 Hi, I'm Paul. I'm a lecturer at the University of Essex. In this talk I'm going to describe how we can reduce stereotypes and polarization by learning more about our own values and the values of other people. So if we watch the news with newspapers or especially on social media, we might get the impression that we are living in an at least somewhat divided society and divided world. This impression is partly caused by politicians having heated debates in parliament or people protesting against or for various issues. So for example, one of the more recent protests or series of protests were the Fridays for Future and protests that demanded more pro environmental behavior from policymakers and especially policymakers and companies, but also from individuals. And those who went on those protests were mostly younger people and thereby causing the impression that younger people care more about the environment whereas older people care less about the environment. And on this topic there have been some thoughts or some heated discussions. However, are we actually divided? Is there actually a division between an actual division between those who support one party or the other party or those who belong to one generation, for example, the younger generation and those who belong to an older generation? Let's have a look at values because values are quite relevant in the context of tensions and polarization. So values in social sciences often defined as abstract ideals that guide our decisions. Researchers in over 80 countries have identified over 50 distinct values such as helpfulness, honesty or loyalty, but also other values such as equality, freedom, pleasure, power, success, security or tradition. So you can see a quite variety of values. Now, if we look at the values of conservative voters living in the UK using data from 2018 and 2019 where we have a large data set of our 2000 respondents living in the UK, we can see that conservative voters and focusing on helpfulness as an example, you can see that the majority of conservative voters think it's important or very important to them to help other people. In other words, helpfulness is important or very important to the majority of conservative voters. So you can see on the x-axis how important it is and on the y-axis you can see how many respondents, how many conservative voters have selected a specific response option. For example, response option one to three barely selected, so suggesting barely any conservative voters thinks it's not important to help other people, whereas the majority of conservative voters thought it's at least partly or important or very important to help other people. You can also see that the conservative voters are not a homogeneous group, so some of them agree more, say it's very important, rather say it's a bit important to help other people, so there's some variability among conservative voters. And we can see a very similar pattern if we look at the responses of Labour voters. So we now see that both groups, so I feel merged those distributions, response distributions, you can see that both groups are conservative voters, as well as Labour voters, endorse a statement it's very important to help other people, or if I can say it in slightly more statistical terms. Now if you know that someone voted Tory or Labour, it barely gives you any information about their level of helpfulness or how. So they might be very helpful or they might be a bit helpful, but you just don't know by just knowing for which party they voted for. And if you can look at the data in a different way and also quantify the results, so you can just looking at two circles, you can see that there's 93% similarities between, so circles overlap to 93%, which represents the amount of similarities between conservative and Labour voters. Now we've now looked at helpfulness as an example, but if we look at other values such as protecting the environment, security or tradition, we find similarities of 85 to 99%, so very similar results than what we've seen for helpfulness. So overall we can conclude that the values of conservative voters and Labour voters are more similar than some people at least believe. And those value similarities they extend to other groups. So if we now look at people from different generations, such as younger and older people, we can see that in both groups, younger and older people say that looking after the environment is important or very important to them. And if we are quantifying the amount of similarities again, we see that's 91% similarities in the responses of younger and older people. And most importantly, both groups agree it's very important or at least important to them to look after the environment. Now those patterns, response patterns, generalize to other groups, other categories, such as people from different countries. There are some exceptions, of course, but in the majority of countries, so over 60 countries, people endorse values such as loyalty, honesty and helpfulness, most, so they think those are the most important values, versus belief that values such as power are least important to them. And this is a pattern that is consistent across most countries. Also people identify as women or men have very similar values. And those who have different sexual orientations or those who have a lower or higher formal education degree, they all agree in terms of their values to a very large extent, usually between 80 to 95%. Plus the amount of similarities we've identified in a range of studies. So now you might wonder, why does it appear that differences are so large that it appears that we are living in a divisive or at least partly divided society? There are many reasons for that. So just listening a few reasons here. So one of them is politicians debate more about divisive issues and at least the discussions are more heated if they disagree on a specific topic than if they agree. Sometimes they also feel that they need to find a point of disagreement. Also the media is reporting more about divisive issues and leaders of political parties tend to be more extreme than their voters, more extreme in the direction of the party. And finally, the final reason of this non-exhaustive list is that researchers contribute also to it because the majority of research focuses on differences on small differences. So we can see for example, for helpfulness, there are small differences between labor and conservative voters and research tends to focus on those small differences and tends to ignore the substantial amount of similarities. So now as a final point, briefly I want to say why focusing on similarities is beneficial. So high similarities lead to fewer tensions. So if we discriminate, so kind of discrimination against other people from different groups is often based on the assumption that they hold different values. So because they have different values, they don't fit in here. So or because they have different values, there's no point of talking to them because we have no common count. But as we have seen, this is not the case. We have much more in common, at least in when it comes to our values, but also when it comes to our attitudes and other psychological variables and often also abilities. We have much more in common. So of course, this is focusing on similarities. It's not a cure for everything. So sometimes there's one tiny thing of another person. So even if you find that this person is very similar to us, but there's one tiny thing that is different. And we kind of find this tiny thing important or kind of quite weird about this other person, then we are less likely to engage with this other person. And so it's not a cure for everything. But in general, if we focus more on similarities and on the things we have in common, we can reduce polarization because we're more likely to be open minded and approach people from other groups. Thank you. So if you want to learn more about this exhibition, about our exhibition, please visit our website. There you can also complete a short-value survey and to learn more about your own values and value values lie in comparison to other people. And you can learn more about the values of other people.