Speaker 1: Why is there so much polarization in the world, and
Speaker 1: what does this have to do with the brain, And
Speaker 1: what does any of this have to do with how
Speaker 1: you picture a cat, or why we respond to certain
Speaker 1: cartoons or the British nobleman Lord Gordon, or the Iroqui
Speaker 1: Native Americans? And why do you naturally feel that everyone
Speaker 1: who disagrees with you is a troll or misinformed? And
Speaker 1: if you could just shout loudly enough in all caps
Speaker 1: on Twitter, they would see that you're right. Why can't
Speaker 1: they see that you know the truth? Welcome to inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
Speaker 1: author at Stanford University, and I've spent my whole career
Speaker 1: studying the intersection between how the brain works and how
Speaker 1: we experience life. It hasn't escaped anybody's notice that we
Speaker 1: are in a time in which polarization and disagreement is
Speaker 1: higher than most of us have seen in our lives
Speaker 1: so far, and so in the past decade I've become
Speaker 1: very interested in the brain science behind that behind polarization,
Speaker 1: and more generally, how we come to believe our own
Speaker 1: political opinions and why we're so certain that everyone else
Speaker 1: is wrong, and how if we could just talk to them,
Speaker 1: if they could just listen to us, they would see
Speaker 1: the light and they would know that we are right
Speaker 1: and they were mistaken. Now, I want to set the stage.
Speaker 1: Polarization is not a new thing. Although we are in
Speaker 1: a polarized era right now, this is far from unique.
Speaker 1: Just think about the Civil War in America, where you
Speaker 1: had brothers and neighbors taking up arms against one another,
Speaker 1: or in the nineteen sixties and seventies, people here held
Speaker 1: vastly different opinions about the war in Vietnam and how
Speaker 1: to treat the returning soldiers or take stuff that's even bigger,
Speaker 1: like Nazism in Germany, which was the most advanced country
Speaker 1: in Europe. The thing to recognize is that in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four elections in Germany, every single seat in
Speaker 1: the Reichstag, the German Parliament, was either Communist Party far
Speaker 1: left or National Socialist Party far right. Or look more
Speaker 1: generally at the whole twentieth century, the Communist Revolution in
Speaker 1: China or in the USSR, or the Hutu massacre of
Speaker 1: the Tutsi in Rwanda, or the Camera Rouge in Cambodia,
Speaker 1: and on and on. There's nothing new about polarization and
Speaker 1: people taking up arms. And what I want to talk
Speaker 1: about today is why so the question on lots of
Speaker 1: people's mind, it seems to be, is this because of
Speaker 1: social media. I don't think that has much of anything
Speaker 1: to do with it. Keep in mind that all the
Speaker 1: examples I just named preceded Twitter and Facebook, and those
Speaker 1: were much worse than what we have going on currently.
Speaker 1: The fact is it doesn't take much to get people
Speaker 1: all worked up over different opinions and taking up arms,
Speaker 1: and you don't need social media for that. And my
Speaker 1: goal today is to explain why it is so easy
Speaker 1: for people to get so worked up and believe their truth.
Speaker 1: So this is what we're going to explore. Why does
Speaker 1: everyone have different opinions? And why does everyone with a
Speaker 1: different opinion to yours seem misinformed or obstreperous or like
Speaker 1: a troll. So I'll start with a cartoon and a story.
Speaker 1: The cartoon was one that I saw recently on Twitter.
Speaker 1: It shows a bunch of people walking on a road
Speaker 1: and up ahead there's a fork in the road and
Speaker 1: off to one side there's a small number of smart,
Speaker 1: thoughtful people that are following a windy path marked complex
Speaker 1: but right, and on the other side of the fork
Speaker 1: there is a very packed group of people and they're
Speaker 1: all walking and it's labeled simple but wrong, and this
Speaker 1: takes them to a cliff that they eventually tumble off of.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to come back to this cartoon later,
Speaker 1: and when I come back, we're going to understand this
Speaker 1: in a slightly different way.
Speaker 2: But first I want to turn to this.
Speaker 1: Story, which is a true story. Many years ago, I
Speaker 1: got my PhD in neuroscience. I was a second year
Speaker 1: graduate student when the new class of first year students
Speaker 1: came in and one student really stood out, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to call her Tanya.
Speaker 2: She seemed very sweet.
Speaker 1: And what we found out was that Tanya had extraordinary grades,
Speaker 1: and she'd come from a very impoverished neighborhood in Chicago,
Speaker 1: but she had these incredible grades and these incredible letters
Speaker 1: of recommendation and great scores on her gres. So during
Speaker 1: the first month or two of school, she was given
Speaker 1: a special award and there was going to be a
Speaker 1: banquet for it, and to my surprise, she asked me
Speaker 1: if I would be her date to the banquet.
Speaker 2: So I said yes.
Speaker 1: I didn't know her well, but I thought she seemed
Speaker 1: very sweet, and so I said yes. So the banquet
Speaker 1: was supposed to be on Friday of that week, but
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the banquet never happened. Why it's
Speaker 1: because on Tuesday of that week, Tanya was in the
Speaker 1: women's restroom with one of the administrators at the school
Speaker 1: and they started talking. The administrator said, Wow, Tanya, everything
Speaker 1: is so amazing about you and.
Speaker 2: Your grades and your skills.
Speaker 1: I want to know how your school cultivated a thinker
Speaker 1: like you. And so Tanya just had some humble answer,
Speaker 1: and so this administrator decided she was going to call
Speaker 1: the school and find out how they produced somebody like Tanya.
Speaker 2: So she calls to.
Speaker 1: Talk to one of the professors that wrote a letter
Speaker 1: of recommendations for Tanya. And so she dials up and
Speaker 1: she gets the secretary and she asks to speak to
Speaker 1: the professor, and the secretary says who, and the administrator
Speaker 1: repeats the name. I'm looking for, Professor so and so,
Speaker 1: and the woman on the other end says, there's nobody
Speaker 1: here by that name. So the administrator says, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the professor that wrote this letter, and the secretary says,
Speaker 1: I've worked here thirty years and there is nobody here
Speaker 1: by this name. So turn out to be a fake
Speaker 1: letter of recommendation. So the administrator calls the second letter
Speaker 1: of recommendation, same story. So she calls the third recommender
Speaker 1: and gets connected, and it turns out that it was
Speaker 1: Tanya's mother's office. And so what quickly became unraveled is
Speaker 1: that Tanya had faked everything her transcript or GRES. And
Speaker 1: this was by the way back in the nineties. So
Speaker 1: she did this by digitally scanning her gres and then
Speaker 1: changing them with early versions of photoshop, and then reprinting them. Anyway,
Speaker 1: one of my colleagues equipped that she should get a
Speaker 1: PhD just for the cleverness of her deception. But the
Speaker 1: thing that struck me was how blind we all were
Speaker 1: to the deception. We were completely fooled by it. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the graduate school said to her, WHOA, there's something really
Speaker 1: strange here, and you have to come up with an
Speaker 1: explanation for this, And Tanya just ran away. But one
Speaker 1: of my classmates caught her on the way out at
Speaker 1: the door, and she had an excuse for everything, and
Speaker 1: she said, I got screwed by this person, and this
Speaker 1: person cheated me, and I thought they were writing a
Speaker 1: real letter, and I thought the school was accredited, but
Speaker 1: they lied to me, so she had an excuse for everything. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously the details of this story stuck with me through
Speaker 1: the years because I had almost gone on a date
Speaker 1: with this girl. Anyway, that was the end of the
Speaker 1: Tanya story, or so I thought. A couple of years later,
Speaker 1: someone pointed me to an article from the Yale University newspaper,
Speaker 1: and that's how we learned that Tanya had left our
Speaker 1: school and gone to ya next and faked her way
Speaker 1: into graduate school there, and Yale had caught her. This
Speaker 1: was just like the first time, but Yale was mad
Speaker 1: because they had been paying her a stipend, and so
Speaker 1: they put her in jail. And I pictured the girl
Speaker 1: that I almost went on a date with sitting on
Speaker 1: a cement bench in jail, and the next newspaper article
Speaker 1: I found showed that in jail, Tanya had bitten two guards,
Speaker 1: and at some point she was released from jail, and
Speaker 1: then we heard nothing about her after that until two
Speaker 1: years later. Because Tanya went home to where she lived
Speaker 1: in Chicago, and she and her mother decided to do
Speaker 1: a big drug deal with two men who turned out
Speaker 1: to be undercover agents, and they got caught and she
Speaker 1: was going to be sentenced for a long time, and
Speaker 1: so she and her cousin came up with an idea.
