Speaker 1: Humans disagree on many political fronts, but we're finding ourselves
Speaker 1: globally in a period of higher polarization, and the question
Speaker 1: is is there anything to be done about that. Presumably
Speaker 1: we're not going to get humans to not have conflict,
Speaker 1: but is there any such thing as better conflict? What
Speaker 1: would that mean? And what does any of that have
Speaker 1: to do with brains or with the fact that modern
Speaker 1: humans only spread out across the globe sixty thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: or with social media recommender algorithms, or the Iroquois Native Americans.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes,
Speaker 1: I examine the intersection of our brains and our lives.
Speaker 1: And today's episode is about something that you know, I'm
Speaker 1: obsessed with from the point of view of brainience, which
Speaker 1: is issues of conflict and empathy and in groups and outgroups.
Speaker 1: We find ourselves in a time of conflict. Now. The
Speaker 1: things on everyone's mind are the war in Ukraine and
Speaker 1: the war between Israel and Hamas. And even though those
Speaker 1: have sucked up most of the media's attention, it's critical
Speaker 1: to note that we have lots of other conflicts also
Speaker 1: going on around the globe right now. There's ongoing internal
Speaker 1: conflict in Myanmar. There's an Islamist insurgency in the Maghreb
Speaker 1: region of Africa. There's the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.
Speaker 1: There's a civil war between rival factions in Sudan. There's
Speaker 1: a multi sided conflict of the Syrian Civil War. There's
Speaker 1: the ongoing civil wars in Somalia and Ethiopia, and Afghanistan
Speaker 1: has been in near continuous armed conflict for essentially as
Speaker 1: long as I've been alive. Now, if you've been listening
Speaker 1: to this podcast for a while, you know that I'm
Speaker 1: very interested in why conflict happens between humans and why
Speaker 1: it happens so readily and consistently. So in this light,
Speaker 1: there are three main things to note from the neuroscience
Speaker 1: point of view. The first thing is that we all
Speaker 1: have the same brains on the inside. So despite cultural
Speaker 1: differences and geographic differences, your pink brain looks exactly the
Speaker 1: same as someone else's anyone else's anywhere around the globe.
Speaker 1: And I don't mean that as a feel good statement.
Speaker 1: That's just a biological fact. Anatomically modern humans radiated out
Speaker 1: of Africa only about sixty thousand years ago, and some
Speaker 1: turned left and became European, and others turned right and
Speaker 1: became Asian, and those who stayed remained African. But the
Speaker 1: timescale that we're talking about some tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 1: That is simply not enough time on the evolutionary timescale
Speaker 1: for brains to change in any meaningful way to change
Speaker 1: their operation or their algorithms. So we're all running the
Speaker 1: same version of the biological operating system, despite superficial differences
Speaker 1: in size and shape and culture and the costumes that
Speaker 1: we wear and how much melanin we have in our
Speaker 1: skin and so on. We can end up seeming pretty
Speaker 1: different as a result of these surface properties, but we
Speaker 1: have the same cognitive and emotional engine on the inside. Now. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: one of the things that operating system does is it
Speaker 1: gives us all a very strong drive toward having in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups. This tribalism is something that characterizes our species.
Speaker 1: We belong to groups based.
Speaker 2: On our neighborhood or the way we look, or our
Speaker 2: religion or our family or whatever it is, and we
Speaker 2: take to feel closer to our in groups and treat
Speaker 2: them better and listen to their opinions more strongly.
Speaker 1: Our outgroups not so much. When it comes to someone
Speaker 1: from the other side of the railroad tracks, or who
Speaker 1: happens to have grown up under a different deity, or
Speaker 1: who sings different songs or uses different language sounds to
Speaker 1: transmit information, or whatever it is, we tend to treat
Speaker 1: them with more suspicion. And in decades of neuroscience experiments,
Speaker 1: including those from my lab, we've been able to show
Speaker 1: that your brain simply does not care as much about
Speaker 1: people in your outgroup. At the extreme, your brain will
Speaker 1: view somebody in an outgroup the same way it will
Speaker 1: view an object, not like a fellow human the way
Speaker 1: it does with people in your in group, but instead
Speaker 1: as something that's not particularly worthy of empathy, something that
Speaker 1: you have to deal with in the same way that
Speaker 1: you would deal with a vice, rusts, or a cockroach
Speaker 1: or a rat. And if you're interested in more detail
Speaker 1: on this point, I dove deep into examples of this
Speaker 1: in episode twenty and one of the things I talked
Speaker 1: about was an experiment that we did in my lab
Speaker 1: that got at this in group outgroup difference, where all
Speaker 1: we needed were single word labels. So I'll just tell
Speaker 1: you the short version here of the experiment. We put
Speaker 1: you in brain imaging in fMRI, and you're looking at
Speaker 1: six hands on the screen and one of them gets
Speaker 1: stabbed by a syringe needle. Now, seeing that activates a
Speaker 1: network in your brain that we summarize as the pain matrix.
