Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm not a groupie person really at all. I
Speaker 1: don't really care about sports. I don't really care about teams.
Speaker 1: I did not care about baseball at all. I really
Speaker 1: it was only there because I was so smitten with him.
Speaker 1: Me and a Chikara is telling me about an early
Speaker 1: date she had with her husband, Carrie. Carrie is an
Speaker 1: avid Boston Red Sox fan, so they decided to check
Speaker 1: out a game against the Sox's arch rivals, the Yankees,
Speaker 1: and they did so an enemy territory Yankee stadium. He
Speaker 1: is a little bit risk seeking, and so he decided
Speaker 1: to wear his Red Sox hat to this game. Even
Speaker 1: just getting off at the subway station was already a
Speaker 1: bunch of jokes and ribbing and look at this guy.
Speaker 1: And what was really interesting to me, though, was that
Speaker 1: it seemed very good hearted at first, right, it was
Speaker 1: just sort of people acting the script. But as the
Speaker 1: game wore on, the score got closer and closer, and
Speaker 1: the entire stadium grew tense, the banter stopped being playful,
Speaker 1: and Carrie wasn't reacting well. So at some point I decided,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take the hat from him, because I
Speaker 1: don't want him to get into a fist fight here,
Speaker 1: so I didn't have anywhere to put this hat, so
Speaker 1: I put it on my own head, thinking I'm not
Speaker 1: a fan of either team. I really couldn't care less
Speaker 1: about this. No one's gonna talk to me, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna say anything. And I couldn't have been more wrong
Speaker 1: about that assumption. So the second I put on the hat,
Speaker 1: people started calling me names. They started telling me about
Speaker 1: my mother, They started saying, oh manner of horrible things
Speaker 1: about me. But there was a second assumption Mina was
Speaker 1: wrong about. She thought if she got taunted, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: bother her. But within minutes of putting on that Red
Speaker 1: Sox cap, Mina found herself screaming at Yankee fans in
Speaker 1: the seats all around her. My husband actually had to
Speaker 1: put himself between me and this other guy. And this
Speaker 1: experience gave me this incredible insight, which was that by
Speaker 1: virtue of marking myself as a member of Red Sox Nation,
Speaker 1: I started to get treated that way. And once I
Speaker 1: started to receive that treatment, I started to react on
Speaker 1: behalf of Red Zox Nation. Mina had unwittingly fallen prey
Speaker 1: to some of the most dangerous forces in all of
Speaker 1: human nature our inter group biases. So it's that shift
Speaker 1: that happens when you approach an idea or an interaction
Speaker 1: not through the lens of me and you, but rather
Speaker 1: through the lens of us and them. As humans, we
Speaker 1: naturally divide the world into end groups and out groups,
Speaker 1: and not just on sports fields, we also do so
Speaker 1: across political, ethnic, racial, national, and ideological lines as well.
Speaker 1: The bonding we get from being part of a group
Speaker 1: can sometimes feel good. It can make us feel connected,
Speaker 1: like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, but our
Speaker 1: partisan urges can also cause us to feel pretty miserable.
Speaker 1: They can steal opportunities to make meaningful connections with people
Speaker 1: who are different from us. They can make us feel
Speaker 1: angry at the other side and cause us to engage
Speaker 1: in nasty, sometimes even violent behaviors, and our tendency towards
Speaker 1: us versus them thinking has even led to much worse
Speaker 1: outcomes than a dip in our personal happiness. These urges
Speaker 1: hinder important progress in politics. They can fuel lethal racist violence,
Speaker 1: deadly ethnic conflicts, and some of the worst atrocities human
Speaker 1: history has ever seen. By some counts, over two hundred
Speaker 1: million civilians, not soldiers. Civilians perished in the last century
Speaker 1: as a result of large scale group violence. So, in
Speaker 1: a time when our society is feeling more divided than ever,
Speaker 1: what can we do to avoid all the anger and bitterness?
