Speaker 1: How does your brain decide that some other person has
Speaker 1: their own inner life? And how does this sometimes go
Speaker 1: in a different direction where you end up viewing another
Speaker 1: person more like an object. This is what neuroscientists mean
Speaker 1: when they talk about dehumanization. It means that your brain
Speaker 1: is not cranking up its social machinery to understand that
Speaker 1: the other person has a mind like you do.
Speaker 2: We're gonna dive deep.
Speaker 1: Into this today with social neuroscientist Lessana Harris, will ask
Speaker 1: is dehumanization a cause of violence or is it the
Speaker 1: fuel that keeps it burning? Do people who think of
Speaker 1: themselves as highly empathic sometimes dehumanize.
Speaker 2: More than other people?
Speaker 1: And on the flip side, why do we sometimes think
Speaker 1: that chatbots or robots are people with interior minds? Little
Speaker 1: children raised with AI grow up to fight for AI rights.
Speaker 1: Today we're going to dive deep into how your brain
Speaker 1: sees others. So get ready for a great brain stretch.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand how
Speaker 1: we see the world, and importantly, today, how we see
Speaker 1: each other. Every second of your life, your brain is
Speaker 1: working to figure out something very important in the space
Speaker 1: around you, what is alive in the sense that it
Speaker 1: has intentions and feelings and plans. In other words, it
Speaker 1: has a mind. We are mind detectors, and so whenever
Speaker 1: you walk into a room, your social antenna are up.
Speaker 1: You're not conscious of this, but your brain is putting
Speaker 1: tons of effort into figuring out where there are people.
Speaker 1: And you are watching faces, and you're registering postures, and
Speaker 1: you're listening to the tones of voice, and your brain
Speaker 1: is building models like okay, I think that person is irritated,
Speaker 1: and that person is curious, and that person is hiding something,
Speaker 1: and that person wants approval. This is one of the
Speaker 1: brain's deepest talents is mind perception. Think of this as
Speaker 1: your ability to infer an inner movie playing behind someone's eyes.
Speaker 1: As I said, this is typically done automatically without any
Speaker 1: conscious awareness. But you do this all day long with
Speaker 1: friends and family. You do this with strangers, you do
Speaker 1: this with people you've never met. And by the way,
Speaker 1: we don't do this just for other humans. Our neural
Speaker 1: mechanisms for making this happen. It applies more broadly, so
Speaker 1: we anthropomorphize, meaning we assign human like minds to non
Speaker 1: human things. You might treat your car like it has
Speaker 1: a personality. We certainly do this with robots, and we
Speaker 1: root for the animated toys in a Pixar film. You
Speaker 1: can even watch a film with some animated triangles and
Speaker 1: circles moving around no words at all, and you end
Speaker 1: up narrating a story about what the shapes are doing.
Speaker 1: In all these scenarios, your brain lights up its social machinery,
Speaker 1: and things around you become characters with motivations. Our brains
Speaker 1: are always eager to find agency and intention, to find
Speaker 1: minds that it can predict. So if our brains are
Speaker 1: so ready to see minds, how do we ever fail
Speaker 1: to see them? Now you've heard me talk about this
Speaker 1: before on the podcast, because history shows us over and
Speaker 1: over that humans have the capacity to stop seeing other
Speaker 1: humans as having an entire cosmos going on on the inside.
Speaker 1: We can treat other humans as objects. And when you
Speaker 1: look at any conflict, Let's say we're talking about the
Speaker 1: communist revolutions in China and Russia, or we're talking about
Speaker 1: Nazism in Germany or fascism in Italy, or the camer
Speaker 1: rouge in Cambodia, or the Hutu taking up machetes against
Speaker 1: their neighbors, the Tutsi in Rwanda. Wherever we look, we
Speaker 1: see that it is possible for people to look at
Speaker 1: their neighbors and feel nothing, to feel no tug of empathy,
Speaker 1: no sense of shared humanity. Now how does that happen. Well,
Speaker 1: it's typically helped along by propaganda that trains people to
Speaker 1: see their neighbors as as vermin as contagion, as something
Speaker 1: that can be crushed with no moral cost, the way
Speaker 1: you might treat a bug. So we essentially have this
Speaker 1: dial in the brain that makes us see a thing
Speaker 1: in the world as a person within inner life or not.
Speaker 2: Today's episode is about that dial.
Speaker 1: It's about the neural machinery that supports social cognition and
Speaker 1: what it means when that machinery gets dialed down. It's
Speaker 1: about dehumanization, which is when the brain does not engage
Speaker 1: its social machinery for considering another person's mind.
Speaker 2: And as we'll see, a slight.
Speaker 1: Dialing down in the brain can have big consequences for
Speaker 1: our behavior. And we're also going to talk about the
Speaker 1: mirror image of this anthropomorphism, because in our new landscape,
Speaker 1: we have all the things around us growing mind like
Speaker 1: in their behavior. So what happens when the cues that
Speaker 1: trigger mind person become cheap and ubiquitous. We're going to
Speaker 1: cover all this and much more today. My guest is
Speaker 1: Lasana Harris. He for many years has been at the
Speaker 1: forefront of mapping all these questions about humanization and dehumanization
Speaker 1: onto the brain. He's a social neuroscientist and an experimental
Speaker 1: psychologist at University College London, where he leads the Boundaries
Speaker 1: of Social Cognition Lab. Lasaana studies how we perceive other
Speaker 1: minds and how this connects to moral behavior and intergroup
Speaker 1: conflict and the emerging world of AI agents. Here is
Speaker 1: Lasana Harris. So, Lasana, let's start with a little bit
Speaker 1: of an origin story. What first drew you to the
Speaker 1: issue of understanding how we perceive other minds?
Speaker 3: I think I was always fascinated in how other people
Speaker 3: experience emotions and how a lack of emotion regulation effect
Speaker 3: social interactions. Once I got into graduate school, I realized
Speaker 3: the emotion literature was a mass, and so I had
Speaker 3: the sort of crisis point. Lots of potential PhD students
Speaker 3: had where I realized the thing I really wanted to
Speaker 3: study seemed impossible to study.
Speaker 4: At that time.
Speaker 3: I happened to take a social cognition class where they
Speaker 3: talked interestingly about anthropomorphism, some of the very classic hydro
Speaker 3: and similar research where you had these geometric shapes colliding
Speaker 3: into each other and chasing each other and people were
Speaker 3: bringing them to life, and that really fascinated me.
Speaker 1: Let me jump in for one second for any listeners
Speaker 1: who don't know. Heiner and Simmer were two psychologists who
Speaker 1: made a little movie where there's what was it? It
Speaker 1: was a triangle in a circle and then another bigger
Speaker 1: triangle and they're moving around.
Speaker 2: The shapes are moving around.
Speaker 1: There's no sound, but when viewers watch this, there's a
Speaker 1: whole story that they on to what's going on.
Speaker 2: It looks like a love story.
Speaker 1: And then the bigger triangle is a bully who's trying
Speaker 1: to break up their relationship. And by the way, listen,
Speaker 1: define for us social cognition.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 3: Social cognition is how we consider other people's minds, essentially
Speaker 3: in the shortcut, so it's the psychological tools that lets
Speaker 3: us interact with other people. So if I want to
Speaker 3: have a conversation with someone. In order for that to happen,
Speaker 3: I have to have some inference about what it is
Speaker 3: they're thinking. Without that inference, it's near impossible for me
Speaker 3: to have that conversation. So this is an ability we
Speaker 3: have that we use all of the time constantly to
Speaker 3: not only figure out what other people are thinking, but
Speaker 3: to also predict what someone might say or do in
Speaker 3: a given situation. So it's crucial for any kind of
Speaker 3: social interaction. So what fascinated me about those cartoons from
Speaker 3: the nineteen forties of shapes moving around is that we
Speaker 3: would use this ability for something as simple as shapes
Speaker 3: sort of acting in funny ways. And that really juxtapose
Speaker 3: with me when considering processes like dehumanization, where you have
Speaker 3: this failure to engage these processes. I was struck by
Speaker 3: how it is that something that seems so prevalent, that
Speaker 3: happened in such a benign environment wasn't actually coming to
Speaker 3: bear when people needed it the most. Right, So, when
Speaker 3: I actually have someone who might be suffering, who might
Speaker 3: be having some type of negative experience, why was it
Speaker 3: that we couldn't seem to get this mechanism going. Yet
Speaker 3: we watched some shapes running around in the screen, and
Speaker 3: suddenly we imagine this whole complex story about their lives, right,
Speaker 3: And so that juxtaposition is really what got me hooked
Speaker 3: on the stuff that I study.