Speaker 1: So they went out and they found a woman who
Speaker 1: was a drug addict, who who was approximately her size
Speaker 1: and looked a bit like her. And they said, hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to give you free drugs if you come
Speaker 1: to the dentist. And she said she was doing an
Speaker 1: insurance scam, and she said, come to the dentist and
Speaker 1: say that your name is my name. And she had
Speaker 1: the woman wearing gloves to the dentist office so there
Speaker 1: wouldn't be any fingerprints, and she accompanied her and she
Speaker 1: signed the paperwork for her. And then after they had
Speaker 1: the imprints, they brought this woman home and they smashed
Speaker 1: her on the head with a brick and they injected
Speaker 1: her with a bunch of insulin to make her pass out.
Speaker 1: That's all they had access to and that's why they
Speaker 1: used the insulin. And their plan was to kill this
Speaker 1: woman and burn the body so that the dental imprints
Speaker 1: would be found and they would conclude that Tanya was
Speaker 1: dead and then she wouldn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, this poor woman eventually came to
Speaker 1: in the basement of Tanya's cousin's house and she managed
Speaker 1: to scramble out of the window and she ran a
Speaker 1: crossed the street to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. She
Speaker 1: screamed for help, and Tanya realized that the woman had
Speaker 1: just escaped, and she ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken
Speaker 1: right after her and started screaming that the woman had
Speaker 1: stolen her money. And everything was very confusing, but the
Speaker 1: police showed up and they couldn't figure out what was happening,
Speaker 1: so they arrested everyone.
Speaker 2: Here was this woman with blood.
Speaker 1: All over her, so they just took everyone into the station,
Speaker 1: and eventually the whole thing became unraveled and everyone involved
Speaker 1: in this case was jaw dropped. As this story unfolded,
Speaker 1: the ease and creativity with which Tanya thought of a
Speaker 1: plan that went, okay, how about I just kill this
Speaker 1: woman and then burned the body. And when you burn
Speaker 1: the body, the dental imprints are the things that last.
Speaker 1: And so because this woman had gone to the dentist
Speaker 1: under Tanya's name, then the world would conclude I'm dead
Speaker 1: and then I won't go to jail, and I was thinking, Wow,
Speaker 1: I almost went on a day with this woman. So
Speaker 1: this was one of the moments in my life when
Speaker 1: I was struck by how different people can be on
Speaker 1: the inside and how little insight we have into the
Speaker 1: cosmos of someone else's brain and mind. And happily this
Speaker 1: was positioned at the very beginning of my neuroscience career,
Speaker 1: and it influenced what I've been studying since. It has
Speaker 1: always struck me as fascinating the differences between people. Everyone
Speaker 1: is very different on the inside, sometimes much more than
Speaker 1: we expect. Now it turns out my father was a
Speaker 1: forensic psychiatrist and he was involved in most of the
Speaker 1: big mass murder cases in New Mexico where I grew up.
Speaker 1: One of them was a guy named William Wayne Gilbert
Speaker 1: who had killed three people cold blooded murder, and my
Speaker 1: father became the psychiatrist in that case. Now, I was
Speaker 1: a child and we went to some social event with
Speaker 1: my father, and I remember somebody saying to my father,
Speaker 1: Gilbert should not get the death penalty because presumably he
Speaker 1: feels terrible for what he's done. Presumably he feels deep
Speaker 1: regret for having killed three people. And as a kid,
Speaker 1: I remember totally feeling like I agreed with that, but
Speaker 1: I remembered my father's surprise at the statement, because my
Speaker 1: father had just spent hours in deposition with Gilbert, and
Speaker 1: he explained to this man genuinely and professionally that it
Speaker 1: simply wasn't the case that Gilbert had regret, because when
Speaker 1: William Wayne Gilbert would think about the idea of going
Speaker 1: to murder somebody, he said, he had the same level
Speaker 1: of excitement that he did as a child on the
Speaker 1: night before Christmas. That's what it felt like for him
Speaker 1: when he was thinking of killing someone. And so my
Speaker 1: father's point to this man and to me when I
Speaker 1: was eight years old, is you can't actually stick yourself
Speaker 1: in other people's shoes, as much as you'd like to.
Speaker 1: You think everybody's just like me, especially when you're a child,
Speaker 1: but in fact people can be quite different on the inside.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that the governor of New Mexico
Speaker 1: at the time commuted William Wayne Gilbert's sentence since he
Speaker 1: was sentenced to death, so Gilbert was not going to
Speaker 1: die now, and to show his gratitude, he managed to
Speaker 1: smuggle a pistol into the prison and led one of
Speaker 1: the most stunning prison breaks from a maximum security penitentiary
Speaker 1: where he let out several other murderers. And so for
Speaker 1: a few months it was very tense in New Mexico
Speaker 1: because there was this group of mass murderers on the loose.
Speaker 1: They were finally found again, but only after this very
Speaker 1: scary month or two where they were hiding out and
Speaker 1: taking hostages. So all this stuff really got me thinking
Speaker 1: from a young age about the differences between people. So
Speaker 1: I'll just mention one more anecdote here, my father deposed
Speaker 1: a guy who was on trial. This guy had gone
Speaker 1: into Western Union office and asked the clerk to use
Speaker 1: the phone, and the clerk had said, sorry, but the
Speaker 1: phone is only for the back office people and not
Speaker 1: for customers. So this guy jumped the counter and beat
Speaker 1: the clerk almost to death. And the interesting part is
Speaker 1: that he said to my father during the deposition, but
Speaker 1: anybody would have done the same thing in that situation, right,
Speaker 1: And he meant it. He was being genuine because we
Speaker 1: all have an internal model of the world what constitutes
Speaker 1: appropriate behavior in the world, and we assume that everyone
Speaker 1: else's model is the same as ours, and this guy
Speaker 1: genuinely could not imagine anyone having a different reaction in
Speaker 1: that circumstance. Now, when we think about the differences between people,
Speaker 1: were used to thinking about extreme cases like Tanya or
Speaker 1: William Wayne Gilbert or this guy in the Western Union office.