Speaker 1: What can we do to fight the intergroup biases that
Speaker 1: lead to so much unhappiness? These are the very, very
Speaker 1: hard issues that will try to tackle scientifically in this
Speaker 1: season's final two episodes of The Happiness lab Our. Minds
Speaker 1: are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
Speaker 1: But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
Speaker 1: minds are lying to us, leading us away from old
Speaker 1: make us happy? The good news is that understanding the
Speaker 1: science of the mind can point us all back in
Speaker 1: the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with
Speaker 1: Doctor Laurie Santos. We left Mina's story with her screaming uncontrollably,
Speaker 1: having to be restrained by her boyfriend from squaring off
Speaker 1: with people she'd never met, her passions inflamed by a
Speaker 1: game she had zero interest in just hours before. It
Speaker 1: may sound crazy that one little red sox hat could
Speaker 1: cause all that trouble, but yet happened and was actually
Speaker 1: the impetus for my dissertation. Mina is now a professor
Speaker 1: of psychology at Harvard University. She's become a world expert
Speaker 1: on the neural underpinnings of our intergroup biases. As we
Speaker 1: got to talking, I learned that Mina's unfortunate foray into
Speaker 1: Red Sox fandom wasn't the first time she'd seen the
Speaker 1: dark side of our US versus them, thinking my dad
Speaker 1: is Serbian, my mom is Bossi, and my entire family
Speaker 1: is from former Yugoslavia. Mina and her parents moved to
Speaker 1: the United States in the nineteen eighties, but her extended
Speaker 1: families stayed in former Yugoslavia as her homeland descended into
Speaker 1: bloody civil war. You know, I would hear these harrowing
Speaker 1: stories of people who had been neighbors for decades, who
Speaker 1: had raised their children together, they had been friends, they
Speaker 1: had been in each other's weddings, and basically, when things
Speaker 1: took a turn politically, they turned on each other and
Speaker 1: murdered one another or tried to murder one another. And
Speaker 1: this was really, I mean, horrifying, but also really fascinating
Speaker 1: to me, in part because what it revealed to me
Speaker 1: was how quickly these dynamics can change. The speed with
Speaker 1: which our group instincts can lead to all out violence
Speaker 1: is especially shocking because generally speaking, humans really don't like
Speaker 1: doing bad things to one another. Laurie, did you punch
Speaker 1: somebody today? I have not punched somebody today. It's been
Speaker 1: a good day. Have you punched anyone in the last month? No?
Speaker 1: In fact, okay, how about the last year? Actually no,
Speaker 1: I'm a kind of non puncher most of the time. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1: And what's really interesting about this is that there seemed
Speaker 1: to be very strong moral prohibitions against harm that guide
Speaker 1: most people's behavior most of the time. Decades and decades
Speaker 1: of psychological research show that we really don't like doing
Speaker 1: mean stuff. One study by the neuroscientist Molly Crockett found
Speaker 1: that participants were more reluctant to administer an electric shock
Speaker 1: to a stranger than they were to shock themselves. Harvard
Speaker 1: psychologist Fiery Cushman found that people even get queasy when
Speaker 1: they pretend to harm other people. He had his subjects
Speaker 1: point a toy gun in someone's face or smash the
Speaker 1: skull of a realistic looking plastic baby. Cushman found that
Speaker 1: even though people knew these mean actions were fake, they
Speaker 1: still showed a strong physiological reaction to doing them. They
Speaker 1: had an increased heart rate and other bodily signs of arousal,
Speaker 1: and participants showed these physiological reactions more when performing the
Speaker 1: fake actions themselves versus watching a similar action being performed
Speaker 1: by somebody else. We just hate doing mean stuff, and
Speaker 1: yet every day we see videos of people doing violent
Speaker 1: things to strangers who've done them no harm. So that's
Speaker 1: this puzzle, and what it suggests is that there had
Speaker 1: to be certain preconditions or certain factors in place in
Speaker 1: order for people to overcome this aversion to harm. Mina
Speaker 1: has spent the last decade studying what leads people down
Speaker 1: this awful road towards actively wanting to hurt members of
Speaker 1: other groups. She's found that the first step is what
Speaker 1: psychologists have christened the intergroup empathy gap. Normally, we feel
Speaker 1: sad when others are sad, and a bit of empathic
Speaker 1: pain when others get hurt, but not always. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense for us to empathize with all people all
Speaker 1: the time, right If we really felt the weight of
Speaker 1: every person in the world, we'd never get out of bed.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that more and more evidence indicates
Speaker 1: that these failures of empathy are particularly likely when targets
Speaker 1: or socially distant, so when they belong to other social
Speaker 1: or ethnic groups. Tons of studies show that we literally
Speaker 1: don't experience the pain of outgroup members the same way
Speaker 1: we do for people in our own group. There's evidence,
Speaker 1: for example, that white doctors are less likely to prescribe
Speaker 1: pain medication to their black patients, and even when such
Speaker 1: pain reducers are prescribed, they're given in lower quantities. Are
Speaker 1: indifference to other groups pain I mean that even doctors can,
Speaker 1: intovert only cause people who are unlike them to suffer
Speaker 1: more than is necessary. But an absence of empathy still
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we're cool with knowingly causing bad things
Speaker 1: to happen to other people. To do that, we need
Speaker 1: to take the next troubling step on that dangerous inner
Speaker 1: group path, one that's summed up by a German word
Speaker 1: schadenfreude literally harm joy. Schadenfreude really specifically refers to the
Speaker 1: malicious pleasure that people feel when they see another person suffering. Oftentimes,
Speaker 1: if you just don't like someone, if you perceive that
Speaker 1: someone has acted in an unjust way, if they're deserving,
Speaker 1: or if you envied them that these would all be
Speaker 1: precursors for feeling pleasure when you saw that person suffer misfortune.