Speaker 1: So tell us about dehumanization and give us an example
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 3: Sure, So, dehumanization is one of those psychological terms where
Speaker 3: everybody has an idea what it is, but psychologists tend
Speaker 3: to think of it a little differently. So for most people,
Speaker 3: dehumanization this horrible thing that only happens in cases of
Speaker 3: human atrocities, and we've never been able to get any
Speaker 3: evidence that's actually the case. Right, we can't go in
Speaker 3: the lab and do unethical things to people to know
Speaker 3: that dehumanization is present. So for a long time there
Speaker 3: was all of this theoretical philosophical work about dehumanization and
Speaker 3: human horribleness, but as psychologists, we tended to define dehumanization
Speaker 3: a lot more simply. We basically said, when you encounter
Speaker 3: other people, you tend to spontaneously get these social cognitive
Speaker 3: processes going, right. You tend to spontaneously think about what's
Speaker 3: going on in their minds in order to interact with them,
Speaker 3: to understand them. Potentially to have empathy towards them. Dehumanization
Speaker 3: then was a case where you didn't get this process
Speaker 3: going in the presence of another person. So you encounter
Speaker 3: another person and instead of that person triggering this psychological process,
Speaker 3: there was an absence of it. So it was a
Speaker 3: very simple definition of humanization, what we like to call
Speaker 3: not your grandpa's definition of dehumanization.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: It's the definition that is detached from the human atrocities,
Speaker 3: and it makes it much more of an everyday process.
Speaker 3: And a lot of the work we've done in the
Speaker 3: last twenty years or so really has established it as
Speaker 3: an everyday process which can be used to do horrible things, right,
Speaker 3: but so can lots of other psychological processes.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that you did is
Speaker 1: you looked at what was happening in social psychology, and
Speaker 1: then you asked, what is happening in the brain?
Speaker 2: So tell us what you found when you did those studies.
Speaker 3: Sure, so, in the brain, there's this large network of
Speaker 3: regions that supports us figuring out what's going on in
Speaker 3: other people's minds. These brain regions are mainly in the neocortex,
Speaker 3: that's the more recently evolved parts of the brain. So
Speaker 3: the parts of the brain that separates us from other species,
Speaker 3: and what you tend to see is that these brain
Speaker 3: regions are tonically active, which means if I suddenly took
Speaker 3: a picture of your brain, now, I'd probably see activation
Speaker 3: in that large network.
Speaker 4: What we did is.
Speaker 3: We had people look at other dehumanized targets. So these
Speaker 3: are groups in society that you wouldn't typically humanize, that is,
Speaker 3: you would treat as more like an object than a
Speaker 3: human being, homeless people being one example. And what we
Speaker 3: found was that this network was not engaged when our
Speaker 3: participants just looked at pictures of these people. And I
Speaker 3: was shocking to us again because shapes running around in
Speaker 3: a screen can sort of trigger some of this engagement
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 4: And so the.
Speaker 3: Brain research was the place we first discovered this effect
Speaker 3: because we found this failure of these networks to engage. Now,
Speaker 3: at the time when we first made that discovery, almost
Speaker 3: every study in social neuroscience got these brain regions coming
Speaker 3: on right because whenever I stuck someone in an MRI
Speaker 3: machine and I showed them a person, I had them
Speaker 3: think about a person, I had them think about themselves,
Speaker 3: you would see this network lighting up. But for these targets, right,
Speaker 3: like homeless people, you didn't quite see the same pattern
Speaker 3: of activation.
Speaker 1: So just give us a slight bit more color on
Speaker 1: the experiment. People are in the scanner. You're showing them
Speaker 1: pictures of other humans. But some of the humans were
Speaker 1: let's say, athletes or successful businessmen, some were homeless people
Speaker 1: or drug addicts. And so give us a sense of
Speaker 1: what you presented and what you saw.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3: So participants would lie there, we'd flash these pictures up,
Speaker 3: these what we call stereotypical representations of social groups, So
Speaker 3: a picture where you look at it and you know
Speaker 3: exactly who it is you're looking at, be it an athlete,
Speaker 3: a college student, a business person, or a homeless person.
Speaker 3: And what we would find is that for all of
Speaker 3: the other social groups, the ones that aren't typically dehumanized,
Speaker 3: you'd get engagement of this network of brain regions. But
Speaker 3: when it came to the traditionally dehumanized social groups, that is,
Speaker 3: the homeless people or the drug addicts, you wouldn't see
Speaker 3: this naturally engaging in quite the same way. So this
Speaker 3: absence of engagement is where we've sort of picked up
Speaker 3: in this dehumanization response.
Speaker 1: And So when I first read this work, first of all,
Speaker 1: I thought it was amazing for several reasons. One is
Speaker 1: that this is different than simply disliking somebody. This is
Speaker 1: actually the networks that understand that person as a human.
Speaker 1: These are diminished.
Speaker 3: They're absolutely right. This is not dislike or simple prejudice.
Speaker 3: For instance, So let's take prejudice as an example. Let's
Speaker 3: say I hate a particular racial outgroup. I would see
Speaker 3: an activation in the brain that's correlated with sort of
Speaker 3: a threat response, because you tend to feel threatened by
Speaker 3: the groups data.
Speaker 4: I'm not the old group, right.
Speaker 3: People that belong to a different political ideology, have different opinions,
Speaker 3: come from a different racial or ethnic group. You tend
Speaker 3: to feel threatened by them, and there's a very clear
Speaker 3: brain response in those cases. That's a typical prejudice response.
Speaker 3: This is not that. This is not just a dislike
Speaker 3: response or prejudice response. This is a failure to process
Speaker 3: as a person, because when you see people, you tend
Speaker 3: to turn on these networks so you can understand something
Speaker 3: about their minds. And that's really important, right, because interacting
Speaker 3: with a person is very different from interacting with an object.
Speaker 3: So if I see a table, I'm not wondering what
Speaker 3: the table's thinking. I'm not wondering what does the table
Speaker 3: think about me. I'm not guessing at the intentions of
Speaker 3: the table. I'm not doing any of the stuff I
Speaker 3: do with other human beings. But even if I see
Speaker 3: a stranger, I'm going to have those thoughts, right because
Speaker 3: I might have to interact with that person. That person
Speaker 3: might be a potential friend someday in the future, and
Speaker 3: ouri they may have information I need. So when you
Speaker 3: see other people, we tend to always engage these networks
Speaker 3: because it's useful. It gives us information that facilitates any
Speaker 3: interaction I may have with them. So to see human
Speaker 3: beings and to not even switch these processes someone was
Speaker 3: stunning for us as well.
Speaker 1: How do you think it happens that we can go
Speaker 1: from engaging these networks with other people to not doing
Speaker 1: it anymore. For example, let's say in Nazi Germany, when
Speaker 1: people had Jewish neighbors and friends and then things changed,
Speaker 1: or in Rwanda where you had intermarriage and friendships between
Speaker 1: the Hutu and the Tutsi, and then there was lots
Speaker 1: of propaganda about the Tutsi being like talkroaches and then
Speaker 1: these things, presumably these networks turned down.
Speaker 2: How does that happen?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the million dollar question, isn't it. I think,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, propaganda does play a role in those
Speaker 3: cases of genocide and human atrocities, because what the propaganda
Speaker 3: does is it puts the idea in your head that
Speaker 3: this person isn't quite a human being in the way
Speaker 3: that I am a human being, right, And so you
Speaker 3: might have interacted with them before, but now the propaganda
Speaker 3: suggests to you that there's something about their fundamental nature
Speaker 3: that's just different. And it turns out that we still
Speaker 3: have a lot of beliefs about other human beings not
Speaker 3: being human. This is something that has been kicking around
Speaker 3: science for centuries, right. So there's a lot of what
Speaker 3: you can call of dustbin science, where scientists were trying
Speaker 3: to prove right, members of different groups weren't quite human
Speaker 3: like the human beings of interest, right, people like themselves.
Speaker 3: And so these ideas are really old ideas that have
Speaker 3: stuck with us as a society and as a civilization.
Speaker 3: And so once the propaganda makes it salient that that
Speaker 3: particular group might not quite be human in the way
Speaker 3: that you're human It's not impossible to think that you
Speaker 3: can now switch off the network. But that's the sort
Speaker 3: of kind of answer where we have no evidence. The
Speaker 3: kinds of stuff we do have evidence for suggests that
Speaker 3: you switch off these networks because it serves a particular function.
