[00:00:00] I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.
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[00:00:40] Trisha: Hi there everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness.
[00:01:01] The shifts in thinking. As regular listeners know on this podcast, we unpack and apply cultural intelligence cq to gain those different perspectives. CQ itself is made up of four capabilities, motivational CQ drive, cognitive CQ knowledge, metacognitive CQ strategy.
[00:01:24] And that's the one we often focus on and behavioral CQ action on this episode, which by the way is episode 60. So if you followed along from the beginning, congratulations and we should be having a party, but it's just me. I don't have a guest. And instead we are going to take a bit of a nerdy dive into something that's been stuck in my brain over the past week.
[00:01:53] So I've been doing some reflection and, uh, a fair bit of learning. So let me start with perhaps not the beginning of it, but certainly one of the key influences. This week on LinkedIn. David Livermore, one of the key thought leaders in cultural intelligence. Key author, researcher, founder of the CQ Center, and, let me say previous guest on the shift, check out episodes two and four, back to LinkedIn. He posted a really thoughtful question. He asked, how have we figured out how to send people into space, train AI to diagnose disease and edit the human genome, yet our answer to national and international conflicts is still killing each other?
[00:02:47] And a bit later on in the post, he said, I'm not naive enough to think we can just sit around a table and magically achieve world peace. But at the core of my resolve to build a more culturally intelligent world is the hope that we can move beyond the idea that the only path forward is to kill each other.
[00:03:06] Maybe that starts with how you and I handle our own differences.
[00:03:12] People responded with thoughtful and committed comments about the importance of leadership and about voting for leaders who will work for peace. People pointed out that violence is viewed as strength and we need to change that perception. People emphasize the need for our work in building cultural intelligence.
[00:03:36] One wise person pointed out that language matters as we lose empathy. Others spoke about the lack of respect for other people, the lack of empathy, and the lack of cultural intelligence in the world, and the need for courage. All really good points. I wanted to add something, but honestly I didn't know where to start.
[00:04:01] Partly because it had already been on my mind because it was the second time that week that I'd heard a researcher who I highly respect. Raising this very topic or speaking on this very topic. Last week, I attended the International Positive Psychology Association World Congress, which was held in Brisbane.
[00:04:23] And if you're interested in that, just have a look on LinkedIn with the hashtag IPA, I-P-P-A 2025. Dear listeners, it was such an encouraging, uplifting. Also challenging event. I wished you were all there with me and never more than in the q and a session with Dr. Martin Seligman. Now he is like David Livermore in the CQ field.
[00:04:50] Dr. Martin Seligman really is the father of positive psychology, thought leader, author, researcher, lecturer, and mentor to many people in the field. So one of the questioners in the Q and a session asked Marty how he thought positive psychology research could speak to situations of war. Well, he replied quite bluntly that positive psychology is not a panacea against war.
[00:05:21] He acknowledged that he doesn't think we have a solution to tribalism, which he described as one of the key forces. Pushing people towards war. He said the question of how do we get out of tribalism was key to speaking to the issue of war. And within that, he raised the question of how do we expand the diameter of our moral circle?
[00:05:49] He referenced the work of Peter Singer within tribalism, he explained, the moral circle diameter is very small. It's just the people who are in your own circle, maybe this certain color or religion or race or gender or your clan or tribe. And so the problem for him. As Dr. Martin Seligman saw it, as expanding the diameter of the circle.
[00:06:17] He said he didn't know how it was done, and that's a scientific question for psychology generally, and not just for positive psychology. He felt that that might help us reduce the hatred, the fear, and the need for revenge. To be completely honest with you, dear listeners this moral circle concept was not one that I had heard before.
[00:06:40] I'd heard of the contact hypothesis and wondered if it was related to that idea. For those of you who perhaps haven't heard of Gordon Allport's contact Hypothesis, he proposed that under certain conditions, direct contact between members of different groups could reduce prejudice. This was a radical and hopeful idea during a time of racial segregation in the us
[00:07:07] More recent research. By Thomas Petre and Linda Troop in 2006, conducted a meta-analysis of over 500 studies across 38 countries into the contact hypothesis. And their key finding was that intergroup contact does significantly reduce prejudice in multiple contexts and across different group types. So contact works not just by changing attitudes, but also by reducing intergroup anxiety and increasing empathy and yes, perspective taking.
[00:07:48] So its initial point is an action connection with others. So was that the moral circle that Marty Seligman was referring to? Nope, it wasn't. I spent some time with chat GPT and the Consensus app, and if you don't know that, try it out. Looking up the different ideas and research, and this is what I've come to understand about Peter Singer's expanding moral circle.
[00:08:20] In. In one sense, it does align with the intention of Allport's work, but they approach the reduction of tribalism and prejudice through different pathways. Allport is looking at interpersonal contact as the key mechanism, whereas Singer is looking more at the rational reasoning and moral reflection that we use as we think about the people around us and he asks us to think about our circles.
[00:08:50] Those we care about, have a moral affinity to, and he asks us to expand our thinking. He suggests that human progress, moral progress happens when we learn to extend our concern to those beyond our immediate group, to strangers, to people of other races, other beliefs, other geographies. Even he points out to animals and to future generations.
