WEBVTT - Ep130 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 1: Polarization 0:00:05.160 --> 0:00:09.240 What does political polarization have to do with the brain. 0:00:09.920 --> 0:00:14.480 How does an understanding of the medial prefrontal cortex tell 0:00:14.560 --> 0:00:20.240 us about what propaganda posters have in common across nation 0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:22.919 and time. What does any of this have to do 0:00:23.000 --> 0:00:27.640 with the Civil War or hippies versus soldiers, or border 0:00:27.720 --> 0:00:33.280 ruffians versus free staters or barbarians, or hanging chads or 0:00:33.440 --> 0:00:37.760 pearl harbor, or the shadows side of oxytocin, And why 0:00:38.080 --> 0:00:43.080 education can serve as an immune response to mind viruses. 0:00:46.280 --> 0:00:49.360 Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a 0:00:49.440 --> 0:00:53.239 neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we 0:00:53.360 --> 0:00:57.560 sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why 0:00:57.640 --> 0:01:16.640 and how our lives look the way they do. Today's 0:01:16.640 --> 0:01:19.200 episode is one of a couple I'm making on the 0:01:19.360 --> 0:01:24.600 topic of neuropolitics. We are in a polarized era, and 0:01:24.680 --> 0:01:28.160 when I look around, I see a primate brain doing 0:01:28.240 --> 0:01:31.640 lots of things that primate brains do. So today I'm 0:01:31.640 --> 0:01:35.160 going to talk about polarization, and in the next episode, 0:01:35.200 --> 0:01:37.320 I'm going to talk about all the good news, which 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:41.440 is the flexibility of the brain and what hopes we 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:46.160 might have to get ourselves out of polarization. I'm also 0:01:46.160 --> 0:01:49.440 going to do another episode about all the other aspects 0:01:49.440 --> 0:01:52.960 of the bigger picture that I'm calling neuropolitics, which is 0:01:53.000 --> 0:01:56.240 the way that the circuitry of our brains leads us 0:01:56.280 --> 0:01:59.520 to the kind of political viewpoints we have, and why 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:03.880 we often have a difficult time understanding one another and 0:02:04.000 --> 0:02:09.600 why societies fracture along particular lines. Okay, so when I 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:13.920 think about America, the polarization is high, and this feeling 0:02:14.000 --> 0:02:18.000 we all have is of course easily quantified. As one example, 0:02:18.040 --> 0:02:21.160 you can look at the numbers about how many times 0:02:21.200 --> 0:02:25.760 you have congressmen voting across the aisle. When a society 0:02:25.840 --> 0:02:28.680 is very polarized, like it is now, people hold on 0:02:28.840 --> 0:02:32.560 tight to their team. I'm very interested in viewing this 0:02:32.680 --> 0:02:36.080 all from the perspective of the brain, but first I 0:02:36.120 --> 0:02:39.320 need to do some table setting. A lot of people 0:02:39.320 --> 0:02:43.440 assert that our polarization has everything to do with social media. 0:02:43.840 --> 0:02:47.160 I'm interested in the roles that social media plays, but 0:02:47.240 --> 0:02:49.640 I do need to say that I don't think it 0:02:49.840 --> 0:02:55.520 serves by itself as much of an explanation for our polarization. Why, 0:02:56.200 --> 0:03:00.880 because we've been exactly this polarized many many times before, 0:03:01.040 --> 0:03:05.520 all before the Internet was even a twinkle in anybody's eyes. So, 0:03:05.600 --> 0:03:10.840 for example, America in the late nineteen sixties was very polarized. 0:03:10.919 --> 0:03:14.280 This was easily seen on the streets, in living rooms, 0:03:14.400 --> 0:03:18.760 on television screens. The Vietnam War split the nation. You 0:03:18.840 --> 0:03:22.839 had young people marching against it, while others saw opposition 0:03:22.919 --> 0:03:28.000 as unpatriotic and dangerous. The Civil rights movement was reshaping 0:03:28.120 --> 0:03:30.680 laws and culture, and that was going too fast for 0:03:30.760 --> 0:03:34.600 some and too slow for others. Generational divides ran deep. 0:03:34.720 --> 0:03:37.960 Parents who had lived through World War Two and fought 0:03:38.040 --> 0:03:42.960 in it struggled to understand their children's embrace of counterculture 0:03:43.000 --> 0:03:47.440 and long hair and psychedelic music and radical politics. The 0:03:47.520 --> 0:03:51.600 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, 0:03:52.160 --> 0:03:55.800 the urban riots, what happened Kent State. All of these 0:03:55.840 --> 0:04:00.320 moments reinforced the sense that Americans were not living in 0:04:00.400 --> 0:04:04.960 one shared country, but in different realities. Trust in government 0:04:05.120 --> 0:04:08.760 plummeted with Watergate in the nineteen seventies, and that further 0:04:09.200 --> 0:04:12.480 hardened the feeling that institutions could no longer be trusted. 