About this live event
Our self-conscious emotions and self-protective tendencies lead us to create enemies, biases and stereotypes about other people. We mistakenly believe we can understand or even control other people’s intentions without asking them. Our perspectives on “others” are fueled by our own conscious and unconscious motives. Even in our moment-to-moment perceptions, we see through a “viewfinder” or “virtual headset” that is first-person and individual and so, our perceptions of other people are often very flawed and distorted.
In this course, we will investigate two aspects of human tendencies: (1) to create enemies in our closest relationships and families, as well as in our societies and communities and (2) to be relentlessly mistaken or wrong.
We will zoom out and get an overview of bias and stereotype as a by-product of self-consciousness and contextual social variables or abuse. We will also review some of the research on inaccuracies in what people believe they saw, heard, felt or said.
The objective of this course is to create a fundamental modesty about we believe we see, hear, know and feel to be true. Through Real Dialogue (Speaking for Yourself, Listening Mindfully and Remaining Curious) we can prevent the worst outcomes from our human biases and flaws, but we also need to understand what motivates all humans to be biased and flawed in what they believe they experience.
