Speaker 1: How do societies get out of polarized eras, and what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with the brain. What does
Speaker 1: any of this have to do with broken down trucks
Speaker 1: or the Apollo program or the movie Watchmen, or education
Speaker 1: or Iroquois Native Americans or a new idea for social
Speaker 1: media algorithms or moral taste buds, And how we can
Speaker 1: take advantage of the common threads that bind us coming
Speaker 1: to see each other as fellow travelers improvising their way
Speaker 1: through the same noisy world. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with
Speaker 1: me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford
Speaker 1: and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three
Speaker 1: pound universe to understand why and how our lives look
Speaker 1: the way they do. Today's episode is part two of
Speaker 1: the question of what our brains have to do with politics.
Speaker 1: Last week, in episode one thirty, we talked about polarization,
Speaker 1: why brains are so predisposed for us versus them, for
Speaker 1: in groups versus outgroups. We set the table pretty thoroughly
Speaker 1: with that, but this week we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: how we might be able to fix that. So quick
Speaker 1: summary from last week so that we're aligned the human
Speaker 1: brain is disturbingly good at polarization and dehumanization, and this
Speaker 1: is why societies across history keep falling for the same
Speaker 1: psychological tricks. Last week, we began with Rwanda in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety before, where constant radio messages calling the Tutsi cockroaches
Speaker 1: reshaped how people perceived their neighbors. That kind of language
Speaker 1: bypasses rational thought and dampens the brain's ability to recognize
Speaker 1: others as humans with inner lives. The same pattern appeared
Speaker 1: in Nazi portrayals of Jews, in American World War II
Speaker 1: propaganda characterizing the Japanese, and even in ancient Rome's use
Speaker 1: of the word barbarian. Across cultures and eras, the first
Speaker 1: step toward violence is always a separation with some group,
Speaker 1: comparing them to animals, or pests or pestilence. Why because normally,
Speaker 1: the medial prefrontal cortex activates when we consider another person's
Speaker 1: thoughts and feelings, but when we view some group as
Speaker 1: less than human, this social cognition circuitry quiets down. Dehumanization
Speaker 1: is nothing but the dimming of these circuits in your brain,
Speaker 1: and once that happens, that makes harming others psychologically easier.
Speaker 1: And the reason it's so easy for this to happen
Speaker 1: is because we are experts at tribalism. Our ancestors survived
Speaker 1: in small bands, and our brains still automatically sort the
Speaker 1: world into us and the potentially dangerous them. Even arbitrary
Speaker 1: labels create favoritism. Many studies show that all you need
Speaker 1: to do is divide some group of people at random
Speaker 1: and assign labels, and you can watch things escalate from
Speaker 1: group bonding to aggression. And brain imaging studies from my
Speaker 1: lab and others show the neural basis of this, which
Speaker 1: is that empathy circuits respond strongly when in group members suffer,
Speaker 1: but that response weaker for outgroup members. Sometimes outgroup pain
Speaker 1: even activates reward pathways. So last week we also talked
Speaker 1: about how easily political identity fuses with our sense of self.
Speaker 1: When people encounter political statements that challenge their beliefs, brain
Speaker 1: regions involved in physical threat become active. This is why
Speaker 1: facts rarely change minds. The brain interprets disagreement as an
Speaker 1: attack on who you are. I have long suggested that
Speaker 1: education is our strongest defense against all the tricks of polarization.
Speaker 1: If young people can learn the basics of propaganda, they
Speaker 1: can recognize it and resist it before it takes hold,
Speaker 1: and we'll get more into that today. So in this
Speaker 1: week's episode, we're going to focus on the good news,
Speaker 1: such as it is, how we can channel tribal tendencies
Speaker 1: for better societies and reignite the circuitry of our empathy.
Speaker 1: It can sometimes feel like polarization is an unbreakable law
Speaker 1: of human nature. It's a reflex wired into the brain,
Speaker 1: fueled by emotions, amplified by technology, exploited by propaganda. But
Speaker 1: if neuroscience teaches us anything it's that the brain is
Speaker 1: not fixed. It is live wired. It's always changing, it's
Speaker 1: always adapting, and that means that polarization is not destiny.
Speaker 1: When we get to the end of today's episode, I
Speaker 1: will hope to have convinced you that a polarized society
Speaker 1: is not destiny, because brains are capable of much more,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to propose some brand new ways that
Speaker 1: we might turn down the heat. So last episode, we
Speaker 1: saw lots of things to be depressed about regarding the
Speaker 1: tribal nature of our neural machinery. But here's the hopeful part.
Speaker 1: Our notions of who is in and out of our tribes.
Speaker 1: This is not fixed. The line of us them is malleable,
Speaker 1: and under various circumstances, it can get redrawn. So here's
Speaker 1: an example. Last week we talked about the Robbers Cave
Speaker 1: experiment in the nineteen fifties. This was a group of
Speaker 1: eleven year old boys who got divided into two arbitrary
Speaker 1: groups and given names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and
Speaker 1: the experimenters watched how quickly tribal conflict formed. Once the
Speaker 1: two groups developed their own identities and were put into competition.
Speaker 1: They escalated from friendly rivalry to open hostility, despite having
Speaker 1: no prior differences. So this was a famous demonstration that
Speaker 1: even arbitrary group labels can trigger us versus them dynamics.
