How should we live in an increasingly diverse society? To what values, understandings and standards ought we hold ourselves accountable? Most answers to these questions focus on mitigating personal prejudice. Churn joins that call. But it identifies a more fundamental challenge: the unstable trust that our history imposes on us and the churn it causes when we are in each other’s midst. It is a formidable challenge, but Churn sees a new path to making diversity work: trust-building. This approach is a more manageable way for our society to become the integrated, enabling society we need it to be. This hope, as I have stressed, is based on a simple fact: trust-building is a game played largely on the ground, in the immediate circumstances of our lives. It doesn’t depend on first changing individual hearts and minds. Rather, in the important settings of our lives--our schools, businesses, colleges, churches, etc.—it focuses on building the skills and conditions that enable trust. Churn offers a blueprint for how to do this:
across the divides of difference, see full humanity and full potential; listen in a learning mindset; be prepared to give trust first; and then show up with concrete support that enables full participation. It’s a scalable blueprint. It can be hard work. But it’s not magic. And all of us can do it.

The RCGD Seminar Series on the Social Psychology of Systemic Racism meets Mondays from 3:30 to 5 at ISR Thompson 1430. When speaker permission is given, events will be recorded and posted within a few weeks to YouTube.

The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism
What are the points of connection between structures and individuals when we think about bias? In the Fall 2024 RCGD Seminar Series “The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism,” an all-star lineup of behavioral and political psychologists will define what, in their words, makes systemic racism systemic, and how extra-individual levels of analysis could be incorporated in social psychological theories and methods.

Group Dynamics Seminar Series
The Group Dynamics Seminar series is considered one of the longest running seminar series in the social sciences. It has been running uninterruptedly since it was founded by Kurt Lewin in the 1920’s in Berlin. The seminar series runs every semester on a theme chosen by faculty organizer/s who are affiliated with the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research. A very important feature of this seminar today is its interdisciplinary nature. Recent themes have included political polarization, evolution and human behavior, and cultural psychology