Claude Steele

And look, he's trying to help me deal with it.

That is more powerful, I think, than we have recognized.

We have seen this challenge of the diverse society that we have, this challenge of bridging differences.

as more complicated, as somehow we have to get past, you know, prejudices and biases and misunderstandings and, you know, mistrust takes, complicates things and gets us down very difficult paths.

I'm trying to reorient or refocus us on the simpler things.

and so what would be some examples of things i could do to do that well i do think listening the the really trying to see uh what the other person is concerned about that itself engenders trust in the other person that person begins to trust you when you show that kind of interest in them so if i'm a teacher with a student if i'm a doctor with a patient if

I'm a lawyer with all these circumstances.

I'm proposing this focus on simple things.

First, really, really listening, asking questions.

I can give you an example of an experiment that I think that we did some years ago that illustrates what I'm talking about here.

Sure.

Yeah.

I'd love to hear it.

We were interested in what would enable people across a racial divide to have an honest conversation about difficult topics.

So we had white male Stanford students come into the lab one at a time, and they were told they were going to have a conversation with two other students.

And on the table in front of them are photographs of the two students they're going to talk to.

And for half of these participants, the two photographs were of two white guys.

And for the other half, they were of two black guys.

And then they find out that they're going to talk either about something easy to talk to anybody about, love and relationships in college, or they're going to talk about something kind of challenging, racial profiling.

So that's the setup.