefly experiences that increase understanding of the perspectives, experiences and circumstances underlying surface actions and talking points Importantly, this does not imply agreement, permission or equivalence.
We may be wired to “Other.”
But we are also wired to “Us.”
Sharing one’s story — and being heard — in dignified listening settings can strengthen feelings of being valued and welcomed for who one is. For speaker and listener, this validates and alleviates isolation.
Being drawn into others’ backstories heightens humane, empathetic connections, affirming identities and experiences cutting across political, ethnic or economic divisions (e.g. parents and parenthood; pain, loss, joy; we are all Americans, etc). This enables community members greater resonance with a broad range of fellow community members. Identity theory and social psychology studies since the 1950s repeatedly demonstrate that as innate as it may be to “other,” splintering into factions with as little as different colored shirts or eye-color, people are also wired to “us:” To emotionally connect with others based on shared experience, physiologically (e.g. Mirror neurons) and psychologically (Paluck, Iyengar). The more moving the experience, the more this occurs (See the 4C’s)