The intensifying political division and violence in our country is concerning — but it’s not unique. And few know that better than Tim Phillips, founder of Beyond Conflict. He speaks to Baratunde about lessons learned from intractable global conflicts and how our psychology can be harnessed for peace.

In today’s episode of our series on the 4R Network, Dr. Vivian Khedari DePierro will touch upon the connection between unresolved trauma and the perpetuation of violence, and how failure to address mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) needs of extremist offenders may hamper rehabilitation and reintegration efforts of extremist offenders.

7. Reducing Political Polarization by Correcting Erroneous Meta-Perceptions: A Video Intervention, Beyond Conflict The wonderfully hopeful narrative and data in this video powerfully illustrates how our polarized perceptions of people in the “other party” drive distortions and exaggerations about exactly how different our positions are on critical issues.

He will speak as part of the SNF Agora Institute’s “Talking (and Listening) Across Divides” conference that takes place in Athens, Greece, on Wednesday During his career, Tim Phillips has learned a great deal about reconciliation and human behavior. One lesson in particular stands out: The Enlightenment was deeply flawed. “During the Enlightenment, scholars believed that humans are rational beings who happen to have emotions,” Phillips says. “In fact, the opposite is true—science is showing that we are highly emotional beings who happen to have moments of clarity.” It’s a lesson that’s been reinforced throughout the 27 years Phillips has spent leading the nonprofit Beyond Conflict, which he founded in 1992 to support governments and organizations as they broker peace and reconciliation in areas ravaged by war, oppression, trauma, and discord. Phillips helped pave the way for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which aimed to bring restorative justice to victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses under Apartheid, the nation’s strict system of racial segregation that came to an end in the early 1990s. Read the full story here.

Beyond Conflict’s Lead Scientist Emile Bruneau joined Christian Picciolini, a former Neo-Nazi who now works to counter racism and help people disengage from violent extremism, and Nancy Baron-Baer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, on NPR’s WHYY. They discuss the violent rhetoric, fear mongering, and hateful attacks which are becoming nearly ubiquitous to American life. The interview took place one week after eleven people were killed and six injured when a gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The attacker was reportedly shouting anti-Semitic slurs as he started shooting.Dr. Bruneau talked about our research into the cognitive factors that contribute to hate and dangerous group behavior and finds hope for positive change due to the ability of our brains to learn and reframe our minds and biases.Listen to the podcast here and read excerpts of the interview below “One of the basic elements of psychology at play here is this tendency to think in terms of us and them. We come into the world with a tendency to categorize people into groups – but deciding who is us and who is them is extraordinarily flexible in humans. So this tendency towards ‘tribalism’ is baked into us – but ‘racism’ is a cultural construct. Children aren’t born racist. We have to teach them that ‘race’ is a social category, and that it matters. In experimental research, one-year-olds, three-year-olds don’t have a preference for black [people] over white [people], they don’t understand [skin color] as a characteristic. However, five-year-olds have a 7:1 preference to engage with a White person versus a Black person when given the choice. We, as a society, have to diligently teach our children to specifically who to hate. And once tribalism is established, it opens the door to a host of other psychological processes, which make us see ‘them’ as irrational, untrustworthy, dangerous, and somewhat less than human.” – Emile Bruneau “This is the flexibility of the human mind: Once [an individual] is defined as part of a group, we imbue that individual with the characteristics of the group. So, you can transfer your hate from one ‘out-group’ member to another; they become psychologically interchangeable. This is how someone can shoot a Muslim cab driver in New York City because of the acts of a Muslim extremist in Paris. The ability to think in terms of groups makes sense for our brains from an efficiency standpoint, but it is this tendency that has been a pernicious enabler of intergroup conflict in humans.”- Emile Bruneau Follow us on twitter — @Beyond_Conflict

You can’t fight prejudice with name calling. Here’s one strategy that actually works. By Brian Resnick On Wednesday, President Donald Trump retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos from a known hate group. The videos — one of which has been revealed to be fake — purport to demonstrate the dangers Muslims pose to Western society: that Muslim migrants beat up white Europeans, threaten Western culture, and mock Western religious figures. As my colleagues at Vox have pointed out, Trump’s retweets fit with a pattern: He feels that the whole of Islam, collectively, is a threat to the United States and the West. He treats Muslims as a monolith, a group of millions who deserve to be banned from the United States. There’s a psychological theory that helps explain this tendency: “collective blame,” when we punish the whole for the actions of a few. In some ways, Trump is channeling how many people in America feel about Muslims. We see collective blame rear its head after an act of terror committed by a member of the Islamic faith. “Maybe most [Muslims are] peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible,” Rupert Murdoch tweeted after the 2015 terrorist attack in France. A similar sentiment often repeats on Murdoch’s Fox News. There’s nothing logical about condemning millions of people — who are spread across the globe and are unrelated to each other except by religious tradition — for the actions of a few. You wouldn’t blame all white people for the actions of Dylann Roof, who walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine African-American worshippers. You wouldn’t blame all Christians for the meanness of the Westboro Baptist Church. Yet collective blame happens, with ugly consequences. Read the full story in Vox.

As anti-Muslim rhetoric increases under Trump, more Americans are seeing Muslims as less than human. By Brian Resnick You can think of human psychology as a series of overlapping mental programs. One program identifies faces as individuals we recognize. Another is working memory, which allows us to make quick calculations in our heads. These programs were coded by evolution and help us survive every day; they are the sources of our ingenuity and our compassion. They are everything we are. These mental programs — etched in all of us — are also the sources of horror and pain. Nour Kteily is a psychologist at Northwestern University whose research is about understanding one of the darkest, most ancient, and most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the ability to see fellow men and women as less than human. Psychologists are no strangers to this subject. But the prevailing wisdom has been that most people are not willing to admit to having prejudice against others. Kteily suspected otherwise. And so he and his colleagues created a new way to measure people’s levels of blatant dehumanization of other groups. It’s not subtle. Read more in Vox.