Speaker 1: We might believe that we're people who treat others with
Speaker 1: fairness and justice and respect. But because we've absorbed so
Speaker 1: many toxic ideas in our culture, we can react in
Speaker 1: ways that really conflict with those values, and it can
Speaker 1: be extremely harmful for others and for ourselves. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized
Speaker 1: the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true,
Speaker 1: and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Jessica Nordell. She's an
Speaker 1: award winning science and culture journalist whose work has appeared
Speaker 1: in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post
Speaker 1: and many others. Today, Eric and Jessica discuss her book
Speaker 1: The End of Bias, A Beginning the Science and Practice
Speaker 1: of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. Hi, Jessica, Welcome to the show. Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited
Speaker 1: to talk with you. Your book is called The End
Speaker 1: of Bias, A Beginning the Science and Practice of Overcoming
Speaker 1: Unconscious bias, and this is such an important topic that
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to get into it. But let's start
Speaker 1: like we always do with the parable. In the parable,
Speaker 1: there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 1: in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are
Speaker 1: always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 1: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other
Speaker 1: is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
Speaker 1: hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about
Speaker 1: it for a second, looks up at their grandparents which
Speaker 1: one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. There are so many different
Speaker 1: sets of wolves. I feel like in my in my
Speaker 1: life and in my work. You know, I think where
Speaker 1: I experienced the battle between these two wolves is in
Speaker 1: moments when I make a mistake, when I screw up,
Speaker 1: or when I fall short of my expectations for myself.
Speaker 1: Because when that happens, there is on one hand, the
Speaker 1: kind of fearful wolf who says things like, oh no,
Speaker 1: this is a disaster. You've totally screwed up. This is
Speaker 1: a sign that you need to stop, retreat, find safety,
Speaker 1: find comfort, Do not keep going in this direction. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't know what you're doing, and this is bad.
Speaker 1: And then there's the loving, brave wolf who I try
Speaker 1: to listen to more and feed more, who says, huh,
Speaker 1: this is interesting, this is new. The fact that you
Speaker 1: made a mistake, that you screwed up, that you've kind
Speaker 1: of felt short is maybe a sign that you're trying
Speaker 1: something new and that you are stepping into some kind
Speaker 1: of growth or change. Because I think we're all on
Speaker 1: some kind of journey of growth and transformation, hopefully, And
Speaker 1: you know, I think when we screw up, when we
Speaker 1: make a mistake, it's because we're on that journey and
Speaker 1: we're going in a certain direction and we're actually moving forward.
Speaker 1: But I think it can be easy, especially for those
Speaker 1: of us who grew up in a very critical home,
Speaker 1: critical household, it can be easy for the fearful wolf
Speaker 1: to sort of see a mistake and seize on it
Speaker 1: and amp up the self criticism and then try to retreat.
Speaker 1: And so those are the wolves that are alive for me. Often.
Speaker 1: I love that, and I was struck by that. At
Speaker 1: the end of the book, or near the end of
Speaker 1: the books, you were talking about how and when we're
Speaker 1: trying to do this sort of work where we're looking
Speaker 1: at our biases and our prejudice, when we make a mistake,
Speaker 1: we very often, as you said, we retreat. We are uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: we don't want to be there, and that some people
Speaker 1: in this space even say that that's the biggest challenge
Speaker 1: is that, particularly among white people who are trying to
Speaker 1: engage more in work around their prejudice, is that when
Speaker 1: they feel like they've done it wrong, they run away.
Speaker 1: And I know in conversations I've had with people in
Speaker 1: this area on the show, I have that reaction. I'm
Speaker 1: just I want to be right, I want to be good,
Speaker 1: and I'm not always, you know, because I'm learning like
Speaker 1: you and uh. I think that's a really important point
Speaker 1: that you make, that this is a growth process and
Speaker 1: we have to be willing, like if we were learning
Speaker 1: to ride a bike. We have to be willing to
Speaker 1: make mistakes. Right. We know we're not going to be
Speaker 1: perfect at it in the beginning, But this stuff feels
Speaker 1: very emotionally charged. Yes, absolutely, it's so emotionally charged. And
Speaker 1: you know when you're stepping into a context of diversity
Speaker 1: or difference, or you're you're stepping into a situation where
Speaker 1: people are coming from lots of different backgrounds. One of
Speaker 1: the people I interviewed for the book said, your mindset
Speaker 1: has to be I have no idea what's happening here.
Speaker 1: I really don't know what's happening because you don't, and
Speaker 1: inevitably we will make a mistake and we have to
Speaker 1: understand that that exactly as part of the learning process.
Speaker 1: I've come to think of it, the process of tackling
Speaker 1: our biases and maybe the process of just becoming more
Speaker 1: human is like learning a language, and we start out
Speaker 1: not very good at it, and we have to continually practice,
Speaker 1: get a little better, screw up, We have to try
Speaker 1: it in community with others. You know, we can't just
Speaker 1: be by ourselves, and we move towards hopefully greater fluency,
Speaker 1: but it's not without flaws or you know, our mistakes
Speaker 1: along the way. Yeah. Yeah, I love that analogy. I
Speaker 1: often use it when talking to people about the process
Speaker 1: of getting sober and sobriety, because you know, you start
Speaker 1: out and you don't know how to speak the language
Speaker 1: at all, and then over time you get better and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, I'm sober all the time, but every
Speaker 1: time I visit my mom, you know, it's like when
Speaker 1: you're like, well, I can speak French pretty well, except
Speaker 1: when they start talking about sports. Then I'm lost, you know,
Speaker 1: but eventually you kind of get it. So I think
Speaker 1: that's a great analogy. Let's kind of jump back to
Speaker 1: the beginning and talk a little bit about what biases.
Speaker 1: We don't even need to go into what implicit or
Speaker 1: unconscious biases, but what is bias in general and how
Speaker 1: prevalent is it? You know, when we talk about bias,
Speaker 1: my focus is more on sort of the unexamined kinds
Speaker 1: of bias, unintentional bias. But you know, the idea is
Speaker 1: that we store a lot of information as a byproduct
Speaker 1: of growing up in a culture and living in a culture,
Speaker 1: and we store a lot of stereotypes and beliefs and
Speaker 1: associations about different groups of people in our memories, and
Speaker 1: then when we encounter a person or a situation that
Speaker 1: we recognize as belonging to a category in our culture,
Speaker 1: all of those beliefs and associations and stereotypes start to
Speaker 1: influence our interaction and our evaluation and our response to
Speaker 1: that person. The idea of sort of unintentional or unconscious
Speaker 1: bias is that this happen without us being aware of it.
