TRANSCRIPT: Overcoming Bias to Unite Our Divided World: Dave Osh

Read the full transcript of Dave Osh’s talk titled “Overcoming Bias to Unite Our Divided World” at TEDxTralee 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

DAVE OSH: Have you ever dated someone who wasn’t quite what you expected? My wife did. Here’s what happened. I started dating online in 2005 and I took it very seriously. I wrote a long dating profile as if I were looking for a Nobel Prize laureate in literature. After editing this masterpiece a hundred times, I finally clicked the submit button. And then nothing. Even after a few days, I didn’t get it. I really put myself out there.

It took a few weeks until I received a wink from an American woman named Ainsley, living in the jungles of Borneo, Malaysia. Of all places. The problem was that I couldn’t date her in Malaysia due to my Israeli citizenship. So after three months of chatting on the phone, Ainsley came to meet me in Singapore.

I was waiting for her in a shopping mall and saw this beautiful woman walking in my direction. I gave her a huge smile, but she ignored me and continued walking. I called after her. “Ainsley, I’m Dave.” She turned to me and looked up. “Hey, you’re much taller than I expected.”

Over dinner, I discovered I had made a mistake converting my height from meters to feet on a dating platform. I made myself five inches shorter. Ainsley had to overcome a subtle prejudice about dating a shorter man. It was an unforgettable moment in which I learned to always under promise and over deliver. After eight months of long distance relationship, we moved in together, married two years later, and lived happily ever after, experiencing many other funny cultural misunderstandings.

The Nakba Discovery

Until a few years into our marriage, Ainsley told me, “I’m watching a documentary about the Nakba. It means catastrophe in Arabic. How come you never mention it?” “What? Nakba? Dave? Are you joking? You’re an Israeli. That’s your history. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.”

I thought we were losing years of trust in just one minute. But I didn’t back off. “Look, the Palestinians were not expelled. They left voluntarily during their wars. Arab countries started trying to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel.” “Dave, just watch it.” And I did.

I was glued to the screen for an hour, watching thousands of Palestinians dispelled at gunpoint. I was shocked. I knew only one part of history. The part that tells how the Jewish people return to the homeland after 2000 years in exile.

I became obsessed about learning the other side. And the other side was that Palestinians were already in Palestine for many years. The more I learned, the more I realized how my family, schools, and the media shaped my values, beliefs, and behaviors.

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Cultural Conditioning

Well, aren’t we all subject to cultural conditioning? Of course. But I was indoctrinated to see Palestinians, Arabs, and even the rest of the world through a discriminative lens of Jewish religion, history and nationalism. There’s a difference between education and indoctrination. Education teaches us how to think. Indoctrination teaches us what to think. And I was indoctrinated.

The Nakba was a taboo in Israel. My history books never mention it. Instead, I learned a lot about existential threats. There were two mantras I heard many times when I was young. “Arabs hate Jews and they want to throw us all into the sea.” It was, and it still is, us against them. And this narrative led me to serve 20 years as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force fight unnecessary wars and dismiss everything outside my culture.

Religious indoctrination played a major role in my cultural conditioning. It created discrimination that led to division similar to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The troubles, where the Protestant majority limited the rights of the Catholic minority. Such discrimination in both Palestine and Northern Ireland generated social divide, resistance and violence.

I visited Belfast recently. The scars are still visible 26 years after the Good Friday peace agreement bridged the gaps and ended the violence. Also, look around the world. Our society has become more and more divided. We have polarised in so many aspects of our lives such as immigration, climate change, and economic inequality. And it all starts with cultural conditioning.