0:04:12.920 --> 0:04:16.920 It was a time when the nation's social fabrics seemed 0:04:17.160 --> 0:04:21.160 to be tearing and when, much like today, people questioned 0:04:21.200 --> 0:04:24.400 whether their neighbors were even living in the same world 0:04:24.400 --> 0:04:28.880 that they were. And of course that was just one 0:04:29.080 --> 0:04:33.239 of many polarized eras in this country. The most obvious 0:04:33.279 --> 0:04:35.599 one began in the eighteen forties and led to the 0:04:35.720 --> 0:04:40.839 Civil War. The divide over slavery and states rights sharpened 0:04:41.000 --> 0:04:45.560 decade by decade, inflamed by the Missouri Compromised, the Kansas 0:04:45.640 --> 0:04:49.240 Nebraska Act, the dread Scott decision. You can see the 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:54.320 way that newspapers and churches and politicians increasingly spoke in 0:04:54.520 --> 0:04:59.240 absolutist terms, and by the way violence erupted well before 0:04:59.320 --> 0:05:02.200 the war did. From eighteen fifty four to fifty nine 0:05:02.240 --> 0:05:07.760 in the Kansas territory, you had pro slavery border Ruffians 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:11.280 and the anti slavery free Staters, and they would make 0:05:11.440 --> 0:05:16.360 raids back and forth, committing assaults and murders, each retaliating 0:05:16.400 --> 0:05:19.360 for the last. There were at least fifty six political 0:05:19.440 --> 0:05:23.120 killings during that time, and by the next year, eighteen sixty, 0:05:23.560 --> 0:05:28.040 the election of Abraham Lincoln prompted Southern states to secede 0:05:28.080 --> 0:05:32.360 and Civil War followed. Okay, so that was a really 0:05:32.480 --> 0:05:37.360 grim outcome with seven hundred thousand people killed. But there 0:05:37.440 --> 0:05:41.320 have been many, many other periods of polarization that somehow 0:05:41.680 --> 0:05:45.279 had their day, and then the temperature went down without 0:05:45.440 --> 0:05:47.760 war for different reasons, and we're going to dive into 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:51.279 that next week. For example, in the eighteen seventies, a 0:05:51.400 --> 0:05:58.039 decade after the Civil War, polarization grew again around rapid industrialization. 0:05:58.160 --> 0:06:02.000 You had labor strikes and violent clashes like the Haymarket 0:06:02.080 --> 0:06:06.320 riot and the Pullman strike. You had class resentment between 0:06:06.400 --> 0:06:10.240 robber barons and workers. And what you can see then 0:06:10.440 --> 0:06:15.760 as now is that newspapers and politicians portrayed opponents as 0:06:15.920 --> 0:06:20.000 existential threats to the American way of life. Then in 0:06:20.040 --> 0:06:23.479 the nineteen tens and twenties, polarization happened again. World War 0:06:23.600 --> 0:06:28.320 I and its aftermath split Americans over issues of free 0:06:28.320 --> 0:06:32.240 speech and loyalty and communism. The first Red Scare was 0:06:32.480 --> 0:06:36.920 concerned about anarchists and labor organizers who were depicted as 0:06:37.000 --> 0:06:41.279 dangerous reds. There were mass arrests and deportations, and this 0:06:41.520 --> 0:06:46.160 deepened divides, and simultaneously there was a surgeon racial violence. 