Speaker 1: It can happen really automatically and quickly, and it can
Speaker 1: conflict with our actual values. Like we might believe that
Speaker 1: we're people who treat others with fairness and justice and respect,
Speaker 1: but because we've absorbed so many toxic ideas in our culture,
Speaker 1: we can react in ways that really conflict with those values,
Speaker 1: and it can be extremely harmful for others and for ourselves. Right,
Speaker 1: it's almost impossible as a human to not have our
Speaker 1: brains function this way. This is that's what they do.
Speaker 1: Brains notice things and it categorizes things. We're always seeing
Speaker 1: the world through some set of filters. Yes, yes, we are,
Speaker 1: and part of it is just, you know, an adaptation
Speaker 1: to the tremendous amount of information that we are constantly
Speaker 1: being flooded with. I mean, if we had to continually
Speaker 1: interpret every bit of sensory data that was coming in,
Speaker 1: it would be overwhelming. So we to some extent have
Speaker 1: to make quick assumptions and and categorizations in order to
Speaker 1: make sense of the world. But where we run into
Speaker 1: trouble is when those result in us responding to another
Speaker 1: person not as an individual, but as a day dream hallucination.
Speaker 1: You know, that's put together from these sort of cultural
Speaker 1: ideas that we've absorbed. Yeah, you see, the individual who
Speaker 1: acts with bias engages with an expectation instead of a reality. Right,
Speaker 1: We're engaging with our idea of what this person or
Speaker 1: this type of person is, instead of with that person
Speaker 1: directly exactly. I mean, I think this is how most
Speaker 1: of us operate most of the time. Honestly. You know,
Speaker 1: I had an experience about twenty years ago that made
Speaker 1: me realize how rarely it was that I encountered another
Speaker 1: person with some kind of purity or clarity. And it
Speaker 1: was an encounter I had with a poet. Actually the
Speaker 1: poet Adrian Rich, who had come to Minneapolis where I
Speaker 1: was living, on September twelve, two, one of all days,
Speaker 1: and everyone flooded to this concert hall to see her
Speaker 1: because we were, all, you know, in such a state
Speaker 1: of just chaos and confusion. And I've never seen so
Speaker 1: many people at a poetry event before, and she had
Speaker 1: been a huge idol of mine for a really long time.
Speaker 1: I waited in line to see her after her reading,
Speaker 1: and I just spent about thirty seconds with her, and
Speaker 1: she sat with me with this quality of attention that
Speaker 1: I don't think I'd ever experienced before. It was like
Speaker 1: she was really seeing me, not through this like daydream
Speaker 1: haz hallucination of bias that we all know bring with
Speaker 1: us in our encounters with other people. But it was
Speaker 1: like she was really really encountering a person and not
Speaker 1: an expectation. I remember feeling like physically changed by the experience.
Speaker 1: That's how powerful it was to have someone really be
Speaker 1: present with me as an individual in that moment, in
Speaker 1: that place, in that time. Yeah, that's a beautiful story.
Speaker 1: Tell me about how prevalent is bias in our culture?
Speaker 1: You know, I think it can be easy to say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, things have gotten a lot better. We're more
Speaker 1: of an equitable culture than we once were, which may
Speaker 1: be true, But talk about how we kind of know
Speaker 1: how much bias there is. What are what are some
Speaker 1: of the things that point towards it. You know, there
Speaker 1: is evidence of bias in basically every realm of human activity.
Speaker 1: We see evidence of bias on the basis of race, gender, ability,
Speaker 1: sexual orientation in medicine and healthcare. We see it in education,
Speaker 1: We see it in public safety policing, we see it
Speaker 1: in the workplace. It's everywhere. There are thousands of studies
Speaker 1: that document that people are treated differently on the basis
Speaker 1: of their identity, such that you know, it's really kind
Speaker 1: of incontrovertible at this point. The reason that I focused
Speaker 1: my book on the more kind of unconscious, unexamined, unintentional
Speaker 1: bias is that this can happen even like in the
Speaker 1: helping professions. You know, even among people who really want
Speaker 1: to support others or lift others up, like teachers and
Speaker 1: nurses and doctors and social workers, they can still be
Speaker 1: susceptible to these kinds of biases, and they can be
Speaker 1: hard to see and hard to eradicate. Yeah, you say
Speaker 1: that biases woven through culture like a silver thread woven
Speaker 1: through cloth. In some lights it's brightly visible, and others
Speaker 1: it's hard to distinguish, and your position relative to that
Speaker 1: flashing thread determines whether you see it at all. And
Speaker 1: I thought that was such a great description of what happens.
Speaker 1: You early in the book talk about your encountering of
Speaker 1: bias as you were trying to get an essay published. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in my early mid twenties, I was working as
Speaker 1: a journalist, and I had been writing for kind of
Speaker 1: local and regional publications, and I wanted to start branching
Speaker 1: out into national magazines and newspapers, and so I started
Speaker 1: pitching stories, which is what you do, and I sent
Speaker 1: out queries to editors who I didn't know. You know,
Speaker 1: they got these cold, cold pitches and their email inboxes
Speaker 1: and I never heard back from anybody. And you know,
Speaker 1: I did this for a while, and at one point
Speaker 1: I had an essay that was tied to a very
Speaker 1: specific thing happening. It was like tied to a movie
Speaker 1: that was coming out. And I knew that if I
Speaker 1: didn't place this essay at that particular time, it would
Speaker 1: just die. It would just go. You know, it would
Speaker 1: just never never get published. So I thought, what am
Speaker 1: I going to do? I'm not getting any responses, and
Speaker 1: so kind of in a moment of desperation, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll try sending it out under a different name
Speaker 1: and see if that makes a difference. And so I
Speaker 1: made a new email address for myself and sent out
Speaker 1: the same pitch, but this time, instead of as Jessica,
Speaker 1: I sent it out as j D, which I thought
Speaker 1: maybe sounded like plausibly masculine. And the piece was accepted
Speaker 1: within a couple of hours, and it was published, and
Speaker 1: it really started my career. I started pitching as j
Speaker 1: D and using that as my byline for a few years.