Speaker 1: These people, presumably have psychopathy paths make up about one
Speaker 1: percent of the population. These are people who simply don't
Speaker 1: care about your feelings. You're just an obstacle that they're
Speaker 1: trying to get around to get what they want. But
Speaker 1: this idea that other people can be different from you
Speaker 1: on the inside can be generalized. So take something like schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: You see a man on the street corner and he's yelling.
Speaker 1: He's in an angry dialogue with somebody who's not there.
Speaker 1: He's delusional, he's not in contact with reality. So in
Speaker 1: situations like this, you look at the man and you say, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess that man's internal model isn't the same as mine.
Speaker 1: He's not experiencing reality the same way I do. So
Speaker 1: you might think, okay, I get that about different models
Speaker 1: on the inside for psychopaths and for people with schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: But otherwise the intuition is that the rest of us
Speaker 1: are all about the same. But there are some important
Speaker 1: things to note here. First, when it comes to something
Speaker 1: like psychopathy or schizophrenia, we tend to think about these
Speaker 1: as being categories, like Okay, that person's psychopathic and I'm not,
Speaker 1: or that person is schizophrenic and I'm not. But in fact,
Speaker 1: all of these things are now appreciated as living on
Speaker 1: a spectrum, so you have different degrees along the spectrum.
Speaker 1: So take psychopathy for example. There's a well used way
Speaker 1: to measure this. It's a questionnaire and you score a
Speaker 1: certain number of points on this from one to forty,
Speaker 1: and in the United States, if you're above a thirty,
Speaker 1: then you are labeled a psychopath. You don't want to
Speaker 1: be roommates with the guy who scores twenty nine on
Speaker 1: this test, even though they're not technically a psychopath, they
Speaker 1: share a lot of the fundamental characteristics, so it's a
Speaker 1: spectral issue. And by the way, this is the same
Speaker 1: with everything in psychiatry. This has been the direction of
Speaker 1: the Bible of psychiatry called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Speaker 1: It used to be all about categories, and now everything
Speaker 1: is about living on a spectrum, but let's keep drilling down.
Speaker 1: When we look at mental illnesses more generally, we find
Speaker 1: things that influence people's thoughts or feelings or behaviors, including
Speaker 1: not just things like schizophrenia or psychopathy, but you presumably
Speaker 1: know people with clinical depression or bipolar disorder, or anxiety disorder,
Speaker 1: or obsessive compulsive disorder or borderline or narcissistic or avoidant,
Speaker 1: or an eating disorder, or dissociated identity disorder or panic disorder,
Speaker 1: or many other things like that. There are at least
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty seven of these in the Diagnostic
Speaker 1: and Statistical Manual, So it becomes increasingly difficult to assert
Speaker 1: that everybody is exactly like you on the inside. Despite
Speaker 1: superficial appearances, people can be very different in terms of
Speaker 1: what is happening on the inside. And if you've read
Speaker 1: my books or listen to my other podcasts, you know
Speaker 1: that when we see people with two strokes or brain
Speaker 1: injuries to different parts of the brain, it's not hard
Speaker 1: to say, oh, I guess their reality is a little
Speaker 1: bit different than mine. But it proves harder to think
Speaker 1: about this in terms of everybody that you know and love,
Speaker 1: because we assume that the people in our lives have
Speaker 1: essentially the same thing going on on the inside. That
Speaker 1: we do the same opinions, the same way of sense making,
Speaker 1: the same way of gathering meaning, the same political views
Speaker 1: on the world as you do, but they don't. Everyone
Speaker 1: that you know is having a slightly different reality going
Speaker 1: on than you are. We are very different people on
Speaker 1: the inside. Now, I want to be clear that I'm
Speaker 1: not just saying this as a philosophical claim. We can
Speaker 1: increasingly measure so many examples of this, and this is
Speaker 1: something I've worked on in my lab for most of
Speaker 1: my career. Neuroscience has always cared about the big disorders,
Speaker 1: the things that are most obvious and societally costly. But
Speaker 1: when we start looking at the more innocuous details, we
Speaker 1: uncover these clear and measurable ways that reality can be
Speaker 1: different inside different heads. So, for example, imagine that you
Speaker 1: and I and a bunch of other people are looking
Speaker 1: over Times Square in New York. We're standing on a
Speaker 1: corner and enjoying watching the crowd. So you open your
Speaker 1: eyes and there's the world and all its blues and
Speaker 1: golds and greens. But if you happen to be colorblind,
Speaker 1: you're seeing it differently than the person next to you.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can't distinguish reds from greens those look exactly
Speaker 1: the same to you. Or maybe you have a more
Speaker 1: extreme form of color blindness in which there are no
Speaker 1: colors at all, just shades of gray. So for you,
Speaker 1: in the person next to you, the internal experience can
Speaker 1: be quite different, even though you're looking at the same scene.
Speaker 2: And we now know that a small.
Speaker 1: Fraction of the female population has not just three types
Speaker 1: of color photoreceptors in their eyes and their retinas, but
Speaker 1: four types of color photoreceptors, which means they are seeing
Speaker 1: colors that the rest of us can't even imagine. This
Speaker 1: is called tetrachromacy, and I'll come back to this in
Speaker 1: a future episode, But the point I want to make
Speaker 1: now is that we might all be watching the same
Speaker 1: corner in Times Square, but having totally different internal experiences.
Speaker 1: This is the type of issue that I've been studying
Speaker 1: in my lab for many years, so you might have
Speaker 1: heard about my episode on synesthesia. In synesthesia, people have
Speaker 1: a blending of the senses. About three percent of the
Speaker 1: population will, for example, see a letter on a page
Speaker 1: and that'll trigger a color experience for them on the inside.
Speaker 1: So maybe s's a purple for you, and L triggers
Speaker 1: a green experience, and so on. It's different for every synesthete,
Speaker 1: and there are many forms of synesthesia. You might hear
Speaker 1: a sound and that triggers a visual experience, or you
Speaker 1: taste something and it puts a feeling on your fingertips. Essentially,
Speaker 1: any sense can end up having crosstalk with any other
Speaker 1: sense in these different forms of synesthesia. And my colleagues
Speaker 1: and I have documented dozens and dozens of forms throughout
Speaker 1: the population. Now, synesthesia is not considered a disease or
Speaker 1: a disorder. It is simply an alternative reality. The point
Speaker 1: is that people can have very different experiences on the inside,
Speaker 1: but to a synesthee, their experience is precisely as real
Speaker 1: as anything you might experience. So in neuroscience, this is
Speaker 1: just one more recent appreciation that from one person to
Speaker 1: the next, reality can be a little bit different. And
Speaker 1: let me give you one more example that's even newer,
Speaker 1: the issue of how we imagine a visual scene inside
Speaker 1: our heads. So I'm going to ask you to picture
Speaker 1: this picture a gray and white cat on a picnic
Speaker 1: table eating colorful cereal and looking at you suspiciously, So
Speaker 1: really picture that in your head now. There were two
Speaker 1: researchers who began looking at this question of mental imageries
Speaker 1: some years ago, Stephen Costlin and Zen and Felicition, and
Speaker 1: they ended up disagreeing very strongly. Coslin said, when you're
Speaker 1: imaging something, you're essentially running your visual cortex to see
Speaker 1: this like a movie. It's like vision. And Felician said,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. You're not seeing something. It's purely conceptual. It
Speaker 1: doesn't involve seeing in vision. And they both did experiments
Speaker 1: back and forth, and Felician said, look, you're insane. It's
Speaker 1: not stored like a picture, and Costlin said, no, you're insane.
