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Introduction:
Robert Stains, program director of the Public Conversations Project,
recommends holding a social event before the formal commencement of a dialogue group. This
allows participants to get to know each other and helps to reduce stereotypes.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Human Connection
Robert Stains
Program Director, Public Conversations Project, Watertown, Massachusetts
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When people come to an event, we usually try to do some sort of
human connection activity before there's a formal dialogues. So we'll have a meal, or some way for people to
interact with each other without talking about the issue, so there is a common human connection
that's made before people identify where they stand. That's often the place where the stereotypes start to fall away. When we were doing abortion work for instance, we would do
these dinners, people would talk about their vacations, or kids or whatnot, and
of course everyone is trying to suss out who's pro-choice and who's pro-life
based on what they wore, or where they were from, and then they'd get into the
dialogue room and discover that they were really wrong, and a lot of the time
about people on their own side too, which was a pretty cool thing.
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