Speaker 1: I did that. And you know, I don't think that
Speaker 1: that editor thought I'm really going to try to reject
Speaker 1: all the queries I get from women and accept the
Speaker 1: quaries I get from men. I think that there was
Speaker 1: probably much more of an unexamined pattern that was happening
Speaker 1: in that moment. Yeah, it's interesting. I saw John Stewart
Speaker 1: talk once about diversity, and he was explaining how they
Speaker 1: ended up with way more men in the writing room,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, we're even trying to do
Speaker 1: blind interviews, like we don't even want to know the gender, right,
Speaker 1: But the problem starts far upstream of that. It's the
Speaker 1: pitches that we get, it's the people we know. You know,
Speaker 1: I have definitely as we've tried to make sure we
Speaker 1: have more diversity on this show, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's like my cultural orientation points me towards certain things,
Speaker 1: and publishers are pointing at certain things. And it's just
Speaker 1: very interesting, you know, back to that idea of a
Speaker 1: thread like it. It's not that I'm sitting here going well,
Speaker 1: I would like to have men white men. That's my thing,
Speaker 1: right right, you know, if I'm not careful, that's how
Speaker 1: it ends up, because that's the way the system just
Speaker 1: sort of feeds things to me. And as a white man,
Speaker 1: it's what's normal, it's what feels comfortable. So again, and
Speaker 1: I think this is what we're saying. My values say diversity,
Speaker 1: but I have these implicit biases right where I might
Speaker 1: be in ways I don't even understand. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: one really powerful force I found especially helpful to have
Speaker 1: a name for is hommafullie, which means love of the same.
Speaker 1: And this is I think what can often explain some
Speaker 1: of the patterns that we see where we see people
Speaker 1: hiring people who kind of resemble themselves, or people associating
Speaker 1: with people who resemble themselves. There's a an attraction toward
Speaker 1: the familiar. I always laugh because there's a lake near
Speaker 1: my house, and when I go walking around the lake,
Speaker 1: I see pairs of friends walking around the lake, and
Speaker 1: they often almost are like identical twins, like they even
Speaker 1: down to like the same outfit. You know. You see
Speaker 1: people sort of resemble the people that they're with often,
Speaker 1: and it's such kind of like a natural impulse that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to actually very consciously interrupt it if you
Speaker 1: want to not suddenly end up in a room of clones,
Speaker 1: you know, which is quite boring in my opinion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I was reflecting on athletes that I've loved in
Speaker 1: the past, and I realized that the athletes I've been
Speaker 1: most drawn to our athletes that are a little bit
Speaker 1: like me. They're a little bit under size and so been,
Speaker 1: not even just within racial elements, but it's even like
Speaker 1: you know, body shape, all these different things. I love that.
Speaker 1: What's it? Homfullymmfully? Yes, love of the same Yeah, boy,
Speaker 1: that's a strong one. Yeah, And I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: even just having language for it helps me see it
Speaker 1: in my own life, you know, I see that I
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm drawn to, you know, petite white women with
Speaker 1: very dark hair, which is you know, that's me. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm like seeking, you know, my own reflection. I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: I'm not careful. Yeah. Yeah. The idea here that many
Speaker 1: people have said is that prejudice is a habit. Say
Speaker 1: more about what that means. There's a researcher at the
Speaker 1: University of Wisconsin whose work really centers around this idea
Speaker 1: that prejudice can be a habit. That we may not
Speaker 1: want to react in prejudiced ways towards one another, but
Speaker 1: we're so used to it because the cycles have been
Speaker 1: repeated so many times, that we can rest bond spontaneously
Speaker 1: and automatically toward another person using this kind of trove
Speaker 1: of stereotypes that we've stored in our head. And I
Speaker 1: think the power of that particular way of thinking about
Speaker 1: it is that we know that habits can be broken,
Speaker 1: whether it's any kind of habit, you know, the habit
Speaker 1: of drinking, or the habit of procrastinating, or or these habits,
Speaker 1: you know, can be broken with intentionality and with awareness
Speaker 1: and with motivation and with strategies, you know, and consistent effort,
Speaker 1: daily effort toward it. Yeah. Yeah, I think everything, as
Speaker 1: I referenced earlier, is my Buddhist leanings show here. But
Speaker 1: in Buddhism they talk about everything being conditioned. Yes, every
Speaker 1: thought that you have is conditioned. It goes through all
Speaker 1: these layers. But if it's conditioned, it can be unconditioned.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do, but it can be done. And
Speaker 1: I think that's sort of speaking to this idea of habit.
Speaker 1: You say that this researcher talks about a belief being
Speaker 1: something people actively choose, whereas we have these associations, which
Speaker 1: are things we absorbed from our surroundings. Yes, and you know,
Speaker 1: I think the idea that it's conditioned means also that
Speaker 1: this is culturally specific, This is not natural or inevitable,
Speaker 1: and that I find to be so so powerful. I mean,
Speaker 1: some of the most personally moving research that I did
Speaker 1: was about other times and other cultures and other places
Speaker 1: that had different patterns. You know, they did not have
Speaker 1: the prejudice patterns that we have in our culture. And
Speaker 1: I think seeing examples from history and from other parts
Speaker 1: of the world where our patterns of white supremacy and
Speaker 1: patriarchy just weren't present. It's courage giving, really, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's inspiring, and it's courage giving because it helps
Speaker 1: reinforce this reality, which is that these patterns are interruptible.
Speaker 1: You know, they're not inevitable. Their product of culture and conditioning,
Speaker 1: not something that we're just stuck with. Right. You have
Speaker 1: a story in the book about a study that was
Speaker 1: done around putting children into different color uniforms. We want
Speaker 1: to share about that because I think it speaks to
Speaker 1: this point that this was a conditioned process. Yes, interesting research.
Speaker 1: So this is work by a developmental psychologist named Becky
Speaker 1: Biggler who was trying to understand really how prejudice develops
Speaker 1: in children. And she has a whole body of work
Speaker 1: that really has run into a lot of ethics complaints
Speaker 1: because she's working with children and she's manipulating their environment
Speaker 1: to see how this affects their levels of prejudice toward
Speaker 1: one another. And she primarily has looked at gender and
Speaker 1: so one of the things that Dr Biggler has done
Speaker 1: in her work is work with schools where she has
Speaker 1: certain classrooms of children given certain kinds of instructions and
Speaker 1: other classrooms given other instructions. For example, she has some
Speaker 1: studies where she had one group of teachers refer to
Speaker 1: the children constantly by gender. The teachers would say hello
Speaker 1: boys and girls, or girls line up over here in
Speaker 1: boys line up over here, and those teachers were constantly
Speaker 1: reinforcing the idea of gender differences. And then she had
Speaker 1: another group of teachers who didn't label the children at all,
Speaker 1: who just said hello children, you know, hello students. And
Speaker 1: what she found is that the more the children were labeled,
Speaker 1: the more it was reinforced to them that they belonged
Speaker 1: to different groups, the more gender stereotyping those children did.
