Amnesty International released a video in which they show strangers begin to understand common struggles with the help of eye contact. The refugee crisis is a worldwide issue that effects us all. People disagree about the right path forward for individuals that are often displaced by conflict or economic crisis. In these disagreements what is often missing from the conversation, is empathy.
When talking about the problem of refugees, we use dehumanised language, which reduces human tragedy to numbers and statistics. But this suffering concerns real people, who – just like us - have families, loved ones, friends; their own stories, dreams, goals... Only when you sit down opposite a specific person and look into their eyes, you no longer see an anonymous refugee, one of the migrants, and notice the human before you, just like yourself – loving, suffering, dreaming...
This video is an impactful look at what it means to share in our common humanity. The idea, put forth by psychologist Arthur Aron in his 1997 study, "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness," is that in as little as four minutes of eye contact with a stranger you can develop a bond.