Speaker 1: Your brain is showing a big spike, and what that
Speaker 1: represents is you are feeling the other person's pain even
Speaker 1: though it's not your hand. The eras in your brain
Speaker 1: that care about pain are coming online. This is the
Speaker 1: basis of empathy, of feeling someone else else's pain. But
Speaker 1: now we label the six hands with one word labels Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, atheist,
Speaker 1: And now we measure people of all religions in the
Speaker 1: scanner as these different hands get stabbed. And what we
Speaker 1: found is that everyone has a larger brain response when
Speaker 1: it's their own group that's getting stabbed, and their brain
Speaker 1: shows a smaller response when it's any of the other
Speaker 1: five out groups. And this was true across religions and
Speaker 1: even for the atheist group, which cared more when the
Speaker 1: atheist hand gets stabbed than the other hands. So this
Speaker 1: is not an indictment of religion, but more broadly, it
Speaker 1: highlights your brain's exquisite skills at distinguishing in group from
Speaker 1: your outgroups and the fact that your brain simply does
Speaker 1: not spend as much energy on simulating what it is
Speaker 1: like to be someone who is in your If you
Speaker 1: want more details on that, please listen to episode twenty,
Speaker 1: which is called why does your brain care about some
Speaker 1: people more than others? And beyond the fact that we
Speaker 1: are naturally tribalistic, there's a third point to note, which
Speaker 1: is that every one of us feels like we know
Speaker 1: the truth, and it's not clear to us why other
Speaker 1: people don't see the truth as clearly as we do.
Speaker 1: They must be stupid or ill informed, or trolls or
Speaker 1: stubborn or who knows why they don't simply admit to
Speaker 1: what is so obviously the truth. And deep down most
Speaker 1: people have an intuition that if you could just simply
Speaker 1: shout loudly enough in all caps on social media, that
Speaker 1: everyone would agree with you, everyone would see the light.
Speaker 1: And this is true of everything, not just political positions.
Speaker 1: Take religion. There are two thousand active religions on this
Speaker 1: small planet, and many people feel that if they could
Speaker 1: just share with all the infidels why their religion is
Speaker 1: right and everyone else is wrong, that everyone would agree
Speaker 1: with them. Everyone would come to know that the religion
Speaker 1: you happened to grow up in is the correct one. Now,
Speaker 1: if there actually were one correct religion, we might expect
Speaker 1: it to spread everywhere equally, But obviously that's not the case.
Speaker 1: Religions remain clustered around where they started, and you're not
Speaker 1: going to see a blossoming of Islam in Boise, Idaho,
Speaker 1: just like you won't expect to see a blossoming of
Speaker 1: Protestantism in Mecca. But here's the interesting part. Whether we're
Speaker 1: examining one's political preferences, or religious affiliation or whatever, people
Speaker 1: are generally reluctant to change to consider the perspectives of
Speaker 1: other people. So, given the deep wiring that we have
Speaker 1: for having our in groups and for feeling we know
Speaker 1: the right answer because of our very limited internal models,
Speaker 1: this leads to the critical question about whether there would
Speaker 1: be any way for eight billion brains to find peaceful coexistence. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've been a regular listener to the podcast, you
Speaker 1: know that I'm generally highly optimistic about everything, but I
Speaker 1: would suggest the answer to the question of whether we
Speaker 1: will achieve peace is probably not. We're probably not going
Speaker 1: to find ourselves ever in some magical moment where all
Speaker 1: the newspapers say, Wow, nobody is fighting, we're taking a
Speaker 1: day off today, and we're not going to find some
Speaker 1: extraordinary presidential candidate where everyone says, yeah, that person's great.