Speaker 1: She's done similar work where she kind of generalized it,
Speaker 1: where she had students put on blue shirts and red
Speaker 1: shirts and some teachers said hello red shirts and hello
Speaker 1: blue shirts, and the other group of teachers just said
Speaker 1: hello students. And there again, when the children were told
Speaker 1: that they were part of a group and they were
Speaker 1: constantly labeled and categorized, they started to develop stereotypes about
Speaker 1: blue shirts and yellow shirts. And so, I mean, her
Speaker 1: work is quite powerful in that it shows that labels
Speaker 1: and categories really plant the seeds of discrimination. I mean,
Speaker 1: we do a lot of categorizing and labeling in our culture,
Speaker 1: so I think it's important, you know, for us to
Speaker 1: understand how it works. You wrote, what lays the foundation
Speaker 1: for brejudice, it seems, is not the perceptible differences between people,
Speaker 1: but how much the culture tells us these differences matter.
Speaker 1: And then you also go on to say, this sequence
Speaker 1: categorize essentialized stereotype is sort of the way this happens,
Speaker 1: and that idea of that sequence has been repeated and
Speaker 1: seeing over and over and over again exactly, you know.
Speaker 1: And to be honest, like this is a complicated situation
Speaker 1: because when you hear about that, one possible conclusion a
Speaker 1: person might draw as well, we need to eliminate categories
Speaker 1: and labels, We need to kind of stop categorizing people.
Speaker 1: The problem with that, of course, is that, like we
Speaker 1: have inherited categories for hundreds and in some case thousands
Speaker 1: of years, these categories aren't going away. So what do
Speaker 1: we do. You know, this is a real tension I
Speaker 1: think in this work. Well, that's right, we almost can't
Speaker 1: not do it. Is that even a sentence I think
Speaker 1: it is. But when I teach about perspective in the
Speaker 1: Spiritual Habits program, I talk about like you're going to
Speaker 1: be seeing the world through some perspectives, thumbs filters. That's
Speaker 1: the way the brain works. It's can we become aware
Speaker 1: of them? Yes, you have a couple really touching stories
Speaker 1: in the book where you yourself, as you've gotten deeper
Speaker 1: into this work, actually realized like, oh there, I'm doing
Speaker 1: it and are able to go Okay, let me pause
Speaker 1: and can I allow more into this picture than just
Speaker 1: the category? Yeah. Absolutely. As someone recently asked me, you know,
Speaker 1: Jessica's you were working on this book, did you notice
Speaker 1: any biases in yourself? And you know my answer was yes,
Speaker 1: all of them, literally, all of them. They're all in me,
Speaker 1: They're all They're all in all of us. And the
Speaker 1: direction that we want to go is toward seeing differences
Speaker 1: but not creating hierarchies as a consequence of those differences.
Speaker 1: You know, Audrey Lord said, we have no pattern for
Speaker 1: relating across our human differences as equals. And I think
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's our task, that's our human task
Speaker 1: to be able to do that. That's what I hope
Speaker 1: for us yeah, I think that's absolutely true. We don't
Speaker 1: because as you were talking about cultures that don't have, say,
Speaker 1: for example, patriarchy, right, and we go, well, that's very hopeful.
Speaker 1: That they didn't have patriarchy means that patriarchy is not
Speaker 1: a built in thing. But we can be certain that
Speaker 1: those cultures had some form of bias and categories and
Speaker 1: all that also. So I think we are hopefully evolving
Speaker 1: to see that these things exist within us. And you
Speaker 1: talked about this a second ago about how it might
Speaker 1: lead you to think, well, you get rid of all categories,
Speaker 1: but you talk about how trying to deny differences actually
Speaker 1: can make discrimination worse. Absolutely. I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: things that came up over and over in my interviews.
Speaker 1: I interviewed, you know, maybe two hundred people at least
Speaker 1: for this book, and one of the things that came
Speaker 1: up again and again, particularly with African American individuals who
Speaker 1: I spoke with, was that when employers or co workers
Speaker 1: sort of pretended to not see difference, sort of tried
Speaker 1: this kind of color blind attitude, like I'm going to
Speaker 1: pretend that you know, I don't see that you're African American.
Speaker 1: That that was incredibly hurtful and felt like an act
Speaker 1: of erasure. And so this came up with many different
Speaker 1: groups of people that I spoke with. So I think
Speaker 1: that trying to simply pretend that these categories don't exist
Speaker 1: is sort of it's an erasure, and it's a denial
Speaker 1: of people's experience, which is extremely important to understand and
Speaker 1: to perceive into validate. So yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: there's an inherent tension in trying to on one hand,
Speaker 1: see people as individuals and not bring group based ideas
Speaker 1: to our encounters with one another, and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: to recognize the importance and the history and the group
Speaker 1: experiences that people do have as a result of being
Speaker 1: categorized in our culture. Yeah, I do think it is,
Speaker 1: like you're saying, it's a very nuanced and slightly difficult
Speaker 1: point that I think a lot of well meaning people
Speaker 1: stumble on because it sounds right to say I don't
Speaker 1: see difference. It feels like that's the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: But we know, from uh, the experiences of people who
Speaker 1: are different, and from lots of research out there, that
Speaker 1: that approach doesn't really work. And so, like you said,
Speaker 1: it's like, how can I see the differences because I
Speaker 1: can't not right, I have eyes they work. You know
Speaker 1: you're white, that person is black. I mean, of course
Speaker 1: I see the difference. It's then the phrase I used earlier,
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm wondering what you think about, is how
Speaker 1: do I bring more into the picture than just that? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah, I love that that kind of framing, seeing
Speaker 1: that difference as adding more information rather than filtering out information.
Speaker 1: Another way that I think about it is like we
Speaker 1: need to practice three types of vision at the same time.
Speaker 1: I need to see you Eric as an individual completely unique,
Speaker 1: as a member of a group that you belong to,
Speaker 1: or many groups that you belong to, because that has
Speaker 1: shaped your experience, and we can't forget also as a
Speaker 1: fellow human who has common needs and desires and dreams
Speaker 1: just like me, because I'm a fellow human. So we
Speaker 1: I think we need to hold all of these things
Speaker 1: in our heads at the same time, and it can
Speaker 1: be challenging, right right. I heard a phrase once and
Speaker 1: I'm curious what you think of it based on the
Speaker 1: work that you've done, and the phrase was it's not
Speaker 1: that stereotypes are necessarily untrue, it's just that they're incomplete
Speaker 1: I think it depends. I mean, I think you know.