Speaker 3: It gives you a particular benefit in a moment that.
Speaker 4: You want to enjoy.
Speaker 3: So let me give you an example of some of
Speaker 3: these benefits. Let's take the case of the homeless person.
Speaker 3: Let's say you live in a big city and you're
Speaker 3: on your way to work, and you're rushing there. You're
Speaker 3: worried about the important meeting that you have, and you
Speaker 3: come across a homeless person sitting at the side of
Speaker 3: the road. Chances are that's not the first homeless person
Speaker 3: you've seen today. If you stop and fell sorry for
Speaker 3: that homeless person and every other such homeless person you see,
Speaker 3: you would probably not get to work.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: The amount of human suffering in the world is overwhelming,
Speaker 3: So in order to focus on the tasks at hand
Speaker 3: and do the things we need to do, we sometimes
Speaker 3: shut out that suffering because it's useful for us, right,
Speaker 3: It's useful for us not to be delayed as we
Speaker 3: rush about our daily lives. That's not a novel finding.
Speaker 3: We've known that since the nineteen seventies. Research and the
Speaker 3: bystander effect, for instance, demonstrated that. So the buyside under
Speaker 3: a fact. There's a really fun set of studies where,
Speaker 3: in the most famous case, they brought in a bunch
Speaker 3: of theology students, people practicing to be pastors and priests,
Speaker 3: and they had them think about the Good Samaritan and
Speaker 3: come up with a samon around the theme of the
Speaker 3: Good Samaritan. So they're thinking about helping people, and then
Speaker 3: they tell them, oh, we're sorry. This room booking we
Speaker 3: have with the experiment, we lost it, so we have
Speaker 3: to switch you to another room across campus. But we're
Speaker 3: running out of time, so could you hurry over there.
Speaker 3: And these theology students hurrying out the building came across
Speaker 3: someone lying on the street who seemed to need help,
Speaker 3: and very few of them stopped to help this person,
Speaker 3: even though they were thinking about helping as they were
Speaker 3: doing it, because again, it would have been inconvenient in
Speaker 3: that moment to help, right, you're sort of focused on
Speaker 3: your task at hand, which is rushing across campus. And
Speaker 3: so I think that's one of the reasons you might
Speaker 3: dehumanize someone because it saves a particular function. Reason you
Speaker 3: might do it is because if I start thinking about
Speaker 3: you as a human being, that brings with it a
Speaker 3: bunch of moral obligations, and I think this is what
Speaker 3: might happen in the genocide cases.
Speaker 4: So when I.
Speaker 3: See you as a human being, there's a bunch of
Speaker 3: rules that come with how I treat human beings. And
Speaker 3: one rule says that I empathize with you if you're suffering, right,
Speaker 3: I try to help you if I can. That's what
Speaker 3: human beings tend to do with other human beings. It's
Speaker 3: in our very nature. In fact, some researchers think it's
Speaker 3: why we evolve to be the species that we are,
Speaker 3: because we're so helpful to other human beings. But I
Speaker 3: may not have the capacity to be empathic towards you, right,
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm emotionally taxed, maybe I'm drained. And this is
Speaker 3: the sort of evidence we see when you look at
Speaker 3: medical professionals, for instance, Right, they're dealing with suffering all day.
Speaker 3: If they felt terrible for each suffering person they encountered, again,
Speaker 3: they wouldn't get through the day, And so dehumanizing some
Speaker 3: and shutting down that part of the brain allows me
Speaker 3: to not have to expand those resources and empathize with you,
Speaker 3: and I can go about my business. And now the
Speaker 3: morality isn't salient, So I don't have to feel guilty
Speaker 3: about not helping you, Right, I don't have to worry
Speaker 3: about the fact that I might see myself as a
Speaker 3: terrible person.
Speaker 4: Always, Yeah, you might think of.
Speaker 3: Me as a terrible person because I didn't even process
Speaker 3: you as a person to begin with, right, I didn't
Speaker 3: get those parts of my brain going. And so we
Speaker 3: have a lot of evidence for those kinds of explanations
Speaker 3: for why dehumanization happens. But again, we can't study it
Speaker 3: in the genoci context because that's an ethical so we
Speaker 3: do things like liquid medical care professionals look at cases
Speaker 3: with homeless people, that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: This argues what you have argued is that social cognition
Speaker 1: is actually quite flexible, and what are some of the
Speaker 1: other key factors that dial it down.
Speaker 3: Another key factor is that feeling of negative moral feelings. Right,
Speaker 3: So if I feel like I've done something horrible to someone,
Speaker 3: or I feel like my group has done something horrible
Speaker 3: to another group, and I don't want to feel that guilt.
Speaker 3: An easy way of getting rid of it is by saying, well,
Speaker 3: those people didn't really suffer because they're not quite human
Speaker 3: in the same way. And so you often see with
Speaker 3: our groups who are subject to a lot of suffering,
Speaker 3: narratives pop up around their capacity to endure that suffering,
Speaker 3: for instance.
Speaker 4: Right, so you.
Speaker 3: Get these stories about some types of groups being superhuman,
Speaker 3: for instance, and having a great capacity to deal with
Speaker 3: pain and suffering. So the actual suffering the experiencing isn't
Speaker 3: that bad because they're not quite human. Right, So if
Speaker 3: it will me going through what they went through, I
Speaker 3: would feel horrible. But because they're not quite human the
Speaker 3: way I am, it's not really that bad. So I
Speaker 3: don't have to feel that terrible about the horrible thing
Speaker 3: that I did. So I can sort of dehumanize as
Speaker 3: a way to protect myself in the face of evidence
Speaker 3: that I haven't been a great person, for instance.
Speaker 1: From your perspective, what are the main roots the main
Speaker 1: psychological roots to dehumanization. Is it things like unfamiliarity, or
Speaker 1: is it perceived immorality, or is it the borders of
Speaker 1: our own in groups?
Speaker 3: I think they are multiple roots to dehumanization because it's
Speaker 3: a very useful tool for a range of situations. So
Speaker 3: these days we've been doing some interesting work. I'm going
Speaker 3: into caring domains beyond just medical professionals, and we're looking
Speaker 3: at parents and their kids, for instance. And so imagine
Speaker 3: you have a five year old and you've already given
Speaker 3: you a five year old some treat for the afternoon,
Speaker 3: and they've come back to you begging for more, tears
Speaker 3: streaming down their face. What that kid is doing is
Speaker 3: tugging at your empathic strings, right, You're trying to get
Speaker 3: you to feel sorry for them, so you do what
Speaker 3: they want you to do. If you want to be
Speaker 3: a responsible parent, you have to somehow shut that out
Speaker 3: right and find a way to stick to your guns
Speaker 3: and tell them that's the limit for today. And so
Speaker 3: doing that means you have to ignore their perceived suffering,
Speaker 3: right because the tears streaming down their face makes it
Speaker 3: seem like they're suffering. And so having a flexibility, having
Speaker 3: a tool that lets us shut that out and say nope,
Speaker 3: that's final, allows you to stick to your goal in
Speaker 3: the particular case of taking care of that kid. So
Speaker 3: we've been interested in cases where dehumanization needs the benefits.
Speaker 3: For instance, right, because I've shut out your mind, it
Speaker 3: allows me to do some stuff that I wouldn't have
Speaker 3: otherwise been able to do because now I'm not quite
Speaker 3: processing you in the same way. That's exactly what we
Speaker 3: see with domadical professionals who are actually.
Speaker 4: Trained interview human beings like that. Right.
Speaker 3: They're taught to view the body as that machinery, a
Speaker 3: biological machinery, and the medico curriculum really pounds that in,
Speaker 3: and so they learn, both sort of explicitly and just
Speaker 3: true practice that they need to shut these people suffering out.
Speaker 3: And shutting out the suffering requires you to shortsake at
Speaker 3: these social cognitive processes.
Speaker 1: I want to return to this question about, let's say,
Speaker 1: on a larger political cultural level, what are the things
Speaker 1: that make it easy to dehumanize another groups? So the
Speaker 1: examples I gave you know, I'm unfamiliar with them, I
Speaker 1: just don't know enough about them, or I perceive them
Speaker 1: as immoral in some way, or I have boundaries to
Speaker 1: my group, you know, my in group and my outgroup,
Speaker 1: and they are clearly on the other side of the outgroup.
