THE JIGSAW SOLUTION
To protect themselves from the intergroup frictions rampant in their large Manhattan high school, girls from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic united into a single clique. But within that tight-knit clan occasional bad feelings arose between Dominican and Puerto Rican factions.
One day a fight started between two girls, when a Puerto Rican put down a Dominican for being too proud for such a recent immigrant. The two became enemies, splitting the group’s loyalties.
In high schools across America students increasingly find themselves in an ever-diversifying ethnic mix. In this new global microcosm the standard categories of discrimination—the ways Us and Them are defined—constantly reinvent themselves.20 The old categories, like blacks and whites, have been replaced by much subtler strains. In that Manhattan school these divisions included not just blacks versus Latinos but, among the Asians, “ABCs” (American Born Chinese) and “FOBs” (Fresh Off the Boat). Given the projections for immigration into the United States over the next several decades, this multilayered ethnic mix, with its expanding varieties of in- and out-groups, will only thicken the varieties of Us and Them.
One sobering lesson in the costs of a socially splintered climate was the horrific shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, when two “outsider” kids sought revenge by killing several fellow students, a teacher, and themselves. That tragedy inspired social psychologist Elliot Aronson to examine the problem, which he saw as having roots in school atmospheres that are “competitive, cliquish and exclusionary.”
In such a setting, Aronson saw, “teenagers agonize over the fact that there is a general atmosphere of taunting and rejection among their peers that makes the high school experience an unpleasant one. For many, it is worse than unpleasant—they describe it as a living hell, where they feel insecure, unpopular, put-down and picked on.”21
Not only the United States, but countries from Norway to Japan have been grappling with the problem of how to stop children from bullying. Anywhere there are “in” students and outsiders whom other students shun and exclude, the problem of disconnection plagues the social world of the learner.
That fact may seem to some a trivial side effect of the normal social currents that make some students stars and place others off the map. But research with people who are made to feel left out or who are reminded that they belong to an “outsider” group shows that such rejection can plummet them into a state of distractedness, anxious preoccupation, lethargy, and a sense that their lives are meaningless.22 Large doses of teen angst are brewed from this very fear of exclusion.
Remember that the pain of ostracism registers in the node of the social brain that also reacts to actual physical pain. Social rejection in students can torpedo academic performance.23 Their capacity for working memory—the crucial cognitive ability for taking in new information—becomes impaired enough to account for an appreciable decline in mastery of subjects like math.24 Beyond having difficulties in learning, such disengaged students tend to have higher rates of violence and disruptive behavior in class, show poor attendance, and drop out at higher rates.
The social universe of school is at the center of teenagers’ lives. That fact presents a danger, as the data on alienation show, but also a promise: for school also offers every teenager a living laboratory for learning to connect positively with other people.
Aronson took up the challenge of helping students connect in healthy ways. From social psychology he knew one dynamic of moving from Them to Us: as people from hostile groups work together toward a common goal, they end up liking one another.
So Aronson advocated what he calls the “jigsaw classroom,” where students labor in teams to master an assignment on which they will be tested. Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each student in the group holds one piece essential for full understanding. In studying World War II, for example, each team member becomes a specialist on one area, like military campaigns in Italy. The specialist studies that one topic with students from other groups. They then go back to their home group and teach the others.
To master the subject, the whole group must listen intently to what each has to say. If the others heckle them or tune out because they don’t like them, they risk doing poorly on the test that follows. Learning itself becomes a lab that encourages listening, respect, and cooperation.
Students in jigsaw learning groups quickly let go of their negative stereotypes. Likewise, studies in multicultural schools show that the more friendly contacts students have across group divides, the less their bias.25
Take Carlos, a fifth-grader who suddenly had to leave the school that most Mexican-American students like him attended and be bused across town to a school in a prosperous neighborhood. Kids in his new school were better informed in all the subjects than he was, and they ridiculed his accent. Carlos became an instant outsider, shy and insecure.
But in the jigsaw classroom, the same students who had made fun of him now had to depend on his piece of the learning puzzle for their own success. At first they put him down for his halting delivery, making him freeze—and they all did poorly. So they began to help and encourage him. The more they helped, the more relaxed—and articulate—Carlos became. His performance improved as his groupmates saw him in an increasingly favorable light.
Several years later, out of the blue, Aronson got a letter from Carlos as he was about to graduate from a university. Carlos recalled how he had been scared, had hated school, and had thought he was stupid—and how the other kids had been cruel and hostile. But once he took part in the jigsaw classroom, that had changed, and his tormentors had become his friends.26
“I began to love to learn,” Carlos wrote. “And now I’m about to go to Harvard Law School.”
FORGIVING AND FORGETTING
It was a cold December day, and the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, former dean of New York City’s Episcopal Cathedral and now director of the Interfaith Center, had very bad news for his staff. Their largest donors had cut back funding, and the center could no longer pay its rent. It was about to become homeless.