Speaker 1: It's not stored like a proposition. You're actually seeing it.
Speaker 1: And it was very difficult for a conclusion to be
Speaker 1: reached here. Both argued passionately for their side of the argument,
Speaker 1: and this went on for twenty years in the literature.
Speaker 1: So why couldn't they come to an agreement on this.
Speaker 1: The answer is Coslin had what we now call hyper fantasia,
Speaker 1: which means he has extremely vivid mental imagery. When he
Speaker 1: imagines something, it's as vivid as real seeing. Now, this
Speaker 1: is the opposite of what Felician had, which is called
Speaker 1: a fantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. He
Speaker 1: doesn't see anything in particular, He just has a concept,
Speaker 1: and all of this lives on a spectrum from hyperfantasia
Speaker 1: to a fantasia. Everyone in the population is somewhere on
Speaker 1: this spectrum.
Speaker 2: So think about this for a moment.
Speaker 1: Picture an ant crawling on a checkered tablecloth towards a
Speaker 1: jar of purple jelly. Are you closer to the hyper
Speaker 1: fantasia side, where you're seeing it like a movie, or
Speaker 1: closer to the a fantasia side where you can understand
Speaker 1: the concept perfectly fine, but you're not seeing anything. So
Speaker 1: my lab has studied this in detail, and we use
Speaker 1: neuroimaging to figure out what's going on in the brain
Speaker 1: along this spectrum.
Speaker 2: But what I want to.
Speaker 1: Focus on today is why there was such a spirited
Speaker 1: debate in the literature for two decades before anyone realized
Speaker 1: there was a spectrum. It's because both researchers were operating
Speaker 1: under the assumption that everyone else experiences visual imagery just
Speaker 1: like they do. So when Felician introspected, he wasn't seeing
Speaker 1: a picture, and so he felt clear that other people
Speaker 1: don't either, And when Coslin introspected, he was seeing a
Speaker 1: super clear image and he assumed that's what happens inside
Speaker 1: every head.
Speaker 2: And I want to use.
Speaker 1: The debate between them as a more general metaphor that
Speaker 1: we all assume that everyone else is experiencing the world
Speaker 1: the way we do. My point in talking about color
Speaker 1: vision and synesthesia and visual imagery is this, as neuroscience
Speaker 1: and psychology move on from studying the really big disorders,
Speaker 1: we find increasingly more subtle issues, which caused us to say, wow,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that someone could experience so differently than
Speaker 1: I do. But the fact is that everyone is having
Speaker 1: a different internal experience and this led me to search
Speaker 1: for a good metaphor. And when I saw the movie
Speaker 1: poster for The Martian, I thought, Oh, that's it, because
Speaker 1: the poster shows a single person, Matt Damon, walking around
Speaker 1: on his own planet. He's the only one there, and
Speaker 1: I thought, that's the perfect model. We're each living on
Speaker 1: our own planet, we're each having our experiences, and we think, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is reality, and it makes sense that everyone has
Speaker 1: the same experience that I do. But in fact, just
Speaker 1: like in any galaxy, each planet is different. Everyone's got
Speaker 1: their own atmosphere, their own landscape, their own experiences. But
Speaker 1: we always feel certain that he or she feels exactly
Speaker 1: the same way that I do about whatever. Take for example,
Speaker 1: what comes to mind when I say the word justice.
Speaker 1: What happens inside everyone's head is slightly different. Or fairness
Speaker 1: what comes to your mind it might not be the
Speaker 1: same thing that comes to someone else's. Or attractiveness or love, home, freedom, success,
Speaker 1: these concepts are triggering different neural networks and different people.
Speaker 1: They trigger different meaning, which is tied to your whole
Speaker 1: personal history and your aspirations. But we assume when we
Speaker 1: use words that the other person knows exactly what we mean.
Speaker 1: We operate under the assumption that words mean the same
Speaker 1: thing to me that they do to you. But in
Speaker 1: fact that never happens because we each have different internal lives.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways that you can always appreciate
Speaker 1: this is just look around you. The next time you're
Speaker 1: in the bookstore or the library. There are so many
Speaker 1: different sections, and nobody walks in and explores all the
Speaker 1: sections equally. Instead, people go in and they go straight
Speaker 1: to the section they want the thing that resonates with
Speaker 1: their internal model of the world, mysteries or romances or
Speaker 1: westerns or sci fi or whatever. They gravitate to particular
Speaker 1: things and not others because of the differences in their brains.
Speaker 1: So this is the first important lesson that I want
Speaker 1: to establish. Others see the world differently than you do.
Speaker 1: But why is this true? Why can't we have one
Speaker 1: really smart person who writes a blog post and says, hey,
Speaker 1: I think this is the way we should run the country,
Speaker 1: and all three hundred and sixty five million people read
Speaker 1: then say, yeah, that's pretty good. Why are we all
Speaker 1: so different? This question has been at the heart of
Speaker 1: a very long standing debate where people attribute differences to
Speaker 1: either genetic factors or environmental factors, in other words, the
Speaker 1: nature versus nurture debates. Why do you argue with your
Speaker 1: sibling about political issues? Does your sibling have very different
Speaker 1: genes than you do, even though you have the same parents.
Speaker 1: Does your sibling have different nurture than you even though
Speaker 1: you were raised in the same household? So are we
Speaker 1: determined by our genetics or our environment? And traditionally there
Speaker 1: have been very strong advocates on both sides of this. Well,
Speaker 1: both of these have something to say. So let's start
Speaker 1: with genetics. Do genetic differences matter? Heck yeah they do.
Speaker 1: Although we're all members of this species, Homo sapiens, there
Speaker 1: are millions of differences in our genomes from person to person.
Speaker 1: For the cognitionanty, these are single nucleotide polymorphisms or substitution variants,
Speaker 1: or copy number variants and so on. And your genetics
Speaker 1: matter for who you are. Take just as an example
Speaker 1: from my book Incognito, so I compiled statistics that if
Speaker 1: you are a carrier of certain genes, your probability of
Speaker 1: committing violent crime goes up eight hundred and eighty two percent.
Speaker 1: So I took statistics from the US Department of Justice,
Speaker 1: and I broke these down into two groups, those who
Speaker 1: carry the genes and those who do not. And it's
Speaker 1: a massive difference. Can you guess what this collection of
Speaker 1: genes is. We summarize it as the Y chromosome. If
Speaker 1: you have these genes, we call you a male. So
Speaker 1: genes matter, but it's not all genes. It's also your
Speaker 1: experiences in the world. We drop into the world with
Speaker 1: half baked brains and we absorb everything around us, everything
Speaker 1: that you know that you believe, your language, your culture,
Speaker 1: your memories. It's all stored in this giant neural network.
Speaker 1: And how does it get stored by reconfiguration of the network.
Speaker 1: This is known as brain plasticity. Brains absorb the world
Speaker 1: around them, and that's how the world shapes you. We're
Speaker 1: influenced by our culture, our friends, our neighbors, our generation,
Speaker 1: and so on. So you're shaped by both your genes
Speaker 1: and your environment, and these are intertwined in very complex ways,
Speaker 1: such that it's really rare that we can point to
Speaker 1: one or the other and conclude that it's responsible for
Speaker 1: something that we see. It's all about what we nowadays
Speaker 1: call gene environment interactions. So you've got the genes that
Speaker 1: you drop into the world with, and then you've got
Speaker 1: all these experiences, and these intertwined in this complex way.
