Hidden Brain - Radio Replay: Creative Differences

Episode Date: February 2, 2019

What happens when we connect with people whose view of the world is very different from our own? We look at the links between diversity, conflict, and creativity.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2011, Richard Freeman was studying scientists, specifically how scientists walk together. Richard, who's a Harvard economics professor, noticed something surprising. Scientists in the United States stick to their own kind. You'd see Chinese folk concentrated in one lab, Indian folk concentrated in another lab, Europeans of different groups, associating more with their compatriots. This was not surprising. You see this kind of clustering in lots of workplaces.

But Richard thought, science ought to be different. It general people who are more alike are likely to think more alike and one of the things that gives a kick to science and scientific productivity is that you get people with somewhat different views, different perspectives coming together. Some people agree with Richard's contention that a mix of perspectives will produce better ideas. But others say, no, a group that has lots of different views will end up in gridlock. So, which is it? Richard decided to figure out whether scientists who collaborate with others from the same group

produce better or worse research than scientists who have a wide network of collaborators. He looked at one of the most important signals of scientific success, research publications. He found that in a large share of these scientific publications, co-authors shared a common ethnicity. No surprise. But then he went further. He looked at citations. In general, the better a paper, the more likely it is to be cited by researchers writing other papers. We asked, well, are the papers done by people who are more ethnically the same? Are those papers, do they get more attention?

Do they have more citations? Do they appear in journals that are of greater prestige? The answer was no. Papers that got the most citations, the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world.

People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world.

People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the world. People are the most prestigious citizens of the US, between countries rather than people only working in the same group. The finding held true, no matter which ethnic groups you looked at. And I think the key thing is to get more ideas linked together so they can spawn better ideas,

as opposed to working in the same way. We're going to ask a question today that draws on Richard's finding and scientific research. What happens when people put themselves in contact with difference, with people whose ideas and history differ from their own. Diversity, conflict and creativity. This week on Hidden Brain. In the far northwest of Spain is a place of farms and forests and ocean. Galithia. It's a region of rugged coastlines, hardy stews, and the Galithian backpipe. I come from Orense, which is one of the four provinces of Galicia.

This is Christina Pato, she's a backpack player. When you grew up in Galicia, you grew up hearing music everywhere, hearing music in Abar, hearing music in Asquare, celebrating the festivities of the day or wedding weddings or in even birthdays. I mean, when you are in Galicia, you pretty much can hear the backpipes almost everywhere. Christina has been playing the backpipes since she was a child. She grew up in a musical household. Her father was an accordion player.

Her three older sisters all played the backpipes. She started playing when she was four. By the time she was ten, Christina and her sister Raquel would travel to villages to play at festivals. In those streets, the sound of two backpipes at 8am is something that everybody can not only hear but also recognize. My sister and I will be just waiting for them to come out, play a little Muneera which is the Galician National Dance and people will just start dancing around. As she grew older, Christina began to experiment with her

bat pipes. She started to play music that wasn't embedded in the folkloric As she grew older, Christina began to experiment with her backpipes. She started to play music that wasn't embedded in the folkloric tradition. She started touring with bands. At 18, she released her first solo album. The more Christina's stretched, the better she got. By the time her second album was released two years later, she died her hair bright green and acquired a nickname, the Jimmy Galicia, the backpipes remained deeply embedded in tradition. But improvisation came naturally to her. She needed to make her own kind of music. I was trying to just tell people this is what I am and I is not like I don't care about what you think about what I do with my instrument,

but there is something about what I do with my instrument that keeps me going. By the time she was a young adult, Christina had to make a choice. It seemed to her like the backpipes could only take her so far. Christina had also been trained in classical piano. In her mid-twenties, she decided to leave Spain and go to the United States. She would pursue a mainstream musical career with a piano. And I moved here. I didn't tell anybody around me when I went to Rackers University to get my doctorate, but I had another life. Christina kept her two lives separate.