0:06:46.240 --> 0:06:50.040 The summer of nineteen nineteen saw dozens of race riots 0:06:50.279 --> 0:06:53.520 and the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which 0:06:53.640 --> 0:06:58.720 polarized communities along racial and religious and immigrant lines. Then 0:06:58.839 --> 0:07:01.320 by the Late Night Seen twenties and nineteen thirties, you 0:07:01.400 --> 0:07:05.920 had the Great Depression, the economic collapse that sparked really 0:07:06.040 --> 0:07:10.920 fierce battles over the role of government. FDR's New Deal 0:07:11.560 --> 0:07:14.160 was hailed as salvation by some and it was condemned 0:07:14.200 --> 0:07:18.200 as socialism by others. Far left and far right groups 0:07:18.400 --> 0:07:21.080 clashed bitterly. And it was also the case that the 0:07:21.080 --> 0:07:25.120 country was polarized over whether America should intervene in Europe 0:07:25.200 --> 0:07:29.320 as fascism rose, until the attack on Pearl Harbor, which 0:07:29.400 --> 0:07:35.000 temporarily united public opinion. Okay, then I already mentioned the 0:07:35.000 --> 0:07:38.480 polarization of the civil rights movement Vietnam era. So let's 0:07:38.560 --> 0:07:42.680 jump to the culture wars of the nineteen eighties and nineties. 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:46.400 Some of you might even recall the Reagan era, where 0:07:46.440 --> 0:07:49.720 the country saw sharp divides over taxation and welfare, and 0:07:49.760 --> 0:07:53.920 abortion and feminism and gay rights. These were the so 0:07:54.000 --> 0:08:00.160 called culture wars, which pitted conservatives and evangelicals against progressives 0:08:00.240 --> 0:08:04.040 in battles over school curricula and art and family values. 0:08:04.400 --> 0:08:07.800 And again you could measure this with polarization in Congress 0:08:07.880 --> 0:08:10.840 steadily growing. Finally, some of you may even remember the 0:08:10.920 --> 0:08:15.280 contested two thousand election of Bush versus Gore. Again, this 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:18.200 was still pre social media, and the whole race came 0:08:18.240 --> 0:08:21.800 down to just the state of Florida, where Bush seemed 0:08:21.800 --> 0:08:25.160 to lead by a few hundred votes out of six 0:08:25.280 --> 0:08:29.119 million cast there, and officials tried to figure out voter 0:08:29.400 --> 0:08:34.840 intent involving hanging chads, which were in completely punched paper ballots, 0:08:34.880 --> 0:08:39.960 and pregnant chads, which were paper ballots that were dimpled. Anyway, 0:08:39.960 --> 0:08:41.960 this spun all the way up to the Supreme Court, 0:08:42.240 --> 0:08:45.480 who finally ruled the electoral vote in favor of Bush, 0:08:45.520 --> 0:08:48.440 even though Gore had received five hundred thousand more popular 0:08:48.520 --> 0:08:51.679 votes nationwide. Now, not all my listeners were alive or 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:54.240 watching the news at that time, but boy, that was 0:08:54.280 --> 0:08:57.960 a really highly polarized time as well. Then you had 0:08:58.040 --> 0:09:00.800 nine to eleven, which brought the nation together. But then 0:09:00.880 --> 0:09:04.600 over some years the Iraq War started to sharpen those 0:09:04.640 --> 0:09:08.360 divides again. Now you might be tempted to say, well, 0:09:08.400 --> 0:09:11.840 it's worse than ever now because of social media filter bubbles, 0:09:11.880 --> 0:09:14.680 but I just want to remind us all that echo 0:09:14.880 --> 0:09:18.960 chambers are the oldest story of humankind. We are more 0:09:19.040 --> 0:09:22.280 comfortable with people who agree with us and see the 0:09:22.320 --> 0:09:26.160 world from our angle now. I often hear people say 0:09:26.200 --> 0:09:30.080 things like, yes, but we only had a few news 0:09:30.160 --> 0:09:33.320 sources back in the day, so everyone was pinned to 0:09:33.400 --> 0:09:37.880 the same truth. Walter Kronkite or whoever. This is a 0:09:38.000 --> 0:09:42.120 seductive idea, but it's not true. People got some of 0:09:42.160 --> 0:09:46.840 their info from Kronkite, but also from the newsletters they 0:09:46.880 --> 0:09:50.840 subscribe to in their physical mailbox, and also from all 0:09:50.880 --> 0:09:54.920 their friends and neighbors and co workers. And when people 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:58.560 would have dinners together or chat in the breakroom or 0:09:58.640 --> 0:10:01.600 drink beers in their backyard with their friends, that's when 0:10:01.640 --> 0:10:05.320 they would really come to consensus agreement about what was 0:10:05.400 --> 0:10:08.560 happening in the world. Just to jump back to the 0:10:08.640 --> 0:10:12.120 Vietnam era, do you think the hippies and the returning 0:10:12.200 --> 0:10:17.720 soldiers were sitting down and watching Walter Cronkite and saying, ah, okay, 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:20.600 I see the truth. There's no problem. We all agree now. 