Speaker 1: But Mina wanted to know, as schadenfreude could also be
Speaker 1: at the root of between group conflicts too. Would it
Speaker 1: be enough just to know that someone came from a
Speaker 1: different group in order to be able to engender this
Speaker 1: kind of aggressive, malicious pleasure. Human history has shown us
Speaker 1: that it's surprisingly easy to get people to feel schadenfreude
Speaker 1: towards outgroup members. Sports is this great microcosm in which
Speaker 1: to study these dynamics, because people not only feel allowed,
Speaker 1: but emboldened to say really horrible things about the outgroup.
Speaker 1: So what we realize is if we could just tap
Speaker 1: into individuals who identified as sports fans, that maybe we
Speaker 1: could get some honest responding when we just asked them,
Speaker 1: how good does it make you feel to see this
Speaker 1: bad thing happened to these other folks? Mina recruited, of course,
Speaker 1: Red Sox and Yankees fans. She stuck them inside a
Speaker 1: brain scanner and showed them cartoon versions of baseball plays
Speaker 1: involving lots of different teams, but on theical trials the
Speaker 1: ones Mina was really interested in. They got to watch
Speaker 1: good and bad things happen to their arrivals. What we
Speaker 1: found was that watching your rival fail engaged several different
Speaker 1: brain regions, but the only one that was associated with
Speaker 1: just how much pleasure participants said that they felt was
Speaker 1: this region called the ventral stri item. The ventral stri
Speaker 1: item is part of our brain's rewards her kuit, but
Speaker 1: this region doesn't just register, Hey, that event felt really good.
Speaker 1: It's also critically involved in learning. That means that when
Speaker 1: the ventral stri item is activated, it helps us decide
Speaker 1: how we personally should behave in the future. It notes
Speaker 1: when there's a surprising positive event in the environment and says, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's come back to taking the action that brought that
Speaker 1: event about, because that's going to be the thing that's
Speaker 1: going to be rewarding in the future. Mina's Red Sox
Speaker 1: fans were starting to make a mental connection between that
Speaker 1: great schadenfreud of feeling and the possibility that they could
Speaker 1: use their own personal behaviors to cause that nice feeling again,
Speaker 1: perhaps by actively harming someone else. Those participants who exhibited
Speaker 1: that much more ventral straight le activation in response to
Speaker 1: watching their rival fail were the same people who told
Speaker 1: me two weeks later that they would be that much
Speaker 1: more likely to heckle, hit, and insult a rival fan.
Speaker 1: So that for me established this suggestive link between the
Speaker 1: sort of pleasure of watching out group failure or harm
Speaker 1: and potentially the likelihood that it was related to your
Speaker 1: own desire to become the agent of harm and other circumstances.
Speaker 1: And these awful dynamics don't just play out on sports fields.