One side of her was a diligent classical music student. The other was still a green-haired backpipe player from Galicia. One day, in her second semester, a professor asked for help in translating a song. So I get this call from the professor of the vocal department, and she says, I have a son in here, which is in a language that I believe is closer to Spanish. So I was wondering if you could be the pianist for this singer

and also the coach, the vocal coach for diction. And when I see this car, it was Lua de Escalorida, which is literally colorless moon in Galithian. And this was a poem by the most amazing Galithian poet of all times Rosalia de Castro, a female writer of the end of the 19th century. And this composer who, to be honest honest I didn't know anything about him. This composer actually has chosen that poem to create music around it. That composer it turns out was celebrated. An Argentinian named Oswald Ogolyhoff.

She met him at rehearsal. We started talking about Alicia. Then he got excited. Then I told him, well, I actually pray the other, the other most important thing about Galicia and which is Negalicia's backpipe. And then his eyes opened even wider. Fast forward six months, Christina got a call. It was uswoldo. He says, why don't you and your husband come to Lenox as a chosen some year with some

friends, being your back-by, and yeah, just come and have fun with us. So they went. We see uswoldo, we started talking and he says, well tonight we are having like gathering and I was hoping for you just to show them your instrument, talk a little bit about your tradition, your music, what you do and I'm sure they will love it. So there I was, like playing my instrument with a bunch of strangers that I, the only person I could recognize physically, it was Jojo.

Jojo? Jojo, Jojo, Ma, the cellist. The most renowned and famous cellist in the world. What Christina didn't realize was that she'd stumbled into a room filled with master musicians from around the world. They were part of a group created by Jojo Ma. It's a collective known as the Silk Road ensemble, and it brings together musicians from around the world. They were part of a group created by Yo-Yo Ma. It's a collective known as the Silk Road ensemble, and it brings together musicians from different cultures and different traditions.

I kind of was lucky that that night I didn't even know who I was playing for because if I did, probably would not have felt so free in the idea of, what are these people, what am I doing in front of all of them? I began playing, they started asking questions, I got excited, then I asked them to join and play, and then we ended up that evening, all dancing a Galiheen Muneera that I coached them, how to dance it,

and that moment really changed my life in every possible direction. And in that moment I didn't even realize how much that moment was going to mean for the rest of my life. It was a turning point. Christina joined the Silk Road ensemble. She embraced the vision for the collective, a vision that began with a simple question. What could happen when a stranger's meet? What could happen when strangers meet? This is the question you're your maharast.

What could musicians from many different cultures create when they come together? It turns out something extraordinarily beautiful. Jojo Ma describes the work of the collective as something he calls the Edge Effect. Christina says it's an idea that stuck with her. The Edge Effect is the pointing which two ecosystems meet, like the forest and the savannah, and apparently in ecology, in this Edge Effect is where the most new life forms

are created. And somehow Silk Road is some sort of his recreation of this edge effect. For Christina, working in that zone where new life forms emerge, that changed the way she saw music. She began to question why Christina, the backpipe player and Christina, the classical pianist, had to live in different worlds. It's true, the music was different, the traditions were different, even the audiences seemed

different. But so what? All of a sudden, working with Silrod, I found the connections between the two worlds I've been living on my life that were not even connected in my hometown. And you have to understand also that in Orénse where I come from, the Backpipers School and the Conservatory for Classical Music were two buildings next to each other. This Backpipers School had, in a city of 100,000 people, had more than 10,000 somehow involved with the Backpiper School. And I could count with the fingers of my hands,

the people that could actually go to both, to go training classical music, but also got trained as a Backpiper. Christina says that what drew her was the possibility for connections and conversations between different musical forms. says that what drew her was the possibility for connections and conversations between different musical forms. In Silver Road, you also have to keep going in meeting new strangers, meeting new communities, meeting communities of people that you have never imagined of working with. And maybe putting together instruments that you will never think they will work together

like a Galician backpackanna Japanese Sakohachi. Somehow to me, Silver Road is the metaphor of the 21st century society or at least to the wish I have for the 21st century society. The Silk Road musicians have discovered in music what Richard Freeman discovered in science. The interesting stuff happens when people from different groups come together, work together, collide. groups come together, work together, collide. When we come back, we look at research that explains why diversity and creativity often go hand in hand. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Hi Adam, I'm Shankar.

Nice to meet you. Not long ago when I was in New York, I stopped by the apartment of social psychologist Adam Gylinski. When reproducer Jenny Schmidt and I got there, Adam and his family were waiting for us at the front door. Adam lives with his wife, Jen O'Lion, his two young sons, Asher and Aiden, and his mother and son, Vicki O'Line. As we walked into the apartment, Adam made a quick request.