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:27.319 So any reading of history shows that polarization is depressingly 0:10:27.720 --> 0:10:32.319 a recurring pattern. Each cycle takes a different shape, whether 0:10:32.360 --> 0:10:36.400 that's slavery or labor or immigration, or race or culture 0:10:36.640 --> 0:10:39.960 or war. But the common thread is the part I 0:10:40.000 --> 0:10:43.000 want to zoom in on. When people begin to see 0:10:43.000 --> 0:10:46.880 each other not as neighbors with families and mortgages and 0:10:46.960 --> 0:10:51.320 lives and desires for a better life, but as existential threats. 0:10:52.040 --> 0:10:56.040 When that happens, the brain circuitry involved in empathy, in 0:10:56.200 --> 0:11:00.680 understanding another person's hopes and dreams, the activity in those 0:11:00.720 --> 0:11:05.120 circuits dials down, and the social fabric begins to frame. 0:11:05.840 --> 0:11:07.480 By the way, I just want to flag a point 0:11:07.520 --> 0:11:09.600 that I'm going to explore next week, which is that 0:11:10.000 --> 0:11:14.199 most historians interested in this topic linger on how societies 0:11:14.720 --> 0:11:18.760 fall into polarization, but my main interest nowadays is how 0:11:18.760 --> 0:11:21.720 they crawl back out. So next week I'm going to 0:11:21.760 --> 0:11:25.080 examine the factors that seem to pull societies back from 0:11:25.120 --> 0:11:28.800 the brink, because with all those eras that I just named, 0:11:29.160 --> 0:11:33.000 we went to actual war only once, and with all 0:11:33.040 --> 0:11:36.320 the other periods, we managed to pull ourselves back onto 0:11:36.440 --> 0:11:40.080 a straight road. Sometimes this is because of external factors 0:11:40.320 --> 0:11:43.480 and sometimes because of internal work, And this is all 0:11:43.520 --> 0:11:46.840 what we're going to address next week. Okay, So now 0:11:46.880 --> 0:11:50.199 I want to return to the particular issue for today, 0:11:50.240 --> 0:11:54.560 which is how our brains operate with in and out 0:11:54.559 --> 0:11:57.600 groups and what the brain is capable of when it's 0:11:57.679 --> 0:12:01.400 pushed in the wrong direction. So let's start in nineteen 0:12:01.480 --> 0:12:06.240 ninety four in Rwanda. The radio was on in homes 0:12:06.280 --> 0:12:09.839 and shops and bars, and the message that pours out 0:12:09.920 --> 0:12:15.520 every day is relentless. The Tutsis are cockroaches. They must 0:12:15.559 --> 0:12:19.840 be crushed. This was literally the language in this framework. 0:12:20.160 --> 0:12:24.640 The Tutsi were not citizens or neighbors or people with 0:12:24.720 --> 0:12:28.560 families and histories and memories, but they were cockroaches. The 0:12:28.640 --> 0:12:31.920 more often this message was repeated, the more it carved 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:37.320 itself into people's brains, and eventually the machetes got unsheathed, 0:12:37.480 --> 0:12:41.400 neighbors turned on neighbors. In one hundred days, half a 0:12:41.559 --> 0:12:45.199 million people were killed. And the part that is frankly 0:12:45.280 --> 0:12:47.920 terrifying is that when you think about genocide, you might 0:12:47.960 --> 0:12:51.559 think this gets driven by soldiers or politicians, but that's 0:12:51.640 --> 0:12:54.160 not what was going on here. The engine of what 0:12:54.240 --> 0:12:59.480 happened in Rwanda was regular people who to neighbors who 0:12:59.480 --> 0:13:02.520 had lived side by side with the Tutsi for generations. 0:13:03.120 --> 0:13:08.120 That is the power of dehumanization. Once someone is no 0:13:08.240 --> 0:13:16.040 longer perceived as human, the neural breaks come off. Now, 0:13:16.120 --> 0:13:18.960 it would be comforting if we could view Rwanda as 0:13:19.240 --> 0:13:22.920 a tragic anomaly, but it's not. History gives us no 0:13:23.040 --> 0:13:27.679 shortage of examples of this very same principle. In Nazi Germany, 0:13:28.200 --> 0:13:32.160 the Jewish community was depicted in newspapers like their Sturmer, 0:13:32.600 --> 0:13:37.319 as rodents swarming through sewers. They were painted as vermin 0:13:37.440 --> 0:13:42.360 to be exterminated. And this is precisely the cognitive space 0:13:42.400 --> 0:13:45.439 that you need to get into if you actually want 0:13:45.480 --> 0:13:49.640 to murder your former friends and neighbors. And by the