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree presidential elections are always
Speaker 1: fairly close to fifty to fifty. Why this results from
Speaker 1: the enormous variety of internal models inside everyone's heads. There
Speaker 1: is no perfect candidate because no one can fit all
Speaker 1: the constraints at once of all all the different models. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if we take this all as our starting point
Speaker 1: for today, the question is what does this all mean
Speaker 1: for the future of conflict? Are we facing a future
Speaker 1: where wars and polarization will stay as they are or
Speaker 1: even grow worse. Well, that's certainly a reasonable fear. But
Speaker 1: a little while ago I discovered there was a movement
Speaker 1: of political scholars around the idea of how to have
Speaker 1: better conflict. Now, what does better conflict mean? We'll get
Speaker 1: into that in a second, but first I just want
Speaker 1: to say I've been moved and inspired by this movement.
Speaker 1: It feels like it's the opposite of what we see
Speaker 1: online every day, where people pick aside and scream and
Speaker 1: yell for it or fight and die for it at
Speaker 1: the cost of not meaningfully considering the complexity of human situations.
Speaker 1: Just take what's happening in the middle least. Typically, if
Speaker 1: someone points out that the history there is extraordinarily multi
Speaker 1: layered and complex, people will often say, no, this is
Speaker 1: actually quite simple, and then they will give their version
Speaker 1: of the history. But the extraordinary part is that people
Speaker 1: on both sides will deliver that same line. They will say,
Speaker 1: it's actually very simple, And to me, that's a barometer
Speaker 1: that tells me the situation is not so simple. But instead,
Speaker 1: like most human conflict, it's full of different paths that
Speaker 1: you can take through the history to come to a
Speaker 1: variety of conclusions. And we witness this sort of complexity
Speaker 1: whenever you have millions of people with all personalities involved
Speaker 1: in conflict on all sides. You have sinners and saints,
Speaker 1: and you have psychopaths and peace seekers, and no one
Speaker 1: can hope to derive a meaningful solution without doing the
Speaker 1: hard work of digging in and trying to understand what
Speaker 1: happens between groups of millions of humans, rather than imagining
Speaker 1: there's a good guy side and a bad guy side. So,
Speaker 1: as I said, I was very moved to discover that
Speaker 1: some people really take on this sort of political intellectual
Speaker 1: humility and try to figure out what do we do
Speaker 1: with humans? What do we do about the fact that
Speaker 1: they're never going to agree, There's always going to be conflict.
Speaker 1: How do we make conflict more productive rather than simply
Speaker 1: being about bloodshed? So to explore this, I called up
Speaker 1: my colleague Jonathan Stray. Jonathan is a former journalist who
Speaker 1: is now a senior scientist at the Berkeley Center for
Speaker 1: Human Compatible AI, where he works on the algorithms that
Speaker 1: feed up content to online and how their operation affects
Speaker 1: things like polarization. And he writes a terrific newsletter called
Speaker 1: The Better Conflict Bulletin. So here's John Jonathan. So you
Speaker 1: are a conflict researcher. Tell us about what that means.
Speaker 3: Well, I try to study what causes people to disagree
Speaker 3: and then how that disagreement transforms into polarization and eventually
Speaker 3: violence if unchecked, And how to build computer controlled media
Speaker 3: systems like social media that will prevent that.
Speaker 1: I know that you think about conflict in terms of
Speaker 1: good and bad conflict. So what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Well, we don't want no conflict in society. Conflict is
Speaker 3: so first of all, it's inevitable. We all disagree, we
Speaker 3: want different things unavoidably. But sometimes when we disagree, it
Speaker 3: comes to something productive, you know, we talk about it,
Speaker 3: we figure something out, and sometimes it doesn't right, Sometimes
Speaker 3: it escalates to some sort of zero sum game or
Speaker 3: even violence. The idea is, when we think about conflict,
Speaker 3: we're not trying to prevent people from fighting. We're trying
Speaker 3: to have them fight in some sort of productive way.
Speaker 1: So what does that look like? What does that mean?
Speaker 3: Well, the simplest example might be violent versus nonviolent, right,
Speaker 3: so we can all understand the difference between you know,
Speaker 3: people trying to get their way by using force or
Speaker 3: getting their way by discussion, yes, but also non violent
Speaker 3: conflict tactics, you know, protests. You know, there's famous historical
Speaker 3: figures like doctor Martin, Luther King or Gandhi who really
Speaker 3: developed these techniques and showed that you could achieve you know,
Speaker 3: large political victories without using physical force. So that's that's
Speaker 3: maybe the most obvious way but there's a bunch of
Speaker 3: other stuff when you start thinking about this.