Speaker 1: Your experiences actually shape your nervous system and can feed
Speaker 1: all the way down to the level of which genes
Speaker 1: are getting expressed and which you are getting suppressed. And by
Speaker 1: the way, you don't choose your genes, and you don't
Speaker 1: choose your childhood experiences. None of that is about choice,
Speaker 1: but it makes you who you are now. These differences
Speaker 1: can be quite subtle. You can disagree with your sibling
Speaker 1: politically even know you're genetically similar and we're raised in
Speaker 1: a similar environment, but small differences can take you off
Speaker 1: in very different directions. So you're shaped by both your
Speaker 1: genes and your environment, and hence the nature versus nurture
Speaker 1: question is dead. And brains end up as different from
Speaker 1: one another as faces. Just walk along the street and
Speaker 1: look at how different people's faces are. The variety of
Speaker 1: faces that you see around you, Well, there's that much
Speaker 1: variety in brains too. And just as a side note,
Speaker 1: I can recognize all my students just from their brain scans,
Speaker 1: because brains actually physically come out looking different from one another. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've established that people are very different on the
Speaker 1: inside and given a sense of how that comes about.
Speaker 1: But you may think, okay, other people are different from me.
Speaker 1: But what is clear is that I see the truth.
Speaker 1: And if I could just sit down with them and
Speaker 1: have them listen to me, or I could just shout
Speaker 1: in cap letters on Twitter, everyone would see the correctness
Speaker 1: of my position.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So the main question that comes up in our lives politically,
Speaker 1: whether on social media or and dinner conversations is why
Speaker 1: can't everyone see the truth? So now we'll turn to
Speaker 1: Act three, where we'll ask how do you land on
Speaker 1: your opinions, your notion of the truth, and how accurate
Speaker 1: and complete is it really? So the critical concept I
Speaker 1: want to tell you about here is this your brain
Speaker 1: is locked in silence and darkness, and your brain's job
Speaker 1: is to build an internal model of the outside world
Speaker 1: so that it understands what is happening out there. So
Speaker 1: everything in your life, everything about the way the world works,
Speaker 1: is represented in your brain, usually unconsciously. How you deal
Speaker 1: with people, where your house is, how to operate the
Speaker 1: appliances in your kitchen, what language you speak and your
Speaker 1: spouse speaks, how to drive your car. Everything in your
Speaker 1: life is represented in this internal model. And I'm not
Speaker 1: going to talk too much about the internal model today
Speaker 1: except to say that one of the fascinating things is
Speaker 1: that usually it's totally unconscious. And I gave an example
Speaker 1: of this in a recent episode about putting your hands
Speaker 1: up on an imaginary steering wheel in front of you
Speaker 1: and pretending that you're driving thirty miles an hour down
Speaker 1: the road, and I asked you to make a lane
Speaker 1: change from the center lane into the right lane. And
Speaker 1: what essentially everyone does with their hands is they turn
Speaker 1: the steering wheel to the right and back to center.
Speaker 1: But that would actually steer you off the road and
Speaker 1: you would crash. When you actually get in the cart
Speaker 1: and watch what your hands are doing, you'll see that
Speaker 1: the way you make a lane change is by turning
Speaker 1: to the right, back to center, just as far to
Speaker 1: the left, and then back to center again. That's how
Speaker 1: you make a lane change. Your brain has made a
Speaker 1: model of the physics of cars and steering wheels and
Speaker 1: roads and so on, but you don't even know how
Speaker 1: you do this, and you didn't even know that your
Speaker 1: brain had that model. This is the gap between what
Speaker 1: your brain knows under the hood and what your conscious
Speaker 1: mind has access to. And the point I want to
Speaker 1: make is that you have this same sort of model
Speaker 1: about the whole world around you and its political truths. Now,
Speaker 1: the details of your trajectory in the world up to
Speaker 1: this moment convince you that you know the truths, even
Speaker 1: though someone else's internal model might tell them that they
Speaker 1: know the truth and it might be different. Now, the
Speaker 1: really important point here, the thing that no one talks about,
Speaker 1: is that we don't usually take into account how poor
Speaker 1: our internal models are. Here's just an example, starting in
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty, when the pandemic hit, why did all
Speaker 1: the bank lobbies close? After all, there were lots of
Speaker 1: other shops that were open. The floorist was open, the
Speaker 1: hair salons were open, and all of these were much
Speaker 1: smaller spaces than the spacious lobbies of the bank. And
Speaker 1: it's not that the banks couldn't put up plexiglass in
Speaker 1: front of the teller's windows. In fact, that was usually
Speaker 1: already in place. And it's not that the banks wanted
Speaker 1: to be closed, because they still staffed the drive up
Speaker 1: windows throughout the day.
Speaker 2: So what was going on.
Speaker 1: Most people didn't know why, And this is an example
Speaker 1: of internal models. If something is not in your model,
Speaker 1: then it just doesn't strike you. The answer was that
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty twenty, most of the population
Speaker 1: began wearing masks, and the bankers didn't want masked customers
Speaker 1: coming through all day. It's a perfect costume for a robbery,
Speaker 1: so they closed their lobbies. The point is simply that
Speaker 1: we always think our understanding of the world is complete,
Speaker 1: but we're always facing situations where we say, oh, I
Speaker 1: guess I didn't know that. Now it's complete, by the way,
Speaker 1: the limits of your internal model. This is the engine
Speaker 1: of comedy. So a comedian, I'll say something like this,
Speaker 1: I went to the doctor the other day and the
Speaker 1: doctor said, put your clothes there in the corner next
Speaker 1: to mine. It's funny and surprising only because your brain
Speaker 1: makes a full world of assumptions about the doctor, and
Speaker 1: then you realize that your model didn't have all the information.
Speaker 1: And there are so many examples of the limitations of
Speaker 1: your model. Imagine I were to draw a handful of
Speaker 1: diagonal lines on a page and ask you what you see.
Speaker 1: You'd say diagonal lines. But if I say to you
Speaker 1: how many are there here, you'd realize that you don't
Speaker 1: know the answer, and you have to deploy your attention
Speaker 1: to seek the answer. So this happens to us all
Speaker 1: the time, where we think we have a complete understanding
Speaker 1: of what's in front of us, but a little bit
Speaker 1: of questioning unmasks that we don't actually have all the
Speaker 1: details of the picture. And I'm using this all as
Speaker 1: a metaphor to emphasize the importance of genuine dialogue with
Speaker 1: other people, because sometimes you can't see what questions you
Speaker 1: haven't asked, or the things that you're not even aware
Speaker 1: you're not aware of. And by genuine dify dialogue, I
Speaker 1: don't mean how do I convince the other person that
Speaker 1: I'm right and they're wrong. I mean listening and considering
Speaker 1: and questioning, and trying where appropriate to change your own
Speaker 1: mind or to stand in a slightly different viewpoint than
Speaker 1: you were before. Now, I want to come back to
Speaker 1: this issue that it's so easy to poke holes in
Speaker 1: our internal models. And the question I've always wondered is
Speaker 1: why do we think our models are complete when they
Speaker 1: lack so many answers? So consider this. Do you know
Speaker 1: what a bicycle looks like? Of course you do. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're in a place where you can get out
Speaker 1: a piece of paper, I'd like you to get it
Speaker 1: out and sketch a bicycle. Go ahead, And if you
Speaker 1: can't get the paper, then go ahead and sketch it
Speaker 1: in the air with your finger. Just the basic outlines
Speaker 1: of the frame, the wheels, the seat, the handlebars.