way, 0:13:49.679 --> 0:13:52.520 it's not just the Hutu and the Nazis, but everyone 0:13:52.600 --> 0:13:56.760 does it. So during World War Two, American propaganda posters 0:13:57.160 --> 0:14:01.840 portrayed the Japanese with distorted faces and thick glasses and 0:14:01.880 --> 0:14:06.720 clawed fingers crouched like apes. The caption was this is 0:14:06.840 --> 0:14:10.040 the enemy. And this is the same across history. If 0:14:10.120 --> 0:14:13.280 we step back into the world of ancient Rome, you'll 0:14:13.320 --> 0:14:17.240 see that outsiders were called barbarians. The word comes from 0:14:17.240 --> 0:14:21.200 the Greek barbaros, which was a mocking sound meant to 0:14:21.680 --> 0:14:26.280 imitate the noise of foreign languages. Bar barbar Originally, it 0:14:26.360 --> 0:14:29.640 didn't have a negative connotation. But pretty quickly the terms 0:14:29.760 --> 0:14:35.440 meaning shifted from outsider to a pejorative for being savage 0:14:35.600 --> 0:14:39.880 or uncivilized. And this was because to Roman ears, outsiders 0:14:39.920 --> 0:14:45.640 had meaningless babbel and increasingly reviewed like animals. The Romans 0:14:45.640 --> 0:14:51.400 often described enemies as wild or beasts. Julius Caesar characterized 0:14:51.440 --> 0:14:55.800 the Galls and Germans as quote, living like animals. Tacitus 0:14:55.920 --> 0:14:59.880 described the Britons as quote savages who live like beasts 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:05.240 in the forests. So across continents and centuries, the pattern 0:15:05.320 --> 0:15:09.480 is exactly the same. When societies prepare for conflict, they 0:15:09.560 --> 0:15:13.360 sharpen their words, and the words are designed for the 0:15:13.440 --> 0:15:18.080 simple task of stripping away the humanity of the other side. 0:15:18.320 --> 0:15:22.200 Now why does this work so well? Why are animal 0:15:22.280 --> 0:15:28.120 metaphors so effective. It's because they reach down into the 0:15:28.160 --> 0:15:33.880 neural machinery and turn a dial. Under normal circumstances, when 0:15:33.920 --> 0:15:37.040 you look at someone else and another person, you have 0:15:37.160 --> 0:15:40.880 regions of the brain that allow you to imagine their 0:15:41.040 --> 0:15:44.440 inner life. Specifically, a region behind your forehead called the 0:15:44.480 --> 0:15:49.120 medial prefrontal cortex gets involved when you consider that this 0:15:49.240 --> 0:15:55.320 person has thoughts and feelings and plans and fears. That's 0:15:55.360 --> 0:15:58.320 what lights up when you see someone else as a 0:15:58.600 --> 0:16:02.560 human reaching out to deal with a bicycle or a 0:16:02.680 --> 0:16:06.280 chair or a coffee machine. This area does not become active. 0:16:06.600 --> 0:16:09.400 It's only active when you're dealing with a human, when 0:16:09.440 --> 0:16:13.400 you're doing what researchers call a social cognition task. But 0:16:14.560 --> 0:16:17.680 some years ago, my colleagues Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske 0:16:17.800 --> 0:16:21.840 at Princeton wanted to see if the amount this area 0:16:22.000 --> 0:16:26.840 is active depends on what you think about a particular group. 0:16:27.240 --> 0:16:30.520 So they put people in the brain scanner fMRI, and 0:16:30.560 --> 0:16:34.560 they showed them photographs of business people and athletes and 0:16:34.600 --> 0:16:37.840 the elderly, and nurses, and drug addicts and people who 0:16:37.880 --> 0:16:41.920 were homeless. And here's what they found. While some pictures, 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:46.400 like wealthy people, triggered envy, this social region, the medial 0:16:46.440 --> 0:16:50.360 prefrontal cortex was still active. Other photos, let's say a 0:16:50.440 --> 0:16:54.320 very elderly people, triggered emotions of pity, and this social 0:16:54.360 --> 0:16:58.200 region was still active. But when the brain looked at 0:16:58.280 --> 0:17:02.840 pictures and felt discussed, like for pictures of homeless people 0:17:03.200 --> 0:17:07.080 or drug addicts at rock bottom, the brain viewed them 0:17:07.119 --> 0:17:12.720 not as humans with minds, but more like objects. That 0:17:12.960 --> 0:17:18.800 is the humanization, your brain decides, and this is essentially 0:17:18.880 --> 0:17:24.359 all subconsciously that this person does not count as another mind. 0:17:24.560 --> 0:17:30.239 This person is