 My name is Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton. I'm a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, as well as a senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. My name is Allison Frisco-Smith, and I'm a clinical psychologist and a senior fellow here at the Greater Good Science Center. Bridging differences means simply how to connect with those who are different than us. But I also think about it in terms of, how do I reach out and speak to someone who thinks really differently than I do, or might even hold opposing views. It's not about trying to change someone's mind. Bridging differences, rather, is about trying to meet someone halfway, about trying to understand someone's humanity, trying to understand someone's point of view, and as difficult as it can be sometimes about suspending judgment about how that person feels, how that person views the world, and what their attitudes may be. What we do in this class is just think a little bit about what are the skills, techniques, tools that we could use to interact and to connect. We can also think about what are the first ways to become aware of our own biases, our own ideas. And I think about a couple of different ways that we can do that. First is to think about something called implicit bias, our automatic unconscious associations. We can become more aware of it because there's actually a test that we can do, a test that we talk about in the class called the implicit association test. We can also just try to sometimes engage in this act of self-distancing. This is, again, another skill that we talk about, which is noticing and paying attention to ourself almost as if we're separate from ourselves, to notice our behaviors or responses. This really requires simply slowing down and having an open mind to pay attention to how we're acting and behaving and perhaps why. One of the skills that we discuss in the course is actually called intellectual humility. The humility of knowing that the things that we think, the things that we feel, the things that we feel we know are true may not really be true or necessarily obvious to the person who is in front of us that we are interacting with. Remember, we're not trying to convince, we're not trying to change minds, we're not trying to negotiate. We are trying to understand somebody's humanity. And part of that involves a lot of work of ourselves, a lot of that intellectual humility to understand that we don't have all the answers and that there may be something that we can learn from other people in our social interactions. It doesn't mean that we have to accept everything that they say or that we don't have to question it. But bridging differences really is fundamentally about understanding a person's humanity, understanding where they are coming from and recognizing that they are people too. I think before having a bridging conversation, our first step is to think about, well, why am I engaging in this conversation? What is my hoped for outcome? What do I hope will come out of this? And actually doing that a little bit of investigation of yourself to think about, am I trying to change this person's mind? Am I trying to be seen and heard? Am I trying to learn? I think taking a moment to pause to think about why am I engaging in the conversation? It's a good and helpful way for us to start.