Outgroups, "Othering" and a healing meditation

0:04 This is Crappy to Happy and I am your host, Cas Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher, and of course, author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Happy. This week, I've got something a little different for you this week. I would like to teach you one of my favorite meditation practices. But before I do that, let me tell you why I have been inspired to share this with you this week, and then I will tell you a little about why this particular practice is very very good for you. So that if you've already decided you're going to skip this episode because you're not a meditator, you're not into this, then let me tell you all of the reasons why this one is one well worth trying. All of the benefits to you emotionally, psychologically, even physically that might compel you to give it a go. So I don't think I am the only one who feels like everything feels a little bit dark. Lately. There has been a lot of bad news. There's been a lot of tension in Australia. Obviously,

1:36 there has been the Voice referendum. The result of that maybe went your way, maybe it did not. I know for many people it did not, and that was devastating for a lot of people. But even regardless of the result, what it appeared to do, and I'm a long way away from Australia at the moment, but from what I heard, it was a really really divisive, really kind of awful time in Australia. A lot of the commentary, the conversation, the ad campaigns that were running, really, as these things tend to do, just brought out the worst in people and really did the job of dividing people well and truly really polarizing people and having people do the thing they do, which is to kind of firmly dig their heels into one camp and to make kind of fairly broad sweeping generalizations about the other, which is exactly the topic that I want to talk to you about today.

2:33 At a far far more horrifying, devastating level, there is the Israel Palestine situation, and I don't want to go into the details of any of these actual conflicts. I don't think we need to hear more of that. It's everywhere we turn. But what I do want to point out this week, I guess and the reason why I want to share with you this particular meditation is because what we're seeing here in action is this concept of in psychology what we call other ring, so other ring as in other ing, make it a verb. It's essentially like the in group out group effect in psychology, where we consider ourselves to be a part of one group, the good group, the right group, and we take another group and we consider them to be the other. It is this very clear delineation. It is them versus us.

3:28 When we talk about other ring, we're taking another group. It could be a different racial group, religious group, different nationality, could be a different bloody football team. We take this other group and we attribute to them a whole lot of negative characteristics and qualities. We consider ourselves to be on the right side. These are the wrong side. There's often a lot of fear involved. I saw a bit of this during the Voice referendum, where I saw some of the NO commentators and I'm not saying this was you if you're a no voter. But I saw people saying, we're going to have to pay the rent. They step they want to take our land. This is just the first step before they take away all of these things that we rightly deserve. Basically, they're getting more than what they deserve, and I fear that they're going to take something from me. That kind of idea we see the same with refugees and asylum seekers. They're coming, They're going to take the jobs that don't belong here, legals, illegals, this kind of terminology. When we go down this path of othering a group of people, we essentially dehumanize them.

4:33 We don't consider them to be individual humans with thoughts and feelings and complexities. They just belong to this group of people we consider to be a threat. They are against us. And this happens at all levels and in all sorts of different ways, and we all, then, all of us, then have these biases that come into play, these implicit biases, these unconscious biases that lead to us having particular perceptions and judgments of people who belong to this other group. We cast them all in the same kind of like they're all tired with the same brush. I've also seen if you are a no voter, they will tell you that all the Yes voters are inner city lefties, woke lefties, all the privileged elite. And then the No voters they get called racist or bigoted, or uninformed, uneducated, all sorts, all sorts, like both sides. Both sides do this.