neurally speaking, less than human. And by 0:17:30.280 --> 0:17:32.159 the way, I'm linking all the relevant studies to the 0:17:32.160 --> 0:17:34.639 show notes, I encourage you to check those out. So 0:17:35.280 --> 0:17:39.359 let's return to propaganda. When some group of people is 0:17:39.520 --> 0:17:47.000 portrayed as cockroaches or rats or babbling animal, barbarians, or 0:17:47.040 --> 0:17:51.320 a virus or a robot or whatever, the social cognition 0:17:51.520 --> 0:17:56.639 regions like the medial prefrontal cortex get dialed down. The 0:17:56.720 --> 0:18:00.560 brain no longer treats this other group as people with 0:18:00.720 --> 0:18:06.080 a mind. Instead, people of that group become more like objects. 0:18:06.520 --> 0:18:10.720 And when these circuits are not steering your decisions, violence 0:18:10.800 --> 0:18:16.040 becomes psychologically easier. As an example, unless you are a vegetarian, 0:18:16.200 --> 0:18:19.359 you don't really mind murdering a big, beautiful animal like 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:21.800 a cow or a bowl, because you want that burger, 0:18:22.160 --> 0:18:24.560 and that animal is just an animal to your mind, 0:18:24.600 --> 0:18:28.000 it's not a human, and so your medial prefrontal cortex 0:18:28.480 --> 0:18:31.080 is less active when you look at that cow, and 0:18:31.119 --> 0:18:33.200 so you can take a knife to its throat without 0:18:33.320 --> 0:18:37.600 that keeping you up at night, and that ease of killing. 0:18:37.640 --> 0:18:39.520 Maybe it bothers you a little, but not enough to 0:18:39.520 --> 0:18:44.560 stop doing it. That's what we see throughout history, over 0:18:44.840 --> 0:18:49.960 and over, people murdering their neighbors after a sufficient amount 0:18:50.040 --> 0:18:55.480 of messaging telling them that their neighbors aren't really humans. 0:18:55.520 --> 0:18:59.080 They are less than humans, they're more like cows or worse, 0:18:59.359 --> 0:19:03.479 they carry pestilence and they're dangerous. Now, next month, I'm 0:19:03.520 --> 0:19:05.320 going to have a colleague of mine on the podcast 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:08.159 who pioneered a lot of these studies, Lassana Harris, So 0:19:08.240 --> 0:19:11.400 we'll go into more detail about the prefrontal cortex then, 0:19:11.760 --> 0:19:13.960 But for today, I just want to make it crystal 0:19:14.080 --> 0:19:19.080 clear that this dehumanization is the oldest trick in the 0:19:19.160 --> 0:19:23.960 playbook of propaganda. Dehumanizing another group doesn't have to be 0:19:24.040 --> 0:19:28.640 about making watertight arguments for convincing people with data. It 0:19:28.680 --> 0:19:34.439 can simply be about bypassing reason entirely and tampering directly 0:19:35.000 --> 0:19:39.960 with the machinery of social cognition. It's really important to 0:19:40.040 --> 0:19:43.800 understand that this is a vulnerability built into the human brain. 0:19:44.160 --> 0:19:47.800 When the wind blows hard enough, the flame of your 0:19:48.119 --> 0:19:51.240 social empathy gets blown out. So when we look at 0:19:51.480 --> 0:19:56.560 Rwanda or Nazi Germany or America during wartime, we're seeing 0:19:56.600 --> 0:20:00.600 a basic lesson about the architecture of our own We're 0:20:00.600 --> 0:20:06.159 seeing how fragile our humanizing can be and how dangerous 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:10.520 it is when pundits and politicians and online influencers lay 0:20:10.600 --> 0:20:29.760 their hands on the dials. Now, before I go on, 0:20:29.840 --> 0:20:31.720 I want to make really clear why I'm devoting a 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:34.359 lot of my efforts to this sort of research is 0:20:34.400 --> 0:20:37.880 because I think we can solve this, at least mostly, 0:20:38.359 --> 0:20:43.360 and part of this comes down to education as a population. 