Speaker 1: But what I didn't tell you last week was the
Speaker 1: important part, the turning point. Once hostility reached a fevered pitch,
Speaker 1: the researchers changed the game. They introduced problems too big
Speaker 1: for any one team to solve alone. These are called
Speaker 1: superordinate goals. So think of a truck that stalled and
Speaker 1: needs to be moved, but it takes all the boys
Speaker 1: to get the job done. Or think of a broken
Speaker 1: water supply that requires all hands on deck to fix it.
Speaker 1: When these problems were presented, now the boys found themselves
Speaker 1: in a situation where they had to cooperate. They had
Speaker 1: to pull together to move the truck or get the
Speaker 1: clean water. And slowly, grudgingly, they began to soften towards
Speaker 1: each other. They worked side by side. Then they ended
Speaker 1: up sharing meals together, and by the end of camp,
Speaker 1: the boys insisted on riding home together in the same bus.
Speaker 1: The same circuitry that had driven them into conflict was
Speaker 1: rerooted by collaboration. And this is one of the key
Speaker 1: points we see in the research is that who your
Speaker 1: tribe is is pretty flexible. So one strategy is to
Speaker 1: create goals which become superordinate identities that are larger and
Speaker 1: more encompassing. This is what happened when Franklin Roosevelt introduced
Speaker 1: the New Deal. This was in the early nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: The United States was fracturing under the pressures of the
Speaker 1: Great Depression. Unemployment was that record highs, the banking system
Speaker 1: was collapsing, and regions and classes were turning inward, and
Speaker 1: everyone was blaming one another for the catastrophe. It was
Speaker 1: a moment of deep polarization. But instead of leaning into division,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt pulled a robbers Cave maneuver on a national scale.
Speaker 1: He created superordinate goals projects that were so large and
Speaker 1: so urgent that no single group could solve them on
Speaker 1: its own. He launched massive public works projects like the
Speaker 1: Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority and the
Speaker 1: Works Progress Administration. And these required Americans from very different
Speaker 1: backgrounds to cooperate. You had far and city dwellers, You
Speaker 1: had immigrants and veterans and young people. All these people
Speaker 1: suddenly had to work side by side to build dams,
Speaker 1: to restore forests, to pave roads, to electrify rural America.
Speaker 1: The Social Security Act gave everyone a shared stake in
Speaker 1: the same national project. These programs obviously don't erase every division,
Speaker 1: but they did expand the sense of us. People who
Speaker 1: might have seen each other as competitors or strangers now
Speaker 1: became teammates in a collective effort to rebuild the country.
Speaker 1: In exactly the same way that the campers bonded over
Speaker 1: the shared struggle to move a stalled truck. Americans began
Speaker 1: to feel that their fate was linked to the fate
Speaker 1: of others across the country. The New Deal created a
Speaker 1: broader identity. It wasn't rattlers versus eagles, It wasn't farmers
Speaker 1: versus city workers. It was now citizens cooperating under a
Speaker 1: common banner to climb out of disaster. So with the
Speaker 1: robbers Cave experiment and with the New Deal, we see
Speaker 1: that groups can shift identity boundaries. You might be conservative
Speaker 1: or progressive, but you're also an American. You might be
Speaker 1: religious or secular, but you're also a human. The larger
Speaker 1: the circle, the more empathy gets extended in the brain.
Speaker 1: When we expand the category of who counts as us,
Speaker 1: the circuits involved in seeing others as humans start to
Speaker 1: crank back up. These empathy networks brighten, and the silhouette
Speaker 1: we made of the other person regains a mind. We
Speaker 1: see this throughout history. Think of the Apollo program in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. America was deeply polarized at that point,
Speaker 1: divided over civil rights, over Vietnam, over generational change. But
Speaker 1: for a moment, the space race offered a superordinate goal.
Speaker 1: The effort to land a human being on the Moon
Speaker 1: pulled together scientists and engineers and politicians and ordinary citizens
Speaker 1: into a project bigger than any one side. When Neil
Speaker 1: Armstrong took his first steps in nineteen sixty nine, millions
Speaker 1: of Americans, regardless of party or identity, celebrated the same story.
Speaker 1: And consider what happens after natural disasters. Whenever societies get
Speaker 1: hit with earthquakes or hurricanes or wildfires, people who might
Speaker 1: otherwise mistrust each other suddenly find themselves working side by side.
Speaker 1: They're clearing debris, they're distributing food, they're searching for survivors.
Speaker 1: The amygdala recalibrates to the new, bigger threat, and the
Speaker 1: reward circuitry fires. When cooperation succeeds, the brain recognizes in
Speaker 1: real time that the circle of us has to expand.
Speaker 1: The general story from decades of research is that when
Speaker 1: people from different political or racial or religion are put
Speaker 1: into situations where they have to collaborate solving puzzles or
Speaker 1: building structures or managing scarce resources, their biases towards one
Speaker 1: another's shrink. Their medial prefrontal cortex, which I keep mentioning,
Speaker 1: dims for outgroups. This reactivates the circuitry of humanness comes
Speaker 1: back online. Of course, this is not easy, and we'll
Speaker 1: come back to this in a bit, And the challenge
Speaker 1: is that in everyday politics there aren't that many superordinate goals.