Speaker 4: So maybe you think about this at a personal level.
Speaker 3: You know, we've all had the experience of an argument
Speaker 3: where you know, we said some ugly things that can't
Speaker 3: be unsaid, and you feel worse at the end of it.
Speaker 3: And then I think most of us have had the
Speaker 3: experience of an argument where you know, there were some
Speaker 3: hard truths, but it was honest, it was carrying, it
Speaker 3: was empathetic, and even if we couldn't solve the problem
Speaker 3: at the end of it, we still have a positive
Speaker 3: regard for each other.
Speaker 4: And so that would be an example of good versus
Speaker 4: bad conflict.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that has always intrigued me
Speaker 1: is that we all have this illusion that we know
Speaker 1: the truth, that we have a complete story of what's
Speaker 1: going on, and therefore other people that disagree with us
Speaker 1: seem like they're trolls, or they're uninformed, or they're disingenuous.
Speaker 1: And so the question is, how do we address that
Speaker 1: illusion that we have. How do we get ourselves a
Speaker 1: little bit outside our own fish bowls to see the
Speaker 1: other side.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So there's a bunch
Speaker 3: of ways of answering that. So there's I was at
Speaker 3: a conference yesterday on the topic of intellectual humility, the
Speaker 3: idea that actually we don't know the answer, there's always
Speaker 3: something we're missing. And this is important not just as
Speaker 3: an epistemological practice, that is, to be more correct in
Speaker 3: what we believe, but as a relational practice, meaning it
Speaker 3: changed is how we relate and how we can relate
Speaker 3: to other people. And I think part of this is
Speaker 3: we always have a partial picture, and we tend to,
Speaker 3: in conflict situations, believe that the other person actually holds
Speaker 3: more extreme views than they do. So there's really good
Speaker 3: evidence of that. This is the case in the American
Speaker 3: Culture War, where if you ask one side what the
Speaker 3: other side thinks, they will imagine the other side is
Speaker 3: actually more extreme than they are. So conflict in particular
Speaker 3: is prone to these misperceptions of the other.
Speaker 1: So give us an example of how we know that
Speaker 1: that each side thinks the other side is more extreme.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, there's tons of work on this.
Speaker 3: So there's a group called the Perception Gap which has
Speaker 3: done a bunch of research from this. And so, for example,
Speaker 3: if you ask Republicans how many Democrats would support completely
Speaker 3: open borders, they'll say something like seventy five percent. If
Speaker 3: you ask Democrats how many of them would support completely
Speaker 3: open borders, it's something like, so they're twenty or twenty
Speaker 3: five percentage points off. And this pattern is consistent across
Speaker 3: a range of issues, and it's bidirectional as well. So
Speaker 3: you know, if you ask Republicans or if you ask
Speaker 3: democrats something like, you know, how many Republicans would say that,
Speaker 3: you know, everyone should have access to as many guns
Speaker 3: as they want, Democrats will guess that number a lot
Speaker 3: higher than Republicans will say.
Speaker 1: So, speaking of Democrats and Republicans, here's the question. Are
Speaker 1: we more polarized currently in America? Is that just an
Speaker 1: impression or is that backed up by statistics?
Speaker 3: No, Unfortunately, it's real, and you can measure it a
Speaker 3: lot of different ways. You can look at where people
Speaker 3: are on political issues, you can look at how people
Speaker 3: feel about each other. You can look at congressional voting patterns,
Speaker 3: whether you know members of Congress will cross the aisle
Speaker 3: to vote on each other's builts, and all of these
Speaker 3: measures show the same basic pattern, which is that polarization
Speaker 3: has been increasing since the the mid seventies or maybe
Speaker 3: the early eighties and is now at historically high levels.
Speaker 3: And it's not just America, it's several other countries in
Speaker 3: the world as well.
Speaker 1: Right now, I know you and I have independently made
Speaker 1: arguments about why this is not entirely about social media,
Speaker 1: and that, of course seems like a good thing to
Speaker 1: point to is the fact that this started in the seventies.
