How Dialogue Affects Us Individually
Dialogue often affects people in significant and lasting ways. Years after an intense dialogue between people who have felt great trauma or conflict, participants sometimes talk about how much the experience changed them. In some cases, people are touched so deeply that they change their careers to address the issues discussed in the dialogue. Many participants experience the following effects.
Personal Reflection and Clarity
A primary goal of dialogue is to help participants gain greater insight into their own perspectives, values, patterns of thinking, and biases. Most people do not realize how much their unique lifè experiences shape the way they believe and act. People develop different perceptions of what is “true” or “right” or “good” through their life experiences. Different perceptions or “worldviews”— ways of seeing the world—can cause disharmony and lead to interpersonal or intergroup conflicts. If a dialogue is successful, people leave the process more keenly aware of the way their personal experiences shape their perceptions, and the way their perceptions shape how they view or interpret their experiences.
| Dialogue helps participants gain insight into their own perspectives. |
One mother in a parent/teen dialogue initially complained that her daughter “whined too much” about needing praise from her. Through the dialogue and her own reflection, the mother realized that she saw her daughter as excessively wanting praise because of the way her own mother raised her. She had been taught that giving compliments lessens parental power. This is one example of how dialogue can help participants recognize their roles in the challenges they face. This space for self-reflection can lead to other changes.
Empathy for Others
People often prefer to be with others they perceive as similar to themselves. People who see themselves as significantly different from another person or group create boundaries that distinguish “us” from “them.” The less people interact with each other, the more they are likely to perceive each other as strange, wrong, or even evil. A fundamental goal of dialogue is to explore participants' experiences and perceptions so they can potentially understand why those in different groups may view reality differently.
In the ethnically divided Fijian islands, indigenous leaders are often in conflict with Indo-Fijian (originally from India) business and community leaders. These tensions have erupted into political coups on several occasions. In an interethnic national peace dialogue in Fiji, participants shared with each other their most important needs and interests in finding a peaceful solution to these tensions. In the process, people learned to empathize with the experiences of others and discovered similarities they didn’t know existed previous to the dialogue. Dialogue provided the context for indigenous and Indo-Fijians to share their experiences living through several violent political coups. People in both groups told stories of anxiety and tension caused by the political turmoil. The dialogue created a sense of shared history and community in times of hardship. [3]
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Increased Understanding
In dialogue, understanding why people believe what they believe, in the context of their stories, is central. Some may regard reports or facts generated by journalists or researchers as more objective measures of truth than personal stories. But dialogue helps participants to understand that both types of knowledge are valuable, and that neither are totally objective.
| Dialogue values both “objective facts” and personal stories in understanding an issue. |
Participants in the interracial dialogues in Richmond reflected on their own lives, especially on ways they experienced economic, racial, and jurisdictional segregation in the region. As time progressed, we saw significant shifts among participants in how they understood the impact of race on economic and political divisions in their city. In general, African Americans tended to be more acutely aware of this impact because of their own experiences. Nevertheless, the dialogue prompted some white citizens to realize that they and some blacks shared a semi-conscious frustration about the way some parts of town were considered “off-limits” for whites on weekend nights.
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