Then just a few days before Christmas, an unlikely savior came. Sheikh Moussa Drammeh, an immigrant from Senegal, heard about their plight and offered the Interfaith Center room in a building where he was about to start a day care facility.
In this rescue by a Muslim of a center where Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others could meet to work on common problems, Dean Morton saw a fitting parable, one that validated the very mission of his group. As Drammeh put it, “the more we know about each other and the more we are willing to sit down and drink and laugh together, the less we are inclined to shed blood.”27
But what can be done to heal the hatred of peoples when they have shed blood? In the aftermath of intergroup violence, prejudice and animosity inevitably metastasize.
Once hostilities have ceased, over and above harmonious relations there are good personal reasons to speed the process. One is biological: holding on to hatred and grudges has grave physiological consequence. Studies of people posthostility reveal that every time they merely think of the group they hate, their own body responds with pent-up anger; it floods with stress hormones, raising their blood pressure and impairing their immune effectiveness. Presumably, the more often and intensely this sequence of muted rage repeats, the more risk of lasting biological consequence.
One antidote lies in forgiveness.28 Forgiving someone we’ve held a grudge against reverses the biological reaction: it lowers our blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of stress hormones and it lessens our pain and depression.29
Forgiveness can have social consequences, like making friends with former enemies. But it need not take that form. Especially while wounds are still fresh, forgiveness does not require condoning some offensive act, forgetting what happened, or reconciling with the perpetrator. It means finding a way to free oneself from the claws of obsession about the hurt.
For a week psychologist
s coached seventeen men and women from Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, on forgiveness. Each of them had lost a family member to sectarian violence. During that week the bereaved aired their grievances and were helped to find new ways to think about the tragedy—most resolving not to dwell on their hurt but to honor the memory of their loved ones by dedicating themselves to a more hopeful future. Many intended to help others go through the same ritual of forgiveness. Afterward, the group not only felt less hurt emotionally but also reported a substantial drop in physical symptoms of trauma like poor appetite and sleeplessness.30
Forgive, perhaps, but don’t forget—at least not entirely. There are larger lessons for humanity to learn from acts of oppression and brutality. They need to be held in mind as morality tales, reminders to the ages. As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says of the Holocaust, “I want to remember its horror only to make sure that such a thing never happens to me or to anyone else ever again.”31
As Kushner puts it, having learned the most horrible lesson about “what it means to be victimized by the full power of a technocratic state gone mad,” the best response to that memory lies in helping other people who are in danger of genocide now.
That motive lies behind the production of New Dawn, a weekly radio soap opera that is popular in Rwanda, where from 1990 to 1994 rampaging Hutus slaughtered seven hundred thousand of their Tutsi neighbors, along with moderate Hutus who might oppose the killings. The soap’s plot, set in the present, follows the tensions simmering between two neighboring hardscrabble villages in dispute over fertile land that lies between them.
In a Romeo and Juliet twist, Batamuliza, a young woman, has a romantic interest in Shema, a young man in the other village. To thicken the plot, her older brother, Rutanagira, leads a faction in their village that tries to goad hatred toward the other village to foment an attack on them—and he’s trying to force Batamuliza to marry one of his cronies. Batamuliza, though, belongs to a group with friends in both her own and the other village. These young people cook up ways to oppose the troublemakers, like tipping off the targets of the planned attack and speaking out against the instigators.
Just such active resistance to hatred was absent during the genocides of a decade ago. Cultivating the capacity to fight hatred is the subtext of New Dawn, a joint project of Dutch philanthropists and American psychologists.32 “We’re giving people an understanding of the influences that led to genocide, and what they can do to see it never repeats,” said Ervin Staub, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and one of the designers of the show.
Staub knows about the dynamics of genocide from personal experience as well as from his research. As a child, he was one of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews saved from the Nazis by Swedish ambassador Raoul Wallenberg.
Staub’s book The Roots of Evil summarizes the psychological forces that spawn such mass murder.33 The groundwork gets laid during severe social upheavals, like economic crises and political chaos, in places that have a history of division between a dominant group and a less powerful one. The turmoil causes members of a majority group to find appealing the ideologies that scapegoat a weaker group, blaming them for the problem and envisioning a better future that They are preventing. The hatred spreads all the more readily when the majority group has itself been victimized in the past and still feels wounded or wronged. Already seeing the world as dangerous, when tensions rise they feel a need to resort to violence against Them to defend themselves, even when their “self-defense” amounts to genocide.
Several features make such violence more likely: when the targets are unable to speak up to defend themselves, and bystanders—those who could object, or people in nearby countries—say and do nothing. “If others are passive when you first harm the victims, the perpetrators interpret that silence as an endorsement,” Staub says. “And once people start the violence, step by step they exclude their victim from the moral realm. Then there’s nothing to hold them back.”