Speaker 1: But tell us your sense of the involvement and the
Speaker 1: non involvement of social media in this polarization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, there's definitely some involvement.
Speaker 3: There are a number of ways that social media, in
Speaker 3: particular social media algorithms, that is to say, the systems
Speaker 3: that decide what we see.
Speaker 4: And in what order, can have some involvement.
Speaker 3: So probably a lot of your listeners have heard of
Speaker 3: the idea of the filter bubble, the idea that, you know,
Speaker 3: we're each trapped in this sort of algorithmically produced reality
Speaker 3: where we don't see the other side. The evidence tends
Speaker 3: to be against that. We actually do see quite a
Speaker 3: lot of cross cutting content, you know, even if it's
Speaker 3: you know, rage clicking on an article that has a
Speaker 3: different viewpoint, but there's a bunch of other things going on. So,
Speaker 3: for example, most social media and other systems which select
Speaker 3: content for us, like news recommenders and so forth, rank
Speaker 3: things based on basically the number of clicks they get engagement,
Speaker 3: And we really do pay more attention to things that
Speaker 3: are valuable to us, but also we pay more attention
Speaker 3: to things that are threatening, offensive, fearful. So this approach
Speaker 3: of ranking things by how much attention we give them
Speaker 3: also tends to amplify more extreme or scarier items.
Speaker 1: Now, I did an episode a few episodes ag Go
Speaker 1: where I mentioned for the Iroquois Native Americans up in
Speaker 1: essentially Wisconsin and Canada, some hundreds of years ago, they
Speaker 1: were having bloody battles between these different tribes all the time,
Speaker 1: and they had a new leader come in who came
Speaker 1: to be known as the Great Peacemaker because one of
Speaker 1: the things he did is assigned everybody in the tribes
Speaker 1: to different clans. So you might be a member of
Speaker 1: the Turtle clan and I'm a member of the Heron clan,
Speaker 1: even though we're members of the same tribe. And it
Speaker 1: turns out these allegiances were cross cutting, so that each
Speaker 1: person had their allegiance to their tribe and also to
Speaker 1: their clan. And these weren't equivalent, and that ended up
Speaker 1: bringing peace because now it wasn't so simple to have
Speaker 1: a clear in group and out group because they were mixed.
Speaker 1: And I know that you in your work with social
Speaker 1: media have been looking at something similar to this, which
Speaker 1: is this issue of how an algorithm should rank posts.
Speaker 1: So tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that is a great example. I've heard of
Speaker 3: this Ariquais example as well. And what is happening is
Speaker 3: conflict is tied up with identity. We fight basically against
Speaker 3: people who are different than us. And in the last
Speaker 3: few decades in this country, identity has become more and
Speaker 3: more collapsed into a single dimension of you know, left
Speaker 3: versus right, red versus blue, Republicans versus Democrats.
Speaker 4: It didn't actually used to be this way.
Speaker 3: People didn't identify with their political parties in the same
Speaker 3: way a generation ago. And also there was much more
Speaker 3: mixed identification at the national versus local level. So you know,
Speaker 3: you would have some town where, you know, you had
Speaker 3: a Republican mayor, but you had, you know, progressive politics
Speaker 3: because that's what the people there believed.
Speaker 4: In and wanted.
Speaker 3: Politics has become very nationalized. There's less local news, there's
Speaker 3: less split ticket voting.
Speaker 4: Every issue takes place.
Speaker 3: At this huge scale where there's only two ends in spectrum.
Speaker 3: So how you would have to reverse this is you
Speaker 3: would have to have some sort of sense of not
Speaker 3: necessarily local, but community level values.
Speaker 4: Right, it would have to be.
Speaker 3: Okay for you know, specific groups online or perhaps discussion
Speaker 3: to have opinions that just don't quite fall along this
Speaker 3: left right axis.
Speaker 1: And what's the reason that we have seen more sorting
Speaker 1: into these groups. What's the reason that particular issues go
Speaker 1: together that don't necessarily belong together.
Speaker 3: Well, again, it's an identity thing. It's one of the
Speaker 3: things that makes all of these issues sort of one
Speaker 3: big blob where you only have two choices is merely
Speaker 3: exposure to people who are far away from us, either
Speaker 3: physically or social. So you know, maybe you only talk
Speaker 3: to your neighbors in your town, or you only read
Speaker 3: the local newspaper, and so you could have this sort
Speaker 3: of quixotic local politics in a way that was healthy.