We slipped off our boots and Adam and Jen pointed to a selection of house shoes they kept under a bench. Here's some slip-wise if you like. Adam admits that having a shoe-free house wasn't something he'd done growing up. I'd never taken my shoes off in my own house before dating Jen. Jen even doesn't want us to put our clothes on, outside clothes on, sitting on the bed. So I really integrate this. I go to hotels now and I take off my pants before sitting on the bed. Jen has strong ideas about keeping the inside of a home separate from the outside world.

Over time, Adam has made those ideas his own. I think that that's really made me think about space in a totally different way and how people construct their worlds and their interior environments. And I have much better interior design now in my house than I ever had when I was single. Adam grew up in a secular Jewish family in North Carolina. Jen grew up in Connecticut with parents who were demigrated from the Philippines. They'd held on to their Filipino culture. Part of that culture includes a deep respect for the home or respect they passed on to Jen.

Jen in turn passed on that cultural belief to Adam. I think that yeah the bedroom now is like it does feel a little bit more like a sanctuary like then you know like it's almost like you're stepping across this into this different portal if you will. Jen is also adopted some of Adam's values. Adam has taught me through his Jewish tradition about embracing opening up a feeling, so that labeling, identifying feelings, I tend to mute those things or don't like real conflict,

so I'll steer on to it. Now, you might be asking, what's the big deal? Any time a couple gets together, they blend their lives, embrace some things, let go of others. But here's the difference. When people from different countries or cultures come together, it seems to affect their creativity. Adam has studied this topic, we caught up for a longer chat when Jen and the kids weren't around.

I wanted to know how he'd gotten interested in the link between diversity and creativity. Adam says it started long ago when he was in high school. Before leaving for a semester abroad, he'd attended a mandatory orientation. And I still remember to this day, they said, look, some of you are going to go to China, and in China, it is a sign of respect if you leave food on your plate because it says that you got enough to eat. But in Indonesia where I was going it's a sign of disrespect to leave food on your plate because it basically says the food wasn't very good.

And so that was sort of eye-opening, transformational experience for me to recognize the same object, food on a plate, could have very different meanings and have very different implications depending on the culture. The same thing means different things, depending on your background and perspective. It made Adam wonder how different cultures can help us see the world differently and spark creativity and innovation. Years later, he decided to explore these ideas in a research project. The whole project is a great story because it's a good example of both scientific discovery

and scientific collaboration. Adam and some colleagues tracked a group of students at a business school. The researchers hypothesized that the students who showed the most creativity at the end of their school years would also be those who had the most interactions with people from different countries. school years would also be those who had the most interactions with people from different countries. The collective vast amount of data crunched the results. They were about to publish when another group of researchers had actually even a better design

than we did and scooped our idea and published the paper. That should have been the end of it. Their goal had been to publish and they'd gotten beat. So even though they had a lot of data, they put it all away and moved on. A couple years later, I had a first-year doctoral student in Jackson-Lew and I said, hey, we have this old data, we can't publish in a great journal because someone already scooped us on it, but we could publish it as a replication simmer good. Why don't you go through the data?

What happened next might be an example of the phenomenon Richard Freeman noticed that it helps a research project to have scientists from different ethnicities. Jackson Lewis saw something exciting in Adam's data that Adam himself had overlooked. And I said, what's that? And he said, I found this finding that people who had dated someone from another culture became more creative during their business school career, but those who just had friends from another culture didn't seem to become more creative.

So there's something unique and wonderful about intercultural and romantic relationships. Jackson's enthusiasm made Adam and his colleagues sit up. They realized they may have stumbled on something important. Why would dating someone from another culture spur creativity? Why would casual friendships not work the same way? So we started thinking again about this idea of a deep or the depth and the closeness of those intercultural connections might make a difference. The designed an experiment to test whether the finding was real. This time they reached out only to students who had both dated someone from a different

country and dated someone from their own country. The students were then randomly split into two groups. In one condition, we'll ask them to recall their experience they had with their dating someone from their own culture and just describe that experience. Now in the other condition, we said, we're called a time when you dated about your one of your relationships someone from another culture. What was that experience like? Afterwards, the researchers asked the students to reflect on how much they learned about their own and the other culture. And then they were given a test for creativity.