Speaker 1: What are the important things and what else do you
Speaker 1: see is the roots to dehumanization.
Speaker 3: I think in the end to group space, we have
Speaker 3: to be careful because we have these ideas about dehumanization
Speaker 3: doing a lot of heavy lifting when we don't have
Speaker 3: a lot of scientific evidence for it. And I think
Speaker 3: that's because there are multiple processes operating. So if there's
Speaker 3: a group that I'm unfamiliar with, yes, unfamiliarity might promote dehumanization,
Speaker 3: but unfamiliarity can also permit a desire to learn more
Speaker 3: about this particular group, right, So it can go both ways.
Speaker 3: I think what sort of helps is when you have
Speaker 3: a combination of these processes coming together, then dehumanization can
Speaker 3: be useful. So let's say that this outgroup you have
Speaker 3: in the past has done some wrong to you, so
Speaker 3: you know that they're established as a particular threat. Here,
Speaker 3: dehumanization is not going to be helpful because if someone
Speaker 3: is threatening you, you kind of want to know their intentions, right,
Speaker 3: You want to know what it is that they have
Speaker 3: in store for you. So dehumanization on its own isn't
Speaker 3: going to do the work. Now, let's assume that the
Speaker 3: same our group that you view is threatening, you're able
Speaker 3: to do something about it. So now I've done some
Speaker 3: horrible thing to them to mitigate the potential threat. When
Speaker 3: I reflect on that behavior, I might feel terrible. Now,
Speaker 3: dehumanization becomes useful to shut out those negative feelings I
Speaker 3: have around the thing I did to the group. So
Speaker 3: I often tell people I don't think dehumanization motivates things
Speaker 3: like political violence. I think we have other psychological mechanisms
Speaker 3: that are much better at getting us to be cruel
Speaker 3: and violent to other human beings. But I think dehumanization
Speaker 3: is able to sustain it, right, because what it does
Speaker 3: is it shuts out the suffering of the group that
Speaker 3: you've now done something horrible too, so it lets the
Speaker 3: violence keep going. So for me, dehumanization is really problematic
Speaker 3: when you're already in a bad place. So if there's
Speaker 3: already animosity between groups and you get political violence going,
Speaker 3: now I worry about dehumanism because the horse has already
Speaker 3: left the stable, so to speak, and dehumanization is going
Speaker 3: to keep.
Speaker 4: That violence going.
Speaker 3: So I don't see it as the motivator.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: The analogy I often use is, I don't think dehumanization
Speaker 3: is going to cause you to pick up a machete
Speaker 3: and go to your neighbor's front door. But when you're
Speaker 3: in the process of kicking that door in dehumanization might
Speaker 3: be useful, right to shut out their mind when you're
Speaker 3: doing the horror black We have no evidence for that scientifically.
Speaker 3: But then afterwards you have to live with yourself, and
Speaker 3: here's where dehumanization is particularly useful, because it allows you
Speaker 3: to live with the things that you've done. Because you've
Speaker 3: now viewed the other person as not quite human, morality
Speaker 3: goes out the window. So in these cases of integroup conflict,
Speaker 3: we tend to focus on dehumanization because it has a
Speaker 3: bad reputation and it is playing a role, but I
Speaker 3: feel like it can often mask some of these other
Speaker 3: psychological processes like threat, for instance, which is really what
Speaker 3: drives a lot of the violence and the animosity. But
Speaker 3: they were hand in hand, right Our job as psychologists
Speaker 3: is picking these things apart, but in reality, they often
Speaker 3: occur in sequence, they co occur, and that's the part
Speaker 3: of it that we're working actively to figure out.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with your intuition on this, because you know,
Speaker 1: when I look at a squirrel that is dehumanized, for me,
Speaker 1: it's more like an object.
Speaker 2: But I have no desire to harm that squirrel. But
Speaker 2: if the squirrel were.
Speaker 1: Rabid and charging at me, and I felt a threat
Speaker 1: and so on, that might lead me to feel like
Speaker 1: I need to do something in a way that I
Speaker 1: wouldn't feel terrible about.
Speaker 2: So I agree with you on that.
Speaker 1: You have other studies about putting a price on people
Speaker 1: and what that does in terms of these networks that
Speaker 1: are involved in dehumanization.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, once we did the classic dehumanization, we're GRAVI
Speaker 3: loked at it in a group context. I really wanted
Speaker 3: some evidence of this being more of an everyday thing.
Speaker 3: So I didn't just I didn't imagine dehumanization just evolving
Speaker 3: and functioning because we have to deal with our groups.
Speaker 3: I thought it might occur in cases where you didn't
Speaker 3: just need to process people's minds for a host of reasons,
Speaker 3: and one reason might be because you're actually outcome dependent
Speaker 3: in someone. So what we did is we looked at
Speaker 3: a labor market context, and to do this we used
Speaker 3: essentially a fantasy football league.
Speaker 4: So the idea really came.
Speaker 3: From an interview I heard an NFL player give many
Speaker 3: years ago, where he was injured and he couldn't play,
Speaker 3: and he received all of this horrible abuse from fans
Speaker 3: online because he couldn't play, and a lot of the
Speaker 3: fans were abusing him because their fantasy teams would suffer,
Speaker 3: right because he wasn't going to make any points for
Speaker 3: them that particular week. And he said that he felt
Speaker 3: very dehumanized. Now, no one's going to shed a tear
Speaker 3: for a very highly paid professional athlete saying that they're dehumanized,
Speaker 3: But it did suggest that there's something about being in
Speaker 3: a labor market that might promote that kind of outlet.
Speaker 3: So what we did in our studies we essentially created
Speaker 3: a fantasy league, a fantasy time estimation league. We didn't
Speaker 3: have athletes available. We took regular people off the street
Speaker 3: and sort of put them in a league where they
Speaker 3: had to guess different intervals of time. We then brought
Speaker 3: other people in, gave them some money and had them
Speaker 3: purchase some of these people to be on their team.
Speaker 3: And then these people they purchased, these players would go
Speaker 3: out and compete, and if they won, they want money
Speaker 3: for the owners, just as it works in sports leagues
Speaker 3: or any other type of labor market. And what we
Speaker 3: found is that the owners, the ones who had purchased.
Speaker 3: These players were dehumanizing the players, but just the ones
Speaker 3: that they had purchased, not all of them, right, because
Speaker 3: the ones they had purchased they are now outcome dependent on.
Speaker 3: What matters for them winning money is that they get
Speaker 3: these guesses correct, just like that football player.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: What matters is that you go out there and you perform.
Speaker 3: I don't care what's in your head. Is win me
Speaker 3: any money? I don't care what your intentions are. All
Speaker 3: that matters is that you're competent in the thing that
Speaker 3: I'm paying you for, essentially, And so we found some
Speaker 3: evidence that in these labor market context right, people become
Speaker 3: sort of cogs in a machine. Now, again, there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of novelty there. People like Marks have been
Speaker 3: saying that for quite some time, but it's fun to
Speaker 3: get some brain imaging evidence for it as well.
Speaker 1: Do you find that certain people are more or less
Speaker 1: prone to dehumanization of others?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and it goes in the opposite way you might think.
Speaker 3: So the people who believe that they are very good
Speaker 3: people and they never do anything wrong, those are the
Speaker 3: ones most likely to dehumanize others, because those are the
Speaker 3: ones that have this need to protect this idea of
Speaker 3: themselves that they are a morally good person. If you
Speaker 3: accept that sometimes you're good and sometimes you're not, then
Speaker 3: you don't tend to dehumanize as much because you're not
Speaker 3: as invested in protecting this self image you have of
Speaker 3: being being a morally good person. So it's actually an
Speaker 3: ironic effect whether people that think of themselves as being
Speaker 3: very good people are the most likely to dehumanize.
Speaker 4: At Lisnawa Resarch.
Speaker 1: You know, this is really interesting because so I did
Speaker 1: a study years ago where I was looking at in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups and essentially you're looking at hands getting
Speaker 1: stabbed on the screen, and they all have a label Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, atheists,
Speaker 1: and depending on your in group, you have a larger response.
Speaker 1: And let's summarize this as the pain matrix to your
Speaker 1: own in group hand getting stabbed then any of your outgroups.
Speaker 1: And this was true across everybody, including atheists, by the way,
Speaker 1: who care more when they see atheist hands getting stabbed.