5:29 What we do in truth in psychology is we consider within our own group, in our in group, that there is a wide range of variability. We're all different, We've all got different thoughts and feelings and opinions, and education levels and socioeconomic status and all sorts of things. Whereas we consider the other group to be all the same. We just put them all in the one basket. We could judge them all exactly the same. Now, if you think that's not you, I guarantee you. We all do this. It's one of the ways that our brain just makes shortcuts. It takes all of the complex thinking out of it, and it just divides people and it just categorizes and labels and we don't have to think about that again. This in group outgroup effect has been studied since the nineteen sixties. It's very real like I said, we are all susceptible to this, and I think this is the important thing, right We all need to be aware of our own biases. When I did that episode a few weeks ago about Russell Brand, I used Russell Brand as the example, but it was about conspiracy theories. It was about cognitive bias, confirmation bias. Why do we believe the things that we do? And this is the same kind of thing. We have to raise our own level of self awareness of our own biases. We are all guilty of this. So back in the sixties that one of the classic studies was that they took a whole group of school kids schoolboys on school camp who were all playing happily together, and they broke them up into groups, and then they kept those groups separately for I don't know, a week or so, and then they brought all the groups back together, and during that week they only socialized with their own group. When they all came back together,

7:00 there was this hostility between groups. There had no reason to be hostile towards one another, They're all just little boys on school camp. But in the intergroup dynamics, the favoritism of their own group compared to other groups. It's this bonding that happens when you perceive that you are with your own group. I guess on the positive side, there's this kind of bonding and belonging connection that happens. But what it does lead to is this other ring, this out group bias, where we don't treat other people with the same kind of consideration and thoughtfulness and kindness, and we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. And there are very real biases in how we think about them, the judgments, the qualities, the motivations that we attribute to them, whether those people we consider to be in our group or out of our group. And I want to give you a couple of examples just to demonstrate this, and then I'm going to tell you about the meditation, and you'll understand why I hope that I have chosen to focus on this this week now. In recent history, I don't need to give you examples. You know what the examples are, whether you were supportive or not supportive of vaccinations or lockdowns, whether you were a Trump supporter or not. You know your position about asylum seekers, or whether stopping the votes was a really good thing or not. Just so many really highly emotive issues that have played out this last few years. And I'm sure that it's not only recent history. I'm sure this has been going on forever. These are just the ones that I can think of. I mean, we don't often have a global pandemic, and that kind of situation is bound

8:34 to have people coming down with strong opinions on either side of whatever decisions need to be made to get through a situation like that. But this in group outgroup bias. For example, they've even done fMRI studies that show that people's brain activity is different depending on where they are hearing a statement by somebody that they's in their in group or in their outgroup. So, for example, during the two thousand and four US presidential election, they took Democrat voters and Republican voters and they read to them a statement something like this politician was going to lower taxes, and they told them that that statement was made by either their particular candidate or the opposing candidate. But then what they did was they showed them some more evidence or a statement that indicated that that had not happened, that taxes had not been lowered again. So what was their response based on whether this was their own candidate going back on their promise or the other candidate, and then they gave like a mitigating kind of a statement.

9:31 They basically came up with a reason. So, for example, they said, oh, well, what happened was that it turned out that there was not enough room in the budget to lower taxes as they had wanted to, And how did they respond to that? And again this was brain studies and activity in the brain and different aspects of the brain that activated during particular cognitive processes. And what those images demonstrated was that these people had were more likely to be forgiving of the political candidate who went back on their promise. They're more likely to find that acceptable, and they were much more likely to accept their excuse about why that had happened than if it was the opposing candidate exactly the same statement, exactly the same situation, exactly the same reason, much more accepting and supportive of their own candidate than the other. This is bias. Another one is when they get like two groups of football fans watching a game. One team makes i don't know, seventy five errors, the other team makes twenty five errors, But then they ask them afterwards how many errors did each team make And again they will say there were many more errors made by the opposing team than by their own team. They honestly, the researchers who do these studies say it is as if these people are watching a different game. Their feedback, what they report about what they see on the field is completely different depending on which team they're supporting. This is our natural human tendency.

11:03 We all do this, so none of us is exempt from this right. So I'm just highlighting that we all have this default. I guess if you're a person who is interested, if you are a person who has an opinion about any of these things, if you are watching events in the world, and if you're getting annoyed and frustrated and angry and irritated and disappointed about the things that are going on in the world, and if you feel angry about groups of people behaving in ways that you don't understand and you cannot get through to them, and they seem to be clueless, lacking in compassion or intelligence or rationality or reasonableness. This drives wedges between people, and it also increases our own stress level and our own anxiety. It affects our mood, It affects our physical health.