0:20:43.480 --> 0:20:46.159 If we can learn to recognize the tricks of the 0:20:46.200 --> 0:20:52.040 trade of propaganda, that renders those tricks mostly impotent. Just 0:20:52.119 --> 0:20:55.240 imagine that all the schools in the nation spent just 0:20:55.520 --> 0:20:58.439 fifteen minutes teaching what I just told you. Then the 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:02.480 next time a student see some TikTokers say oh, those 0:21:02.480 --> 0:21:05.560 people are like animals, or that group is a disease 0:21:05.640 --> 0:21:09.320 that's infecting our country, a light bulb goes on in 0:21:09.359 --> 0:21:12.560 our kids' minds and they say, wait a minute, we've 0:21:12.600 --> 0:21:17.719 heard that before. That kind of simple recognition is ninety 0:21:17.720 --> 0:21:21.400 percent of the game. That recognition turns all of us 0:21:21.440 --> 0:21:27.080 from passive receivers into active listeners. Having knowledge about this 0:21:27.240 --> 0:21:31.159 topic about how dehumanization works in the brain. Is the 0:21:31.320 --> 0:21:36.240 difference between catching the contagion of hate and mounting an 0:21:36.240 --> 0:21:40.040 immune response against it. So now let's turn to a 0:21:40.280 --> 0:21:43.600 related issue, one which is equally important to the story, 0:21:44.000 --> 0:21:47.480 and again is deeply embedded in our brains, And that's 0:21:47.480 --> 0:21:52.399 our predilection for in groups and outgroups. We are fundamentally 0:21:53.119 --> 0:21:56.560 very tribal. We see this in so many ways, and 0:21:56.640 --> 0:21:59.320 sometimes it doesn't matter, like which football team you root for, 0:21:59.600 --> 0:22:04.560 but when when it comes to politics, it carries cognitive consequences. 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:07.240 You end up feeling certain that your side of the 0:22:07.280 --> 0:22:11.000 political aisle generally has the right idea and the other 0:22:11.160 --> 0:22:14.640 half of the nation who knows what's infected their brains. 0:22:14.880 --> 0:22:16.600 And I just want to be crystal clear that it 0:22:16.600 --> 0:22:19.240 doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on, you 0:22:19.320 --> 0:22:22.960 are likely to genuinely feel this about the other side, 0:22:23.760 --> 0:22:26.679 and you'll feel like if they would only listen to 0:22:26.720 --> 0:22:30.280 you and stop being so misinformed or stubborn or wrongheaded, 0:22:30.720 --> 0:22:36.480 everyone would fundamentally come to agree with you. Now, if 0:22:36.520 --> 0:22:39.960 we want to understand why humans divide so easily into 0:22:40.000 --> 0:22:42.640 in and out groups, we have to return to our brains, 0:22:42.640 --> 0:22:47.600 in our psychologies, because long before Instagram or cable news, 0:22:47.760 --> 0:22:51.840 or long before propaganda ministries and political campaigns, and even 0:22:51.920 --> 0:22:55.879 long before there were even such things as nations, we 0:22:55.880 --> 0:23:00.040 were wired for us versus them. If you picture the 0:22:59.840 --> 0:23:03.440 world of our ancestors, you had small bands of maybe 0:23:03.720 --> 0:23:08.600 one hundred or so hunter gatherers traveling together, depending on 0:23:08.720 --> 0:23:12.600 each other for survival. These were people who shared food, 0:23:13.280 --> 0:23:17.960 raised children, collectively, hunted side by side, defended one another 0:23:18.040 --> 0:23:21.840 when predators or rivals approached. In that world, there wasn't 0:23:21.840 --> 0:23:26.080 anything abstract about belonging. To be inside the group was life. 0:23:26.480 --> 0:23:29.919 To be outside might mean death, so you had to 0:23:29.960 --> 0:23:35.440 be sensitive to this distinction. Our brains carry this inheritance, 0:23:35.960 --> 0:23:40.560 and we are natural born categorizers. We draw circles around 0:23:40.840 --> 0:23:44.400 us with them on the outside, and once that circle 0:23:44.480 --> 0:23:49.600 is drawn, things inside feel safer and more trustworthy, and 0:23:49.680 --> 0:23:53.840 things outside feel riskier and more dangerous. So there was 0:23:53.880 --> 0:23:56.399 a good experiment on this in the nineteen seventies. The 0:23:56.400 --> 0:24:00.640 psychologist Henry Tefel wanted to know how little it would 0:24:00.720 --> 0:24:05.119 take to spark the tribal machinery, so he brought in 0:24:05.280 --> 0:24:09.520 volunteers and showed them slides of dots on a screen, 0:24:09.880 --> 0:24:13.960 and he asked them to estimate how many dots there were. Then, 0:24:14.080 --> 0:24:18.240 with a straight face, Taefel divided them into two groups, 0:24:18.720 --> 0:24:22.480 overestimators and underestimators, and that was it. It was just 0:24:22.560 --> 0:24:27.960 a label that represented a meaningless categorization. And yet right 0:24:28.000 --> 0:24:31.600 away people started favoring their own side. They gave more 0:24:31.760 --> 0:24:36.679 rewards to fellow overestimators or to fellow underestimators, and not 0:24:36.800 --> 0:24:39.920 to the other side. They rated their own group as 0:24:40.119 --> 0:24:43.760 more likable and more trustworthy. The thing I want you 0:24:43.760 --> 0:24:46.280 to note here is that there was no deep history 0:24:46.359 --> 0:24:49.760 or ideology here. This was just about dots on a 0:24:49.960 --> 0:24:54.200 slide and more specifically belonging to one team or the other. 