Speaker 3: But now we are exposed to people all across the
Speaker 3: country and indeed the world on a daily basis. So
Speaker 3: now we're comparing our point of view to someone you
Speaker 3: know that will never meet, who's far away from us.
Speaker 3: And there's simulations that show you don't need any antagonism
Speaker 3: for people to sort themselves into two big tribes.
Speaker 4: All you need is when you talk.
Speaker 3: To someone and they're you know, near enough like you,
Speaker 3: you get a little bit closer to them, right, which
Speaker 3: is a natural human thing. When two people talk, they
Speaker 3: tend to you know, converge a little on their on
Speaker 3: their views and identity. But because that those interactions are
Speaker 3: now happening all across the country, we're coalescing into sort
Speaker 3: of two big groups.
Speaker 4: It's it's kind of a paradox, right.
Speaker 3: We want to be able to talk to people who
Speaker 3: are very far away from us, you know, that's the
Speaker 3: promise of these online networks, and.
Speaker 4: Yet it seems to make our con clicks global.
Speaker 1: And there are network science models on this right that
Speaker 1: demonstrate how groups end up dividing like this. And what
Speaker 1: is the evidence that these network science models actually cash
Speaker 1: out in real life?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So these models developed actually from models built in
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties to study physical racial segregation. And what
Speaker 3: they showed is that you don't need racism in the
Speaker 3: sense of not wanting to live near people who are
Speaker 3: a different race than you. All you need is a
Speaker 3: slight preference, you know, maybe a few percent to live
Speaker 3: near people who are more like you, and that is
Speaker 3: enough for entire neighborhoods to eventually segregate. And so those
Speaker 3: same models are now being applied to online networks and
Speaker 3: they show very similar results. People if they have a
Speaker 3: slight preference for people who are maybe a little more
Speaker 3: like them in their politics, will spend.
Speaker 4: More time, you know, in a bunch of ways, right,
Speaker 4: hanging out.
Speaker 3: In the same groups, or maybe you know, friending them
Speaker 3: or fallollowing them, that sort of thing. And so we
Speaker 3: see this this sort of global splitting.
Speaker 1: Right, So before we drop this start, I just want
Speaker 1: to return to this issue of what does social media
Speaker 1: not have to do with the current polarization, And that
Speaker 1: certainly seems like one of the issues is this, you know,
Speaker 1: network segregation. What else do you see where you think
Speaker 1: that social media is maybe not the sole culprit as
Speaker 1: opposed to human behavior.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things I like to say is that,
Speaker 3: you know, if Facebook could fix our democracy by changing
Speaker 3: one hundred lines of code, they would have done it already, right,
Speaker 3: if only our problem was that simple. But polarization is
Speaker 3: one of these problems. That requires an all of society approach.
Speaker 3: So it's you know, social media, yes, but it's also
Speaker 3: media journalists. Journalists are going to have to learn to
Speaker 3: cover politics in different ways, and it's the politicians themselves.
Speaker 3: There is always an advantage to taking a view that
Speaker 3: is more extreme because it motivates people, and so it's
Speaker 3: kind of a devil's bargain, right. You can get people
Speaker 3: to turn out and show up for your cause by
Speaker 3: pressing on a divisive issue, but doing that divide society further.
Speaker 3: So we actually need a whole bunch of sectors of
Speaker 3: society to move in the same direction. And there's para
Speaker 3: conflict scholars called Guy and Heidi Burgess, and they have
Speaker 3: a wonderful article on forty different roles that people have
Speaker 3: to do to create a healthy and peaceful democracy. And
Speaker 3: what do they say, Well, some of them are exactly
Speaker 3: what you'd expect, right, So we already talked about journalists
Speaker 3: and so forth, But they also talk about issue analysts.
Speaker 3: There are people who have to go deep on particular issues.
Speaker 3: They talk about healers, people who present a vision where
Speaker 3: we have emotionally healthy relationships with each other. They talk
Speaker 3: about they call them democracy firsters, people who are concerned
Speaker 3: first and foremost with the correct functioning of elections and
Speaker 3: rule of law. Once you start thinking this way, you
Speaker 3: realize there's a lot of different roles to play, and
Speaker 3: a lot of people have to be pulling in the
Speaker 3: same direction. And they say that what we need is
Speaker 3: a generation of people interested in conflict who in much
Speaker 3: the same way that we now have a generation of
Speaker 3: people who are working on climate change.