Speaker 1: Partisanship thrives on smaller battles of taxes and policies and
Speaker 1: culture wars. It's rare that we face a problem so big,
Speaker 1: so undeniable, that it forces us to see the humanity
Speaker 1: on the other side of the aisle. But when those
Speaker 1: moments come, and they always do, we need to recognize
Speaker 1: them as opportunities for repair because the circuitry is there.
Speaker 1: The same brain that DIM's empathy for rival can reignite
Speaker 1: it when cooperation is necessary, the same biology that fuel's
Speaker 1: division can, under the right circumstances, fuel unity. And when
Speaker 1: we understand that, we can design more moments of shared goals,
Speaker 1: like Roosevelt did with the New Deal, not just wait
Speaker 1: for the moments to arrive in the form of disasters
Speaker 1: or wars. So when we ask what pulls us back
Speaker 1: from the brink, one of the answers is this problems
Speaker 1: too big for any one side to solve alone. If
Speaker 1: history is any guide, our best shot at healing polarization
Speaker 1: won't come from continuing to shout at each other, but
Speaker 1: instead finding the trucks that won't budge unless we push together. Now,
Speaker 1: as I flagged a moment ago, it's not just shared
Speaker 1: goals that can bind people. This also happens with shared threats.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack what this can look like. I told
Speaker 1: you in the last episode about an experiment we ran
Speaker 1: in my lab where we had people lie in a
Speaker 1: brain scanner fMRI and they watch images of six hands
Speaker 1: on the screen, each labeled with a different religion. The
Speaker 1: computer randomly selects one of the hands, and you see
Speaker 1: that hand get stabbed with a syringe needle. And what
Speaker 1: we find is activity in the brain's pain matrix, this
Speaker 1: network that generates empathic responses when we see others in distress.
Speaker 1: This comes on when you see the hand getting stabbed.
Speaker 1: But the key finding was that the brain reacts more
Speaker 1: strongly when the stabbed hand has your religious label, and
Speaker 1: it reacts a lot less when the hand is labeled
Speaker 1: as any of your outgroups. In other words, even though
Speaker 1: all the hands look exactly the same, just adding a
Speaker 1: one word label causes the brain to care more or less.
Speaker 1: And this reveals how deeply and automatically our neural systems
Speaker 1: follow in group and outgroup boundaries. Okay, but now I
Speaker 1: want to tell you about the second part of the experiment.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see how flexible these responses can be.
Speaker 1: So now imagine this. You're still in the scanner, but
Speaker 1: now you see a line on the screen that says
Speaker 1: the year is twenty thirty two, and these three religions
Speaker 1: are teamed up against these three religions. So you're seeing
Speaker 1: the same six hands on the screen with the same
Speaker 1: six labels. But suddenly you've got teammates religions that you
Speaker 1: didn't care about a minute ago. They're now on your side.
Speaker 1: And the question becomes what happens in the brain when
Speaker 1: a hand is stabbed that belongs to an outgroup that
Speaker 1: you've just been told is now your ally. And what
Speaker 1: we see is that this pain matrix responds to this
Speaker 1: newly formed alliance. Five minutes ago, you had no empathy
Speaker 1: for that outgroup, but after a single sentence establishing them
Speaker 1: as a shared team with you, your brain cares a
Speaker 1: little more when their hand is harmed. So what does
Speaker 1: this tell us? Even though religious labels run deep, the
Speaker 1: brain's empathy boundaries can shift surprisingly quickly. Now this is
Speaker 1: not particularly wonderful news for the world because your new
Speaker 1: in group is still defined by a common enemy. But
Speaker 1: the important clue I want to surface for now is
Speaker 1: that outgroups can change. They're flexible. Now, sometimes this sort
Speaker 1: of shifting allegiance is going to have strange consequences. For example,
Speaker 1: in the world of fiction, there's a comic in a
Speaker 1: movie called Watchmen, which unfolds in an alternate nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five where aging superheroes who are now outlawed or retired.
Speaker 1: They're grappling with the looming threat of nuclear war between
Speaker 1: the US and the Soviet Union. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: characters believes that humanity is on the brink of self destruction,
Speaker 1: and so what he does is he stages a catastrophic
Speaker 1: fake alien attack and he kills millions of people in
Speaker 1: New York. And his logic is that that only an
Speaker 1: overwhelming external threat can shock the warring superpowers into unity
Speaker 1: with each other. And in the end, the US and
Speaker 1: the USSR do in fact halt their march toward nuclear
Speaker 1: war and they join forces against what they believe is
Speaker 1: a common enemy. So again this taps into the idea
Speaker 1: that ourtgroups are flexible and that with a common threat,
Speaker 1: suddenly enemies can end up on the same side. And
Speaker 1: all of this leads to an idea that I've been
Speaker 1: working on for a while, and that is, can we
Speaker 1: build a better society by complexifying our allegiances? So let
Speaker 1: me explain this. I've been proposing for several years now
Speaker 1: that one of our best defenses against polarization and dehumanization
Speaker 1: is clever social structuring. So to explain this, let's turn
Speaker 1: to the Iroquoied Native Americans who lived up around what's
Speaker 1: now upstate New York. Own currently is the League of
Speaker 1: Peace and Power, but they weren't known as that four
Speaker 1: hundred years ago. Four hundred years ago, they were made
Speaker 1: up of six tribes who were always fighting with each other,
Speaker 1: really bloody battles. But then in the sixteen hundreds, they
Speaker 1: were brought together by a man named Deaganaweda, who became
Speaker 1: known as the Great Peacemaker. He combined them into one nation.
Speaker 1: But of course that's not enough. If you simply push
Speaker 1: people together that can fall back apart easily. Degan Aweda
Speaker 1: did something much more clever. He structured clans so that
Speaker 1: each tribe member ended up belonging to one of nine clans.
Speaker 1: So I might be a member of the Seneca tribe,
Speaker 1: but I'm a member of the Wolf clan, and you're
Speaker 1: a member of the Mohawk tribe, but you're also a
Speaker 1: member of the Wolf clan. The key is that the
Speaker 1: membership to tribes and clans cross cut. So how is
Speaker 1: the Seneca tribe going to fight against the Mohawk tribe?
Speaker 1: Vibe when I'm a wolf and you're a wolf. And
Speaker 1: by the way, my Seneca friend is in the Hawk clan,
Speaker 1: and your Mohawk friend is in the Hawk clan too,
Speaker 1: And so when we all consider waging war, we think,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do that. I got friends over there,
Speaker 1: I've got fellow clansmen. So by cleverly structuring things in
Speaker 1: a society, by making cross cutting ties, that tamps down
Speaker 1: people's natural predilection for easy outgroups. In other words, you
Speaker 1: can complexify our allegiances. On the other side of the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: this kind of cross cutting allegiances. This was common. European
Speaker 1: royalty often married their daughters to husbands and neighboring countries,
Speaker 1: or even in enemy countries, and this was done to
Speaker 1: cement alliances, as with the marriage of Charles to Isabella
Speaker 1: in fifteen twenty six to bind the rival kingdoms of
Speaker 1: Spain and Portugal. Sometimes these marriage contracts were to strengthen
Speaker 1: a power base, but more often they were designed to
Speaker 1: constrain a contender from attacking. If you force two groups
Speaker 1: to intertwine, that can subdue the antagonism in the same
Speaker 1: way that the clash between Shakespeare's fictional montagues and Capulates
Speaker 1: was overshadowed by a relationship between their children. I think
Speaker 1: that it's likely to be naive for us to think
Speaker 1: about everyone in a society getting along, because we're very
Speaker 1: hardwired in groups and out groups. But we can structure
Speaker 1: things carefully like the Iroquois chief did, so that things
Speaker 1: have counterbalance, so that it's not so easy for people
Speaker 1: to raise arms against one another. So I'll give you
Speaker 1: a very specific way that I'm working on this right
Speaker 1: now with social media algorithms. So currently these algorithms are
Speaker 1: optimized for engagement at any cost, but they surface increasingly
Speaker 1: extreme content. They push users into political echo chambers. They
Speaker 1: amplify outrage and division, and what we get out of
Speaker 1: that is a slightly more fractured society. We get diminished
Speaker 1: trust across the aisle, we get reduced ability for people
Speaker 1: to engage constructively across differences. So, as a neuroscientists have
Speaker 1: spent a lot of my career studying how the brain
Speaker 1: forms bonds and how social identity shapes perception, and how
Speaker 1: we might build trust across these divides. And one of
Speaker 1: the conclusions is that when people first connect over non
Speaker 1: political shared interests like sports or hobbies or art or
Speaker 1: music or brands or locations or whatever, they develop these
Speaker 1: multi dimensional relationships, and later, when political differences emerge, the
Speaker 1: relationships are more resilient. People are far more likely to
Speaker 1: converse than dehumanize. So my recent research is in how
Speaker 1: to redesign social media to match the realities of the
Speaker 1: human brains. So I just patented an algorithm that flips
Speaker 1: the traditional method on its head. Instead of inadvertently clustering
Speaker 1: users by political alignment as happens now, the new algorithm
Speaker 1: surfaces information to users through shared interests like running or
Speaker 1: gardening or surfing, or classic films or chests or sports
Speaker 1: teams or baking or whatever. In this way, the algorithm
Speaker 1: builds bonds, creating a rich web of shared interests, and
Speaker 1: then at some later point users might come to see
Speaker 1: that there are differences in political stances, but they've already
Speaker 1: established connections and that's what allows them to converse. When
Speaker 1: we like each other and then find out that we
Speaker 1: have opposite views on some hot button issue, we both
Speaker 1: tilt our heads and we're more willing to hear the
Speaker 1: perspective of the other person because we're already pals. So
Speaker 1: by taking advantage of the common threads that bond, it
Speaker 1: makes it less easy to write off the other person.
Speaker 1: It's just an issue of temporal sequencing. The idea is
Speaker 1: bond first and debate later, and in this way you
Speaker 1: meet the whole person. You're not just distracted by the
Speaker 1: flash of their politics. This algorithm isn't hiding anything. It's
Speaker 1: simply spooling out information in a particular order so that
Speaker 1: you have a chance at having a complexified relationship because
Speaker 1: you generally like the person, and now you're slightly more
Speaker 1: likely to lean in and listen rather than write them off.
Speaker 1: So this whole idea of complexification and new ideas for
Speaker 1: social media algorithms, these are some of the things that
Speaker 1: I'm working on to reduce polarization in society. But the
Speaker 1: good news is there are lots of approaches that researchers study.
Speaker 1: For example, one approach to break the cycle of polarization
Speaker 1: comes from psychology's contact hypothesis, and the idea is just that,
Speaker 1: under the right conditions, if you have personal contact with
Speaker 1: members of an outgroup, that reduces prejudice. But and this
Speaker 1: is crucial, it's not just any contact. If two groups
Speaker 1: are forced into contact where one holds power over the other,
Speaker 1: then hostility usually increases. The key is to structure the
Speaker 1: contact so they have equal status, cooperation, common goals, institutional support.
Speaker 1: When you meet those conditions the brains social cognition circuits,
Speaker 1: like the medial prefederal cortexs and the temporo pridal junction,
Speaker 1: these begin to reawaken. For the outgroup, people stop seeing
Speaker 1: the other as an abstract category and start seeing them
Speaker 1: as individuals. The silhouette of the other person regains a mind.
Speaker 1: There are lots of real world examples. For example, there
Speaker 1: are several beautiful projects where Israeli and Palestinian kids are
Speaker 1: in musical groups together or go camping together, and that's
Speaker 1: the kind of future we need. More generally, there have
Speaker 1: been lots of studies run in schools where children from
Speaker 1: different backgrounds work together on collaborative projects. And biases shrink
Speaker 1: in neighborhoods where police officers live and interact with residents,
Speaker 1: trust grows. In workplaces where heterogeneous teams share responsibility, you
Speaker 1: can measure that stereotypes fade. Obviously, none of this happens overnight,
Speaker 1: but repeated contact under the right conditions chips away as division.
Speaker 1: And there's another avenue that people have studied called compassion training.
Speaker 1: For example, Tanya Singer and her colleagues have studied what
Speaker 1: happens when people deliberately practice extending compassion not just to
Speaker 1: their loved ones, but to strangers and even to rivals.
Speaker 1: They do this for some weeks of training, and you
Speaker 1: can see their brains change. The regions involved in empathy
Speaker 1: begin to fire more broadly. The medial prefedal cortex shows
Speaker 1: stronger activation for outgroups. In other words, compassion can be
Speaker 1: practiced like a muscle. Now, the problem is that most
Speaker 1: of the world is not going to sign up for
Speaker 1: compassion training right because that requires an active investment on
Speaker 1: your part. But I'll tell you another thing that has
Speaker 1: been studied, which I think is much easier to sneak in,
Speaker 1: and that is simply about perspective taking. So lots of
Speaker 1: experiments show that when people are asked to write about
Speaker 1: a day in the life of someone from an opposing group,
Speaker 1: their biases soften. The act of imagining another person's experience
Speaker 1: recruits theory of mind circuits in the brain, in other words,
Speaker 1: circuits that make the others inner life visible. Now, if
Speaker 1: you can't get people to do compassion training, how are
Speaker 1: you going to get them to do perspective taking? Well,
Speaker 1: that is not so hard. This is what I teach
Speaker 1: about in one of my classes at Stanford called Literature
Speaker 1: and the Brain. The trick is that stories give us
Speaker 1: a way to see the humanity of the other side
Speaker 1: by seducing us into perspectives we would otherwise never occupy.
Speaker 1: You read these books, or you watch these movies, and
Speaker 1: you are in the shoes of the protagonist, and that
Speaker 1: reawakens this circuitry that you have for understanding another person.
Speaker 1: You're cranking up this neural machinery that lets you imagine
Speaker 1: another person's inner life. Think about the impact of a
Speaker 1: book like Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book was written at
Speaker 1: a time when half of America viewed enslaved people as property,
Speaker 1: and Harriet Beecher Stowe drew readers into the home of
Speaker 1: a slave family. Now readers got to inhabit their fears
Speaker 1: and loves and losses and moral struggles. The book allowed
Speaker 1: readers to feel the emotional spectrum of people that they
Speaker 1: had been taught to see as less than human. And
Speaker 1: while historians debate the exact effect of the book on
Speaker 1: the Civil War, they all agree it had a really
Speaker 1: profound impact on public opinion and helped intensify the national
Speaker 1: debate over slavery. Or think of a movie like Dances
Speaker 1: with Wolves, where you're with Kevin Costner who's a Union
Speaker 1: Army officer in the Civil War. He gets sent to
Speaker 1: a remote frontier outpost and he's isolated and cut off
Speaker 1: from the army, and there he gradually forms deep relationships
Speaker 1: with the Lakota Sioux Native Americans, and ultimately, over the
Speaker 1: course of a year, he adopts their way of life
Speaker 1: and becomes an honorary member of their tribe. So the
Speaker 1: film starts off with the Lakota as the outgroup, but
Speaker 1: as you watch the movie, you come slowly to identify
Speaker 1: with them, and so it softens the mental boundary of
Speaker 1: us versus them. So the fact is you can't really
Speaker 1: force people to do perspective taking. Your psychology resists when
Speaker 1: it feels threatened, but you can sneak people into perspective
Speaker 1: taking through compelling stories, stories bypass defensiveness, and before you
Speaker 1: know it, you are having empathy with some group that
Speaker 1: you hadn't yet thought to humanize. So generally, one of
Speaker 1: the ways to think about building a less polarized world
Speaker 1: is to have better models of other people. And there's
Speaker 1: a generally smart way that we can build in that direction,
Speaker 1: and that is understanding ourselves in relation to other people
Speaker 1: and being aware of the differences. So let me unpack this.
Speaker 1: One of the most fascinating discoveries of the past few
Speaker 1: decades is that polarization isn't always about facts or even identities.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it just comes down to this strong sense of morality,
Speaker 1: to the foundations on which we build our sense of
Speaker 1: right and wrong. But here's the thing. You've probably noticed
Speaker 1: that it can be difficult or impossible to convince someone
Speaker 1: of your moral view. You both just see it differently.
Speaker 1: So my colleague Jonathan Hite has studied this and gives
Speaker 1: a metaphor that captures this really well. He says, morality
Speaker 1: is like a tongue with multiple taste buds. Our tongues
Speaker 1: pick up sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and new mommy. And
Speaker 1: in the same way, our moral sense comes with its
Speaker 1: own flavors care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Now here's the key.
Speaker 1: Some people have stronger sensitivity to sweetness or to bitterness,
Speaker 1: and in the same way, different people emphasize different moral flavors.
Speaker 1: So speaking, very generally, liberals tend to put the greatest
Speaker 1: weight on care and fairness. Conservatives, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: spread their attention more evenly across all five, including loyalty
Speaker 1: and authority and sanctity. That means when a liberal and
Speaker 1: a conservative argue, at the heart of their disagreement is
Speaker 1: that they're tasting different flavors of morality. So let's make
Speaker 1: this concrete. Take the issue of immigration. A liberal might
Speaker 1: frame the moral question as one of care. How can
Speaker 1: we ensure that families are treated humanely? How can we
Speaker 1: protect vulnerable people who are seeking a better life? A conservative,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, might frame the moral question in
Speaker 1: terms of loyalty and authority. How can we protect the
Speaker 1: integrity of the nation. How can we enforce the rules fairly?
Speaker 1: Both of these are moral arguments. Both come from genuine
Speaker 1: ethical concern, but they're tasting different flavors, and so they
Speaker 1: end up talking past each other. Or take the debate
Speaker 1: over healthcare. A liberal might frame it primarily in terms
Speaker 1: of care and fairness. How do we make sure everyone
Speaker 1: has access to life saving treatment? How do we reduce
Speaker 1: inequality in health outcomes? A conservative might highlight authority and loyalty.
Speaker 1: How do we ensure people have the freedom to choose
Speaker 1: their own doctors and plans. How do we maintain a
Speaker 1: system that reward lord's hard work and personal responsibility. Both
Speaker 1: arguments are just leaning on different moral flavors. Or look
Speaker 1: at discussions around school curricula. Liberals might focus on care
Speaker 1: and fairness. How do we make sure that students from
Speaker 1: all backgrounds feel represented? How do we teach history in
Speaker 1: a way that acknowledges harm and promotes inclusion. Conservatives might
Speaker 1: emphasize loyalty and sanctity. How do we preserve national traditions
Speaker 1: and shared narratives. How do we protect the core values
Speaker 1: that hold society together? Again, both sides are approaching the
Speaker 1: issue from sincere moral commitments, but they're sensitive to different
Speaker 1: moral taste buds. And this is what makes polarization so slippery,
Speaker 1: because when you're speaking from one set of taste buds,
Speaker 1: the other set can feel incomprehensible to someone focused on fairness,
Speaker 1: appeals to sanctity can sound medieval. To someone focused on sanctity,
Speaker 1: appeals to fairness can sound naive. It's not that either
Speaker 1: side is blind, it's that they're tasting a flavor the
Speaker 1: other one barely registers. And you can see all of
Speaker 1: this in brain skinning. When people are asked to make
Speaker 1: moral judgments. Questions of care activate regions linked to empathy,
Speaker 1: like the anterior insula. Questions of fairness activate networks associated
Speaker 1: with reasoning about equality and justice, like the dorsilateral prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: but questions of loyalty and authority these pull in areas
Speaker 1: tied to social emotions and deference to hierarchy, like the
Speaker 1: amigdala and orbit or frontal cortex, and sanctity, which is
Speaker 1: often connected with disgust, lights up the same region that
Speaker 1: flares when you smell something rotten. I mention all this
Speaker 1: to say that the way to understand moral foundations is
Speaker 1: not that these are abstract concepts. These are embodied experiences,
Speaker 1: they are felt in the body, and when two people
Speaker 1: debate morality, they are experiencing the world through different sensory lenses.
Speaker 1: History gives us lots of examples of this sort of clash.
Speaker 1: Think about prohibition in the nineteen twenties. To its supporters,
Speaker 1: banning alcohol was a matter of sanctity and authority, protecting families,
Speaker 1: upholding moral order, and forcing discipline. To its opponents, it
Speaker 1: was a matter of fairness and care. Adults should be
Speaker 1: able to make their own choices, and the band created
Speaker 1: more harm than good. The nation was split along moral
Speaker 1: taste buds, and the result was one of the most
Speaker 1: polarized eras in American social life. And today we see
Speaker 1: this in debates over climate change and vaccines, and gun
Speaker 1: rights and repri auctive rights. Each side emphasizes different moral foundations.
Speaker 1: Each side insists they are on the side of morality,
Speaker 1: and both are correct within their own moral framework. So
Speaker 1: what does this mean for polarization. It means that part
Speaker 1: of our problem is translation. If you are speaking fairness
Speaker 1: to someone who cares most about authority and social order,
Speaker 1: your words are not going to land. If you are
Speaker 1: speaking sanctity to someone who values care, your message falls flat.
Speaker 1: It's not enough to be moral. You have to speak
Speaker 1: in the moral language of your audience. There's a study
Speaker 1: in which researchers reframed arguments about environmental protection. To liberals,
Speaker 1: they emphasized care protecting vulnerable species, preventing suffering. To conservatives,
Speaker 1: they emphasized sanctity, protecting the purity of nature, keeping the
Speaker 1: earth unspoiled. And what they found was that conservatives were
Speaker 1: more persuaded by the sanctity frame, while liberals were more
Speaker 1: or moved by the careframe. Same issue, different taste buds,
Speaker 1: different results. When we recognize that the person across the
Speaker 1: aisle is not immoral, but simply tasting a different flavor,
Speaker 1: it opens a small space. It doesn't mean we're going
Speaker 1: to agree, but it means we can see the clash
Speaker 1: for what it is, not good versus evil, but sweet
Speaker 1: versus salty. Of course, this recognition doesn't immediately solve everything.
Speaker 1: Our taste buds are stubborn and they're shaped by our culture,
Speaker 1: are upbringing, our religion, our genetics. They don't shift easily.
Speaker 1: But understanding our own taste buds and other peoples can
Speaker 1: help us navigate polarization with a little bit more humility,
Speaker 1: because one thing that should be clear to all of
Speaker 1: us is that moral battles are rarely one by shouting
Speaker 1: louder in your own language. They are one by learning
Speaker 1: to speak at least a little bit in the language
Speaker 1: of the other side. In other words, the recognition that
Speaker 1: while we made agree, we're both chewing on the same world,
Speaker 1: we're just savoring it differently. And if this sort of
Speaker 1: thing can become part of education, not just on a podcast,
Speaker 1: but in junior highs and high schools and colleges and
Speaker 1: all over social media, then we might be able to
Speaker 1: get even just a small foothold against polarization. One of
Speaker 1: the most powerful tools we have is simply teaching people
Speaker 1: how the brain responds to political language, to group identity,
Speaker 1: to dehumanizing cues. When we understand the machinery operating under
Speaker 1: the hood, we are far less likely to be manipulated
Speaker 1: by it. Students and of course adults too, need to
Speaker 1: learn to spot the warning signs when rhetoric starts collapsing
Speaker 1: some group of humans into pests and parasites, When headlines
Speaker 1: caricature opponents as monsters, when memes flatten entire populations into
Speaker 1: jokes or stereotypes. These are triggers designed to bypass empathy
Speaker 1: and pull these really ancient levers in the brain. It
Speaker 1: is critical for young people to learn how to recognize
Speaker 1: these moves, because propaganda is not going anywhere. Human brains
Speaker 1: are wired for tribalism, and there are always going to
Speaker 1: be individuals and movements and institutions who are ready and
Speaker 1: willing to exploit that wiring, sometimes out of ideological convictions,
Speaker 1: sometimes for power, just because it gives them a sense
Speaker 1: of belonging. The motivations might vary, but the tactics of
Speaker 1: dehumanization are the same, and that's why awareness is our
Speaker 1: best defense. Once you can recognize these psychological maneuvers from
Speaker 1: a distance, they lose their magic. You are no longer
Speaker 1: a passive recipient of whatever emotional current someone is trying
Speaker 1: to generate. You become an active observer who can say,
Speaker 1: hold on, I know this trick, and that small moment
Speaker 1: of recognition can be enough to keep the spark of
Speaker 1: empathy alive even when someone is trying very hard to
Speaker 1: snuff it. And of course you know that. My favorite
Speaker 1: topic is brain plasticity. The brain is not a machine
Speaker 1: of fixed circuits. It's more like a living city. It's
Speaker 1: always building and demolishing pathways in response to its experience,
Speaker 1: which means the grooves of polarization are not permanent. They
Speaker 1: can be reshaped by new experiences, new rituals, new narratives.
Speaker 1: And the good news is we see this kind of
Speaker 1: thing happen all the time. Think about South Africa after apartheid.
Speaker 1: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasn't perfect, but it was
Speaker 1: an attempt to rewire the national circuitry, to create a
Speaker 1: space where stories could be told, where victims and perpetrators
Speaker 1: could see each other as humans again. It was a
Speaker 1: giant experiment in perspective taking. Or think about Germany after
Speaker 1: World War Two, a country that had been saturated with
Speaker 1: dehumanizing propaganda, to spend decades deliberately teaching the opposite memorials
Speaker 1: to the Holocaust, education about Nazism, cultural rituals of remembrance.
Speaker 1: The goal reached beyond just the teaching of fact. It
Speaker 1: was about retraining empathy, to keep the circuits of humanness
Speaker 1: switched on. You can see this in more local programs.
Speaker 1: Think about restorative justice programs where offenders and victims meet
Speaker 1: face to face in those encounters, stereotypes degrade because now
Speaker 1: the offender is no longer just a criminal and the
Speaker 1: victim is no longer just a statistic. Both parties become
Speaker 1: people again. Possibly they become worthy of empathy again. Now
Speaker 1: none of this is easy. The grooves of polarization are deep,
Speaker 1: and they are constantly being reinforced by politics and media
Speaker 1: and our own psychology. But the point is they are
Speaker 1: just grooves. They're not permanent, and they can be redirected. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the challenges is scale. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: soften polarization in a classroom or a workplace or a neighborhood.
Speaker 1: It's another to do it across a nation of millions.
Speaker 1: But the same principles apply, shared goals, complexified relationships, structured contact,
Speaker 1: perspective taking. This is what we need to concentrate on
Speaker 1: if we want societies to survive their cycles of division.
Speaker 1: And I want to say that at the individual level,
Speaker 1: each of us has a role because every time that
Speaker 1: we resist a caricature of the other side, every time
Speaker 1: we choose curiof over outrage, every time we practice perspective taking,
Speaker 1: even if we don't agree, we are nudging our own circuitry.
Speaker 1: Towards rehumanization. And if you imagine these small shifts in
Speaker 1: the brain multiplied across millions of people, we may just
Speaker 1: be able to slightly bend the arc of polarization. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've spent these last two episodes talking about polarization
Speaker 1: and what we might do about it, and one of
Speaker 1: the lessons is that we are always looking to our
Speaker 1: congresses in our social media to analyze our situation, but
Speaker 1: we're not looking nearly hard enough at our own neural circuitry.
Speaker 1: What we find when we look there is that our
Speaker 1: tribal wiring predisposes us to divide into us and them.
Speaker 1: When we think about polarization, red versus blue, rural versus urban, team,
Speaker 1: stir versus robber, baron, woke us versus magastan whatever, we
Speaker 1: have to remember that what's firing in our brains is
Speaker 1: ancient machinery. It was designed for survival in a world
Speaker 1: of scarcity and danger, and there's absolutely nothing new or
Speaker 1: surprising about polarization. In last episode, we began with propaganda
Speaker 1: across nation and time, and we saw how quickly the
Speaker 1: brain can switch off empathy when the right metaphors are deployed.
Speaker 1: When you call other groups animals or pestilence or viruses.
Speaker 1: We followed that circuitry into the lab where our empathy
Speaker 1: gets stoked up for in groups, but it dims for rivals.
Speaker 1: We saw children at summer camps turn into enemies in
Speaker 1: a matter of days when they're given different labels. We
Speaker 1: traced the amplifiers of emotion, the pull of identity, the
Speaker 1: power of disgust, the shadow side of the neurochemicals that
Speaker 1: bond us but give us sharper division with our groups.
Speaker 1: And we've seen how history again and again has weaponized
Speaker 1: these vulnerabilities. But we also saw today that this doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be our destiny. The same boys at summer
Speaker 1: camp who threw rocks at each other ended up sharing meals.
Speaker 1: We saw how superordinate goals can redraw the boundaries of us,
Speaker 1: like the way we always see when natural disasters turn
Speaker 1: strangers into collaborators. We saw how perspective taking, for example,
Speaker 1: through books and movies, can bring silhouettes back to three D.
Speaker 1: And we saw how complexifying the relationships around us so
Speaker 1: that we have cross cutting ties can bind a tighter
Speaker 1: social fabric that doesn't have a weak direction that it
Speaker 1: tears along in other words, I assert the challenge is
Speaker 1: not to abolish tribalism, because we probably can't, but to
Speaker 1: entangle it with lots of cross cutting knots. And one
Speaker 1: of the main things I can't emphasize enough is the
Speaker 1: importance of education. Just imagine if all students learned about
Speaker 1: the variety of moral taste buds, so that as they
Speaker 1: grew up, they just understood that someone who disagrees with
Speaker 1: them is not necessarily a troll or misinformed, but instead
Speaker 1: someone who perhaps puts emphasis on different parts of the equation.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that two people are going to definitely
Speaker 1: come to agreement, but it'll damn sure give them a
Speaker 1: richer understanding that can reach beyond the naive notion that
Speaker 1: each of them has exclusive access to the truth and
Speaker 1: Lord only knows why the other side is so deluded.
Speaker 1: And obviously, everything I'm saying about students applies to all
Speaker 1: of us at every age. A basic education about polarization
Speaker 1: means recognizing propaganda when it strips away humanness. In other words,
Speaker 1: refusing to let caricatures do the work of collapsing other
Speaker 1: peoples inner cosmosis down to points that you can snuff
Speaker 1: out it means asking how we can leverage our technologies
Speaker 1: to build bridges instead of simply amplifying outrage. And most
Speaker 1: of all, it means holding on to that simple, sometimes
Speaker 1: difficult truth that the person across the divide possesses a
Speaker 1: brain like hours. They are predicting, they're fearing, they're hoping,
Speaker 1: They have the agony and the ecstasy just like you do.
Speaker 1: Polarization thrives when we forget this, when we let the
Speaker 1: circuits of empathy dim, when we allow the metaphors of
Speaker 1: vermin and parasites and mobs to overwrite the complexity of
Speaker 1: human beings. But if we can remember, if we can
Speaker 1: keep those lights on, then we have a chance of
Speaker 1: changing the story, of letting the candle of empathy flicker
Speaker 1: back to life. The task for each of us is
Speaker 1: to guard that can, to shield it against the winds
Speaker 1: of propaganda, to tend to it in the storms of outrage.
Speaker 1: Because if disgust and fear and anger can make us
Speaker 1: see our neighbors as contaminants, just remember that recognizing propaganda
Speaker 1: and taking a different perspective and surfacing what we have
Speaker 1: in common can make us see our neighbors again as
Speaker 1: fellow travelers. Improvising their way through the same noisy world.
Speaker 1: Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Join our weekly discussions on
Speaker 1: my substack, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments.
Speaker 1: Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.