In Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, she observes that a “missing link in our understanding of conflict” is “our failure to realize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn’t matter.” Respecting people’s dignity takes what I think of as applied grace. It involves extending yourself to make people feel they belong. It also involves giving them the benefit of the doubt (using Hicks’s suggestion to start from the premise that they are acting with integrity). And it involves treating them like their opinion and feelings mean something. Hicks believes that a
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