Speaker 1: Specifically, who are interested in doing conflict right exactly, because
Speaker 1: we certainly have a generation interest in conflict. What do
Speaker 1: you see when you look around at college camps? Is, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: you're located at Berkeley, and I know that you are
Speaker 1: a very wise person who keeps a foot in both
Speaker 1: camps and tries to see things from all sides. That's
Speaker 1: not the reputation that Berkeley has in particular. So when
Speaker 1: you look around at the campus, what do you see?
Speaker 1: And is anything different about this generation than previous ones?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know that's a loaded question, right the
Speaker 3: kids today and so forth.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I mean, of course Berkeley.
Speaker 3: Is a liberal campus, right, you know, it's a public
Speaker 3: university in one of the most liberal places in America.
Speaker 4: So it has it's own policy.
Speaker 3: I do see, And of course it's not just Berkeley
Speaker 3: that the current generation of students are I would say,
Speaker 3: more involved in politics, which I would say is a
Speaker 3: good thing, but also less open or less compromising, which
Speaker 3: troubles me in particular when it leads to the suppression
Speaker 3: of alternative views. Now, I don't want to say that,
Speaker 3: you know, anybody should be able to say anything without
Speaker 3: any consequences. I think there are real issues here, for example, inclusion.
Speaker 3: You don't want to make people feel like they don't belong.
Speaker 4: At an academic institution.
Speaker 3: However, where it sort of crosses a line for me
Speaker 3: is where saying something a little unorthodox or a little
Speaker 3: challenging becomes impossible. People are scared to do it. And
Speaker 3: I'm not talking about, you know, the haters here. I'm
Speaker 3: talking about people who are trying to engage in good
Speaker 3: faith and maybe saying something that is, you know, a
Speaker 3: little controversial, and there's just less.
Speaker 4: Tolerance for that than there used to be.
Speaker 3: And I think both it's just sort of anecdotally, you know,
Speaker 3: talking to the faculty, but also there's a bunch of
Speaker 3: data on this. Ironically, Berkeley, which is associated with free
Speaker 3: speech very closely. Right, we have the Free Speech Cafe
Speaker 3: on campus, and this was the heart of the free
Speaker 3: speech movement in the nineteen sixties, is now a place
Speaker 3: where people are often criticizing free speech as being too permissive,
Speaker 3: and I find that very troubling.
Speaker 1: So how do you think about dealing with that as
Speaker 1: you think about training the next generation, for example, with
Speaker 1: all these different roles that we might need to have
Speaker 1: better conflict, how do you do that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, I tried to do this in
Speaker 3: my classes yesterday. I mean, it's really about sort of
Speaker 3: I think it requires two things, right. One is you
Speaker 3: have to create a sense of psychological safety in some way.
Speaker 3: Right when my classes, you know, we discuss algorithm design,
Speaker 3: we discuss racially biased algorith we discuss all this stuff.
Speaker 3: And one of the things I say at the top
Speaker 3: of those classes is like, okay, so you know, we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about some issues which are very charged.
Speaker 3: I understand that some of you are going to have,
Speaker 3: you know, real upsetting personal experience with this stuff. But
Speaker 3: you know, I asked that you you give it a shot,
Speaker 3: and that you know, you try to engage in a
Speaker 3: spirit of curiosity. And we're not always going to get
Speaker 3: things right, But I don't want anyone to ever accuse
Speaker 3: us of not being thoughtful or careful or are empathetic.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the spirit you have to approach this,
Speaker 3: This is spirit of curiosity. So for example, why do
Speaker 3: we disagree about this? What is it about you know,
Speaker 3: this student experience and that student's experience that leads to
Speaker 3: to such dramatically different conclusions on say, affirmative action, the
Speaker 3: you know, media bias, you know, how we should deal
Speaker 3: with crime, how should we should do with immigration that
Speaker 3: came from somewhere? And very often what we find when
Speaker 3: we have the conversation that way is either there's some
Speaker 3: intense personal experience, family background. You know, my mother came
Speaker 3: from El Salvador, my father was deported, you know, I
Speaker 3: had to grow up in economic uncertainty, you know, something
Speaker 3: like this. Or we find that people shaped their ideas
Speaker 3: from their social network and never really thought about it.