Speaker 1: The same processes are at least partially at work in
Speaker 1: settings where people engage in more large scale violence. Think
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing like Mina's family experienced in Yugoslavia, or hate
Speaker 1: crimes against marginalized groups, or the long legacy of lethal
Speaker 1: violence that law enforcement personnel have inflicted on black people
Speaker 1: in the United States. The processes Mina has observed in
Speaker 1: her baseball fans likely contribute to the many acts of
Speaker 1: racist violence we see in the news, shockingly often, especially
Speaker 1: in cases where there are structural features in place to
Speaker 1: help inflame our sense of competition and increase our fear
Speaker 1: of the other side. Now understanding the processes that lead
Speaker 1: to these violent acts, of course, doesn't excuse them. I
Speaker 1: want to be super clear on that point, but Mina's
Speaker 1: work is incredibly important here because it shows just how
Speaker 1: easily situational and structural factors can lead otherwise non violent
Speaker 1: people towards brutal actions. To mean, the most striking thing
Speaker 1: about schadenferda is not that it happens, but how quickly
Speaker 1: we can shift from empathy or indifference to taking pleasure
Speaker 1: and other people's pains, and that there are cases in
Speaker 1: which out group harm appears to be driven by the
Speaker 1: sheer hedonic benefit. It just feels good, and I find
Speaker 1: that totally fascinating. Now, there are lots and lots of
Speaker 1: structural changes needed to stop the large scale inner group
Speaker 1: violence we see all over the world, but Mina's work
Speaker 1: suggests that we might also be able to intervene psychologically
Speaker 1: to curb at least some parts of these often lethal
Speaker 1: downward cycles. And as is often the case in the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab, part of the solution might involve recognizing the
Speaker 1: mistakes our minds are making All the time. I've been
Speaker 1: talking a lot about how competition is doing quite a
Speaker 1: bit of work in these contexts, right, and I think
Speaker 1: that a huge part of conflict escalation is actually a
Speaker 1: mistake that we make in inner group contexts, which is
Speaker 1: that we don't deal with the person in front of us. Instead,
Speaker 1: what we're doing is we're dealing with some idea, some models,
Speaker 1: some stereotype of who they are. When we get back
Speaker 1: from the break, we'll examine how we can turn off
Speaker 1: our intergroup empathy gap and do so in a way
Speaker 1: that can not only make us happier but also holds
Speaker 1: the promise of helping us to make society a kinder
Speaker 1: and less polarized place. The Happiness lab will be right back.
Speaker 1: I'm very worried. I think that there are lots of
Speaker 1: trends that are pushing us away from what is really
Speaker 1: our truer natural state, which is to be interconnected with
Speaker 1: each other. That said, I'm not fatalistic, right, I think
Speaker 1: that there are things we can do to push back.
Speaker 1: This is my friend Jamie Zaki, a professor of psychology
Speaker 1: at Stanford University. Jamil has just written an important new
Speaker 1: book called The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a
Speaker 1: Fractured World. That used to be called Choosing Empathy, which
Speaker 1: now is the title of one of the chapters. I
Speaker 1: started writing it in twenty fifteen and I don't know.
Speaker 1: Around late twenty sixteen early twenty seventeen, I can't quite
Speaker 1: put my finger on what it was, but something changed
Speaker 1: in our culture. I felt like things were getting crueler
Speaker 1: and less connected, and people were getting really exhausted with
Speaker 1: trying to connect with each other and really embracing social
Speaker 1: division in a way that I hadn't seen in my
Speaker 1: adult life. I felt like I was being a Pollyanna,
Speaker 1: just writing this kind of positive hey, you know, you
Speaker 1: can choose empathy too, when all around me it seemed
Speaker 1: like this giant tire fire where people just hated each
Speaker 1: other more than ever, And it felt to me like
Speaker 1: I needed and wanted to acknowledge that to be empathic,
Speaker 1: to choose empathy is a radical choice in today's culture.
Speaker 1: It is a fight against other forces that are pushing
Speaker 1: us in the opposite direction. Jimmiale wants us to get
Speaker 1: pissed off at the current polarized state of society and
Speaker 1: to take up arms for a coming battle, but his
Speaker 1: war doesn't involve weapons or the usual inner group bloodshed.
Speaker 1: Jamil wants us to fight divisiveness and our ever increasing
Speaker 1: sense of disconnection. He wants each and every one of
Speaker 1: us to commit to being kinder to one another. If
Speaker 1: you've paid any attention to the news in the last
Speaker 1: few years, you understand that Jimmiale's war for kindness is
Speaker 1: becoming more and more of an uphill battle. A growing
Speaker 1: body of work shows the empathy in general seems to
Speaker 1: be decreasing over time. One study presented people with a
Speaker 1: series of statements and asked them how well it described them,
Speaker 1: on a scale from one not at all to five
Speaker 1: fits you perfectly. The statements were things like I often
Speaker 1: have tender, concerned feelings for people who are less fortunate
Speaker 1: than me, and when I'm upset at someone, I usually
Speaker 1: try to put myself in their shoes for a while.
Speaker 1: And what they found was that in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: the average Americans scored like a four out of five,
Speaker 1: which sounds not terrible, maybe a B. But by two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, the average American dropped down to a
Speaker 1: three point five out of five. So, to put that
Speaker 1: in perspective, the average American in two thousand and nine
Speaker 1: less empathic by this measure than seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: Americans just thirty years before. This rising level of disconnection
Speaker 1: means that more and more of us are missing out
Speaker 1: on a potential boost to our well being. It's surprising
Speaker 1: to a lot of people that empathy is good for
Speaker 1: us the empathizer, right. We typically think of it almost
Speaker 1: like a transfer, like I give up my money or
Speaker 1: time or emotional peace in order to help you have
Speaker 1: more of it. It's sort of the quintessential act of
Speaker 1: self sacrifice. It turns out, though, that the data point
Speaker 1: almost exactly in the opposite direction, that caring for others
Speaker 1: is one of the most important ways we can care
Speaker 1: for ourselves. People who experience a lot of empathy also
Speaker 1: tend to be happier, less stressed, and experience less depression.