Speaker 1: But we also did questionnaires about how people saw themselves
Speaker 1: in terms of their empathy, and we actually found something
Speaker 1: very similar, which is that the people who felt they
Speaker 1: were more empathic actually had a larger difference between their
Speaker 1: in group recons response and their outgroup response. This very
Speaker 1: low level neural response. So one interpretation that we considered
Speaker 1: was that maybe when they're being asked the question about empathy,
Speaker 1: they are thinking about their in group.
Speaker 2: You know, how would you.
Speaker 1: Feel if you saw someone twist their ankle and fall
Speaker 1: off the sidewalk. Maybe they're just thinking about their own
Speaker 1: in group, and that's why they rate themselves as empathic.
Speaker 1: But this is very interesting what you're saying, because you
Speaker 1: found something similar here that people's responses seem to run
Speaker 1: counter to what's actually happening in their brains.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I think you've seen evidence of this in
Speaker 3: other places as well.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So I have a collaborator that studies compassion. He gets
Speaker 3: a very similar result, Right, the people that identify as
Speaker 3: the most compassionate and the least likely to engage in compassion.
Speaker 3: You see it also with things like racism. Right, there's
Speaker 3: a really interesting study where people that say, well, I
Speaker 3: don't like black people, for instance, I'm the ones that
Speaker 3: show huge implicit bias scores. This is a measure of
Speaker 3: people sort of subtle racist beliefs. But the ones that
Speaker 3: say they love black people and they have a bunch
Speaker 3: of friends and they egalitarian, they're the ones that tend
Speaker 3: to show these bigger differences. So I think it speaks
Speaker 3: to a commonality about some of these psychological processes and
Speaker 3: how they function.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: That is, if you view yourself in a particular way,
Speaker 3: you're invested in protecting that view of yourself and that
Speaker 3: might obscure some of these other biases that you might have. Now,
Speaker 3: saying that has become very unpopular because it seems to
Speaker 3: be an attack against people that who are very positive
Speaker 3: views of themselves. But the goal here isn't necessarily to
Speaker 3: criticize those people. It's simply to make people aware that
Speaker 3: their self perceptions have an impact in the psychological processes
Speaker 3: that they're able to then display towards others. And so
Speaker 3: it's really important, I think, when we think about ourselves
Speaker 3: to be honest with ourselves, right, and to realize that
Speaker 3: we're just here and we're going to have good sides
Speaker 3: and bad sides and that's okay, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So is it possible that the neural responses we're seeing,
Speaker 1: at least in some cases, are rivalries between different networks,
Speaker 1: some of which are saying, Hey, I'm actually feeling this way,
Speaker 1: but I perceive myself that way and I like to
Speaker 1: present myself socially that way. And what we're seeing is
Speaker 1: a big response because of this conflict.
Speaker 3: Quite possibly, quite possibly, it's hard to rule that out.
Speaker 3: I think of it in a very straightforward sense, and
Speaker 3: the fact that what's really important to us as human beings,
Speaker 3: one of the many goals we have is to maintain
Speaker 3: a positive self image and a positive view of ourselves.
Speaker 3: If you don't have a positive view of yourself, you
Speaker 3: tend to slip into mental illness, depression, those sort of issues,
Speaker 3: and so it's really important we maintain that, and there
Speaker 3: are lots of ways we can do it. We do
Speaker 3: it through groups, right, if we belong to groups that
Speaker 3: are prestigious. Those prestigious groups allow us to sort of
Speaker 3: for any negativity about ourselves, which is why everyone puts
Speaker 3: on their team's football t shirt when they're winning, right,
Speaker 3: And so you want that positivity that comes with it.
Speaker 3: This desire we have to maintain this positive view of
Speaker 3: our selves can now get in the way, right, So
Speaker 3: it gets in the way of our typical psychological functioning.
Speaker 3: So if I've done something horrible. I want to feel
Speaker 3: better about myself. An easy way to do that might
Speaker 3: be to engage in some of these processes we've been
Speaker 3: talking about. So I always give the anecdote of let's
Speaker 3: imagine that you have a house that you would like
Speaker 3: to sell. So you're living in this house, you decide
Speaker 3: you need to move.
Speaker 4: You want to sell.
Speaker 3: It till happens your best friend is a realtor. Now
Speaker 3: they're your best friends, so you know that they're a
Speaker 3: terrible realtor. They never get asking price, they always complain
Speaker 3: about it, They worry about their job security because of it.
Speaker 3: Do you go to your friend and say, can you
Speaker 3: sell my house?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: If you're thinking about the friendship and the way your
Speaker 3: friend might view you, you might say, Okay, I'm going
Speaker 3: to go talk to them to sell my house, knowing
Speaker 3: you'll make a huge loss. But if you focus on
Speaker 3: the fact that I need to make a profit from
Speaker 3: selling this house so I can buy the next one,
Speaker 3: you'll probably keep that away from your friend.
Speaker 4: Right, you might go.
Speaker 3: Elsewhere that doesn't make you a terrible place or a
Speaker 3: terrible friend. Right, you're doing the thing that sort of
Speaker 3: sensible and rational. But if you hold this view of
Speaker 3: yourself as being a good friend, right, that can eat
Speaker 3: you inside. Right, you're probably going to be led as straight.
Speaker 3: And so oftentimes these self perceptions we have leaders astray
Speaker 3: lead us into paths that are suboptimal for ourselves but
Speaker 3: also people around us as well.
Speaker 1: I want to return to one point before we move
Speaker 1: on to the next thing, which is you mentioned that
Speaker 1: dehumanization may not be sufficient for groups of people to
Speaker 1: take violent action against their neighbors. What are the psychological
Speaker 1: factors that are involved in that, because threat obviously is one.
Speaker 1: But you know, when I think about dehumanization, probably for
Speaker 1: many of us, we think about things like just as
Speaker 1: one example, there's this famous picture of a Nazi soldier
Speaker 1: who's got his rifle aimed at a woman holding her baby,
Speaker 1: and he's about to execute them both, and the woman
Speaker 1: and baby are obviously terrified he's about to shoot them.
Speaker 1: His colleague took the photograph and he proudly sent this
Speaker 1: photograph back to his family. And the only way that
Speaker 1: sort of behavior is possible is with total dehumanization. But
Speaker 1: clearly the woman and the baby are not a threat
Speaker 1: to him. So what are the psychological factors that allow
Speaker 1: for that sort of violence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's hard because there's a timeline here,
Speaker 3: a timeline element that we never really talk about. So
Speaker 3: it could be that that soldier who has taken the
Speaker 3: picture and his friend have already gotten to the point
Speaker 3: where they've dehumanized the enemy. And this is something that
Speaker 3: we see a lot in police forces, in militaries, where
Speaker 3: as part of your training, much like the medical professionals,
Speaker 3: you're taught to view the enemy in a particular sort
Speaker 3: of way, again, because it makes it easier to engage
Speaker 3: in these types of behaviors. Now that doesn't mean it's
Speaker 3: motivating you to shoot the person, right, but it means
Speaker 3: that upon shooting the person, you don't have the negativity
Speaker 3: that would typically come from it. And so sorting out
Speaker 3: that timeline is one of the challenges that we haven't
Speaker 3: quite cracked in the psychology literature. Which process comes first
Speaker 3: in that task? Gape there's a wonderful book written by
Speaker 3: a historian Browning is his last name, where he interviewed
Speaker 3: a bunch of people at Nazi dead squads and he
Speaker 3: basically asks them, why did you do some of the
Speaker 3: horrible things that you did? And for a lot of them,
Speaker 3: their story starts with threats from the Nazi regime where
Speaker 3: they had to enlist and they had to engage in
Speaker 3: these behaviors or their own families were threatened, so they
Speaker 3: got into these behaviors initially for their own sort of
Speaker 3: self protection and preservation. It's essentially because they were threatened.
Speaker 3: Once they got into the behaviors and they started engaging
Speaker 3: in these behaviors, now they needed a mechanism to keep going,
Speaker 3: to keep doing these behaviors, and that's where dehumanization is handy.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: A lot of people in those interviews also said, well,
Speaker 3: I always miss my shot, right, so I never aimed
Speaker 3: at the people. I always shot outswhere, knowing that in
Speaker 3: a firing squad somebody would probably shoot them didn't have
Speaker 3: to be me. So not everyone was going directly to
Speaker 3: this place where you're now dehumanizing. But in these contexts,
Speaker 3: dehumanization is very useful because it allows you to keep
Speaker 3: engaging in behaviors that you may have started because you
Speaker 3: felt threatened. But now that you've already engaged in them,
Speaker 3: you need a way of living with yourself. There's a
Speaker 3: time course element where dehumanization comes later. It's not the
Speaker 3: motive right at the front. That may just seem like
Speaker 3: an academic distinction, but I think it's really important. And
Speaker 3: you think about prosecuting people for war crimes, for instance,
Speaker 3: where they view dehumanization as demotive, but you can't really
Speaker 3: get evidence of that because people in the Dutch squad
Speaker 3: say I didn't do it because I dehumanize them.