Speaker 1: You could say, well, a stereotype about Dutch people is
Speaker 1: that they're tall. Well, Dutch people are on average taller
Speaker 1: than many people from any other cultures. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's a case in which that stereotype has some truth
Speaker 1: to it. But there are a lot of stereotypes that
Speaker 1: are incomplete, in some cases completely false, you know, that
Speaker 1: have been shaped by a particular way of viewing the world.
Speaker 1: Like I'll give you an example. There's kind of a
Speaker 1: widespread belief that women are more risk averse than men,
Speaker 1: and this is used to explain why women are not
Speaker 1: represented in positions of leadership as as much as men.
Speaker 1: This is kind of often trotted out as a justification
Speaker 1: for what we see in society. You can say that's
Speaker 1: a stereotype about women, they're more risk averse than men.
Speaker 1: But the truth is that when we study risk, typically
Speaker 1: the way it's studied is by looking at things like
Speaker 1: gambling tendencies or financial risks, and if you look at
Speaker 1: other ways of measuring risk, you see that women have
Speaker 1: more of a risk tolerance than men. For instance, you
Speaker 1: see that women are more likely to donate a kidney
Speaker 1: to a stranger, which is a surgery that has health
Speaker 1: risks associated. You see that during the Holocaust, women in
Speaker 1: Germany were more likely to hide Jews than men, So
Speaker 1: this is a risk to life. So I mean, I
Speaker 1: just bring that up as an example of this kind
Speaker 1: of stereotype about women that has emerged out of a
Speaker 1: very narrow way of thinking about this particular characteristic. Right, yep.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of this is not quite the same.
Speaker 1: But there's in psychology the famous marshmallow study. They put
Speaker 1: a kid in the room and they go, look, if
Speaker 1: you don't eat that marshmallow for five minutes, I'll give
Speaker 1: you two marshmallows. Right, And so the conclusion was the
Speaker 1: kids that didn't eat the marshmallow turned out to have
Speaker 1: much better outcomes in life. So self control gives you
Speaker 1: better outcomes in life. And while there's some truth to that,
Speaker 1: the thing that they were missing about that study was
Speaker 1: that some of the kids were making a very wise
Speaker 1: choice to grab the marshmallow because they came from environments
Speaker 1: where they couldn't trust the people in authority. There was
Speaker 1: no reason to believe that the person who said I'm
Speaker 1: going to give you two marshmallows was actually ever going
Speaker 1: to do it. So we said, those children don't have
Speaker 1: self control, where the issue wasn't really about self control,
Speaker 1: it was about the environment in which they came from
Speaker 1: that told them, Hey, trust is not a good idea, right,
Speaker 1: And so that's similar to what you're saying. We're looking
Speaker 1: at things through a certain lens. You talk in the
Speaker 1: book about why it was so hard for us to
Speaker 1: realize that nature is essentially cooperative, Why science thought that
Speaker 1: nature was competitive. Say a little bit about that, because
Speaker 1: I think it applies to exactly what we're saying here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, for many decades, the kind of broad
Speaker 1: consensus in the field of ecology was that nature is
Speaker 1: fundamentally competitive and that species are constantly rye with one
Speaker 1: another for limited resources. What we've come to understand is
Speaker 1: that nature is also extremely cooperative, and there's mutuality in
Speaker 1: almost every, if not every natural relationship in the natural world.
Speaker 1: And what has been proposed is that the reason that
Speaker 1: this took such a long time to see is that
Speaker 1: the science as themselves, the ecologists themselves who were trying
Speaker 1: to understand what was going on themselves, operated within a
Speaker 1: very competitive, capitalistic framework, and to some extent, we can
Speaker 1: only draw from the frameworks that we've been exposed to.
Speaker 1: So if we have only seen competition, then we're going
Speaker 1: to be more likely to see competition out in the world.
Speaker 1: And I think this is such an important example because
Speaker 1: what happened was as a greater variety of people came
Speaker 1: into the field of ecology, they brought with them different
Speaker 1: perspectives and different backgrounds and different frameworks, and the field
Speaker 1: evolved as a result. And so I think this is
Speaker 1: a really powerful example of how important it is to
Speaker 1: have a really broad variety of perspectives to help us
Speaker 1: understand the world. Yeah. Yeah, And I think that's, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the theme we've been saying here is that
Speaker 1: it's how can I be more flexible in the ways
Speaker 1: I look at things? How can I see things from
Speaker 1: multiple different angles? And that sort of leads me to
Speaker 1: something I wanted to make sure we talked about, which
Speaker 1: was something called out group homogeneity. Can you share a
Speaker 1: little bit about what that is, because I think that's
Speaker 1: another fascinating concept that really applies here. This is another
Speaker 1: term that I find so helpful. It sounds a bit
Speaker 1: like a technical term, but I find it so helpful
Speaker 1: in it sort of decoding, you know, our experiences with
Speaker 1: the world. So the idea of outgroup homogeneity is that
Speaker 1: when we think about a group that we're not a
Speaker 1: member of, we tend to see the members of that
Speaker 1: group as being very similar to one another, being fairly homogeneous.
Speaker 1: We see that group is fairly homogeneous. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, we see our own group as being very
Speaker 1: diverse and full of people who are very different from
Speaker 1: one another. And this is really important because the more
Speaker 1: diversity you see within a group, the harder it is
Speaker 1: to stereotype the group, and the more homogeneous you see
Speaker 1: a group, the easier it is to stereotype and then
Speaker 1: to discriminate against that group. And so if we can
Speaker 1: start to understand our kind of tendency towards outgroup homogeneity,
Speaker 1: toward you know, seeing others as being kind of monolithic
Speaker 1: inside their group, we can, i think, start to interrupt
Speaker 1: that pattern and start to really seek the reality, which
Speaker 1: is that all groups are diverse and complex and nuanced
Speaker 1: and full of lots of different kinds of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes me think of I had a girlfriend once
Speaker 1: and she told me that the Beatles and the Kinks
Speaker 1: sounded exactly the same and I was like that they
Speaker 1: cannot sound like, how can you even possibly think that?
Speaker 1: But she's hearing sixties era white musicians, right, And I
Speaker 1: could make the same statement about hip hop and certain
Speaker 1: people would be like, are you out of your mind?
