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Hi, I'm Julie Tietz, and welcome to Conflict Resolution-- Putting the Pieces Together. Today, we're going to talk about our perceptions and how they are filtered through our assumptions. So why don't we start by looking at our key terms.
Belief-- a person's mental sense of what is true or right or correct in a situation. Belief system-- a combination of belief that becomes a model for an aspect of a person's world. Perception-- a person's awareness and interpretation of an event, condition, or person.
When we encounter experiences in our lives, we often give more weight towards the experiences that confirm what we believe. So we are giving more significance or more hold or pull on experiences that are in line with our belief systems. And the more significance or the more important or higher we hold a specific belief, we give more weight to this.
So let's use an example of what this might look like. Let's say you're going to write a speech about a cancer treatment that you think is the best and most important and is going to cure cancer. And you only find information or research that fits in with this belief about the specific cancer treatment. So you're specifically seeking out and giving more weight to this confirmation of information that goes along with your cancer treatment.
And you may be disregarding other information that challenges what you believe about this cancer treatment. And you could be doing this consciously or maybe subconsciously. But regardless, you're disregarding or taking out or not mentioning the other points of view surrounding your belief about this cancer treatment.
And the higher significance that we hold on a certain belief, the more weight we give. And I think a good example of this would be religious beliefs. Lots of people-- not everybody, certainly-- holds religion as the model for their world. It is what they use to act or behave in their everyday lives.
And again, this is a high significance for people. And so they try to confirm their experiences through these held beliefs. So we will do everything that we can in our power to confirm or make right certain situations to fit in with our religious beliefs.
So when we are in conflict, we are making or formulating new beliefs about others and the situation or the specific event. And we are forming these new beliefs, but we are forming them from our previously held beliefs. So we are not making up new beliefs systems. These new beliefs are coming from beliefs that we've already had about people or certain situations or events.
And so our perceptions about these new people or events or situations are coming from our already held beliefs and from the expectations that we form from the beliefs. And we are consciously noticing things about this.
So when we're in a conflict resolution process, its intention is to make parties feel comfortable about altering their beliefs or evaluating their experiences with less skew, as you can call it. And we are attempting to get the parties to acknowledge the other's point of view. They don't necessarily have to take on the point of view or the belief, but to just to acknowledge that there is something else out there.
And doing so, this helps break down and relieve tension and possibly work towards a final agreement or a conclusion to the conflict. So now that we've covered Believe It and See It, perceptions are filtered through assumptions.
Let's go over our key points. We weigh our experiences through our beliefs. And when we weight these experiences, we are trying to confirm the experience with our beliefs. And the higher a significance or the more important our beliefs are to us, we give more weight to them.
And we form new beliefs about other people, events, and situations, but these beliefs are formed through our already held beliefs. So we are not making a whole new belief system. We are forming new beliefs about people through what we already believe.
And conflict resolution helps parties to feel comfortable in seeing others' points of view. And I think that this is a really good point to bring up through our daily lives.
And when we are willing to see the other side or the other person's point of view, we can have stronger relationships. We can relieve tension, we can prevent conflict and come up with better solutions. We don't necessarily have to take on other beliefs, but just acknowledging that something else is out there is really important to our everyday relationships.
Thank you for taking the time out to view this tutorial. I hope you've gained something from this. And I can't wait to catch you again next time.