Speaker 2: That's all. Okay.
Speaker 1: Now, I hope you'll actually do this, because assuming you do,
Speaker 1: you will find yourself shocked about how poorly you are
Speaker 1: able to actually reproduce the bike on paper. You think
Speaker 1: you have your bicycle pictured perfectly in your mind, but
Speaker 1: your model, your internal model, is actually quite lousy. For example,
Speaker 1: does the chain connect to both the front and the
Speaker 1: back wheel? And what shape is the frame exactly? And
Speaker 1: how do the handlebars plug into the front wheel. It's
Speaker 1: shocking because you know what a bicycle looks like, or
Speaker 1: at least you think you do. But it's actually a
Speaker 1: big challenge when you're really pushed on your understanding. And
Speaker 1: this is known as the illusion of explanatory depth. Just
Speaker 1: because you're convinced that your model has the full picture,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that it actually does. So here's another example.
Speaker 1: Imagine that I ask you if you know how the
Speaker 1: electoral college works in this country, and you might say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know how that works. But now I say, great,
Speaker 1: please explain it to me, and you might find that
Speaker 1: you get stuck. You think you know, but as soon
Speaker 1: as I scratched the surface of something, you find that
Speaker 1: it's not quite as clear as you suspected. And there
Speaker 1: are a million examples of this sort of thing, And
Speaker 1: if you start paying attention, you'll see more and more
Speaker 1: of the limitations of your knowledge. So it's useful to
Speaker 1: question ourselves, with all of our political opinions, about where
Speaker 1: our knowledge is lacking, because not knowing information doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that you don't have a high sense of certainty about it,
Speaker 1: especially if you really don't know much about a topic
Speaker 1: at all. My graduate advisor once told me to go
Speaker 1: to the library to learn about lattice gases, and I
Speaker 1: had never heard of that at all. So I walked
Speaker 1: over to the library and I discovered there was half
Speaker 1: a shelf with books all about lattice gases. And I
Speaker 1: was shocked, because how could smart people have devoted their
Speaker 1: scientific careers to writing about something that I had never
Speaker 1: even heard of just twenty minutes before. And this is
Speaker 1: the kind of lesson that emerges as you mature in
Speaker 1: the world. But interestingly, it takes a great deal of
Speaker 1: work to get there. If you've studied less about a subject,
Speaker 1: you tend to overinflate your knowledge. This is what's known
Speaker 1: as the Dunning Krueger effect. So these are a couple
Speaker 1: of psychologists and they ran studies where they found that
Speaker 1: if they ask people a bunch of questions about humor,
Speaker 1: or grammar or logic, you then take the people who
Speaker 1: score at the bottom quartile, and they grossly overestimate their
Speaker 1: performance on the test. Although their test scores put them,
Speaker 1: let's say, in the twelfth percentile, they estimate themselves to
Speaker 1: be in the sixty second percentile when you ask them,
Speaker 1: how much do you know about this compared to other people?
Speaker 1: In other words, the less that you know about a topic,
Speaker 1: the more confidence you have in your own abilities. What
Speaker 1: happens is that as you learn more about a topic,
Speaker 1: your confidence goes down, and it's only much later, when
Speaker 1: you become an expert, that it starts to go back up. So, now,
Speaker 1: given everything I've told you so far, I want to
Speaker 1: return to the cartoon that I described at the beginning
Speaker 1: of this podcast, about the fork in the road where
Speaker 1: one sign points to complex but right and the other
Speaker 1: points to simple but wrong, and almost everybody is going
Speaker 1: in the simple but wrong path, except for the few
Speaker 1: people winding their way up the steep, complex but right path.
Speaker 1: Now the cartoon struck me as funny, but perhaps not
Speaker 1: for the obvious reasons, because when I saw this cartoon
Speaker 1: on Twitter, I noticed that it had racked up many
Speaker 1: thousands of likes. So I started to research who exactly
Speaker 1: were the enthusiasts, and I had a suspicion that I
Speaker 1: knew the answer, and that turned out to be correct.
Speaker 1: Each person of whatever political persuasion, sees himself in the
Speaker 1: complex correct thinkers winding the steep path. Whether you are
Speaker 1: on the right or the left, whether with the Independence
Speaker 1: or Green Party or libertarians, whether you're a fan of
Speaker 1: Antifa or QAnon, whether you're a denizen of Wokistan or Magastan,
Speaker 1: you fundamentally know that you are a person who engages
Speaker 1: in refined and proper thinking. You appreciate data that is
Speaker 1: intricate and meaningful, while people on the other side, for
Speaker 1: reasons that you can only guess, they believe incorrect things.
Speaker 1: What I want to emphasize is that each person who
Speaker 1: clicked the thumbs up button knew that he was not
Speaker 1: like the sheep on the opposite side of the fork. Instead,
Speaker 1: he possessed an intricate and accurate view of the world. Okay,
Speaker 1: So which side of the political debate did the cartoonist support, Well,
Speaker 1: who knows who cares. It was presumably one of his
Speaker 1: most successful cartoons because it was the skeleton key that
Speaker 1: fit the lock of each reader's internal model. So the
Speaker 1: first step to rising above our internal models is to
Speaker 1: start watching for these bug traps that lure us in.
Speaker 1: I just saw an example yesterday, a bumper sticker that
Speaker 1: read make America America Again. And everyone on the road
Speaker 1: who saw this bumper sticker presumably thought that sounded great.
Speaker 1: Why because both sides of the political spectrum are equally
Speaker 1: happy to engage in retrospective romanticization. Liberals and conservatives can
Speaker 1: equally well reach back in memory to a time that
Speaker 1: seemed less complicated, a totally illusory era where the nation
Speaker 1: agreed with the logic of your political viewpoint, before the
Speaker 1: of the crazies with whom you now have to deal.
Speaker 1: So the only thing that the bumper sticker really points
Speaker 1: back to is the impoverishment of our memories. The cartoon
Speaker 1: and the bumper sticker. These work because they can mean
Speaker 1: anything to anyone, and what they reveal is the degree
Speaker 1: to which we live inside our internal models. And we
Speaker 1: assume everyone shares the same model we do, and anyone
Speaker 1: who has a different internal model we tend to demonize.
Speaker 1: And that's because we believe our models so strongly, because
Speaker 1: that's all we have, whether that's our religion or our
Speaker 1: political side. Of the spectrum, whether we're the Communists or
Speaker 1: the Nazis in nineteen thirty four, it makes us angry
Speaker 1: that other people can't see the truth as clearly as
Speaker 1: we can, and we are suspicious of them. And this
Speaker 1: leads me to the final chapter of today's episode, which
Speaker 1: is the notion of empathy. And there's an important aspect
Speaker 1: of this that's typically over look So I'll illustrate this
Speaker 1: with a historical example. In the late seventeen hundreds, there
Speaker 1: was a British nobleman named Lord Gordon, who was born
Speaker 1: into privilege, but he found himself caring deeply about the
Speaker 1: welfare of the sailors. He was an officer, but he
Speaker 1: campaigned energetically to improve their conditions, and his empathy was
Speaker 1: broader than that. When they sailed to Jamaica, he was
Speaker 1: disgusted by the slavery there and he berated the British
Speaker 1: governor about it. So here's an example of a guy
Speaker 1: where everywhere he went he sought to improve the well
Speaker 1: being of.