[00:09:22] This my friends, needs us to step into new thinking. So what do we need for that? We need cultural metacognition. CQ strategy. We need that to be operating here. We need to be able to realize, recognize our preference for our own circle. Who are they? Where do we feel most comfortable?
[00:09:47] When we're in that circle, we need to be able to interrupt that preference. Expand our thinking to choose a more inclusive response. Perhaps inviting other people into that circle or extending our thinking out beyond that circle so that we can step into circles with others.
[00:10:10] Well, you can imagine, my first thought was, well, this really needs CQ strategy. And then as I reflected on it, I realized his work really demands a high level of CQ knowledge. We need an awareness and understanding of the experiences and suffering of others whether distant strangers. Animals, or again, those future generations.
[00:10:35] In CQ terms, we need to learn the history perhaps of colonization or the history of conflict in a person's context. We need to explore the sociopolitical systems or the religious values that shape behavior. These are the ways that we can expand our moral circle by deepening our understanding. And this knowledge enables the informed empathy that he speaks about.
[00:11:06] But it isn't just intellectual, it's also morally motivated, and I think that's where CQ drive might step in. It's an awareness of the experiences and suffering of others. So we need the intrinsic curiosity, if you like, and also the self-efficacy, the confidence to step out of our own circles, and then, yep, we need CQ action to make it real.
[00:11:33] So we need to be able to give to distant causes. We need to support global justice. We need to change consumption habits and listening differently across cultural lines. All of these things he wrote about. So if Singer can give us the ethical why and CQ gives us the how. Can we build some of this into our training or coaching?
[00:11:59] Maybe some of you, many of you are already doing this, but perhaps one of the things we could do is ask people to envision who is in their circle and who is outside, and could we see how we could expand the circle? We could get people to consider the different circles they're comfortable in. And then to think of other circles, they might be a part of that cross over some of those distinctions.
[00:12:28] I think of circles like CQ facilitators, intercultural trainers. Where we feel a strong connection. But the circle goes across countries, across races, across ages, genders, religions. That was what it was like at the IPA conference in Brisbane. People from around the world, different ages, all gathering to discuss intensely, some amazing topics.
[00:12:57] So I figure those are some things we could introduce into our programs if we're not already. But what about those people in our programs who aren't that interested in expanding their circle or maybe they're even hostile to the idea? Well, Martin Seligman did reference, an aspect in relation to that, also.
[00:13:17] In a later question, he referred back to the issue of war and conflict and what positive psychology could offer, and he referenced Barbara Fredrickson's work on positivity, resonance. Her research had already been on my mind. Well, it helped that she had been the first speaker that morning. but I have always loved her broaden and build theory, which helps us understand that positive emotions like joy, interest, contentment, satisfaction, awe they enable us to expand the way we think and perceive.
[00:13:54] When we experience positive emotions, we are in a position where we're more likely to see a bigger picture. Perhaps we are more likely to see a different perspective. Those emotions help us loosen the grip of fear and anger, and they undo some of our defensiveness. In fact, one of her studies that I've always loved co-authored with Kareem Johnson found that joy, yes, artificially constructed through watching a, a snippet of a movie could actually eliminate, the racial bias that we hold in facial recognition. And if you want to go back to Dr. Mark Williams' episode, the Neuroscientist, we spoke about our facial template and how that operates, and how we recognize more easily faces that are from our own race. Well, in this experiment, they discovered that that experience of joy helped people see others more accurately.
[00:14:58] Not necessarily through effort or guilt, but through experiencing that emotion that created an openness that broadening and building so that the bias was lessened.
[00:15:12] Frederickson's work shows that positive emotions can literally change the way we perceive those outside our usual circle. So what does that mean for those of us delivering learning experiences? Well, we need to take advantage of those positive emotions to be mindful of the arc of our training, the journey we are taking people on as we get them to think, to reflect, to interact, to listen to others' stories, to play, to learn new content.
[00:15:45] We need to design the journey. The learning journey with an arc of experiences in mind and create the more positive emotions where we need our trainees to step into moments of broader thinking. Now, I'm not saying that our whole program needs to be full of positivity. We need to be real and we want their people we are working with to be real, and they need opportunities to honestly; share the challenges, express sadness and anger because these emotions also can be motivating forces towards good if directed towards the right actions.
[00:16:27] So when you've created that learning journey, think about bringing it all together, different people, different experiences, different knowledge and reflections in a mindful and intentional manner.
[00:16:42] We've covered quite a bit here. Allport, Singer, Frederickson, cultural intelligence. We've covered connection, ethics, emotion, and action.
[00:16:55] They form a kind of reinforcing circle of their own. One that widens and strengthens every time we choose empathy, reflection, and cultural connection. So I invite you to consider this. What emotion do you need to feel today to help you to widen your moral circle? And what can you do, or what can you create to offer that spark to someone else?
[00:17:26] Thanks for being here with me on the shift. Let's keep expanding thoughtfully, joyfully, and together. I look forward to speaking more about these aspects in the future. So please, if you haven't already, push that follow or subscribe button so that you'll be around for the next episode of the shift.
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