11:59 If we're around this kind of stress, it impacts the ability we have to actually connect and relate to people. We pick up one little fact about a person and we immediately pigeonhole that person and we don't want to be connected with them anymore. We don't want to know any more about them because we've already decided exactly the kind of person they are based on one little fact, and that's what happens. I would say though, that while this in group out group bias has been proven, I mean they've proven that even just arbitrarily assigning you to a group, your group are your group, be immediately you will favor the people in your group over the people in the other group. They've proven this time and time again. You will make more allowances, you attribute more positive qualities, you attribute more positive intentions to the people in your own group versus people in another group. But it is heavily fueled by politicians and the media, and I think that that was probably very clear, particularly in Australia with the Voice referendum. I think I wasn't there for it, but from what I have heard, a lot of the media, you know, reporting a lot of the campaigning was really designed to fuel this division, and so we might. We naturally have fears, we naturally have anxieties, we naturally feel uncertain about what we don't know about. I talked about this when I talked about conspiracy theories. We seek to have knowledge, we seek to have control, We seek to have certainty where we lack certainty, and if those things aren't present, then we are more likely to go down

13:31 this path of other ring, kind of huddling with our tribe. Who we feel is in our group, who's on our side, who believes the things that we do, who gives us a sense of belonging, who gives us some sense of certainty. This is the right answer. I'm doing the right thing, I know the right things, and my group is on the right side. I'm in the good camp. All of those other people they don't know, they don't know as much as me. They've got the wrong information, they are making the wrong decision. They're not as intelligent, they're not as informed, they're not as educated, they're not as compassionate, they're not as whatever, whatever, whatever. We all have this natural instinct to seek for certainty, security, and social connection, especially when we feel uncertain, but we are much more likely to be divided and to go down this path of completely ostracizing and othering entire segments of society when we are fed those messages by the media and by politicians, So they definitely use that in their favor. They're now it works. So the point of all of this is if you are feeling hopeless, and if you are feeling annoyed and powerless, particularly when there are some really, really devastating things happening in the world, then one thing that might feel like you're doing nothing but is actually a really useful thing to do is called the Loving Kindness meditation.

14:55 The Loving Kindness meditation is a Buddhist practice which has a focus on bridging gaps between people. It has the effect of helping you or focusing your attention on cultivating connection with other people. People you know and people you don't know, people that you feel connected to, and people that you don't feel connected to, and it has a way of making you feel better. It improves your mood, it reduces stress. Telling me is are like the caps at the end of your DNA strands, which shorten with age and ill health. So the longer you're telling me is the more kind of the longer life, and the healthier and loving kindness meditation particularly buffers against the shortening of tellome is very good for your health. It's been shown to reduce chronic pain, to improve migraines, to just help you to feel more peaceful and more kind. It is shown to reduce self criticism and reduce criticism of others.

16:00 It's shown to reduce negative bias that you might have towards other people. So this is really helpful. It's also just a lovely practice to do. Every time I run a meditation course or a workshop and I introduce the love and Kindness meditation, it is hands down everybody's favorite. And so I hope that with that short introduction and with that reasoning for why I would like to share this with you today, that that would be enough for you to give it a go. So let's just take a pause and come back in a minute. I'll give you time to be sitting down comfortably. If you're driving a car, I don't want you to be meditating while you're driving, but if you can, you know you might want to pause this even and wait until you can get yourself into a comfortable position. Where you can just take ten minutes to practice is Love and Kindness meditation with me. So start by finding yourself a comfortable position, preferably sitting up with a straight spine, but you can be lying down if that's more comfortable for you. The intention is to be relaxed, but to be fully alert, so not dozing off or slouching back. So for that reason we normally ask that you keep an upright kind of a straight spine, but not too rigid. Relax your shoulders.