Staub, working with psychologist Laurie Anne Pearlman, has been teaching these insights—and antidotes to hatred, like objecting openly—to Rwandan groups of politicians, journalists, and community leaders.34 “We ask them to apply these insights to their own experience of what happened. It’s very powerful. We’re trying to promote community healing and build the tools to resist the forces of violence.”
Their research shows that both Hutus and Tutsis who have gone through such training feel less traumatized by what happened to them and are more accepting of the other group. But it takes more than strong emotional connections and friendship to overcome the Us-Them divide. Forgiveness may not help when the groups continue to live next to each other, Staub finds, and when the perpetrators fail to acknowledge what they have done, show no regret, and express no empathy for survivors. The imbalance widens if the forgiveness is one-sided.
Staub distinguishes forgiveness from reconciliation, which is the honest review of oppression and efforts at making amends like those undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. In his programs in Rwanda, reconciliation has meant that those on the side of the perpetrators admit what was done, and people on both sides come to see each other more realistically. That paves the way for both peoples to live together in a new way.
“Tutsis will tell you,” Staub finds, “‘some Hutus tried to save our lives. I’m willing to work with them for the sake of our children. If they apologize, I can see myself forgive.’”
EPILOGUE
What Really Matters
I once met a man who had been invited to spend a week on a private yacht touring the Greek islands. It wasn’t just any yacht but a “superyacht,” a ministeamship so long it was listed in a special registry of the largest pleasure boats in the world. A copy of that registry sat on a table in its lounge: the thick, richly illustrated volume had a two-page spread devoted to the lavish details of each superyacht.
The dozen or so guests aboard were thrilled by the comforts and the sheer immensity of the sleek craft—until the day an even bigger yacht anchored nearby. Consulting the registry, they discovered that their new nautical neighbor was among the five largest yachts in the world and belonged to a Saudi prince. On top of that, it had an accompanying tender, a sister ship that carried its supplies, such as a huge water trampoline hanging from the bow. The tender itself was about the size of their own boat.
Can there be such a thing as yacht envy? Absolutely, according to Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University psychologist. Such high-end envy results from what he dubs the “hedonic treadmill.” Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, uses the image of a treadmill to explain why enhanced life circumstances, like greater wealth, correlate poorly with life satisfaction.
In explaining why the wealthiest people are not the happiest, Kahneman argues that as we get more money, we adapt our expectations upward, and so we aspire to ever more lofty and expensive pleasures—a treadmill that never ends, even for billionaires. As he puts it, “The rich may experience more pleasure than the poor, but they also require more pleasure to be equally satisfied.”1
But Kahneman’s research also suggests one way to escape from the hedonic treadmill: a life rich in rewarding relationships. He and a research team surveyed more than one thousand American women, asking them to evaluate all their activities during a given day in terms of what they were doing, who they were with at the time, and how they felt. The most powerful influences on how happy the women felt were the people with whom they spent their time—not their income, not job pressures, and not their marital status.2
The two most pleasurable activities were, to no one’s surprise, making love and socializing. Least enjoyable were the daily commute and work. And the rankings of which people primed happiness? Here is the list, from top to bottom:
Friends
Relatives
Spouse or partner
Children
Clients or customers
Coworker
s
Boss
Being alone
Kahneman suggests, in effect, that we take stock of the people in our lives and the pleasure we get in being with them, then try to “optimize” our day by spending more time with them in satisfying ways (to the extent that schedules and money allow). But beyond such obvious logistical solutions, a richer possibility is to re-create our relationships to make them more mutually nourishing.
Surely much of what makes life worth living comes down to our feelings of well-being—our happiness and sense of fulfillment. And good-quality relationships are one of the strongest sources of such feelings. Emotional contagion means that a goodly number of our moods come to us via the interactions we have with other people. In a sense, resonant relationships are like emotional vitamins, sustaining us through tough times and nourishing us daily.
Among people around the world, nourishing relationships are the single most universally agreed-upon feature of the good life. While the specifics vary from culture to culture, all people everywhere deem warm connections with others to be the core feature of “optimal human existence.”3
As we saw in Chapter 15, the marital researcher John Gottman has found that in a happy, stable marriage a couple experiences about five upbeat interactions for every negative one. Perhaps that same five-to-one ratio is an approximate golden mean for any ongoing connection in our lives. We could, in theory, do an inventory that evaluates the “nutritional” value of each of our relationships.
If, say, the ratio were reversed to five negative for every positive interaction, the relationship would be in urgent need of mending. A negative ratio, of course, does not necessarily mean we should end relationships just because they are sometimes (or even, too often) difficult. The point is to do what we can to alter the troubling behavior for the better, not banish the person. Armies of experts propose solutions here. Some work only if others are willing to try, too. If not, we can still boost our own resilience and social intelligence, so changing our part in the emotional tango.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 36