Speaker 1: There is no way that Jay Z and Tupac sound
Speaker 1: at all similar, right, And I think it's to that point.
Speaker 1: It's it's sort of thin our little area, we can
Speaker 1: see all the differences, but when we look outside of us,
Speaker 1: we just go, well, that's all the same, right, you know.
Speaker 1: One I think illustration of the power of out group
Speaker 1: homogeneity and interrupting that is seen in this really interesting
Speaker 1: research that was done in France. So, France is a
Speaker 1: country that struggles with a lot of anti Arab prejudice,
Speaker 1: and these researchers, one was a French researcher of North
Speaker 1: African origin and one was an American researcher, tried to
Speaker 1: really disrupt outgroup homogeneity as a way to try to
Speaker 1: decrease discrimination against people of Arab origin in France. And
Speaker 1: what they did was they created this poster which had
Speaker 1: photographs of different people of Arab origin with a name
Speaker 1: and then some kind of description of the person. So
Speaker 1: it would say Yamina, age thirty two optimistic or Annila
Speaker 1: age fifty five stingy. And the important thing was that
Speaker 1: the descriptions were both positive and negative. Some of the
Speaker 1: people were described in positive ways and some were described,
Speaker 1: you know, stingy or greedy, or hostile or unpleasant, and
Speaker 1: so you had to kind of this mix, this really
Speaker 1: rich mix of people. And what they found was that
Speaker 1: when they exposed French people to these posters over a
Speaker 1: period of time, later the people who had seen those
Speaker 1: posters acted in more fair and kind and just ways
Speaker 1: towards people of Arab origin in the real world. So
Speaker 1: they did things like they would show this poster over
Speaker 1: a period of time and then later have a confederate,
Speaker 1: you know, who was in on the secret spill her
Speaker 1: purse in front of some unsuspecting subject, and then then
Speaker 1: they would see it, does the subject help this person
Speaker 1: of Arab origin pick up her things or not? And
Speaker 1: they found that the people who had seen this poster
Speaker 1: were much more likely to help, much more likely to
Speaker 1: be kind, to sit closer, to do all of these things.
Speaker 1: And this worked much better than a poster where everybody
Speaker 1: was just portrayed in a positive light. So the interpretation
Speaker 1: here that when you start to see a group as
Speaker 1: quite different from one another, that people are not homogeneous,
Speaker 1: this really makes it harder to stereotype them and ultimately
Speaker 1: disrupts discrimination and prejudice too. I found that such a
Speaker 1: fascinating part of the book, and it speaks to this
Speaker 1: idea of the more we know about someone, prejudice breaks down.
Speaker 1: You know. It's almost as if the opposite of familiarity
Speaker 1: breeds contempt is that familiarity breeds understanding. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think the important thing is that we start to
Speaker 1: see the groups that we don't belong to as just
Speaker 1: as complex and different as our own group. The people
Speaker 1: are very different from one another. Any group, name a group,
Speaker 1: all of the people in that group, you know, they're
Speaker 1: not all the same. They are as different from one
Speaker 1: another as we are different from the people in our group.
Speaker 1: And I think really absorbing that, really grasping and understanding
Speaker 1: that it's like an incredibly powerful tool against discrimination. I
Speaker 1: know that I see certain groups and sort of assumed
Speaker 1: that they're all similar. You know, I may have enough
Speaker 1: insight into my biases that I don't think that they're
Speaker 1: that they're bad, but I do know as you're saying that,
Speaker 1: I'm noticing as I think about I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do sort of go, well, they're very similar to
Speaker 1: each other. And you know, realizing as you're saying that
Speaker 1: the difference within that culture is as wide as the
Speaker 1: difference within my culture, right, which would be the difference
Speaker 1: between say, if you were to take a white male
Speaker 1: of my age, fifty years old, you could have one
Speaker 1: who believes fervently in Bernie Sanders and another who believes
Speaker 1: fervently and Donald Trump. That's a pretty big difference between
Speaker 1: fifty year old white men that you wouldn't see from
Speaker 1: the outside, right. It's a pretty fundamental difference. And so
Speaker 1: if we assume, as you're saying, extrapolate that out, you know,
Speaker 1: to a twenty year old Chinese female, that there could
Speaker 1: be that level of difference between two people there, that's
Speaker 1: a really illuminating insight. Yeah, and not only can there be,
Speaker 1: but there is actually that amount of difference. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. When I was working on this project, I
Speaker 1: was also, you know, kind of constantly absorbing the news
Speaker 1: cycle and observing that when a young white man commits
Speaker 1: an atrocity, it's attributed often to some kind of individual pathology.
Speaker 1: It's a mental illness. This person is is individually struggling.
Speaker 1: He's not representative of white men in general or eighteen
Speaker 1: year old white men in general. But when a person
Speaker 1: of a group who isn't a white man commits and
Speaker 1: a trocity. For instance, if there is a Muslim person
Speaker 1: who commits a crime, this person is described as often,
Speaker 1: you know, a Muslim terrorist, not an individual with an
Speaker 1: individual pathology and perhaps a mental illness or some kind
Speaker 1: of personal struggle of alienation and isolation and disconnection that's
Speaker 1: causing this behavior. So I think we you know, we
Speaker 1: see this tendency on broad cultural level as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think if you're following the news cycle at this point,
Speaker 1: you should almost be assuming the opposite of what you
Speaker 1: just said, Like I'm starting to categorize eighteen year old
Speaker 1: white men as like dangerous, you know, like okay, you know,
Speaker 1: now again it's a stereotype and I'm half joking, but
Speaker 1: but it's true. You can see it start to happen
Speaker 1: right there. In the workshop that you reference a lot,
Speaker 1: they offered some strategies for how to override bias, and
Speaker 1: I thought maybe we could talk through those and maybe
Speaker 1: unless you remember them off the top of your head.
