People have to see that only cooperation can bring them into positive change. We also speak about opportunities for personal relations between group members, it is not like we will be in one group, another group and put them on two sides of the table. We have to give them opportunity to have the person to person types of relationship and we found, I found in my own research and a lot of research in our field that sometimes you know, small points then people negotiate on the table and then they have small opportunities to speak about their families, their children, I don’t know [???] like [???] everything, which can bring more interesting ideas of what their personal goals can be? What their personal interest could be, really change contacts a lot, because you can start seeing humanity in other people, not just as an [???] and also was speaking about that it is important to have support of [???] by authorities who creates this contact. That you could not put people in one room leave them and tell okay you are now different. You really have to create specific norms very structural procedure to help them to understand each other and to help them to be more and more positive toward each other so this is the requirements of contact theory. Another theory which will be useful for understanding of Gulen ideas is so called realistic contact theory, which tells that contact alone could not really help us. We need to have this [???] interdependence and we have to have common goals, goals, which will unite us together. There is a very interesting story I don’t have time to tell the whole story but more than 60 years, 50 years ago two social psychologists brought together young people their boys to their summer camp, they just randomly divided them into groups and a nice competition and after two days boys started hating each other, it was [???] experiments.
They started hating each other, they were using prejudice biases, they would call names, other friends, other boys, again they were just randomly, some of them sometimes were friend, but now it was a strong boundary between them. And then to deal with it they introduced activities, which united boys together for example they pretended that the car is broken and boys have to push his car to start it and they had to do it together or they told that [???] wanted to see is too expensive, they couldn’t buy it so boys had to collect – raise some money to buy the [???] together and since they started introducing such positive common experiences they saw how relations increased immediately and there are lot of – really [???] if you are interested in this there is a wonderful documentary, which you can now see online, free of charge called class divided, which speaks about very interesting experiments also around 50 years ago when one of the teachers, very famous teachers started to introduce in exercise called brown eyes, blue eyes, I don’t know if you have heard about it where students were divided by blue eyes or brown eyes and the whole idea of discrimination, the whole ideas of biases and prejudice were introduced. One group was better and the other group was worse and it is wonderful movie, [???] like 40 minutes movie, I really recommend you to see to understand how easily you can introduce idea of hatred and ideas of discrimination if you put *competition [???] and this is what, [???] resolution according to this theory possible only if you have intergroup cooperation and common share it identities. And the last one, which I want to speak today is common identity model developed by some guy [???] most of his publication lie in like 2000-2001, 2003 and he suggested that one of the possibilities to deal with conflict is to unite people together. Unite in one common identity because in this situations [???] identity or common identity. Moreover there [???] there are different types of categorization. For example if like we have this divide here, in one group they want to like group A and there is another group B. This categories become so strong, so important and people really see more and more differences that are, I don’t want to go very deeper into this, there are different processes, which shape differences between group over the time and people begin to perceive [???] negatively.
One of the way how to fight with it is to do so called the categorization when each person will communicate [???] which is real similar to contact theory. Another way to deal with it is to do so called [???] identities, where for example we will unite all women together from both groups and all men together or we will unite all young people or all people wearing green or all people wearing black or something. So we will try to develop some [???] categories like young people from different ethnic groups. Muslim non-Muslim scholars what we are doing today and so we have this possibility of developing new ties, new categories across the boundary [???] importance of boundary. There is something going on, hope it is not a ticking bomb. So what – we are also speaking about association of separate individuals as I told and the last one is common identity, develop common regional identity. So why it is important, why speaking about some of these theories today, because there are very relevant and I see [???] fusion with ideas of [???] and about dialogue and what [???] idea, I know some of you [???] just do, very quick overview from social psychological conflict resolution point of view how Gulen is speaking about it. He is speaking first of all that dialogue can bring mutual understanding. It can bring [???] to justice, it is one of the major ideas why we need dialogue. Second very important issue, is dialogue does not require acceptance of another group, way of life, belief, values and this is very important because there is some misperceptions that if we want to build peace we have to accept other ways of life, we have to not just see but accept how they behave and so on. And Gulen is really telling, it is really wonderful that he is stressing that it does not require acceptance, it requires just understanding. It is of opportunity to understand ideas and positions of [???] and from this understanding, respect is coming and we are not just accepting, we are not pushing people to accept, it is not assimilation, which was very – in United States for example assimilation was very popular during 70s and 80s and in lot of many other countries assimilation is still pushing people to accept particular way of life, particular language, particular religion and so on and we are also speaking. As the last one, he is speaking that dialogue really contributes to human ability to come together.