Speaker 4: I felt like I have no choice.
Speaker 1: Well, let's take something like, for example, in America and
Speaker 1: in many places in the world, we happen to be
Speaker 1: in a very polarized era and there is violence that
Speaker 1: keeps cropping up. This violence doesn't happen because somebody feels
Speaker 1: that they're being recruited and the government is threatening their family.
Speaker 1: This is happening for other sorts of reasons. I often
Speaker 1: think about in group and out group issues. But what
Speaker 1: do you see as the main psychological dribes that allow violence.
Speaker 1: We agree that dehumanization might be a later piece.
Speaker 3: I think part of it is identity. So people in
Speaker 3: a particular group may feel that they have to engage
Speaker 3: in certain behaviors to be a good member of that group,
Speaker 3: and that's one thing we can't ignore. So sociologists have
Speaker 3: done some interesting work looking at propaganda and the themes
Speaker 3: in propaganda, Right, the kinds of things that propaganda's talk about.
Speaker 3: Dehumanization is present, but it's not the most popular thing.
Speaker 3: What ends up happening is a lot more talk about threat,
Speaker 3: obviously how threatening the other group are, but also a
Speaker 3: lot of talk about what you do as a good
Speaker 3: member of this group. Right, if you are really a
Speaker 3: good member of this group, these are the kinds of
Speaker 3: behaviors you engage in. So I feel like a lot
Speaker 3: of the political violence you see in the US is
Speaker 3: motivated by identity, right, people believing that as a good
Speaker 3: member of this group, these are the kinds of things
Speaker 3: I should do. So, for instance, why would I sign
Speaker 3: up to an organization like ICE. It's not because someone
Speaker 3: has forced me to do it. It's because I feel like,
Speaker 3: as a good American, there's this real problem in the
Speaker 3: country around immigrants, and I should do something about it
Speaker 3: if I'm able to. And one way I can do
Speaker 3: that is joining this organization which is working towards.
Speaker 4: Addressing this problem.
Speaker 3: So those are identity issues that get you signed up
Speaker 3: in the first place. Now, when you're out in the
Speaker 3: field and you're happening to be engaging in violence because
Speaker 3: you're caught in that particular situation where violence becomes necessary.
Speaker 3: Maybe you feel threatened at a riot, for instance, how
Speaker 3: do you make sense of that. That's when I think
Speaker 3: dehumanization is handy. So now I have to explain why
Speaker 3: I've done these things that my identity says I must do.
Speaker 3: It's because they're not quite people in the way that
Speaker 3: way people. And so you often see in the propagandis
Speaker 3: rhetoric dehumanization occurring, but strong messages around identity that really
Speaker 3: gives you information about what a good member of this
Speaker 3: group does, and strong messaging around the threat that the
Speaker 3: art group presents as well, right, which potentially motivates you
Speaker 3: to feel like you have to defend yourself open your country.
Speaker 3: So I think the multiple psychological factors that go into
Speaker 3: these kinds of political violence, and I don't think there's
Speaker 3: one that we can point at and say it's the
Speaker 3: most critical one, because they're all having a role at
Speaker 3: different points in the cascade.
Speaker 1: Okay, now I want to switch gears to talk about anthropomorphization,
Speaker 1: which is the flip side of dehumanization. We often attribute
Speaker 1: minds to things that don't have them, like our pets
Speaker 1: or characters in the Pixar film or the moving shapes
Speaker 1: that we talked about earlier. Why what's going on with
Speaker 1: anthromorphization and what does this have to do with dehumanization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that juxtaposition between the two is what I
Speaker 3: find really fascinating. So anthwer momorphism occurs because it's so
Speaker 3: useful to get these mechanisms going, Right, Like, when I
Speaker 3: think about what's going on inside of your head, it
Speaker 3: allows me to explain your behavior. Right, I can attribute
Speaker 3: it to your personality, or your psychological mood or your
Speaker 3: emotional state. Right, I can say you threw that chair
Speaker 3: across the room because you were upset, and that gives
Speaker 3: me a reason to explain your potentially erratic behavior. But
Speaker 3: it also lets me predict your behavior. It lets me
Speaker 3: say what you're likely to do the next time you're
Speaker 3: in a situation where you potentially get into that psychological state. Right,
Speaker 3: you're the kind of person that flings chairs about. That's
Speaker 3: really useful, and we want to use that when we
Speaker 3: encounter things in the world that we might want to
Speaker 3: explain and predict the behavior of as well. So I
Speaker 3: think you saw a lot of anthropomorphism throughout human history.
Speaker 3: When it came to things like weather. Right, if there's
Speaker 3: suddenly a storm or a drought, we usually pray to
Speaker 3: the race God so that there's more rain, because it
Speaker 3: helps us explain and predict the occurrence of the weather.
Speaker 3: And we still do it right. We anthropomorphize hurricanes and
Speaker 3: give them names and talk about their behavior as if
Speaker 3: they were people because it's a handy explanatory mechanism. So
Speaker 3: we have this psychological process in our head that gives
Speaker 3: us explanations and allows us to predict.
Speaker 4: Stuff that's really handy to you.
Speaker 3: So if I'm interacting with my pet, of course I'm
Speaker 3: going to infer a mind there one because the pet
Speaker 3: actually has a mind, And pets are a gray area
Speaker 3: for us for exactly this reason, because there is a
Speaker 3: mind there. But even when there isn't, for instance, when
Speaker 3: I'm talking to chat GPT, right, it's better for me
Speaker 3: to think of it like a person and sort of
Speaker 3: triggered the social cognitive processes because I can better understand
Speaker 3: it and predict what it might do. And that's really important.
Speaker 3: As I move around the will interacting with stuff that
Speaker 3: seem to have minds of their own.
Speaker 1: And so you recently wrote a review where you looked
Speaker 1: at the way we've you humans and the way we
Speaker 1: view AI agents, and what do you find there and
Speaker 1: what's interesting and surprising given the increasing presence of AI
Speaker 1: in our lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the early in my career philosopher once
Speaker 3: gave me a challenge that he said, if you're anthropomorphizing,
Speaker 3: don't you still know the thing isn't actually a human?
Speaker 3: And it turns out he's right. When the brain anthropomorphise,
Speaker 3: it tends to use a slightly separate network so that
Speaker 3: you can still maintain that distinction. Right, because even when
Speaker 3: you're anthropomorphizing, you're still not treating it quite like a
Speaker 3: human being. So I could play against a computer in chess,
Speaker 3: and if the computer is beating me, I could unplug
Speaker 3: the computer. Right, I could do something that I wouldn't
Speaker 3: do it another human being. Right, if a human being
Speaker 3: is beating me, I'm not going to upset the chess board.
Speaker 3: That's horrible. That's going to damage my potential reputation because
Speaker 3: when I'm interacting with the human, I'm also worrying about
Speaker 3: what does this human think about me. When I'm anthropomorphizing
Speaker 3: the computer, I don't care what it thinks about me, Right,
Speaker 3: that's irrelevant because it's not a person. It's not going
Speaker 3: to tell anybody that I'm a horrible loser. And so
Speaker 3: there are these such a differences that occuld for things
Speaker 3: that are human and things that aren't human that the
Speaker 3: brain still preserves as it's anthropomorphizing. So it's using some
Speaker 3: of the mechanisms, some of the social cognition, but not
Speaker 3: all of it. If it were a complete overlapping processes,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and then
Speaker 3: there'd be much more talk about the rights of pets
Speaker 3: and the rights of AI. But we don't have big
Speaker 3: conversations about the rights of AI because we don't quite
Speaker 3: see them as human beings. Despite the fact I can
Speaker 3: have an hour long conversation with Alexa and tell her
Speaker 3: about all of my problems and asks for advice, right
Speaker 3: as I might with another human being, at the end
Speaker 3: of the day, the brain knows the difference and preserves it.