Speaker 1: They find it easier to make new friends and to
Speaker 1: maintain important relationships like their marriages. Seventh Graders who are
Speaker 1: able to understand what others feel are also better able
Speaker 1: to survive seventh grade, which is not easy. If my
Speaker 1: recollection serves, the false intuition that empathic work reduces our
Speaker 1: happiness is hard to shake. Jamil saw this himself when
Speaker 1: he taught a class of stamper called Becoming Kinder. So
Speaker 1: every weekend I would give students these kindness challenges, these
Speaker 1: little practical assignments meant to help push them to empathize more,
Speaker 1: and one of the very first ones that we did
Speaker 1: was spend on someone else. So in a moment when
Speaker 1: you don't feel like you have enough time or energy
Speaker 1: for yourself, do the thing that doesn't come naturally to
Speaker 1: you and help someone else instead. And the students were
Speaker 1: really worried about this because it was midterm season. It
Speaker 1: feels like it's always midterm season. It's always been term season,
Speaker 1: It's somehow always midterm season. But they were freaked out.
Speaker 1: They were overwhelmed, and they thought, God, I don't have
Speaker 1: the time to do stuff for other people. And reliably,
Speaker 1: they came back from that challenge feeling like I was
Speaker 1: shocked because after I helped someone else, I didn't feel depleted.
Speaker 1: I felt energized. I kind of felt like, if I
Speaker 1: can do for someone else, then I must be doing
Speaker 1: okay myself. When we don't take actions that could make
Speaker 1: the people around us feel better, when we don't check
Speaker 1: in with friends or notice of a co worker is
Speaker 1: in pain, or stop to aid a stranger, it means
Speaker 1: we're each contributing to that tire fire culture Jamil talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, but Jamie's work shows that doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be the case. Another trick that our minds play on
Speaker 1: us and that our culture plays on us, is convincing
Speaker 1: us that we can't change. I think there's this big
Speaker 1: stereotype that some people are empathic, some people are not,
Speaker 1: and whatever level of empathy you have, it's like your
Speaker 1: adult height or your eye color, you'll have it for life.
Speaker 1: But I think that the evidence actually again point in
Speaker 1: the opposite direction. There are things we can do to
Speaker 1: push back. I mean, the fact that empathy has declined
Speaker 1: so much in the last thirty years means that it's malleable.
Speaker 1: Things that go down can come up. And I think
Speaker 1: that one of the first things that I want people
Speaker 1: to understand is that empathy is under our control more
Speaker 1: than we realize. There are specific strategies each of us
Speaker 1: can use today to increase our empathy, and not just
Speaker 1: in a parochial w where we extend kindness only to
Speaker 1: the people who are like us. The science says we
Speaker 1: can turn up compassion to fight the dangerous intergroup empathy
Speaker 1: gaps that plague our culture, and that we may even
Speaker 1: be able to use some of these strategies to start
Speaker 1: reducing the biggest and most painful divides in society. We'll
Speaker 1: examine all these exciting possibilities when the Happiness lab returns
Speaker 1: in a moment. It turns out that, in fact, empathy
Speaker 1: is like a skill, and there are lots of things
Speaker 1: that we can do to cultivate empathy in ourselves and others.
Speaker 1: When Jamil taught his Becoming Kinder class, he gave his
Speaker 1: students a super hard assignment, an empathy challenge he christened
Speaker 1: disagreeing Better, Oh and welcome back everybody. You can check
Speaker 1: out a version on his website. Find someone with whom
Speaker 1: you have an ideological difference of opinion. But then, instead
Speaker 1: of yelling at each other, or judging each other or
Speaker 1: even debating, I want you to try to cultivate curiosity
Speaker 1: about each other. Ask this person how they came to
Speaker 1: have their opinion in the first place, and share with
Speaker 1: them the story of how you came to have your
Speaker 1: opinion in the first place. Students embarked on hard conversations
Speaker 1: with racist Facebook posting uncles and frank discussions about sexuality
Speaker 1: with their less than progressive parents. They predicted that these
Speaker 1: exchanges would end in frustration or even tears, but in
Speaker 1: nearly all cases those stories sharing conversations went better than expecting.