17:29 You can be sitting on a chair, on the sofa, you can be sitting upright in bed. Don't need any fancy props to practice. Bringing your awareness now to your physical body, sitting here, having a sense of all of the parts of your body that are connecting with a surface, perhaps your feet on the floor, perhaps you're back resting against a chair, the weight of your body sitting wherever you are sitting right now. Bring your awareness now to your breath, not thinking about breathing, but being aware of the movement of the breath in and out of your body, the physical sensation of the breath. You might feel a risin fall on your belly. You might notice a gentle raisin fall on your shoulders. You might notice the sensation of the air as it passes through your nostrils, as it travels down the back of your throat. Just using the sensation of the breath to connect you here with your physical body in this moment, just as sent to you before we start the meditation. And what we're going

19:00 to do is, I'm going to ask you to send loving kindness basically friendliness, warm thoughts, positive vibes to a series of different individuals. Just follow my instruction. We do this, and we help to focus our attention by repeating a series of statements silently in your own mind. So I will say them, and you'll repeat them in your mind, but you can use whatever variation of these statements feels comfortable for you. Just use my example as a guide.

19:43 So what I'm going to ask you to do now is to bring to mind somebody that you feel great affection for, somebody you have no problem loving. Might be a child, might be a pet, be a close friend or family member. Bring up all of those warm feelings of affection, and as you hold this person in your mind, sending them good thoughts while you repeat these phrases silently, May you be happy, May you be healthy. May you be safe from harm. May you live with ease, May you be happy, have peace of mind. May you be physically well and strong. May you be free from danger, safe from all inner and outer harm. May you move

21:14 through life with ease, now letting go of the mental image of that person, taking all of those warm thoughts and feelings, all of that loving kindness, and directing that towards yourself as you silently repeat the phrases, May I be happy, May I be healthy, May I be safe from harm. May I live with e May I be happy.

22:07 May I experience a peaceful mind contentment. May I be as physically healthy and well as I can be. May I be free from danger and harm. May I move through this world with ease. Now bringing to mind somebody who is a neutral person in your life, somebody that you don't know particularly well. Maybe it's a colleague that you don't really know, somebody who serves you in a store, or friend of a friend. Somebody who's quite neutral. You don't have any feelings towards, either positive or negative, And as you hold this person in your mind, sending them loving kindness by silently repeating the phrases, May you be happy, May you be healthy, May you be safe. May you live with ease once more, May you be happy. May

23:43 your mind be peaceful, your heart be peaceful. May your body be healthy and well. May you be free from danger, safe from all inner and outer harm. May you move through this life with ease. Now letting that person go, and bringing to mind somebody who is a difficult person in your life, somebody who you might have some trouble feeling affection towards, and as best as you can do, you hold them in your mind, having the intention of sending them loving kindness by silently repeating the phrases, May you be happy, May you be healthy, May you be safe.

25:10 May you live with ease. Just as I wish to be happy, May you also experience happiness, and just as I wish to be healthy, May you also be healthy and well. May you be safe from harm. And may you move through life with ease and now taking this loving kindness, these good wishes, and sending them out to all beings in the world, plants, animals, humans, all beings seen and unseen, whether you believe they're deserving or not, Every creature on the planet may you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be free from danger and

26:48 safe from harm. May you live with ease. May all beings be happy. May all beings be as healthy and well and as strong as they can be. May all beings be safe from harm, free from danger. May all beings move through life and the world with ease. And as we conclude this meditation, I would love it if you would hold these positive thoughts and intentions silently send loving kindness to everybody that you encounter as you go about your day. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, make sure you subscribe

28:19 so that you never miss an episode, and if you care to leave us a five star rating and a review, that would be amazing as well. I am going to be taking a couple of weeks break while I'm busy working on another project. I do have some great interviews lined up, so don't worry. I'll be back very soon. Thank you so much for being here. As always, I can't wait to catch you again on the next episode of Crabby to Haby