Speaker 3: The worry for me with your question about the prevalence
Speaker 3: of AI is whether that distinction is eventually going to
Speaker 3: go away. So will future generations of humans who have
Speaker 3: now been interacting with AI as long as they've been
Speaker 3: interacting with people suddenly lose that distinction, right, and suddenly
Speaker 3: will we see a rising cases of people fighting for
Speaker 3: AI rights right. That to me is fascinating, very sci
Speaker 3: fi stuff, but a potential possibility given how plastic de
Speaker 3: brain is and how it's willing to adapt or circumstances.
Speaker 3: So these are the kinds of things that I think
Speaker 3: about in the AI ethics space that I don't see
Speaker 3: tons of conversations about.
Speaker 1: It strikes me that maybe part of the difference in
Speaker 1: the way we humanize another person and humanize CHETCHPT might
Speaker 1: have to do with all the consequences that we might
Speaker 1: envelop in this, like, oh, it's another person, so it's
Speaker 1: a repeated game where we're going back and forth and
Speaker 1: their legal consequences if I kill my chest opponent as
Speaker 1: opposed to unplug the computer and so on. So as
Speaker 1: long as those other consequences remain the same as in
Speaker 1: I'll still get busted for hurting a human, but I
Speaker 1: won't for a computer, then you know, maybe maybe we
Speaker 1: won't come to ANTHROPOMORPHISEI in the same way.
Speaker 3: You have great faith. You have great faith in the law.
Speaker 3: I have less faith in its ability to drive behavior.
Speaker 3: I think reputation is a big one, right, So I think,
Speaker 3: for instance, why do you why are you polite to strangers?
Speaker 3: There's no reason for you to be polite to a stranger.
Speaker 3: We live in a world of eight billion people. Chances
Speaker 3: are that stranger will never see you again, We'll never
Speaker 3: know who your friends are, won't be able to tell
Speaker 3: people that you were impolite to them, therefore affect your reputation.
Speaker 3: But we evolved in very small groups of human beings
Speaker 3: where reputation was paramount, right, it really mattered, and so
Speaker 3: we learned to treat other people nicely whilst there were
Speaker 3: damaging consequences for our reputation. That has somehow held on
Speaker 3: in our brain, and we still have this belief that
Speaker 3: when we encounter another human being we have to treat
Speaker 3: them in a particular sort of way to manage potential
Speaker 3: damage to our reputation. That's not a concern we have
Speaker 3: with AI, for instance. But what could change is if
Speaker 3: AI now goes about spreading information about your reputation. So
Speaker 3: if every time my interaction with Alexa was recorded in
Speaker 3: her memory bank somewhere, and the next time somebody used
Speaker 3: Alexa it said, you know that guy David Eagelman, He.
Speaker 4: Was really mean to me.
Speaker 3: I think we will start caring about, right, what Alexa
Speaker 3: thinks about us, And so I don't know if the
Speaker 3: legal changes will drive us to have the neural changes,
Speaker 3: but I think it's an issue of what is the
Speaker 3: technology capable of and how it's being used that's going
Speaker 3: to drive these changes.
Speaker 2: Well, great, and this is a great segue to something.
Speaker 1: You have argued that legal systems should explicitly account for dehumanizations.
Speaker 1: So what's an example of one policy that you would
Speaker 1: like to see Given your expertise in the neuroscience, what's
Speaker 1: something you would like to see changed in our legal system.
Speaker 3: I think I've spent a lot of time talking about
Speaker 3: the stories that we tell with in a society and
Speaker 3: the things that are allowed to be said. So we
Speaker 3: have a censorship system, right that doesn't allow us to
Speaker 3: go on television or make media that does particular things.
Speaker 3: Usually it's a wrong swearing and sexuality, things coming from
Speaker 3: our Protestant past that are holdovers. Nobody cares about those
Speaker 3: things today in quite the same way. I think we're
Speaker 3: focused on the wrong stuff. I think we should be
Speaker 3: focusing on stories that promote dehumanization of particular groups because
Speaker 3: what it does is it facilitates any kind of violence
Speaker 3: that might be occurring against them. So if you say
Speaker 3: a particular group is eating dogs and cats, for instance,
Speaker 3: that's a dehumanizing image you've put out of that group.
Speaker 3: That's very dangerous to me. And that's the kind of
Speaker 3: stuff I wish legal systems would pay more attention to,
Speaker 3: because those stories, whether you believe it or not, whether
Speaker 3: you endorse them or not, they get into your heads,
Speaker 3: and your brain is this powerful machine that's taking in
Speaker 3: all of this information and holding it relevant. When you're
Speaker 3: in a situation where that information is potentially useful, that is,
Speaker 3: it can facilitate dehumanization of that group, it's going to
Speaker 3: kick in, and that's what I really worry about. So
Speaker 3: I really am one who promotes not necessarily a lack
Speaker 3: of freedom of speech per se, but the kind of
Speaker 3: careful monitoring that we use for domains that quite frankly
Speaker 3: were relevant three hundred years ago that I think aren't
Speaker 3: relevant today. So I would like to see less attention
Speaker 3: to swear words, for instance, and more attention to dehumanizing
Speaker 3: rhetoric about groups. Because even though someone says, oh Wes
Speaker 3: said it ingest, it's a joke. Your brain doesn't register
Speaker 3: that it makes that association, and that association can pop
Speaker 3: out at any point. It's convenient to influence your psychological processing.
Speaker 3: So that's one of the sort of policy legal things
Speaker 3: that I've been sort of promoting for for quite some time.
Speaker 3: And that doesn't mean you take away the ability to
Speaker 3: say those things from people. You at least give people
Speaker 3: the option to know that this content they might consume
Speaker 3: does contain this kind of messaging, so they can make
Speaker 3: a conscious choice whether they want to be exposed.
Speaker 4: To that or not.
Speaker 3: And we do that already with our rating system, right
Speaker 3: we say this is for mature audiences because it has
Speaker 3: sexually explicit language or scenes in it. Why can't we
Speaker 3: do it with things that promote negative stereotypes about groups,
Speaker 3: for instance, or has them in a dehumanized like And
Speaker 3: this was my pet peeve with Disney for the longest time,
Speaker 3: and then recently I noticed that Disney started doing that
Speaker 3: right on some of their older programming. They now put
Speaker 3: up a warning saying there's a bunch of stereotypics representations
Speaker 3: in this programming. And so as the consumer, I can
Speaker 3: make a choice. I can say I want to expose
Speaker 3: myself to that or I don't, And I think that's
Speaker 3: a very simple change we can make that would have
Speaker 3: enormous consequences, positive consequence.
Speaker 1: Now switching from legal system to individuals. So if a
Speaker 1: listener wants to reduce the amount of dialing down on
Speaker 1: other people that they're doing, what are some practical take
Speaker 1: home lessons that they can take away from this conversation.
Speaker 3: I think depends on the contacts that they're in, but
Speaker 3: there are lots of strategies. And the case of homeless people,
Speaker 3: I always tell people just make eye contact, because that's
Speaker 3: the first thing you'll notice that people don't do right,
Speaker 3: and looking at someone's eyes gives you a lot of
Speaker 3: information about what might be going on inside of their heads.
Speaker 3: So if you simply looked at them in the face,
Speaker 3: that right there is going to make it less likely
Speaker 3: that you will shortsake these processes. If you're rave enough,
Speaker 3: have a conversation, ask them a question, ask them what
Speaker 3: they were planning to do today, Right, Like, those very
Speaker 3: simple things that don't seem to matter much actually trigger
Speaker 3: these processes.
Speaker 4: In a very rich sort of way.
Speaker 3: In another context, and let's take the political violence context,
Speaker 3: where things are very polarized. I think another very simple
Speaker 3: thing you could do is instead of listening to other
Speaker 3: people's opinions or points of view, is finding the commonalities right,
Speaker 3: figuring out, well, what's the same thing that we have
Speaker 3: in common. For instance, we're all Americans. We have a
Speaker 3: lot more in common with other human beings than we
Speaker 3: are different from them, and identifying these commonalities is often
Speaker 3: quite powerful for shifting how our brain process is people.