Speaker 2: Those less fortunate.
Speaker 1: So the question, from a neuroscience point of view is
Speaker 1: why did Lord Gordon care so much for others? And
Speaker 1: why do any of us help strangers after all, the
Speaker 1: driving force of evolution is survival of the fittest, not
Speaker 1: of the friendliest. Well, fortunately there's another force at work.
Speaker 2: Our brains are.
Speaker 1: Constantly in the business of simulating the experiences of other people,
Speaker 1: and under the right circumstances, this leads to empathy, the
Speaker 1: experiencing of another's emotions. Empathy is what counterbalances our appetite
Speaker 1: for power and tribalism and violence. Empathy is the glue
Speaker 1: that binds society together. Our species dominance is due in
Speaker 1: part to our empathy, which helps us to cooperate flexibly
Speaker 1: in large groups. Now, how can we study empathy neuroscientifically?
Speaker 1: So in my lab we performed a brain imaging study
Speaker 1: in which you are in the scanner and you see
Speaker 1: six hands on the screen in front of you, and
Speaker 1: the computer goes aroundoo and randomly picks one of the hands.
Speaker 1: So one of two things happens. Either the hand gets
Speaker 1: touched with a Q tip or it gets stabbed with
Speaker 1: a syringe needle.
Speaker 2: And when you.
Speaker 1: See it get stabbed, it's very cringe worthy. And so
Speaker 1: what we're doing is we're looking in the brain images
Speaker 1: to understand what is the difference between these two cases.
Speaker 1: That are visually quite similar, but in one of the
Speaker 1: cases you have this very visceral response. And what we
Speaker 1: find is that when the hand gets stabbed with the
Speaker 1: syringe needle, this network of areas in your brain that
Speaker 1: we summarize as the pain matrix, this comes online. And
Speaker 1: these areas in your brain are what would come online
Speaker 1: if your own hand got stabbed. So when you see
Speaker 1: someone else's hand get stabed, that activates this same pain matrix.
Speaker 2: You are not getting hurt, but you.
Speaker 1: Are simulating what it would be like to be that
Speaker 1: person and have your hand get stabbed. This is the
Speaker 1: neural basis of empathy. Now, if the story ended there,
Speaker 1: all of us humans would operate like a big, cooperative
Speaker 1: ant called But the reality is more complex. So let's
Speaker 1: return to Lord Gordon. He empathized with sailors and slaves,
Speaker 1: but he had nothing but hatred for his Catholic neighbors.
Speaker 1: He worked tirelessly to repeal the civil rights of Catholics,
Speaker 1: and in seventeen eighty Lord Gordon marched a crowd of
Speaker 1: fifty thousand people to the Houses of Parliament in London
Speaker 1: and for a week, the mob destroyed Catholic churches and
Speaker 1: Catholic homes in what came to be known as the
Speaker 1: Gordon Riots, which was the most destructive domestic upheaval in
Speaker 1: the history of London. So why did Lord Gordon, a
Speaker 1: person so capable of empathy, have such antipathy for Catholics.
Speaker 1: The answer paints a fundamental fact about human nature, which
Speaker 1: is our tendency to form in groups and outgroups, groups
Speaker 1: that we feel attached to and those that we feel
Speaker 1: opposed to. Our empathy is selective. So, especially after the
Speaker 1: Second World War, psychologists began to study this issue of
Speaker 1: in groups and out groups and how this can so
Speaker 1: easily lead to violence. And my lab and a lot
Speaker 1: of others have done a lot of research into this
Speaker 1: issue of how easily we form in groups and out groups.
Speaker 1: And I'll give you just one example of this. So
Speaker 1: come back to this experiment with the people in the
Speaker 1: brain scanner watching the hands get stabbed. Now we take
Speaker 1: these six hands on the screen and we just add
Speaker 1: one word labels to each hand Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, atheist.
Speaker 1: And now the computer goes around boo boo, boo boop,
Speaker 1: and it randomly picks a hand, and you see that
Speaker 1: hand get touched with a Q tip or stabbed with
Speaker 1: a syringe needle. And the question is does your brain
Speaker 1: care as much if it's an out group versus your
Speaker 1: in group. We tested people of all different faiths and
Speaker 1: atheists also, and the result is that you care more
Speaker 1: about your in group and you care less about outgroups.
Speaker 1: When you see the hand get stabbed that is labeled
Speaker 1: with your in group, we can measure a very big
Speaker 1: response in the pain matrix. And when you see a
Speaker 1: hand get stabbed that has one of the other labels
Speaker 1: on it, we see a very small response in the
Speaker 1: pain matrix. Your brain just doesn't care as much. This
Speaker 1: is a large effect and it's depressing that it's true,
Speaker 1: but it's just the way humans are. We care a
Speaker 1: lot about our in groups. And these are just single
Speaker 1: word labels. I mean, all the hands look the same
Speaker 1: and they just have different colored wristbands on them so
Speaker 1: you can distinguish them. But it turns out we are
Speaker 1: really really sensitive to these labels. So the issue of
Speaker 1: empathy is subtle and complex. With just a single word label,
Speaker 1: your brain can feel more or less empathy for someone.
Speaker 1: One can run the imagery about them and their pain
Speaker 1: more or less vividly. Now, what's fascinating is how rapidly
Speaker 1: our levels of empathy can change. So we next took
Speaker 1: the exact same subject and we presented them with a
Speaker 1: single sentence. The year is twenty twenty five, and these
Speaker 1: three groups have teamed up against these three groups. And
Speaker 1: so now you find your in group teamed up on
Speaker 1: one side or the other. The computer has picked these
Speaker 1: sides randomly, and so you've got this team and the
Speaker 1: other team. So what do you think happens? You care
Speaker 1: now about your allies. The two groups have randomly got
Speaker 1: lumped in there with your in group. So suddenly when
Speaker 1: you see their hand get stabbed, you have a larger
Speaker 1: empathy response than you did just a moment ago.
Speaker 2: And you didn't care about them.
Speaker 1: You still don't care about the out groups on the
Speaker 1: other side, but you care about these allies now more,
Speaker 1: which is not surprising. Like, for example, when the Soviets
Speaker 1: fought side by side with the Americans in World War II, too,
Speaker 1: they had been bitter enemies before then World War two happened,
Speaker 1: and suddenly their allies they're fighting together. They're clapping each
Speaker 1: other on the back and sharing cigarettes and so on.
Speaker 1: And then the war ends and now their enemies again.
Speaker 1: Now take a moment to think about your own level
Speaker 1: of empathy towards others. Imagine that you see a seventy
Speaker 1: five year old man get hit in the face and
Speaker 1: his nose gets cut and he's bleeding. Do you feel
Speaker 1: an empathic sting with that? Okay, Well, now imagine that
Speaker 1: he's at a rally for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: or just anyone you agree or disagree with. Is your
Speaker 1: empathy any different? And if so, does that challenge your
Speaker 1: view of yourself as an empathic person. If you felt
Speaker 1: unequal responses in those two situations, a Biden rally or
Speaker 1: a Trump rally, you're not alone. People generally assess their
Speaker 1: own empathy by thinking about those in their in group.
