30 minutes with a stranger

It's not just loneliness, it's that by being isolated you can make sweeping generalizations about other people, and fall for the hatefull narative.

When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.

This goes for other stuff as well, like if you're "ungrounded" by not actually observing/communicating with the thing you're judging, you can kind of just make up the perfect villain in your head and hate that

I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of

>When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.

I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.

From the research I have heard and seen on the subject, when people communicate with people different than themselves it can both help and hurt trust. The primary factor that I took from the research is that it depend on ethical values. If the two people are different but share ethical values, especially symbolic ones, then relationships tend to improve. If however people have different ethical values, then the results of such meeting tend to create more hostility and distrust. People can generally accept that people have different ethical values only if they don't need to actually see it.