Speaker 1: When you start with narratives, instead of either calling people
Speaker 1: out or saying how wrong they are, you get to
Speaker 1: a new type of discussion right away, one in which
Speaker 1: it actually doesn't matter as much if you would agree
Speaker 1: on every point. But something just as important, or maybe
Speaker 1: even more important, happens, which is that they grow to
Speaker 1: appreciate that people they disagree with are not necessarily bad people.
Speaker 1: There's just people with different stories than their own. No
Speaker 1: one owes anyone empathy, especially if they're expressing bigoted viewpoints.
Speaker 1: But Jamil says his students were still surprisingly grateful for
Speaker 1: having been given the challenge, because it taught them that
Speaker 1: making connections across seemingly unbridgable divides is actually possible. But
Speaker 1: you might be saying this is just an anecdote from
Speaker 1: one college class of students talking to their family members.
Speaker 1: Is there scientific evidence that sharing stories and empathic work
Speaker 1: like this really does the job? Can connecting over shared
Speaker 1: experiences actually reduce the inner group disconnection we see all
Speaker 1: over the world. Did you vote to allow gay and
Speaker 1: lesbian couples to continue to marry or did you vote
Speaker 1: to a banned gay and lesbian couples from being able
Speaker 1: to marry. Typical political canvassing involves knocking on someone's door
Speaker 1: and launching into a one way conversation filled with facts, figures,
Speaker 1: and strong arguments. This style of canvassing doesn't really work,
Speaker 1: especially when the usual political partisanship tightens its gript. My
Speaker 1: name's Josh Kala. I'm an assistant professor of political science
Speaker 1: and data science at Yale University. People just tune it out.
Speaker 1: They won't engage, they won't pay attention, or they'll argue
Speaker 1: against it. Most people are just such consistently democrat, are
Speaker 1: such consistently Republican, there's often not much room to to
Speaker 1: change someone's mind there. But Josh and his colleagues have
Speaker 1: begun studying the effectiveness of a new kind of canvassing,
Speaker 1: one that can break down our inner group blinders, and
Speaker 1: one that also employs a lot of the same empathic
Speaker 1: practices that Jamie and his students used in that disagreeing
Speaker 1: better assignment. Deep canvassing is a longer form of canvassing
Speaker 1: that really involves sharing personal narratives about an issue. It
Speaker 1: often involves a canvasser sharing a moment in their life
Speaker 1: that is somehow relevant to the issue that's being studied.
Speaker 1: I'm a gay guy. I doubt that totally shocks you,
Speaker 1: and I was in a relationship for eighteen years. Often
Speaker 1: those stories then prompt the voter to share their own
Speaker 1: story when my wife died or whatever, it broke my heart. Well, no,
Speaker 1: it didn't break my art. Put a hole in it
Speaker 1: and it won't be a lot. Yeah, it sounds like
Speaker 1: marriage is incredibly important to you. I was married forty
Speaker 1: seven years, so she'd press you. But what we find
Speaker 1: is that by talking through these stories, the type of
Speaker 1: discrimination that we're trying to reduce becomes much more concrete,
Speaker 1: and it also reduces a lot of fears that the
Speaker 1: voter has towards that out group. It helps them understand
Speaker 1: what does this word transgender actually mean? Or what does
Speaker 1: this word undocumented immigrant actually mean? By walking through the
Speaker 1: life of an undocumented immigrant or a transgender person through
Speaker 1: hearing their story, hearing the canvasser's stories tends to shut
Speaker 1: off the indifference we typically feel for people outside our tribe.
Speaker 1: Deep canvassing also forces the listener to see people from
Speaker 1: unfamiliar groups and with unfamiliar views as people and that
Speaker 1: empathic boost allows deep canvassers to do something that billions
Speaker 1: of dollars of political ads can't. They actually change people's
Speaker 1: minds about controversial political issues. You know this issue is
Speaker 1: going to come up for a vote again in the future,
Speaker 1: vote in favor of allowing gay and muspian couples to
Speaker 1: marry good. Josh's careful field research has found that deep
Speaker 1: canvassing gets about five to seven new supporters for every
Speaker 1: hundred people they talk to. Now that might not sound
Speaker 1: like much, but for ballot measures that are typically one
Speaker 1: are lost by less than five percentage points, deep canvassing
Speaker 1: can make or break the adoption of a progressive new law.
