Robert Atkinson

Bio

Robert Atkinson, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Maine, where he taught for decades. He holds a doctorate in cross-cultural human development from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. An internationally recognized authority on life-story interviewing and personal mythmaking, he founded StoryCommons and the One Planet Peace Forum and belongs to the Evolutionary Leaders Circle. His book 'The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness' won a 2017 Nautilus Book Award. His work tracing humanity’s evolution toward unity grounds his session topic on human oneness as the foundation for global progress and the common good.

The big questions

The kind of questions this session opens up.

1. We keep calling “us versus them” human nature. What if it is only a habit we have not outgrown yet?
2. If humanity is, in the deepest sense, one, why does almost every system we have built assume the opposite?
3. What becomes possible the moment a civilization stops treating cooperation as weakness?
4. Is human oneness a comforting idea, or the most practical one we have been too afraid to act on?