Behaviors Shaped by Cultural Conditioning

It shapes our behaviors in different ways. Here are just three examples:

The first one is controlling. Some of us tend to get things done in a certain way. It’s my way or the highway. I’m obsessed with putting food containers in the exact same place in the fridge. Ainsley drives me nuts when she moves them around. Isn’t that weird? I know, but guess what? My parents were the same. They resented people who did things differently than them.
The second one is judging. Some of us tend to criticize other people’s points of view. We argue endlessly to prove that we are right and they are wrong. We need to outsmart everybody to feel good about ourselves. If I earn a dollar every time I thought someone was an idiot, I could have retired many years ago.
The third one is pleasing. Some of us tend to avoid conflict and stay passive in disagreements. We are afraid to challenge authority or group norms. We don’t want to risk the relationship by rocking the boat.

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You see, cultural conditioning shapes different behaviors like controlling, judging, and pleasing. More importantly, it also shapes our worldview, the lens we see ourselves, others, and issues. I wish I had known it earlier.

Breaking Free of Cultural Conditioning

After giving up my Israeli citizenship and becoming a Singaporean, we moved to Malaysia. Yes, the country I couldn’t even visit before. I started traveling to Middle Eastern countries, doing business and making friends with people I had previously considered enemies. It turned out that we are more alike than different.

For example, we all love to eat hummus.

However, the more I expanded my worldview, the more I got into non-stop conflicts with my Israeli family and friends. Until one day I got it. Of course, the same indoctrination that shaped my worldview also affected theirs. That’s why I made it my mission to help people break free of their cultural conditioning, so that together we create a ripple effect of unity in our divided world.

Over the last seven years, I work with the world’s renowned developmental psychologists on frameworks that can help us break free of cultural conditioning. I discovered that all these frameworks have one thing in common they show an evolutionary continuum. On one side, we can only hold a single worldview that rejects everything outside our culture. On the other side, we can hold multiple, even competing worldview free of cultural conditioning.

If we evolve from one side to the other, we become highly effective in resolving conflicts. These two sides are like two different operating systems. One conforms to the values and expectations of the group that shaped us. The other one gives us freedom and independence. Instead of seeing people only through the lens that shaped us, we can see them through both our lens and their lenses, and with such a broader perspective, we become more inclusive of people outside our group.

When we acknowledge the impact of our cultural conditioning, we can see how others are subject to their own. We then can open our hearts and minds and include them despite our differences. Inclusion creates unity.

The Power of the Pause

So how do we break free of cultural conditioning once we become aware of its stronghold? It’s the world’s simplest idea. Pause. Just wait a few seconds before you respond. Cultural conditioning controls us when we are triggered. It’s like a knee jerk reaction that brings back a younger version of ourselves. And we all know that impulsive reactions are not the best way to respond to a confronting boss, partner or teenager.

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The pause interrupts our automatic patterns. As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “The best remedy for anger is delay.” Three seconds is enough. Five seconds? Even better. It feels awkward at first, but it sounds natural to others.

The pause is highly effective because of the way the brain works. The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s thinking center, while the amygdala is the reactionary center, and it’s also the gatekeeper to the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex can reflect on the past and introspect about the future. The amygdala cannot. The amygdala stores our cultural conditioning experiences like photos without dates on our smartphones. And it reacts based on this unorganized data. That’s why we don’t want the amygdala to short circuit the prefrontal cortex. Unless we are confronting a tiger, we should never let the amygdala be our first responder.

However, if not trained, what are the chances we will remember to pause when we are triggered? Very slim. Probably none. Therefore, we need to practice pausing in day to day conversations when nothing triggers us until it becomes second nature.

Conclusion

The Good Friday Peace Agreement is an example of two sides of the conflict pausing and listening to each other. 26 years later, Northern Ireland has more inclusion and unity. I wish the same for Israelis and Palestinians.

So here’s my invitation to you. The next time someone triggers you when they’re trying to control, judge, or even please you`, pause for five seconds and instead of thinking, “What’s wrong with them?”, think “What conditioned them?”

When we acknowledge the impact of our cultural conditioning, when we question our group norms and expectations, when we pause before we respond, we then know we have broken free of cultural conditioning. We become truly inclusive and inclusion creates unity.