Speaker 1: But what's most impressive about Josh's deep canvassing findings is
Speaker 1: that these persuasion effects last a long long time. Well,
Speaker 1: keep doing those follow up surveys two, three, four or
Speaker 1: five months later, and typically we run out of money
Speaker 1: to run more surveys before the effects dissidate. But aside
Speaker 1: from the policy tis, Josh has also seen how powerful
Speaker 1: deep canvassing can be and empathically connecting people from different identities.
Speaker 1: One of his favorite examples comes from an encounter in Florida,
Speaker 1: during a campaign for trans rights. He was a transgender canvasser,
Speaker 1: and he shows up to a house that has a
Speaker 1: big American flag and a pickup truck, and he's really
Speaker 1: bracing himself for what he expects to be a really
Speaker 1: difficult conversation. The canvas shared his story anyway, He described
Speaker 1: the kinds of prejudice and misunderstanding he faces on a
Speaker 1: near daily basis. He even shared a story about being
Speaker 1: made fun of and called an animal on the New
Speaker 1: York subway. After sharing this story of personal discrimination, he
Speaker 1: asked the person he's canvas, saying, this white, macho pickup
Speaker 1: truck drive in American flag, guy, have you ever faced
Speaker 1: anything like that? The guy he's canvassing really pauses for
Speaker 1: a minute and says, the experiences that you face, a
Speaker 1: discrimination that you face, and people's lack of empathy and understanding,
Speaker 1: it's it's not that different than the experiences that I face.
Speaker 1: I served in Afghanistan. I did two tours there. I
Speaker 1: came back and I had PTSD. People would look at
Speaker 1: me like I was crazy and they wouldn't understand what
Speaker 1: was going on. And what I love about that story
Speaker 1: is it just questioned so many of the assumptions that
Speaker 1: we all make, and shows that again, if we're patient,
Speaker 1: if we question those assumptions, if we're vulnerable and try
Speaker 1: and listen and share our share our experiences, we can
Speaker 1: be successful at changing minds. Jamil is a huge fan
Speaker 1: of Josh's deep canvassing work because it provides a wonderful
Speaker 1: example of the central claim in his War for Kindness book,
Speaker 1: the empathy is a skill we can build over time,
Speaker 1: a tool we can use to do some amazing things
Speaker 1: if and when we have the bandwidth to use it.
Speaker 1: I think our culture right now includes a lot of
Speaker 1: threat at home, online, outside. We're constantly feel as though
Speaker 1: there are people who threaten our identity, who threaten our
Speaker 1: way of life, who threatened our beliefs, and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say that that's untrue. And although it's easy
Speaker 1: and natural to engage in I guess what you'd call
Speaker 1: call out culture right so just sort of attacking people
Speaker 1: who have toxic or problematic attitudes. I think the hard
Speaker 1: but often very productive thing to do is to be
Speaker 1: the person who takes that first step, who puts their
Speaker 1: guard down and decides to be vulnerable. And Jamille himself
Speaker 1: recognizes just how hard that first step can be. It
Speaker 1: can be really exhausting to try to empathize with people
Speaker 1: who are different from us, especially if they have opinions
Speaker 1: that we might fear or ab or now. I try
Speaker 1: really hard to be an understanding person, and I truly
Speaker 1: believe in the importance of Jamie's battle for kindness. But
Speaker 1: almost every day I see some view online that makes
Speaker 1: me see red. When people seem to be so hateful,
Speaker 1: it's really really hard for me to see them is
Speaker 1: deserving of my compassion or my emotional energy. I was
Speaker 1: surprised that the guy who literally wrote the book on
Speaker 1: empathy got exactly what I was saying. Trust me, I
Speaker 1: feel that way all the time. I still remember where
Speaker 1: the New York Times had this whole, very sympathetic portrayal
Speaker 1: of a family in Illinois that happened to be Nazis,
Speaker 1: and I remember a detail where they were trying to
Speaker 1: humanize this family by talking about how they cooked their pasta,
Speaker 1: and I just remember thinking, I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: about your Nazi pasta. You know, I don't want to
Speaker 1: humanize you. It's exhausting to connect, and it's especially exhausting
Speaker 1: to connect with people who say things that are awful
Speaker 1: and that don't really deserve a platform. So I think
Speaker 1: it's perfectly okay for people to think about what they
Speaker 1: have the energy for, what they have the space for,
Speaker 1: and no one should feel like they're obligated to connect
Speaker 1: with or empathize with somebody who's saying off things. Now,
Speaker 1: no one has to do this, it's not anybody's job.