0:24:54.760 --> 0:24:59.720 So the brain doesn't require a grand narrative to polarize, 0:25:00.000 --> 0:25:04.040 It doesn't need centuries of grievance. It just needs a category. 0:25:04.560 --> 0:25:08.320 And once the category is there, the neural machinery of 0:25:08.800 --> 0:25:13.439 favoritism for your group weres to life and seeing the 0:25:13.640 --> 0:25:17.600 out group as fully human. That dials down. And even 0:25:17.640 --> 0:25:20.679 earlier experiment on this was from nineteen fifty four. This 0:25:20.840 --> 0:25:25.160 was called the robbers Cave experiment. The psychologist Muzifer Sharif 0:25:25.560 --> 0:25:28.520 recruited two groups of eleven year old boys and took 0:25:28.520 --> 0:25:31.840 them to a summer camp in Oklahoma. Yeah, for the 0:25:31.880 --> 0:25:34.600 first week, the groups didn't even know the other existed. 0:25:34.960 --> 0:25:39.119 Each built their own identity. One group called itself the Rattlers, 0:25:39.160 --> 0:25:42.600 the other the Eagles. They made flags, they sang songs, 0:25:42.600 --> 0:25:47.080 they created rituals, and then once those identities had formed, 0:25:47.400 --> 0:25:51.600 Sharif brought the two groups together and set them into competition. 0:25:52.080 --> 0:25:55.800 There was baseball and tugawar and treasure hunts and so on, 0:25:56.280 --> 0:26:01.720 and Sharif watched as things spiraled turned into food fights. 0:26:02.160 --> 0:26:05.960 Food fights escalated into raids on each other's cabins. Cabin 0:26:06.080 --> 0:26:10.360 raids escalated into rocks hurled across the camp, and by 0:26:10.400 --> 0:26:13.040 the end the hostility was so intense that the researchers 0:26:13.040 --> 0:26:17.440 had to physically intervene to keep the boys safe. What's 0:26:17.480 --> 0:26:21.240 so striking about this is how quickly it happened. These 0:26:21.240 --> 0:26:25.600 were boys who had no prior grudges, no ideological differences. 0:26:26.160 --> 0:26:30.520 The researchers manufactured a divide out of thin air, and 0:26:30.560 --> 0:26:35.120 the brains tribal machinery did the rest. And I wish 0:26:35.240 --> 0:26:38.600 this only said something about psychology labs or summer camps, 0:26:38.840 --> 0:26:42.159 but of course, we see the same story everywhere in 0:26:42.200 --> 0:26:45.280 our society. So first let's take something that's not so terrible. 0:26:45.359 --> 0:26:50.760 We see tribalism on full display every weekend in sports stadiums. Sports, 0:26:50.840 --> 0:26:55.280 in a way are our culture's safe tribalism. They let 0:26:55.400 --> 0:26:59.520 us channel our loyalty and hostility into arbitrary groups. So 0:26:59.560 --> 0:27:03.480 it's Yeas versus Red Sox, or Manchester United versus Liverpool, 0:27:03.560 --> 0:27:07.560 or Cowboys versus forty nine ers. People chant, they paint 0:27:07.600 --> 0:27:11.280 their faces, they wave flags, they curse at their rivals, 0:27:11.560 --> 0:27:15.480 and for a few hours they experience the same surge 0:27:15.520 --> 0:27:20.000 of in group bonding that once held hunter gatherer bands together, 0:27:20.440 --> 0:27:24.639 and when the game ends, most fans go home without bloodshed. 0:27:24.840 --> 0:27:28.399 Sports give us the thrill of us versus them in 0:27:28.440 --> 0:27:33.440 a contained, ritualized form. They act like a lightning rod, 0:27:33.960 --> 0:27:37.800 grounding tribal energy, so it doesn't always arc into violence. 0:27:38.640 --> 0:27:43.120 But outside the stadium, when the same circuitry is recruited 0:27:43.359 --> 0:27:49.800 for politics, religion, race, the consequences aren't so harmless because 0:27:49.840 --> 0:27:54.200 then the stakes are higher and the hostility doesn't turn 0:27:54.320 --> 0:27:57.040 off when the whistle blows. So here's what the neurosigence 0:27:57.080 --> 0:28:00.280 shows us about this. The amigdala, which we often think 0:28:00.320 --> 0:28:04.400 of as a detector of fear, is also a sentinel 0:28:04.560 --> 0:28:09.000