Speaker 1: I could give you the um and we could just
Speaker 1: kind of discuss them. So the first one was we
Speaker 1: were just on this one, right, Notice when a stereotype
Speaker 1: arises and then actively replace it with alternate images. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's definitely one strategy. I think that the power there
Speaker 1: is to simply create space. This goes to the Buddhist
Speaker 1: approach to create some space between the input and the reaction,
Speaker 1: and so noticing when a stereotype arises allows us to
Speaker 1: just pause, to slow down, and then to take any
Speaker 1: number of directions. Right, one is to replace that image
Speaker 1: with an alternative image. Maybe if it's a negative stereotype
Speaker 1: of a person, replace it with a positive image of
Speaker 1: a person from that group. Another strategy is to try
Speaker 1: to consider the situation from the other person's perspective. And
Speaker 1: this is really powerful. This is like begetting a path
Speaker 1: towards empathy, trying to understand why a person might behaving
Speaker 1: in a way that they're behaving, trying to see perhaps
Speaker 1: the situational reasons for a person's behavior, rather than assume
Speaker 1: that there's something innate or essential about that person that's
Speaker 1: causing that particular behavior. Yeah, I love them. And that
Speaker 1: was the second one, which was, you know, look for
Speaker 1: situational reasons for a person's behavior rather than assume it
Speaker 1: comes from an inherent characteristic. There's actually a name for
Speaker 1: that bias. One name of it is the fundamental attribution error,
Speaker 1: and it basically means when I do something wrong, there's
Speaker 1: a very clear reason for it. I didn't get enough
Speaker 1: sleep last night. So that's why I was kind of
Speaker 1: grouchy to you. When you do something wrong, it's because
Speaker 1: you're it's the it's the fundamental attribution error. So just
Speaker 1: recognizing that and extending that out, which is to say,
Speaker 1: like you said, that people do things for reasons, not
Speaker 1: necessarily for who they are. Yeah, And I mean we
Speaker 1: could talk about a powerful interven shin along these lines.
Speaker 1: That was done with math teachers, but we can also
Speaker 1: go on with the other strategies to let's hear the intervention. Well,
Speaker 1: I was just thinking, you know, one kind of illustration
Speaker 1: of these approaches, interrupting stereotypes and considering another person's perspective
Speaker 1: or the situational reasons for someone's behavior, was tested by
Speaker 1: an interesting psychology professor named Jason o'kanno Fua who recruited
Speaker 1: math teachers middle school math teachers to do an empathy
Speaker 1: training with students. And what Okano Fua was particularly looking
Speaker 1: at was suspension rates, and particularly the disparate rates of
Speaker 1: suspension for black and Latino students. So what he wanted
Speaker 1: to see is whether increasing teachers empathy might change those
Speaker 1: suspension rates. And so what he did was he had
Speaker 1: teachers do exactly what we're talking about, So he didn't
Speaker 1: frame this as a bias intervention. He just asked teachers
Speaker 1: really to recommit to kind of fundamental values of teaching,
Speaker 1: things like considering the students perspective, of trying to avoid
Speaker 1: labeling students and instead thinking about why they might be
Speaker 1: behaving in a particular way, rather than thinking, oh, well
Speaker 1: that students just a troublemaker, or that students just a jerk.
Speaker 1: Let's see what were the others. It was looking at
Speaker 1: a situation from a student's perspective, avoiding labeling, thinking about
Speaker 1: situational reasons for their behavior. And he asked teachers to
Speaker 1: really focus on all of these things, and they did
Speaker 1: sort of written reflections and they read students experiences of
Speaker 1: feeling respected by teachers who behave this way and what
Speaker 1: he found was that as a result of this intervention,
Speaker 1: suspension rates dropped, and particularly suspension rates of black and
Speaker 1: Latino students were cut about in half. This is a
Speaker 1: really interesting approach because instead of actually targeting bias itself,
Speaker 1: he focused on trying to elevate these other values and
Speaker 1: these other ways of being, which then kind of overrode
Speaker 1: the biased tendencies. M I love that. I think that's
Speaker 1: a beautiful idea and it makes me think about one
Speaker 1: of the ideas of Buddhism that has been fundamental to
Speaker 1: me is just this teaching that every other human wants
Speaker 1: to be happy just like me. Yes, Like when I
Speaker 1: boil it all down to that, they want to be
Speaker 1: happy just like me, they don't want to suffer just
Speaker 1: like me. Everything after that is all strategy, it's all approach,
Speaker 1: it's all culture, it's all conditioning. But underneath, we all
Speaker 1: have that basic thing, and that has been over the
Speaker 1: years for me, very transformational. As you're saying, when I
Speaker 1: notice I'm thinking negatively towards someone, which it is usually
Speaker 1: happening without me knowing the person, right, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just somebody's wearing a visor, which I happen to
Speaker 1: think is a terrible fashion choice, and I suddenly, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm judging them. They might be a complete idiot, right,
Speaker 1: Or people who backed their cars into spaces and crowded
Speaker 1: parking lots another example where I suddenly think like this
Speaker 1: person is an awful person. I just, you know, know
Speaker 1: that person underneath all that, they want to be happy,
Speaker 1: just like me. And it takes a while to internalize that.
Speaker 1: But it's a really powerful, I think intervention that speaks
Speaker 1: to what you're talking about seeing commonality. Instead of trying
Speaker 1: to sort of cut off a specific bias, you're trying
Speaker 1: to sort of go underneath all of them in a way, yes,
Speaker 1: and trying to kind of elevate our best selves, you know,
Speaker 1: elevate our values and our goals. I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about a study you participated in. I guess it was
Speaker 1: not a study. It's a simulation that you ran which
Speaker 1: really shows how little bits of bias really accumulate over time.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me about what you guys did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the big questions I had when
Speaker 1: I was going into this project was like I thought
Speaker 1: to myself, Okay, well, there's lots of evidence that this
Speaker 1: kind of bias exists. It's everywhere. It's an education, it's
Speaker 1: in healthcare, air, it's in public safety, it's in the workplace,
Speaker 1: it's everywhere. How much do these individual, discreete moments matter
Speaker 1: in the long run, Like, in other words, all of
Speaker 1: the studies focus on kind of snapshots in time, like
Speaker 1: the moment a doctor makes a particular decision about care,
Speaker 1: or the moment an employer decides to put a resume
Speaker 1: in one pile or another pile. All of the studies like,
Speaker 1: look at these moments of evaluation, these specific discreet moments
Speaker 1: of decision making. But of course bias doesn't just happen
Speaker 1: once or twice. It doesn't happen in these discreet moments.
Speaker 1: It happens continually, and it happens interactively between people, and
Speaker 1: it grows sometimes or it changes. And so I really
Speaker 1: wanted to understand, like how this actually accumulates over the
Speaker 1: long term, over a person's career or over a person's lifetime.
Speaker 1: There's work in the medical field about the accumulated stressors
Speaker 1: of racism. There's a name for this, it's called weathering.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that over a person's lifetime, when
Speaker 1: that person is constantly subjected to the racism that is
Speaker 1: present in our culture. This has a physiological wearing or
Speaker 1: weathering effect on the body that makes that person more
Speaker 1: susceptible to things like metabolic disease or other health conditions.