Speaker 3: And I'll give you an example of a case where
Speaker 3: I think this actually happens. So a few years ago,
Speaker 3: we did a project with a charity in the UK
Speaker 3: called the Museum of Homelessness, and what they did was
Speaker 3: this wonderful performance are piece where they got a bunch
Speaker 3: of stories from homeless people about their daily lives, and
Speaker 3: they got objects that these people donated, And one object
Speaker 3: I really remember was a pack of cigarettes, and the
Speaker 3: guy who donated it said, oh, this is so meaningful
Speaker 3: to me because I need a coffee and a cigarette
Speaker 3: to start the day. And that resonates with lots of
Speaker 3: people who also have a similar experience, and so considering
Speaker 3: that person has a similar experience to you is sufficient
Speaker 3: to now trigger processing of them in a way that's very,
Speaker 3: very different. So in the polarization context, I often encourage
Speaker 3: people to look for the similarities if you're finding with
Speaker 3: members of your own family. While that's in some sense
Speaker 3: easy to resolve because you have so many similarities you
Speaker 3: could talk about instead rather than the differences and the
Speaker 3: stuff that you know is going to cause friction. And
Speaker 3: then in some cases, I don't think we want to
Speaker 3: get rid of the dehumanization. In the care context, for instance,
Speaker 3: I think the dehumanization is very useful. I think what
Speaker 3: we want to do is be aware of when we're
Speaker 3: dehumanizing so it doesn't spiral out of control. So if
Speaker 3: you're a physician and you're seeing a patient and you're
Speaker 3: checking up on their treatment, that's when dehumanization is not relevant, right.
Speaker 3: You want to sort of care about them as a
Speaker 3: human being in that context, so you can ensure that
Speaker 3: whatever it is you're prescribing them is actually benefiting their
Speaker 3: psychological experience as a human being. You're not just treating
Speaker 3: them as a number on a sheet or a person
Speaker 3: with a particular disease or ailment. When you're now operating
Speaker 3: on the operating table, dehumanization is useful there, right, because
Speaker 3: they're the broken machine. Analogy actually helps you get the
Speaker 3: task done. So just being more aware of the context
Speaker 3: in which we might be dehumanizing bass not, I think
Speaker 3: is powerful as.
Speaker 1: Well excellent if you think forward ten or twenty years,
Speaker 1: what would you like to understand the most about these
Speaker 1: issues of what causes us to turn on or turn
Speaker 1: off onnderstanding someone else's mind.
Speaker 3: The timeline is a big one for me, especially in
Speaker 3: the context of violence, Like I really feel like that's
Speaker 3: the next not we have to crack to really understand
Speaker 3: how these processes interact and how they can facilitate or
Speaker 3: inhibit violence. I think that's really crucial, especially in the
Speaker 3: time that we're living in. So for dehumanization, that's the big.
Speaker 4: One for me.
Speaker 3: The other one, which is not as big but also
Speaker 3: very interesting, is really trying to understand something about how
Speaker 3: it is that we regulate these processes. So I've given
Speaker 3: you a bunch of reasons that you might regulate it,
Speaker 3: but we don't have a lot of evidence in these
Speaker 3: heart circumstances where there's active violence or genocide occurring, political violence,
Speaker 3: any of that stuff. So knowing how it is that
Speaker 3: some people are able not to engage in these behaviors
Speaker 3: when all of the forces are pushing you to doing it.
Speaker 3: It's really important for providing us some strategies that might
Speaker 3: help help the majority of people who fall victim to
Speaker 3: these psychological processes. So those are the two big ones
Speaker 3: for me that we're trying to work on in the lab.
Speaker 3: They're very, very difficult, of course, because again you can't
Speaker 3: do this work ethically quite well.
Speaker 4: Right on, our.
Speaker 3: Lab studies feel like toy studies compared to what happens
Speaker 3: out in the real will.
Speaker 4: You talked about showing people.
Speaker 3: Pictures of people getting their arms smashed, Right, if you
Speaker 3: did that in the real will and you actually witnessed that,
Speaker 3: they'd probably be so much more happening. And we're always
Speaker 3: going to be constrained in that way. But I think
Speaker 3: there are ways and methodologies who are developing to get
Speaker 3: around some of these hurdles where we can still do
Speaker 3: the research in an ethical way and answer some of
Speaker 3: these very important questions.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with social neuroscientist Lasana Harris. We
Speaker 1: focused on this single superpower of the human brain, which
Speaker 1: is the ability to see minds in others. We have
Speaker 1: this machinery that lets us infer intentions, and that's how
Speaker 1: we predict behavior, and we build trust and we coordinate.
Speaker 1: All of that depends on this neural infrastructure that models
Speaker 1: other people as beings with interiority. This allows us to
Speaker 1: look at a face and hear a voice, and those
Speaker 1: things become a portal into an imagined inner world. Now,
Speaker 1: Lasauna's work puts a spotlight on the fact that sometimes
Speaker 1: these networks fail to engage in the presence of another
Speaker 1: human being. When his participants viewed images of stigmatized social
Speaker 1: groups like drug addicts or the homeless, the usual mind
Speaker 1: perception machinery cranks way down. So you can see this
Speaker 1: in our everyday cognition, and you also see the issue
Speaker 1: writ larger in history's worst crimes. The brain can turn
Speaker 1: this dial, and once we see this, we start noticing
Speaker 1: the logic that makes it possible. Part of it is
Speaker 1: just triage. Human suffering is infinite, and your bandwidth is finite.
Speaker 1: If you were to fully simulate the inner world of
Speaker 1: every person that you passed by, you would collapse under
Speaker 1: the weight of this. So the brain conserves and keeps
Speaker 1: on trucking past most of it. And by the way,
Speaker 1: as we talked about if you are in a profession
Speaker 1: where you get repeated exposure to suffering, that makes full
Speaker 1: empathy psychologically very expensive. So some professions like surgery train
Speaker 1: a style of perception that focuses on bodies as systems
Speaker 1: and solvable mechanisms, because you have to dial those networks
Speaker 1: down to get the job done. Another part of the
Speaker 1: logic of dialing these networks around has to do with
Speaker 1: moral self protection. If you see someone as fully human
Speaker 1: and that brings moral obligations, then dampening your mind perception
Speaker 1: can reduce your guilt and internal conflict. Lasana and I
Speaker 1: both talked about the irony in our studies that people
Speaker 1: who strongly view themselves as morally good or highly empathic
Speaker 1: sometimes show stronger patterns of dehumanization, and his interpretation was
Speaker 1: that the psyche has to defend its self image. And finally,
Speaker 1: one of Lasana's key points is about sequencing in time.
Speaker 1: In his model, violent action gets driven by things like
Speaker 1: threat and in group out group identity issues, and dehumanization
Speaker 1: can sustain the violence the exact timeline of when each
Speaker 1: process enters this cascade. This really matters for science and
Speaker 1: society because it points to different sorts of interventions is
Speaker 1: the important part about reducing threat perception, or reshaping stories
Speaker 1: about identity, or changing our media environments, or training awareness
Speaker 1: around the moments when mind perception starts to get dialed down.
Speaker 1: And we also talked about the flip side, which is anthropomorphism.
Speaker 1: And this is timely because we are surrounding ourselves with
Speaker 1: synthetic entities that emit the cues that our social brains
Speaker 1: have evolved for. So Lasauna asks whether children who grow
Speaker 1: up with AI agents and robots will have a shift
Speaker 1: in their human machine distinction and whether that will lead
Speaker 1: to new moral intuitions and new political movements and new
Speaker 1: fights over rights. Finally, the question raised by today's podcast
Speaker 1: is what do you do as a single person walking
Speaker 1: around in this enormous social world. Lasana offered some simple
Speaker 1: suggestions more eye contact, more conversation, more small acknowledgments that
Speaker 1: activate the mind perception machinery. As I've talked about in
Speaker 1: several episodes, search for commonalities as a way to reshape
Speaker 1: how the brain categorizes people. There are contexts where dampening
Speaker 1: mind perception can serve a function, but you don't want
Speaker 1: that to become your default stance. So the big picture
Speaker 1: is this. Your brain is a three pound universe that
Speaker 1: constantly builds models of the world, and one of its
Speaker 1: most consequential models is its model of other minds.
Speaker 2: Now, that model can.
Speaker 1: Be richly detailed, or it can be thin, or it
Speaker 1: can be absent. Also, it can be projected onto pets,
Speaker 1: onto storms, onto chatbots, and it can be withdrawn from
Speaker 1: groups of people. And I think that if we want
Speaker 1: to go mining for the mother load of morality, much
Speaker 1: of it lives right there in.
Speaker 2: The fidelity of the.
Speaker 1: Model that you build of someone else's inner world. Go
Speaker 1: to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
Speaker 1: to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack,
Speaker 1: and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube
Speaker 1: for videos of each episode and to leave comments Until
Speaker 1: next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is inner Cosmos.