Speaker 1: But when we do, it's remarkable how powerful that can be,
Speaker 1: because sometimes what you realize is that people on the
Speaker 1: other side are also waiting for a chance to be human.
Speaker 1: Despite the uphill battle, Jamil is optimistic that his war
Speaker 1: for kindness is gaining new recruits. I've received hundreds of
Speaker 1: emails that are something along the lines of I am
Speaker 1: so fed up with this culture of division. I want
Speaker 1: more empathy in the world. But I'm the only one,
Speaker 1: and I'm almost like, can I put you all in
Speaker 1: a group chat or something? Is there like so many
Speaker 1: of you and I think we often feel alone, like
Speaker 1: we are the only ones swimming upstream against a culture
Speaker 1: of hatred and division and isolation. But I think it's
Speaker 1: really shocking how powerful it can be to take the
Speaker 1: first step to be that change instead of waiting for it,
Speaker 1: because when we take a step towards listening to others,
Speaker 1: towards being vulnerable with them, oftentimes we find that they're
Speaker 1: ready to do the same thing. And I think that
Speaker 1: each one of us does that, that can change our lives,
Speaker 1: and it can change the lives of people around us,
Speaker 1: maybe even save lives. The thing that really inspires me
Speaker 1: is what could happen if a lot of us did that,
Speaker 1: if most of us did that, because then we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be changing lives when at a time we'd have the
Speaker 1: chance to actually change our entire culture. I try to
Speaker 1: be an optimistic person, but right now, in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: the idea that our entire culture will change for the
Speaker 1: better seems a pretty distant hope. So much about how
Speaker 1: our institutions work seems to be wrong, and the flaws
Speaker 1: in these systems lead to prejudice, cruelty, and injustice, and
Speaker 1: lots of people don't seem to realize that the burden
Speaker 1: of all these awful things continues to hurt some marginalized
Speaker 1: groups more than others. Seeing all this makes me really
Speaker 1: sad and angry at the groups I feel are responsible.
Speaker 1: I hate the injustice. I hate the divisions, and I
Speaker 1: hate the heat. Even on my best days, it's hard
Speaker 1: not to lose hope that I personally can make any
Speaker 1: difference in these historic problems. But I don't want to
Speaker 1: just retreat to my end group, and I don't want
Speaker 1: to empathize with only people who are exactly like me,
Speaker 1: nor gload at the pain and misfortune of those who
Speaker 1: hold different views or who've lived different lives. So I'm
Speaker 1: now committing to trying to follow Jamille's advice. I'm going
Speaker 1: to remember that the science shows my intuitions are wrong,
Speaker 1: that if I try to take the first step and
Speaker 1: put my guard down, at least in those cases where
Speaker 1: I have the emotional bandwidth to do so, it might
Speaker 1: be more effective than I think. Rather than only seeing
Speaker 1: someone as a member of an identity I disagree with,
Speaker 1: I'll try to connect a bit better. I'll ask people
Speaker 1: to share their stories, and if they'll listen, I'll share
Speaker 1: my own. But like Jamille, I also want to make
Speaker 1: sure that all this empathic labor is a bit more
Speaker 1: evenly distributed, that the hard work of deep connection doesn't
Speaker 1: just fall to historically marginalized groups who've long been on
Speaker 1: the receiving side of all the injustice, These are the
Speaker 1: folks who are least likely to have the needed emotional
Speaker 1: bandwidth to make connections. I also want to make sure
Speaker 1: that we're distributing the work of correcting these injustices a
Speaker 1: little more fairly, and that the blind spots of our
Speaker 1: mind don't prevent well intentioned people like me from inadvertently
Speaker 1: making all those structural inequalities worse. And so when The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab returns next time, we'll tackle all these issues directly.
Speaker 1: In our next episode, How to Be a Better Ally,
Speaker 1: We'll hear what the science says about how you can
Speaker 1: fight the structures that lead to some of society's worst injustices,
Speaker 1: and how the lives of our mind sometimes cause good
Speaker 1: people to unknowingly make things worse. We'll also see that
Speaker 1: using evidence based strategies for becoming a better ally can
Speaker 1: not only boost your own personal well being, but more importantly,
Speaker 1: can make us more effective and contribute positively to the
Speaker 1: causes we care about most. And so I hope you'll
Speaker 1: return next week to hear the final season two episode
Speaker 1: of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
Speaker 1: mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped
Speaker 1: with production. Joseph Fridman checked our facts and our editing
Speaker 1: was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon. Special thanks to Mel LaBelle,
Speaker 1: Carl mcgliori, Heather Fain, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kani,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos