Speaker 1: Pushkin. As a super busy professor, it's rare that I
Speaker 1: have time to truly get addicted to a new TV
Speaker 1: show or podcast. To be really bingeworthy for me, a
Speaker 1: new show has to be exciting, surprising, so captivating that
Speaker 1: I simply can't stay away. And since I really like
Speaker 1: learning new stuff, it usually has to teach me something important.
Speaker 1: And that's the reason I decided to share this special
Speaker 1: bonus episode with you today, because I recently have become
Speaker 1: totally addicted to just such a podcast. It's a new
Speaker 1: show called Bad Women, hosted by the amazing historian Hallie Rubinholt.
Speaker 1: Bad Woman is a show devoted to understanding more about
Speaker 1: the lives of the women who were murdered by Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper. Now from that description, you might be thinking, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is some new true crime thing that Laurie's gotten
Speaker 1: obsessed with, but that's not actually what the show is about.
Speaker 1: What Bad Women really tackles is the mystery behind why
Speaker 1: the Ripper's victims wound up in his path in the
Speaker 1: first place. What are the sociological factors that put them
Speaker 1: in harm's way, and what is it about our minds
Speaker 1: that prevents us from empathizing with these women and countless
Speaker 1: others who face poverty and injustice in the modern world today.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to Hallie about these mysteries and
Speaker 1: what they mean for our own psychology and even for
Speaker 1: our own happiness. I also wanted Hallie to tell me
Speaker 1: the strategies she uses to face these awful injustices head on.
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand how someone could study these dark
Speaker 1: topics and stay optimistic, because that, in particular seems like
Speaker 1: a strategy that we all need, especially nowadays. But before
Speaker 1: we jump in, I also wanted you to get a
Speaker 1: sense of the show and why it is so captivating
Speaker 1: in catchy and so here's a quick listen to the
Speaker 1: Bad Women trailer. It's a bad habit we have. We
Speaker 1: tell the tale of the murderer and not the murdered.
Speaker 1: The clock on Whitechapel Church was striking half past two
Speaker 1: when Ellen Holland watched her friend Polly Nichols sway off
Speaker 1: into the darkness. Polly was drunk, penniless and broken. She
Speaker 1: was inconsequential in the minds of most people she met,
Speaker 1: but she was about to cross paths was someone who
Speaker 1: would give her a grisly, unenviable place in history. In
Speaker 1: the autumn of eighteen eighty eight, Polly and four other
Speaker 1: women were brutally killed in a slum neighborhood of London.
Speaker 1: Their unsolved murders were so violent, so cruel, that their
Speaker 1: killer earned a nickname that is still known the world over.
Speaker 1: Armed down on halls, shann't quick ripping them Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 1: But in the greatest cold case in history, few of
Speaker 1: us have stopped to question the basic facts. One fact
Speaker 1: that you know about Jack the Ripper that he never
Speaker 1: got caught and who did he kill? Prostitutes? I'm Hallie
Speaker 1: Ribbinhold as a historian interested in the stories of women.
Speaker 1: I'd assume the lives of the five victims had been
Speaker 1: thoroughly researched long ago. I was wrong. When I dug
Speaker 1: into the records. I began to reveal rich and interesting lives.
Speaker 1: Most of the time mellmen leave if they're being beaten
Speaker 1: to a pulp or he put out an eye. Lives
Speaker 1: blighted by problems and prejudices. Most women today would recognize.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a great deal of sympathy for alcoholics, so
Speaker 1: one had to sign a temperance pledge saying I will
Speaker 1: not drink if only a tourist so simple. I identified
Speaker 1: with the women, sympathized with the tough life choices they made,
Speaker 1: and admired their determination. She gets on the boat and
Speaker 1: comes to England. She seeks wider horizons. I came to
Speaker 1: know them and like them. She wants more than she's
Speaker 1: been born into. But I also discovered something else, something new,
Speaker 1: something troubling. It was just so obvious to me the
Speaker 1: very first time I looked at this file. How could
Speaker 1: we have gotten this this wrong for this many years?
Speaker 1: And something that chips away at the foundations of the
Speaker 1: Ripper myth? Nam Sure, all of you here today, do
Speaker 1: you know that Jack's sectims were ladies of the night,
Speaker 1: weren't they? They were forced to choose the myth still
Speaker 1: served up by tour guides to visitors who flocked the
Speaker 1: murder scenes each evening. And now, ladies, you might be thinking, well,
Speaker 1: I'd never think that work ever, but didn't Okay, Well, sadly,
Speaker 1: the answer is yes. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Katherine, and Mary
Speaker 1: Jane were not killed while selling sex. It was other,
Speaker 1: no less troubling factors that put them in the path
Speaker 1: of their murderer. In this podcast, I'll tell you how
Speaker 1: I know that and why it still matters very much
Speaker 1: even today, Halle has upset the world of rippology by
Speaker 1: her general attitude towards RiPP rologists. I'll also explain why
Speaker 1: my research has enraged so many people who claim to
Speaker 1: be experts in the Ripper case. The attacks have just
Speaker 1: been relentless and malicious. But actually I think they just
Speaker 1: don't really want other people talking about the murdered women
Speaker 1: and challenging their views in any way. If you want
Speaker 1: to know how we got the Ripper story so wrong,
Speaker 1: what those mistakes tell us about ourselves, and why putting
Speaker 1: the record straight make some people so very angry, join me,
Speaker 1: Hallie Rubbin Holt for Bad Women The Ripper Retold starting
Speaker 1: October fifth, wherever you get your podcasts. So, Hallie, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being on the show. Thank you
Speaker 1: for having me. I mean, when I first heard that
Speaker 1: Pushkin was doing a podcast about the women who were
Speaker 1: murdered by Jack the Ripper, I kind of had this
Speaker 1: assumption it was like the standard true crime podcast, and
Speaker 1: then when I listened to it, I realize that that's
Speaker 1: not really what the show is actually about. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, talk about this misconception. Well, yes, I mean
Speaker 1: it is about a lot more than that. It's largely
Speaker 1: about the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: which have been completely overlooked, and we look at a
Speaker 1: lot of issues that come out of their lives. So
Speaker 1: issue about addiction, for example, issues about homelessness, issues about
Speaker 1: violence against women, all of these things, because they're so
Speaker 1: integrated into the story and the way we tell the
Speaker 1: traditional story of Jack the Ripper. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that I found so striking about this is that
Speaker 1: all of these injustices you've just mentioned, you know, violence
Speaker 1: against women, you know, poverty, addiction, these are things that
Speaker 1: we're facing today and they're the kinds of things that
Speaker 1: we just haven't really dealt with. And so, without giving
Speaker 1: away too many spoilers, give me a sense of how
Speaker 1: some of these things played out in Victorian times and
Speaker 1: with some of the women who were the Ripper's victims. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, people very much in the past were trapped
Speaker 1: in a poverty cycle similar to poverty cycles that people
Speaker 1: in the present are trapped in. So that if you
Speaker 1: were born into a family that doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of money, doesn't have a lot of resources, your opportunities
Speaker 1: in life are going to be very limited. And this
Speaker 1: was even more so the case for working class women
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. Poor women didn't have access to
Speaker 1: education in the way that people of wealth had it
Speaker 1: or men. Women couldn't actually make careers for themselves in
Speaker 1: the professions because the professions weren't open to women, because
Speaker 1: it was believed that a woman's only role in society
Speaker 1: was to be a mother, a wife, a care She
Speaker 1: wasn't a breadwinner, she couldn't have a life of her own.
Speaker 1: And because of that, if something went terribly wrong in
Speaker 1: a woman's life and she didn't have a man to
Speaker 1: support her, she had no way of earning an income.
Speaker 1: She fell into this poverty trap and had to rely
Speaker 1: on going to the workhouse, begging, taking very menial jobs
Speaker 1: that weren't designed to pay her very much. And so
Speaker 1: things were much more difficult if you were a woman.
Speaker 1: And so, I mean these injustices you talk about, I mean,
Speaker 1: the workhouse has just sounds so scary and awful. You
Speaker 1: do such a good job of making sounds so terrifying
Speaker 1: in their podcast. But all of these injustice is the
Speaker 1: thing that I found most striking was the fact that
Speaker 1: all of these women faced this kind of final injustice,
Speaker 1: which is they died at the hand of some horrible
Speaker 1: serial killer, and everyone thinks it was like their fault,
Speaker 1: you know, Oh they were just prostitutes, or oh they
Speaker 1: were addicts and so on. So talk about this kind
Speaker 1: of final injustice, right. Yeah. In the Victorian era, the
Speaker 1: belief that somehow these women deserved what they got was
Speaker 1: part of a narrative which was designed to keep people
Speaker 1: in their place. So it was believed that bad women
Speaker 1: got what they deserved. So here were women who contravened
Speaker 1: the norm for what a woman was supposed to do
Speaker 1: in her life. These were women who had no families,
Speaker 1: or they'd left their families behind. They didn't have a
Speaker 1: proper roof over their heads, they didn't have a husband
Speaker 1: to look after them or a father, and often they
Speaker 1: were reliant upon drink. They were failures as women. And
Speaker 1: because they were failures as women, it was believed, well,
Speaker 1: this is what happens when you're not a good woman.
Speaker 1: You get killed in a terrible, terrible way. And so
Speaker 1: basically this narrative propped up a lot of belief systems
Speaker 1: in the Victorian era. At that time. The problem is
Speaker 1: that we have never really questioned this, and I think
Speaker 1: in a lot of mythologizing about the past, we just
Speaker 1: don't question these sets of ideas that we are really bequeathed.
Speaker 1: You know, we just repeat them, we parrot them, and
Speaker 1: imparroting them. We kind of acquiesce in a lot of
Speaker 1: the morality and the belief systems that pre existed, which
Speaker 1: are of no use to us anymore. And you know,
Speaker 1: I would be lying if I said that we live
Speaker 1: in a society where it's not believed that bad women
Speaker 1: are the ones who get punished. Every time a woman
Speaker 1: goes out at night and is murdered, the first question
Speaker 1: that is asked is, well, why was she out, what
Speaker 1: was wearing? What did she do to incur this? And
Speaker 1: that shouldn't be the question we're asking. The funny thing,
Speaker 1: or the interesting thing for me is a psychologist, is
Speaker 1: that the fact that we ask this question might be
Speaker 1: and part because of some of these biases of the mind. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's true that this kind of fit with the Victorian
Speaker 1: narrative at the time of kind of keeping women in line,
Speaker 1: but this might also just be a deep and pretty
Speaker 1: awful part of our human nature like it tends to
Speaker 1: fit with a couple of the psychological biases that we
Speaker 1: talk about in cognitive science. One of them which is
Speaker 1: so interesting is this bias known as the fundamental attribution error.
Speaker 1: And the fundamental attribution error is that even though when
Speaker 1: I think about my behavior, I usually try to explain
Speaker 1: it using specific situations like oh, I drank too much
Speaker 1: because I was having a bad day, or you know,
Speaker 1: I for about my keys in the car because you know,
Speaker 1: I was like really stressed or something. When we look
Speaker 1: at other people's behavior, we assume that their behavior is
Speaker 1: the result of their personality traits or their moral traits,
Speaker 1: not situations. Right, So if you had a friend, you know,
Speaker 1: a co worker who comes into work and says, oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, you know, my car just got broken into.
Speaker 1: I'd left my person you might say like, oh, she's
Speaker 1: so absent minded, why would she leave her purse in
Speaker 1: the car, Or like, oh, that's just kind of fits
Speaker 1: with her, like she just doesn't treat her stuff well
Speaker 1: or something like that. You wouldn't think, Oh, maybe her
Speaker 1: kid was sick, or maybe she was really stressed, or
Speaker 1: maybe she had a bad day. Right, when you attribute
Speaker 1: other people's behaviors to things. We don't tend to think
Speaker 1: in terms of the circumstances. We tend to think in
Speaker 1: terms of their personality traits. And I see this written
Speaker 1: large in the stories you talk about, right. I just
Speaker 1: listened to your episode with Polly, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of like, oh, well, Polly, you know, she's such a
Speaker 1: glutton and she liked to drink, And it wasn't like, no,
Speaker 1: Polly had these awful family issues, like Polly had this
Speaker 1: horrible marriage, and so talk about what it's been like
Speaker 1: to bring those circumstances to light. Knowing that people's natural
Speaker 1: tendency might not be even to think about them, it's
Speaker 1: really important to try to understand what the circumstances were
Speaker 1: that these people were coming from. This is where I
Speaker 1: think empathy comes in. And using empathy as a historian
Speaker 1: or any type of I think scientist is sometimes frowned
Speaker 1: upon and people recoil at this because they think that
Speaker 1: you're putting too much of yourself into it. But that
Speaker 1: isn't the case. I think we can be empathetic and
Speaker 1: still be very impartial. But when we are telling human stories,
Speaker 1: when we are looking at human struggles, we must try
Speaker 1: and understand what the sets of circumstances were that allowed
Speaker 1: for something to happen. And this is so important because
Speaker 1: I think one of the things we know from cognitive
Speaker 1: science is that if you actually look at the reasons
Speaker 1: behind people's behavior, often it's not as much their personality
Speaker 1: traits or their kind of moral failings as we think.
Speaker 1: Often it's the situation. The whole history of the last
Speaker 1: few decades of psychology has shown us that, hey, if
Speaker 1: you're in a situation where everybody is doing something, you're
Speaker 1: probably going to do it too. If you're in a
Speaker 1: situation where you just feel really horrible time pressure, right,
Speaker 1: you're going to act more immorally. We talk about this
Speaker 1: on my podcast in terms of feeling time famine causes
Speaker 1: you to do all this awful stuff. And if you're
Speaker 1: in situations of poverty, if you're in situations where you're
Speaker 1: in danger, like, you're going to do things that you
Speaker 1: yourself right now not in those situations, might not do.
Speaker 1: And so I think that there's this idea that we
Speaker 1: kind of morally condemn people for taking actions that we
Speaker 1: ourselves would have taken in those situations. And then the
Speaker 1: striking thing about bad women. Is it just articulates how
Speaker 1: awful some of these situations really were. I mean, give
Speaker 1: me a sense of some of the things that these
Speaker 1: women were facing, like just on a day to day basis. Gosh, well,
Speaker 1: I think we really take for granted how easy our
Speaker 1: lives are. Physically, the Victorian era was absolutely terrible. If
Speaker 1: you were poor. The living environment was terrible, often completely
Speaker 1: infested with vermin. People were physically uncomfortable all the time.
Speaker 1: You know, today, we take a painkiller if we've got
Speaker 1: a headache, if something's wrong. You know, they didn't have
Speaker 1: access to that, and it didn't exist, so there's a
Speaker 1: certain level of ambient pain all the time. A lot
Speaker 1: of these women we know had diseases. Annie Chapman had tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: Katherine Edos had kidney disease. Elizabeth Stride, for example, was
Speaker 1: suffering from treachery, syphilis, and the circumstances. Their lives were
Speaker 1: so awful, so bleak, so without hope that of course
Speaker 1: they're going to be drinking to forget as well, and hunger.
Speaker 1: I mean, these people did not know where their next
Speaker 1: meal was coming from. They didn't know what was going
Speaker 1: to happen. Really from hour to hour where they were
Speaker 1: going to be laying their head. One of the most
Speaker 1: evocative things about your podcast is like the smells is
Speaker 1: like a poop everywhere, and it's like stinky. It's such
Speaker 1: a I mean, honestly, it's actually such an evocative part
Speaker 1: of your podcast. It's actually like takes you there in
Speaker 1: this wonderful way. So it's so funny because I'm so
Speaker 1: immersed in it, I don't it's so normalized for me
Speaker 1: that wait a minute, everybody has chamber pots. They're just
Speaker 1: like poop at people's best. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean honestly,
Speaker 1: even if I was just facing like the stench of
Speaker 1: feces all the time, I feel like I definitely would
Speaker 1: start drinking washed in the bodies as well. A lot
Speaker 1: of times people did not have access to laundry facilities,
Speaker 1: to bathing facilities, you know, and sometimes when they had
Speaker 1: access to bathing facilities, it was cold water, so people
Speaker 1: smelled terrible. And the fact that these women were going
Speaker 1: through so much pain, I think leads to the next
Speaker 1: bias that I see so much in your telling of
Speaker 1: these women's stories, right, the next psychological bias, which is
Speaker 1: what researcher is called the just world bias, and so
Speaker 1: the idea behind the just world biases. We would like
Speaker 1: to assume that the world is a just place, that
Speaker 1: you know, good things, like truly awful bad things don't
Speaker 1: happen to good people, right, and that if we ourselves
Speaker 1: are good, if we work hard and do the right thing,
Speaker 1: we can live a life filled with joy and pleasure.
Speaker 1: In these kinds of things. These are deep beliefs that
Speaker 1: like keep us getting up in the morning and not
Speaker 1: kind of terrified about what the world is. And what
Speaker 1: that means is that it makes us do good things right,
Speaker 1: like it makes us fight injustice, It makes us be
Speaker 1: good people because we don't want to get our come up,
Speaker 1: and so we kind of want to believe that if
Speaker 1: we do the right thing, you know, good things will
Speaker 1: happen to us. But it also leads to this insidious rationalization,
Speaker 1: which is like when you see a bad thing happened
Speaker 1: to a person, your first instinct is to assume, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe there was some reason there, right, maybe
Speaker 1: it just didn't happen by chance. A friend tells you like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, my sister just found out she has
Speaker 1: liver cancer. Your brain instantly goes to there must be
Speaker 1: some reason that this is a just dessert, right that
Speaker 1: you know, the world doesn't work by making terrible things
Speaker 1: happen to people. There should be some reason there. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: I wonder if she like drank too much or didn't
Speaker 1: take care of herself. Right, And this I saw just
Speaker 1: written large, not just in your women's stories, but just
Speaker 1: in how people reacted to the fact that you were
Speaker 1: humanizing them and telling their stories. And so does this
Speaker 1: kind of resonate, this kind of just world bias, the
Speaker 1: kind of thing you saw and the retelling of these stories.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's very current with the murder of women.
Speaker 1: So in the United States, Gabrielle Petito, what was going on?
Speaker 1: What was she doing? What was people were asking those questions,
Speaker 1: you know, what did they do to deserve this? You know,
Speaker 1: the belief being, of course, that they brought it on themselves.
Speaker 1: We are so far from actually taking that step back,
Speaker 1: not asking those questions, but just reserving judgment and listening
Speaker 1: and examining the other factors that were at play here.
Speaker 1: But what's triggered, it seems, is this kind of knee
Speaker 1: jerk response about women being at fault for their own murders.
Speaker 1: So for example, you know, here I am coming in
Speaker 1: and saying that, actually the story that you know about
Speaker 1: Check the Ripper, it wasn't these women's faults that this happened.
Speaker 1: By changing it, people get very upset about that because
Speaker 1: they're clinging to this belief system that's still with us today.
Speaker 1: And it really seems to be a belief system that well,
Speaker 1: first of all, there's evidence that it might be really
Speaker 1: ingrained in the sense of emerging really early. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's evidence that even little kids show this, you know,
Speaker 1: belief in a just world bias. In fact, if you
Speaker 1: tell little kids kid versions of the stories we wouldn't
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, Jack the rippburn my serial killer
Speaker 1: murders to little kids, but simple things like Joe was
Speaker 1: walking to school and he got hooped on by a bird,
Speaker 1: the kids will start justifying, well, you know, maybe Joe
Speaker 1: did something wrong or he's a bad person. Right, he
Speaker 1: can't just be unlucky. There has to be some reason
Speaker 1: for this, right, And this emerges in four year old kids,
Speaker 1: so it makes sense that it's still with us as
Speaker 1: an adult. But another thing we know about this bias
Speaker 1: is kind of exactly what you said. This is a
Speaker 1: knee jerk response. Right, this is some unconscious thing our
Speaker 1: brains do really fast, and one of the powers of
Speaker 1: this is that our brains start unconsciously looking for evidence
Speaker 1: that there might be some reason in there that it's
Speaker 1: a justice or you know, like with the cancer example,
Speaker 1: you're like, I wonder if she drank, Like you don't
Speaker 1: know anything about this sister, Like you're just like making
Speaker 1: stuff up about her, because you assume there has to
Speaker 1: be something there, And that means we go through just
Speaker 1: a ton of mental gymnastics to keep these distortions up.
Speaker 1: And I think you know you've seen like these mental
Speaker 1: gymnastics at work, you know, So talk about some of
Speaker 1: the challenges you've faced from people who are like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you're just getting these women's stories wrong. Some people, it's
Speaker 1: some people, not all of the people are incredibly nasty
Speaker 1: and incredibly vicious with what they say. I mean, there
Speaker 1: is this investment in this story. You know, this is
Speaker 1: very personal to some people who feel they've invested their
Speaker 1: lives in researching Jack the Ripper, And here comes this
Speaker 1: person from the outside saying, well, actually, this evidence that
Speaker 1: you've always assumed was true isn't actually true, and it's
Speaker 1: not true because of this, this and this, and so
Speaker 1: the only way instead of actually taking that on board,
Speaker 1: the only way they can process what it is that
Speaker 1: I've written is to say that I've lied, that I've
Speaker 1: hid evidence, that I'm dishonest, that I'm a pathological liar.
Speaker 1: And that's the only way that they make it actually
Speaker 1: carry on with their biases. That really surprised me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: human minds kind of suck, as we say a lot, yes,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, when things challenge our core beliefs,
Speaker 1: it's amazing how much effort will go through to kind
Speaker 1: of rationalize that. But I mean I get this too occasionally, right,
Speaker 1: Like I'm doing a podcast on happiness, and I occasionally
Speaker 1: get critics who say, you know, my voice sucks or
Speaker 1: I'm dumb, or how dare I mentioned this particular thing right?
Speaker 1: Or how dare I not mention someone in like X
Speaker 1: circumstance when I know we have an episode coming up
Speaker 1: about X circumstance in like three weeks. If they just waited,
Speaker 1: What doesn't that kind of critique feel like to you?
Speaker 1: I know what it does to me. It just feels awful.
Speaker 1: How have you kind of processed it? I've tried to
Speaker 1: process it with empathy actually and actually reasoning myself through it,
Speaker 1: which is, look, people want to be angry. By being
Speaker 1: in public life at all, you're going to be a
Speaker 1: lightning rod for everybody's issues, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: who attack you it's their issues. It actually almost has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with you. And I see that as
Speaker 1: a kind of way to navigate through some of this
Speaker 1: real lastiness. But at the same time, it's like being
Speaker 1: a little boat on a rocky sea, you know, and
Speaker 1: you're just trying to find that even keel. That takes
Speaker 1: a lot of energy. Yeah, it can be really exhausting.
Speaker 1: And I think a particular feature of the kind of
Speaker 1: trolling that you've been getting is that my understanding is
Speaker 1: that most of it happens online. Right. It's not like
Speaker 1: these people see you, you know, in a shop and say, hey,
Speaker 1: halle face to face, you know, here my critiques about
Speaker 1: your podcast. It's kind of this short, character length, anonymous
Speaker 1: tweet on the internet. Right. And this is something we
Speaker 1: also know scientifically, is that the internet takes away our
Speaker 1: face to face interactions, like our natural empathic urges come
Speaker 1: up when we're talking to people face to face, right,
Speaker 1: And That's one of the reasons that people can be
Speaker 1: so mean online is that the normal empathic urges that
Speaker 1: would creep up, like I shouldn't say something so harmful
Speaker 1: to someone. It doesn't feel like you're saying it to
Speaker 1: a person because you're doing it on the Internet. On
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab podcast, Scared of my colleague Jamie Zaki,
Speaker 1: who studies empathy directly, and he talks about how he
Speaker 1: worries that the Internet in general is undermining our natural empathy.
Speaker 1: And I think that this is especially true in this
Speaker 1: space of kind of trolling and things. But one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I love your podcast so much, and one
Speaker 1: of the reasons it has been fun talking to you
Speaker 1: today is I can see your natural empathy kind of
Speaker 1: shining through, right. You know, these are people who are
Speaker 1: saying really hateful things about you, and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to have empathy for them. This is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that I think can be so powerful
Speaker 1: about a podcast like yours, right, is it's kind of
Speaker 1: like naturally allowing us to sort of flex our empathy muscles.
Speaker 1: If we can empathize with some women who died many
Speaker 1: many years ago, who've been in circumstances who are very
Speaker 1: unlike ours. It's kind of a way to kind of
Speaker 1: boost our empathy for other people today. I mean, have
Speaker 1: you found that, you know, really understanding what it was
Speaker 1: like to be these women in awful circumstances has helped
Speaker 1: you empathize more with people today. Absolutely. I mean writing
Speaker 1: so much and researching so much about female homelessness, and
Speaker 1: one day I was just walking down the strand in
Speaker 1: London and walked by a woman i'd say like maybe
Speaker 1: early thirties, and she had a child with her who
Speaker 1: was about seven years old, and she was begging for money,
Speaker 1: and I just stopped and I was so overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: looking at her and thinking, my god, you could be
Speaker 1: any one of these women I have just spent so
Speaker 1: much time with. And I stopped and I talked to her,
Speaker 1: and I gave her some money, and she told me
Speaker 1: a story about how she fell into arrears on her
Speaker 1: rent and her landlord threw her out with her child.
Speaker 1: And I was staggered because this was literally a story
Speaker 1: right out of the nineteenth century and right there, right
Speaker 1: in that same place. And so I think writing about
Speaker 1: these women well, writing about poverty, writing about individual's experiences
Speaker 1: really makes you see more of the universal human experience.
Speaker 1: And I think this is one of the powerful things
Speaker 1: about listening to these historical stories, right, you know you
Speaker 1: had that experience with you know, the homeless woman. But
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, like, actually, the same thing happened. I
Speaker 1: binge listened to a lot of your show when I
Speaker 1: was on a long drive and when I finished my drive,
Speaker 1: I parked my car and I was walking back to
Speaker 1: my house. I ran into someone who was homeless, this
Speaker 1: homeless guy who was asking for some money. And you know,
Speaker 1: he's a guy who's often on that same street corner.
Speaker 1: And after listening to your show, I kind of not
Speaker 1: only gave him money, but did the same thing you did,
Speaker 1: which was like spoke to him for a couple of
Speaker 1: like how's your day, Like how are things going? And
Speaker 1: I was compelled to do it because you know, now
Speaker 1: he wasn't just someone I was walking by. You know,
Speaker 1: this was a human who could have been me. Right,
Speaker 1: there's this idea that like, you know, you tend to
Speaker 1: see this not as just oh, this is another but really,
Speaker 1: this is someone that I've connected with in this interesting way,
Speaker 1: And so have you had other people who've had this
Speaker 1: reaction to kind of listening to your podcast where you
Speaker 1: know they're getting a sense of experiencing more empathy afterwards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people are telling me that you know, they're crying as
Speaker 1: they're listening to it. I mean, my my feeling is good. Good.
Speaker 1: We need to connect, we need it's so important, you know,
Speaker 1: human experience. Understanding human experience is so fundamental to understanding ourselves.
Speaker 1: And I worry sometimes with a lot of true crime,
Speaker 1: we tend to focus on the story of the perpetrator.
Speaker 1: We don't focus on the stories of the victims, and
Speaker 1: victimology is not as seen as sexy as suspectology. And ironically,
Speaker 1: you know you mentioned listeners crying, but that those tears
Speaker 1: are actually a path towards well being. This is something
Speaker 1: we know from the research, right that connecting with other people,
Speaker 1: empathizing with other people, even if they have stories of pain,
Speaker 1: can sometimes make us feel more socially connected. They can
Speaker 1: ultimately lead to us helping other people, you know, giving
Speaker 1: you know, the dollar to the homeless person, and then
Speaker 1: that can allow you to feel better. Right, So, ironically,
Speaker 1: kind of connecting to other people's pain is actually a
Speaker 1: path to happiness. The problem though, is that it doesn't
Speaker 1: like feel great in the moment. And I think that's
Speaker 1: what we're going to tackle when the Happiness Lab returns.
Speaker 1: In a moment, which is when you compassionately embrace the
Speaker 1: suffering of other people, it kind of sucks. And so
Speaker 1: what are some strategies we can use to deal with
Speaker 1: the injustice of the world, to face it head on,
Speaker 1: but to protect our well being when we do it.
Speaker 1: That's what we'll talk about when the Happiness Lab returns
Speaker 1: in a second. I'm embarrassed to admit that even as
Speaker 1: I started listening to your podcast, I just assumed that
Speaker 1: the five women were, you know, prostitutes, drunkards, you know,
Speaker 1: people that we could have written off, right, And it
Speaker 1: took me some work to really listen to their stories
Speaker 1: and kind of come to terms with the fact that,
Speaker 1: you know, they were just like me. You know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't this kind of thing that I can just kind
Speaker 1: of write them off, like I have to have empathy
Speaker 1: for them too, And I think that that sort of
Speaker 1: fits with a lot of people's experience, right when you
Speaker 1: finally start empathizing with a person who's going through pain,
Speaker 1: when you start finally empathizing with a person who's going
Speaker 1: through tough times. You feel better, it feels good, feels
Speaker 1: like you're enacting justice. You feel more connected to this person.
Speaker 1: And so one of the strategies I like to suggest
Speaker 1: to my students who want to promote their empathy is
Speaker 1: to really take time to like work to see things
Speaker 1: from other people's perspectives, to like work to see things
Speaker 1: from other people's circumstances, and so, you know, talk about
Speaker 1: how history does that for us, and how you've been
Speaker 1: able to do that with these women's stories. I am
Speaker 1: a social historian, and so the type of history that
Speaker 1: I examine is really the nitty gritty of human experience
Speaker 1: in the past, and I think that automatically brings you
Speaker 1: into a place of empathy, because when you understand the
Speaker 1: granular details of what it meant to be alive and
Speaker 1: a particular time and place, you suddenly see things very differently.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the important things about history.
Speaker 1: You know, Psychologically, we often think that empathy involves sort
Speaker 1: of perspective taking right where I just kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: sit from my modern environment with no you know, chamber
Speaker 1: pots or feces around, and I think Oh, what must
Speaker 1: it have been like, you know, to be you know,
Speaker 1: a woman then, And often that perspective taking is kind
Speaker 1: of wrong, right, because I haven't thought really through the circumstances.
Speaker 1: And that's why a lot of the science suggests that
Speaker 1: a better way to empathize is through perspective getting right.
Speaker 1: You literally ask people what are their stories? Right, which
Speaker 1: I can do in the modern day. I can interview
Speaker 1: someone who has a different circumstance than me and ask
Speaker 1: what that circumstances like and hear it directly from them.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the power of the historical approach
Speaker 1: is ultimately, you know, what social historians have to do
Speaker 1: is to like find those narratives, you know, even if
Speaker 1: it wasn't a journal, right, Like find those circumstances and
Speaker 1: really pull out what would their perspective have been, you know,
Speaker 1: given these circumstances. And I think it can be really
Speaker 1: powerful because you're like, oh, when I perspective take, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I wouldn't be out on the street
Speaker 1: at night, you know, to get murdered. But then I'm like, oh, actually,
Speaker 1: when I get their perspective and see what it's really like,
Speaker 1: I think really quite differently. Yeah, exactly, and that is
Speaker 1: really important. Also when you understand other human experience, both
Speaker 1: in the past and the present, of people you know,
Speaker 1: of people you don't know, it helps you become a
Speaker 1: more empathetic person. It helps you see things you wouldn't
Speaker 1: normally see. And I'm a really evangelical when it comes
Speaker 1: to promoting social history as the way forward in historical study,
Speaker 1: because it tells us so much about the present, and
Speaker 1: it helps us unpick so many of our habits, so
Speaker 1: many of our bad habits, and so many of our
Speaker 1: belief systems, and it helps us lead through you know,
Speaker 1: what can we use today and what belongs in the past. Still,
Speaker 1: it also allows us to kind of build up our
Speaker 1: compassion muscles. I mean, there's tons of evidence showing that,
Speaker 1: you know, compassion is kind of a skill that we
Speaker 1: can build up over time, right, but it takes some practice,
Speaker 1: and that practice really does involve thinking through the bad
Speaker 1: things that are going on with other people. You know.
Speaker 1: There's evidence, for example, that it involves actively trying to
Speaker 1: wish well and give compassion to people who might not
Speaker 1: be so nice to you. Our critics are internet rolls,
Speaker 1: people who say me and stuff. The research shows that
Speaker 1: these are muscles that we can build up. And it
Speaker 1: sounds like this is something that you've been working on too,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to some of the online critics
Speaker 1: and some of the haters too. As much as I
Speaker 1: find it annoying and irritating, and actually some of the
Speaker 1: things they say, it's just so ridiculous that it's laughable,
Speaker 1: you know, And I do laugh at these things, but
Speaker 1: I think I have tried to understand, you know, where
Speaker 1: are these people coming from. I've tried to understand why
Speaker 1: there's so much hatred. You know, whether or not they
Speaker 1: would ever be as kind to me, I think as
Speaker 1: kind of irrelevant. I think when we want to understand
Speaker 1: somebody and we want to understand a problem, it's always
Speaker 1: good to put yourself on somebody else's shoes try to
Speaker 1: figure out where they're coming from. And I think in
Speaker 1: many ways that sort of sometimes takes a lot of
Speaker 1: the poison out of what you see being aimed at
Speaker 1: you or the way you see any particular situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and my podcast, we talk with the meditation teacher Tara Brock,
Speaker 1: and she told this story or metaphor where when you're
Speaker 1: walking by, you know a dog that's kind of barking
Speaker 1: at you, and you go to pettit and it sort
Speaker 1: of snaps at you and snarls. You could be like, oh,
Speaker 1: what a you know, what a jerk, this horrible dog.
Speaker 1: But then you look down and you might notice that
Speaker 1: the dog's foot is in a trap or that it's hurt, right,
Speaker 1: and that gives you a completely different emotional perspective on
Speaker 1: this creature. Right now, you're not dealing with another agent
Speaker 1: who's mean and awful and trying to be a jerk
Speaker 1: to you. You're dealing with this person who's hurt, and
Speaker 1: it so instantly turns on compassion. And it sounds like
Speaker 1: by taking the perspective of some of these folks who
Speaker 1: are kind of haters of some of your work, you've
Speaker 1: been able to do a little bit of that. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're barking dogs, but they're barking dogs who might
Speaker 1: be hurt to some extent. Yeah, exactly, I mean I
Speaker 1: think I would. I would also point out that constantly
Speaker 1: taking that position can get really emotionally exhausting also, where
Speaker 1: you are always what ends up happening I saw times
Speaker 1: feel is that you end up doubting your own position
Speaker 1: because you're giving so much of yourself and so much
Speaker 1: of your empathy out to other people. And I think
Speaker 1: for me and certainly maybe this is even a question
Speaker 1: for you, is how do you draw the line? Where
Speaker 1: are the boundaries? Yeah, well, one of the things you know,
Speaker 1: we learn in compassion research is that there can be
Speaker 1: these compassion fatigue and so using strategies like literally almost
Speaker 1: like you go to the gym and do squats to
Speaker 1: like build up your life muscles, like using strategies to
Speaker 1: literally build up your compassion muscles can be quite powerful.
Speaker 1: And one of the ones you see in the research
Speaker 1: is a technique called loving kindness meditation, which sounds really cheesy,
Speaker 1: but it's a meditation practice where you like literally sit
Speaker 1: and extend compassion to other people. The prompts are usually
Speaker 1: think about someone who's really close to you and say,
Speaker 1: may you be happy, may you be well, may you
Speaker 1: be safe, may you find joy right, which, if you
Speaker 1: do it right, can kind of give you a sense
Speaker 1: of compassion. Sometimes people report feeling something warm in their
Speaker 1: heart or in their heart space. But then what the
Speaker 1: practice is is that over time you kind of extend
Speaker 1: that compassion and that loving kindness to more and more
Speaker 1: difficult people, you know, maybe like a stranger, and then ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, for me, like that guy who made the
Speaker 1: supermean comment on Twitter about the podcast. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: may you be happy, may you be safe, May you
Speaker 1: find joy? Right. And what the process does is, first
Speaker 1: of all, it allows you that feeling of that emotion
Speaker 1: to extend to that person. But then it kind of
Speaker 1: gets you naturally to do the thing that I think
Speaker 1: we were just talking about, which is like, Okay, what's
Speaker 1: their perspective. They're just a human who's trying to find joy,
Speaker 1: who's like getting through it the same way we all are,
Speaker 1: where they're kind of figuring it out as they go,
Speaker 1: and so it can be a powerful practice. But what
Speaker 1: the evidence suggests is that practices like that can reduce
Speaker 1: the thing you're talking about, which is sort of compassion
Speaker 1: fatigue or sort of burnout fatigue, especially in careers where
Speaker 1: you have to really be empathic. And so the studies
Speaker 1: have been done in people like palliative care, war workers
Speaker 1: and first responders, but I think social historians who are
Speaker 1: dealing with the deep injustice of the world could probably
Speaker 1: benefit from some loving kindness meditation too. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I think you're onto something there. And another strategy I
Speaker 1: think we talk about on the podcast a lot is just,
Speaker 1: you know, finding ways to regulate your negative emotion, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think this is true for the online trolls,
Speaker 1: but I imagine it's a social historian. It's more true
Speaker 1: for like, you know, facing the injustice of the world
Speaker 1: head on. You know, there's a reason we have this
Speaker 1: just world bias because it sucks to realize that terrible, terrible,
Speaker 1: awful things can happen to people who don't deserve them right.
Speaker 1: And that comes with a deep sadness, It comes with anchor,
Speaker 1: it comes with frustration, and so we need ways to
Speaker 1: regulate those emotions, and you know, the science shows that
Speaker 1: the way we do it is to actually sit with them.
Speaker 1: You know. Tara Brock, who I mentioned, has this lovely
Speaker 1: practice that she calls rain, which is a meditation practice.
Speaker 1: Are ai n You recognize the emotions that your experience,
Speaker 1: you allow them to investigate what they feel like in
Speaker 1: your body, and then you kind of do something to
Speaker 1: nurture yourself. And there's lots of evidence that those kinds
Speaker 1: of practice where you kind of recognize, oh, I'm feeling
Speaker 1: really frustrated by you know, the fact that the world
Speaker 1: is so unfair. I'm feeling really sad about what happened
Speaker 1: to these women back then and what happens to women today.
Speaker 1: You kind of allow those feelings, you said, I'm just
Speaker 1: going to sit with them and then let them play
Speaker 1: out in your body. And that's because the research shows
Speaker 1: that emotions are kind of like like a wave. You know,
Speaker 1: it's going to go up and you feel more and
Speaker 1: more frustrated, but then you sit with it. Over time,
Speaker 1: it's just going to dissipey, it's going to do something,
Speaker 1: But then you do the end, which is something to
Speaker 1: nurture yourself, which is like it's exhausting to deal with
Speaker 1: the just as the world is exhausting to deal with
Speaker 1: online haters. You know, what can you do that's really
Speaker 1: nurturing to kind of take care of yourself. So sounds
Speaker 1: like practices like rain might also be you know, a
Speaker 1: good thing for social his historians to invest in to
Speaker 1: kind of get through some of the yucky stuff out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that sounds really useful for anybody who is
Speaker 1: surrounded by really unpleasant stuff all the time. And that
Speaker 1: I was even going to say, you know, this day
Speaker 1: and age we're living in right now with COVID, and
Speaker 1: how the New sideical can be extremely overwhelming, and you know,
Speaker 1: every day when the numbers of people dying are published,
Speaker 1: that's really quite overwhelming. And I think that sounds like
Speaker 1: a really good strategy really for all of us. And
Speaker 1: so I think this is a nice way to end,
Speaker 1: you know, And one of the reasons I was so
Speaker 1: happy to talk to you. You know, our natural instinct,
Speaker 1: our brains instinct, is to pretend that bad things don't
Speaker 1: happen to good people. Right. There just must be bad women, right,
Speaker 1: There's not bad things happening to good women. There's just
Speaker 1: bad women. It just simplifies things. And it's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I've loved how much your podcast is kind
Speaker 1: of brought to light, like, hey, these are biases, you know,
Speaker 1: we need to kind of deal with them and empathize
Speaker 1: with people who are going through some tough times, you know,
Speaker 1: but also that the science of happiness maybe can give
Speaker 1: us some good strategies to deal with our emotions as
Speaker 1: we do that. Hallie, thank you so much for chatting
Speaker 1: with me today. This was awesome. Thank you, Laurie. It's
Speaker 1: been really enlightening.