If there was no connection between intercultural romance and creativity, asking the students to reflect on different kinds of encounters should have made no difference. But that's not what the researchers found. We found that there was a boost in temporary creativity just by reflecting on the intercultural relationship, and that was really driven by the fact that people felt that they had learned more about another culture, and that sort of cultural learning that reflection and that cultural learning led to increased creativity. Psychology research out of Tafts University has found something similar. When you introduce racial diversity into a group, all the people in the group begin to broaden the scope of

their thinking and to explore more options. Now, creativity can be difficult to measure, but scientists have devised ways of doing it. Typically, they analyze what they call divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And convergent creativity, taster ones in which there's a single right answer. And one of the most famous examples of a single right answer is the Dunker Candle problem. And the Dunker Candle problem, you ask people to, you give them a candle, a box of tax, and a book of matches. And you tell them, fix the candle to a wall in such way that the candle when lit doesn't rip wax onto the wall, table, or floor. Adam says that when he tried this with a group of smart, undergraduate Princeton, only a

small percentage of the students saw the problem within 15 minutes. The reason is that the test requires you to think about familiar objects in a new way. A box of tax can be a repository for tax, but can also be a stand. And the solution is you dump out all the tax out of the box, you tack the box to the wall, and then you put the candle inside. Divergent tasks don't ask for a single right answer. They require you to produce lots of different ideas. In our study, we ask people at time one, when we first measure their creativity,

to generate as many creative uses as they can for a brick. And then at time two, when they graduated from business school, we asked them to think about as many creative uses they could for a box. And then you can code these uses for the number of uses they come up with. But you can also code them for the number of different categories they come up with. So for a brick, someone might say, oh, it could be used as a piece of furniture. So that's one category. Or it could be used as the weapon.

You could throw it at someone. That's another category. Or it could be used as a piece of furniture, so that's one category, or it could be used as the weapon, you could throw it at someone, that's another category, or it could be used as part of a house, that's another category. Again, generating lots of good ideas is a sign of a creative brain. What Adam and his colleagues found is that in every one of these tests, the group of volunteers randomly selected to reflect on their experience dating someone from another country, outperformed those asked to reflect on their experience dating someone from their own country. They increased in their flexibility and novelty of their ideas and basically in our final data what we did is we basically created a single composite creativity score which really collapsed across all these but the same effect actually emerges on each

of the individual problems which shows how robust and powerful the effect was. As exciting as the findings were the researchers wanted to know if they would hold up in the real world. They were wondering how to do that when one day Adam went to a presentation given by his colleague Dan Wong. And here's presenting this great amazing data set of everyone who had a J1 visa to visit the US and he was able to survey them. J1 visas allow people to work in the United States for a defined period of time, usually

between three months and two years. At any given time, there are about 300,000 J1 visa holders. After the talk, Adam went up to Dan and asked him, if by any chance, he had any data on cross-cultural contact and the depth of those connections. He said, I think I do. It turned out, Dan had asked former J1 visa holders this question, Please report the frequency of contact that you have with your American friends since you have returned to your home country.

The survey also asked the former visa holders, what kind of work they'd been doing since returning home. Adam asked Dan to take a look at his data and see if there was a correlation between those who'd maintained the closest contact with their American friends and whether they became an entrepreneur when they got home and founded their own company and whether they had created new practices in their company when they got home. Indeed there was. He said, oh my god, the data are exactly as you would have predicted.

And so that was really the icing on the cake of this paper. You know, we'd already had this great data from laboratory-based paper and pencil creativity measures, but now we have the core of our hypothesis that the depth of intercultural relationships, the frequency which they had contact predicts these real world, consequential creativity measures, the probability that they became an entrepreneur and started their own business and how much they changed and transformed and innovated in their own This time, Adam and his colleagues did not get scooped. They got published. Adam says he sees more and more links between creativity and cultural diversity. In one of his favorite projects, he looked at fashion lines presented by major fashion houses over 21 seasons.

Milan, Paris, London, and York. He found that there appeared to be a connection between creativity and the time that fashion creators had spent immersed in a different culture. The amount of time that the creative director had worked abroad predicted their entire fashion line creativity, but not the number of countries that they worked abroad. That didn't have near as much of an impact as the amount of time that they worked abroad. All these examples, the fashion designers, the business school students, the musicians, have a common thread.

All these cross-cultural relationships have depth. There's something about deeply understanding and learning about another culture that's transformative. We can get that from living abroad. We can get that from dating someone from another culture. We could even get it from traveling, but only if we really learned it understood and embraced and adapted to that other culture why we were traveling abroad. And so I think the big scientific conclusion that is very robust is that it's about really, truly, deeply understanding another culture is the key to enhancing your own creativity. Adam Galinsky and his wife, Jen, say they want their children to see the world

in this expansive way. And Adam says, the beauty of his research is that it suggests the benefits of broad collaboration are within easy reach, especially in the United States. You don't have to go abroad to get some of the creativity benefits of having that intercultural contact. You can get that same benefit here in the United States by embracing engaging with people from other cultures. But again, there's the catch. It can't just be superficial. You've got to more deeply connect to people from other cultures to have that transformational impact in that experience.

You could argue there are limitations in some of the examples we've discussed today. It's possible that scientists who collaborate with diverse teams or musicians who team up with performers from other traditions, these people might just be risk-takers. In other words, it's not the musical collaborations that make you more creative, it's just having an open outlook. It's very difficult to explore questions like this scientifically. We can't conduct experiments where we dictate who people date or who scientists should collaborate with. But I would argue that even in studies where you cannot prove cause and effect, you can still see the influence that diversity has on creativity.

And this is true, not just at the level of individuals, it's true at the level of communities, even nations. Consider for example, the United States, from the motor car and the airplane to the iPhone and Google, American creativity has powerfully shaped our world. Could some of this outsized ingenuity have to do with the extraordinary diversity of America, the waves of immigrants who arrived here over the centuries? I'd like to think the answer is yes. There are situations where it can be difficult, even dangerous, to get one group to hear

the perspective of another. When we come back, we hear what happens when people try to understand their enemies. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Once you hear about Avnark Vyaryahu's upbringing, it's hard to imagine him doing anything other than joining the Israeli military. I grew up in a religious family,

what we call religious nationalist family. I'm named after a soldier who was killed in 1973 in the Yom Kippur War. My dad, himself, was a paratrooper. My older brother was a combat soldier. The people around me, my mentors, my teachers, my counselors, and my youth movement were all, of course, in the military. So I was really waiting for my chance to go and protect my country and serve. That was sort of something that I always knew I would do and I wanted to be

the best I could be at that. But early in his military service, Afnars started to see things that challenged his worldview. He was often asked to pull a maneuver known as a straw widow. This involved entering a Palestinian home to use the windows on the upper floors to cover other Israeli soldiers carrying out operations on the street. So I found myself numerous cases throughout my service invading people's homes in the

middle of the night, most of the time, after we knew that the people inside these homes were innocent. Because you do not want to enter someone's house if you know that he's involved in some terrorist organization. Now this house, from that moment on, belongs to the soldiers, right? If the family wants to use the bathroom or the kitchen, in many cases they need permission from the soldiers, of course the family can't leave their house and this dynamic between soldiers and Palestinians was something that I was part of for many, many nights. And I think that that's where I really learned

for the first time, first of all, a little bit about the Palestinians because I was never in a Palestinian home before I started my service. I had no real contacts with Palestinians before I started my service But also I learned about the power dynamic that I was part of Just the fact that I was born sort of in the right side of the green line Just the fact that I was born to an Israeli Jewish family gave me the power To walk in with a helmet with a gun with my uniform and I was in control of an entire family. One night in particular stands out in his memory. He and other soldiers were supposed to take over a house. He thinks they may have made

too much noise. We started hearing screaming from inside the Palestinian home. Our soldiers went up to the window where we hear the screams because, you know, we could be detected and that's not something we want. And we break the glass of this house and we peer in with our rifles. We had flashlights on the barrels. And we see on the floor of this house

an elderly lady helpless. And she was on the floor. I don't know what exactly happened but maybe she heard us and she was petrified and she just fell off her bed. I remember looking to the other side of the room and I could see the end of the corridor, some people or voices and it was her family who were petrified to come and help her. And I remember standing there and telling myself, this is not what I thought I would be doing. This is definitely not promoting the security of my country,

or the security of my family. And I started thinking, what about the family of this old lady? I mean, what do they think about me now? Moments like this are what prompted Avanair to start working with an organization called Breaking the Silence, a group of military veterans who want to talk openly about what they've learned. From Avanair's perspective,

there's nothing on patriotic about Israeli veterans telling their stories, talking about moments they struggle with or Palestinian families they got to know. But others see it differently. Some see it as treason. In one video, a group targeting Avnare shows a Palestinian attacking in Israel with a knife. The video then accuses four human rights activists, including Avner, of protecting the terrorist.

They called all four of us Stoulim, which basically means implanted, meaning my opinions, my thoughts, and the actions of myself and my friends are not things we actually think on our own, but we're actually working for in government. To us it sounded like they're blaming us for being spies. As I was listening to Avnare, I couldn't stop thinking about a study I read many years ago. Psychologist Lee Ross ran an experiment at Stanford University. He brought in students from a pro-Israeli group and a pro-Arab group and had them watch television news clips about the Arab-Israeli conflict. He found the pro-Israeli students saw lots of anti-Israel references in the news clips,

whereas the pro-Arab students saw lots of anti-Arab references while looking at the very same news clips. When Arabs in Israelis think about their conflict, each group desperately wants observers to know that they have been wronged. To acknowledge the pain on the other side is to somehow limit this claim. That's why two groups can look at the same reality and see completely different things. I told Avner, his story reminded me of the study. As you're telling me the story I'm realizing that one of the psychological implications of

your work is that really when you try and empathize with what the other side is going through, there is something about that action that drives your friends and comrades really angry. That the idea that one of you would empathize with the other side feels like betrayal. Yeah, I think that you're touching a point which is true and I think is extremely difficult. You know, silence is not an Israeli disease, it's not an Israeli epidemic.

There is no society, there is no community, that does not live with this disease of silence. A big part of what breaking the silence and saying is, you know, the fact that we are talking about our actions, of course it doesn't mean there's no responsibility in the Palestinian side, but you know, when I do think about what can create change, and who has the power for change, I can't ignore the fact that in this specific point, we are the ones with the power.

Like Aufner, Muhammad Dejani started to develop empathy for his enemies when he ended up in the same room as them. Muhammad said he was forced into exile from his native Jerusalem because of his political work on Palestinian statehood. He was allowed to return in 1993 because his father was very sick. In the beginning it was very difficult for me to adjust, but my father, what cancer, started taking me to a incarium hospital where he used to have chemotherapy, and it made me observe my

enemy, the Israelis, the doctors, the nurses, the staff, I noticed that their attitude to my father was not an attitude of an enemy to his enemy, but rather a doctor to his patient. Another time, Muhammad's mother suffered a heart attack. He was in a car with her, his brother was driving. We were coming to the Mingorian airport exit exit and my brother decided to take that exit. Muhammad told his brother he was being foolish. Israeli soldiers would stop them, harass them. Muhammad's brother said they had no choice.

He pulled up at a security gate. When we came to the gates of the airport, and my brother told them that we have a sick woman with us and they saw her. They vacated one of the gates there and immediately called for ambulance there when the doctors came. They found out that they cannot move her, so they tried to restate her there, so it became like an operation room. These experiences changed Muhammad. He says he stopped thinking of the conflict

in terms of Palestinians versus Israelis and started thinking in terms of the Palestinians and Israelis who were four peace and the Palestinians and Israelis who were against peace. And for the very first time he says he tried to see the Palestinian Israeli conflict from the Israeli point of view. He began teaching political science at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, and he brought his new understanding with him. But his students couldn't relate. They hadn't had encounters with kind Israeli soldiers and carrying Jewish doctors. In order to come to the university, they used to go through many checkpoints, so they

would leave something like three in the morning to get to the university at nine. Muhammad tried to get his students to see beyond the soldiers they met at checkpoints every day. The university set up an Israeli studies program and an American studies program, and he started to broach a topic most Palestinians had never encountered at school, the Holocaust. But Muhammad students, consumed as they were with their own trauma, could not or would not listen. One of his students was a young woman named Hanan.

And she was in Israeli presence for nine years. So to her, she looked at what happened with Jews, in Auschwitz, in Krakow, in different, uh, back and now, in different, uh, concentration camps, as if transmitting that to her own experience being a prisoner in Israeli jails and being discriminated against as a woman. Muhammad told Hananshi had constructed a prison inside her own mind, a prison that kept her from seeing the world, from the point of view of her enemy. When nothing worked with the students, Muhammad decided he would take Hanan and a couple dozen other students on a field trip to Europe.

They would visit Nazi concentration camps and learn, first hand, about the trauma at the heart of the Israeli Jewish experience. It was a scientific project to study about empathy, about if you learn about the suffering of the other, would that help more in your attitude for reconciliation? We decided to take these 30 Palestinian students, Auschwitz and Krakow in Poland. Almost immediately, there was trouble. So I received an email from the President of the University. He said that I heard rumors that you are taking students to Auschwitz and I would like you to make it very clear to them that the University has nothing to do with this trip.

Another student came to me and said, you should cancel this trip and that if you would go, once you come back, you might be facing a very big threat. Muhammad did not waver. He was an educator. And like Avner, he believed he was being a patriot. Empathy, he had come to believe, was the only way to understanding and to peace. When they got to Auschwitz, Muhammad and Hanan stopped at the entrance to the cap.

There was like a blackout saying, Arbite Machtfrey works at Sufri. So she was very surprised with that slogan at the gate of the Auschwitz camp and asked me about it and I said, why don't you look it up. Hanan learned the meaning of the cynical phrase. The Jewish prisoners who entered this camp were not set free by work. They were worked to death or killed. There was this big room which had toilets and we were told that every morning more than 2,000 people gathered in front of the room and then they are given ten seconds to use it and then

they have to leave. And so it was such a humiliation for the individual. They were things they never heard of in terms of how human beings were humiliated and broken. As they walked through the camp, Muhammad noticed that Hanan and the other students were no longer seeing the Holocaust through the lens of their own suffering. They were actually empathizing with Jews, their enemies. It was very emotional to them,

one of the, and some of the, some of the girls even cried. One of the students was telling me, I thought that Hitler gathered the Jews in these concentration camps to send them to Palestine, to have them shipped to Palestine. And they had total misconception about what is the Holocaust, what is the concentration camp, what did it mean, how life was there, so it was an open door for them. But back at home, Mohamed's colleagues at the university did not see the trip as an invaluable

educational experience. The last day in Auschwitz, my secretary wrote to me an email saying that students have come and the RANS Act or office, they are making demonstrations against you on campus, and that they came and left you a letter threatening your life that you should not come back to the university and that if you come back they are going to tell you and the letter is with me and she said that there is a lot of enmity and an uproar on campus regarding the trip. So that prepared me that the reception will not be easy going back to the university. And once I went there, I noticed that there was a lot of enmity people who were looking at me as a matrator, of betrayed them.

At the same time, nine student organizations issued a statement on campus saying that this is normalization and normalization equals treason. Muhammad was forced to resign from his job. One night someone set fire to his car. He knew his life was in danger. He packed his bags and left Jerusalem again. This time exiled by his fellow Palestinians. I asked him how it felt to be called a traitor.

What was most hurtful for me, most painful, was nobody stood by me. That was really what was most painful for me. Also the fact that I have dedicated all my life for the Palestinian cause, and suddenly I'm a traitor for that cause, so that also was painful. When I first talked to Muhammad, he was living in the United States. So was Avner.

In the years since I interviewed them, they have both managed to return home. The psychologist Michael Wall and Nyla Brandscom once asked Jewish volunteers to think about the suffering of Palestinians. The psychologist reminded some of the volunteers about the Holocaust. Compared to others, Jews reminded of their own group suffering showed less compassion

toward Palestinian suffering. The same thing happens with other groups. Americans reminded of traumas, even distant traumas like the Pearl Harbor attack, show less empathy for victims of torture carried out by American service members. Trauma creates justifications for the harm we inflict on other groups. It makes us turn inward. Empathy demands that we turn outward to open ourselves to understanding and to risk. Today's episode was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Parts Shah, Maggie Penman, Max Nestrak and

Raina Cohen. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Thomas Liu, Laura Correll and Camilla Vargas Restrepo. For more hidden brain, you can follow the show on Facebook and Twitter. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast. I'm Shankar Vidantam, see you next week.