Speaker 1: And so there's there's like a recognition that these biases
Speaker 1: accumulate into something very consequential. So I wanted to look
Speaker 1: at how this might play out in the workplace and
Speaker 1: what might be the cumulative effect of individual acts of
Speaker 1: bias over time. And so I partnered with a computer
Speaker 1: scientist and we built a computer simulation of a workplace
Speaker 1: where we basically created this computer simulation of a very
Speaker 1: simplified workplace where people just do projects and then the
Speaker 1: project's succeed or fail, and then their score is either
Speaker 1: increased or decreased depending on whether they are succeeding or failing.
Speaker 1: And then every so often people get promoted to the
Speaker 1: next level of this company. So it's a very simplified
Speaker 1: organization with eight levels of hierarchy. And then what we
Speaker 1: did was we we had you know, male and female employees,
Speaker 1: and we introduced a handful of really common gender biases
Speaker 1: into this workplace simulation. So, for instance, we had women's
Speaker 1: work be slightly devalued compared to men. They got slightly
Speaker 1: less of a promotion boost if they succeeded, or their
Speaker 1: work was more devalued if they failed. Because we see
Speaker 1: these patterns in the actual world women's work is women
Speaker 1: are given less credit for successes and they're penalized more
Speaker 1: for failure. And so when you say slightly, you mean
Speaker 1: a couple of percentage points, right. Three percent was the
Speaker 1: was the number that we used for this simulation because
Speaker 1: we wanted to see what happened if you just even
Speaker 1: have a very small amount of bias that accumulates over time.
Speaker 1: And so we ran the simulation and we ran it,
Speaker 1: I think a hundred times or two hundred times, and
Speaker 1: then we looked at the average results, and what we
Speaker 1: found was that even with just a three percent bias
Speaker 1: against women in the simulation, over twenty promotion cycles, the
Speaker 1: top level of the workplace ended up being seven percent men.
Speaker 1: So what what you know, What we found, in other words,
Speaker 1: is that a very very small amount of bias, if
Speaker 1: it's repeated frequently enough, every time a project happens, there
Speaker 1: was just a little bit of bias introduced into the
Speaker 1: evaluation that over time. It's really it creates really significant
Speaker 1: kind of macro consequences. Yeah, that's really interesting, and you
Speaker 1: certainly said that one promotion cycle and you don't see
Speaker 1: a big difference, But as someone's career goes on, it
Speaker 1: explains how you get where you're going. And I think
Speaker 1: the same thing. We can extrapolate that to sort of
Speaker 1: the personal level. Right, The more often we're exposed to
Speaker 1: a bias, the more we internalize it. Yes, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: just the little bit, just a little bit. It's sort
Speaker 1: of the idea of conditioning. It builds over time, or
Speaker 1: habits entrenched themselves slowly over time. The first time you
Speaker 1: smoke a cigarette, it's pretty easy to say, like, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to have another. The ten thousandth time you've
Speaker 1: smoked a cigarette, it's a whole lot harder. One cigarette
Speaker 1: at a time, three percent at a time. These things
Speaker 1: they add up exactly. And that's why I think when
Speaker 1: we talk about things like choice or free will, it
Speaker 1: becomes really complicated. You know. You could say something like
Speaker 1: women are opting out of the workplace because a particular
Speaker 1: woman is choosing to leave her job because she has
Speaker 1: decided that she wants to do something else. But if
Speaker 1: you think about the accumulation of experiences that that woman
Speaker 1: has had that might be contributing to this ultimate decision,
Speaker 1: I think it becomes a lot more complicated, and it
Speaker 1: becomes harder to say, Oh, this person is just sort
Speaker 1: of freely choosing you know A or B. You know. Instead,
Speaker 1: I think we really have to think about the conditioning
Speaker 1: that has led to that moment of decision. I think
Speaker 1: that's so true. And I think about this a lot
Speaker 1: in a lot of context when we talk about choice
Speaker 1: and free will, how much choice and free will do
Speaker 1: different people have? You have it within certain constraints. And
Speaker 1: the example I use not to make everything about addiction,
Speaker 1: but it's just an easy example for people to understand,
Speaker 1: is that me, one day off of being on Heroin,
Speaker 1: the degree of choice I had then feels I can't.
Speaker 1: I don't even have words for the degree of momented
Speaker 1: nous compared to what I have now. Now I feel
Speaker 1: like I got a pretty good choice, Like if I
Speaker 1: go to do that as a choice I made, But then, boy,
Speaker 1: the choice I had felt really slim. And I think
Speaker 1: this is what you're speaking to. It also makes me
Speaker 1: think of another line in your book that I absolutely loved,
Speaker 1: which is you said, for lies repeated often enough do
Speaker 1: not become truth, They become invisible. And that you know,
Speaker 1: if we think about bias, that's what happens. We don't
Speaker 1: even know it anymore. That conditioning has happened a little
Speaker 1: bit by a little bit, by a little bit, and
Speaker 1: it just vanishes. But it's there, it's there. You know.
Speaker 1: There's a philosopher who has coined this term that I
Speaker 1: find really helpful, which is the hyper object. And the
Speaker 1: hyper object is like a phenomenon that is so big
Speaker 1: we can't even see it. It's so pervasive and all
Speaker 1: encompassing that we can't even perceive it. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think of like the patriarchy as a hyper object.
Speaker 1: It influences everything, the way, you know, the entire way
Speaker 1: our society is structured. White supremacy is a hyper object.
Speaker 1: It's so vast and so kind of entrenched that it
Speaker 1: can be hard to even see its individual manifestations. I
Speaker 1: think that's a great term, the hyper object. I'm looking
Speaker 1: and seeing that we are out of time. This has
Speaker 1: been amazing. You and I are going to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more in the post show conversation about two
Speaker 1: things that I am particularly interested in. One is the
Speaker 1: idea of us having different levels to ourselves, which I
Speaker 1: think is a fascinating idea, and I want to talk
Speaker 1: about that. And I also want to talk about a
Speaker 1: analogy you made around mindfulness that I think is one
Speaker 1: of the best analogies for why mindfulness works that I've heard,
Speaker 1: and so you and I'll talk about that in the
Speaker 1: post show conversation and listeners. If you'd like access to
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Speaker 1: join Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: This has been a really great conversation. The book is
Speaker 1: really really wonderful, and I think this is such important
Speaker 1: work for each of us to see in ourselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all, we all do this? How can we do it? Last?
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for just a really enjoyable conversation.
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