Speaker 1: I've always been struck by this in action adventure movies.
Speaker 1: When we see a person get hurt, if it's the protagonist,
Speaker 1: we really WinCE. But if it's the antagonist and he's
Speaker 1: falling off one hundred foot cliff to his death, we
Speaker 1: feel just find about that, possibly happy about that. So
Speaker 1: what this means is that we have the capacity to
Speaker 1: feel someone else's pain in different ways, depending on whether
Speaker 1: they're a member of our tribe or not, and the
Speaker 1: tribal tendencies of humans. This can incite murder and torture,
Speaker 1: from the Spanish Inquisition to the Rwandan genocide. This can
Speaker 1: buy the appeal of nationalist visions, from Hitler's Final Solution
Speaker 1: to Mao's Cultural Revolution. So, given how deeply our biases
Speaker 1: are ingrained, the question is, are we doomed to repeat
Speaker 1: these kinds of atrocities forever? So I'm going to suggest
Speaker 1: perhaps apps not. I'm going to give five strategies here
Speaker 1: to narrow the empathic divide between people. The first thing
Speaker 1: has to do with just understanding our own biases. We
Speaker 1: can increase our awareness of our own internal thought patterns
Speaker 1: so that we recognize our partisanship as we experience it.
Speaker 1: For example, in our social echo chambers, we tend to
Speaker 1: accept the logic of our in group and we reject
Speaker 1: the logic of outgroups. And we're also predisposed to help
Speaker 1: those in our in groups rather than those a little
Speaker 1: farther away who might need help.
Speaker 2: More.
Speaker 1: Understanding the biases behind our actions in this way can
Speaker 1: help lead us to more altruistic behavior. The second strategy
Speaker 1: for narrowing the empathic divide has to do with building
Speaker 1: a better model of other people. So instead of concluding
Speaker 1: that your brother or a coworker is a or an idiot,
Speaker 1: just try taking a crack at understanding his point of view.
Speaker 1: It's not the same as agreeing with his point of view,
Speaker 1: but it's trying to step into that person's world to
Speaker 1: avoid the oversimplifications that we typically accept. And by the way,
Speaker 1: this is often accomplished through art and literature, which has
Speaker 1: for a long time wage day behind the scenes battle
Speaker 1: against dehumanization. Theater and books and movies. This lets people
Speaker 1: step into the shoes of other people, and in the
Speaker 1: fourteen forties, when the printing press was invented, this allowed
Speaker 1: stories to spread widely. So, for example, when Harriet Peacher
Speaker 1: Stowe published the anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty two, readers stepped inside a shack that they
Speaker 1: otherwise wouldn't have ever entered, and once in it was
Speaker 1: no longer so easy to relegate the characters to an
Speaker 1: out group. The third strategy is to learn and resis
Speaker 1: the tactics of dehumanization. There are a lot of tricks
Speaker 1: that governments and propagandists employ and I'm going to do
Speaker 1: a different episode on that, but I'll mention here that
Speaker 1: one common ploy is what's called moral pollution, in which
Speaker 1: a group is socially smeared by association with something repulsive
Speaker 1: like vermin or insects, or anything that develops them in
Speaker 1: a negative emotional cloud. Once you have a negative emotional
Speaker 1: reaction to a group, it becomes harder to hear their perspectives.
Speaker 1: So when you can recognize that a person is being
Speaker 1: attacked for his identity rather than his arguments, you can
Speaker 1: better defend yourself against this trick. The fourth strategy has
Speaker 1: to do with blinding your biases, so design processes and
Speaker 1: organizations that remove the chance that prejudices interfere with your judgment.
Speaker 1: For example, a lot of software companies here in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: they'll ask job candidates to submit code rather than to
Speaker 1: show up in person. And many orchestras have blind auditions,
Speaker 1: which means they audition people behind a curtain, so you
Speaker 1: can't see the gender or the race of the person
Speaker 1: who's looking for the job. You're just listening to the music.
Speaker 1: And in the same way, many universities have a need
Speaker 1: blind application process so they can separate intelligence from financial considerations.
Speaker 1: So the idea is, wherever biases can be subconsciously triggered,
Speaker 1: it's best if you just remove the opportunity. And the
Speaker 1: fifth strategy I think is the least intuitive, and that
Speaker 1: is to entangle group memberships. So what I mean is
Speaker 1: work to ensure that communities are intertwined. So to see
Speaker 1: how this would work in practice, consider the five tribes
Speaker 1: of the Iroqui Native Americans, who fought intensely with each
Speaker 1: other in the fifteenth century. So they had a new
Speaker 1: leader come in named Deganaweda, who came to be known
Speaker 1: as the Great Peacemaker. And what he did is he
Speaker 1: hassigned each tribe member to one of nine different clans,
Speaker 1: the Wolf clan or the Bear clan, or the Turtle
Speaker 1: clan or Sandpiper.
Speaker 2: Deer so on.
Speaker 1: So members of each clan had representation from all the
Speaker 1: different tribes, and these relationships were cross cutting. So I
Speaker 1: say to you, hey, tribe member, let's go attack that
Speaker 1: other tribe over there, And you say, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I would. But I'm a member of the Eagle clan
Speaker 1: and so is he, and so I'm not really that
Speaker 1: interested in attacking him anymore. So by emphasizing the overlapping
Speaker 1: dual allegiances to tribe and to clan, de Ganaweda complicated
Speaker 1: the notions of us and them, and in this way
Speaker 1: he was able to defang the intertribal warfare. So what
Speaker 1: we've seen in today's episode is how different we are
Speaker 1: on the inside, and yet how strongly we believe our
Speaker 1: own truths, even though our knowledge of everything is so impoverished.
Speaker 1: And yet we all walk around with the impression that
Speaker 1: if we could just sit down with another person on
Speaker 1: the other side, we could show them the truth. So
Speaker 1: if you have the same opinions as everyone else in
Speaker 1: your life, great, But I hope you don't. I hope
Speaker 1: you can take the opportunity to dig deep and find
Speaker 1: out how the other folks in your life see the
Speaker 1: world and listen to them. It's not the same as
Speaker 1: agreeing with them or giving in to them, but it
Speaker 1: is acknowledging that your point of view doesn't have a
Speaker 1: lock on the absolute truth, and it's allowing that the
Speaker 1: most important thing you can learn is an ability to
Speaker 1: dialogue in conditions of disagreements and discomfort. It's the most
Speaker 1: important thing that you can do for each other and
Speaker 1: for your own brain. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an
Speaker 1: uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position. So I've
Speaker 1: given five directions for helping us to learn how to
Speaker 1: bridge that gap, not by assuming we're right, but by
Speaker 1: having the intellectual humility to realize that it's a big,
Speaker 1: pluralistic world out there, and that everyone, including you, has
Speaker 1: a model of the truth, and that only by adopting
Speaker 1: the stance of genuine dialogue and understanding your own biases
Speaker 1: and the possibility that we might be wrong, can we
Speaker 1: hope to move things forward. If you're interested in learning more,
Speaker 1: find further readings on these topics at Eagleman dot com,
Speaker 1: Slash podcast, and if you have questions, comments thoughts, email
Speaker 1: us at podcast at eagleman dot com, where we've been
Speaker 1: getting great responses. Watch full video episodes and leave comments
Speaker 1: on YouTube at Inner cosmospod. Until then, this is David
Speaker 1: Eagleman signing off from the Inner Cosmos