Speaker 3: And this is part of what polarization is, is that
Speaker 3: all of our political ideas end up sort of collapsing
Speaker 3: into this left right access. There's no logical reason why
Speaker 3: if you are pro choice you should also be concerned
Speaker 3: about climate change and yet here we are. So there's
Speaker 3: some sort of social process that makes everybody split intoto
Speaker 3: camps in this way, and we can counteract that by
Speaker 3: thinking carefully for ourselves and having discussions with people who
Speaker 3: might have a different view.
Speaker 1: So you address this in your class, but how do
Speaker 1: you think about taking to a larger world. And before
Speaker 1: we get into social media algorithms, which I want to do,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that struck me. Let's
Speaker 1: take the Israel Hamas conflict going on right now. Whenever
Speaker 1: it comes up about Okay, which side launched that rocket,
Speaker 1: it turns out that no amount of evidence sways anybody
Speaker 1: on that. People have their side and they generally stick
Speaker 1: with it. As far as I can tell. This is
Speaker 1: just a you know, view from surfing a lot of
Speaker 1: social media on this stuff. The question is how do
Speaker 1: you expand beyond your class to get people to ask
Speaker 1: these questions about changing their point of view, not even
Speaker 1: necessarily changing it, but just being willing to examine other
Speaker 1: pieces of evidence.
Speaker 3: First, let's talk about facts. I believe that facts matter.
Speaker 3: I believe that they're deeply important. I used to be
Speaker 3: an investigative journalist. We can't know everything, but we can
Speaker 3: know some things. The problem is what facts mean depends
Speaker 3: on who you ask. So in the you know Israel
Speaker 3: Palestine conflict, the fact that Palestinians are living there before
Speaker 3: nineteen forty seven is a fact that matters deeply to
Speaker 3: a lot of people. The fact that Jews were living
Speaker 3: there three thousand years ago is a fact that matters
Speaker 3: deeply to a lot of people. So these facts are
Speaker 3: not in dispute. What is in dispute is the meaning
Speaker 3: of these facts, which points to the problem is fundamentally
Speaker 3: relational in many cases rather than factual, and people can
Speaker 3: be misinformed. I'm not disputing that, but often what you
Speaker 3: find is it is about how people feel about each
Speaker 3: other and about how they are relating to each other.
Speaker 4: Now, so you ask what we can do.
Speaker 3: So this is probably the moment to mention that I
Speaker 3: write a newsletter called the Better Conflict Bulletin, and we
Speaker 3: are news and analysis for.
Speaker 4: A better culture war.
Speaker 3: And the idea here is that many people have this
Speaker 3: gut sense that we're fighting ugly, and we try to
Speaker 3: explore in this newsletter what would it be to fight better?
Speaker 3: So we cover conflict research, the science of how people
Speaker 3: misunderstand and misperceive each other, and we cover people who
Speaker 3: are successfully navigating the culture in a more productive way.
Speaker 3: So there are people exploring these topics, there's not a
Speaker 3: lot of coverage for it because, as they say in
Speaker 3: the peace building field, sometimes peace has no natural constituency.
Speaker 3: It's very easy to get people excited about winning. It's
Speaker 3: harder to get people excited about living together harmoniously.
Speaker 1: That's right. That's why when I met I just met
Speaker 1: you very recently, Jonathan, just a few weeks ago, and
Speaker 1: I was so excited by the kind of work you're doing.
Speaker 1: Because I come from a neuroscience angle. I study a
Speaker 1: lot about in groups and outgroups and empathy and how
Speaker 1: we so easily relegate others to a different group. I
Speaker 1: was so excited to learn that you and others are
Speaker 1: doing the boots on the ground work of trying to
Speaker 1: bring groups of people together. And so I still want
Speaker 1: to drill in on this point though. So you've got
Speaker 1: the newsletter, which is to I'm a paid subscriber to that.
Speaker 1: What are the things that you think about though, besides
Speaker 1: social media, which we'll get to in a second, And
Speaker 1: that's obviously a big leverage point. But are there any
Speaker 1: other things you can do when you think about how
Speaker 1: do we get people to fight less ugly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a bunch of sort of immediate things
Speaker 3: that you can do. So, first of all, there's this
Speaker 3: perception gap, so misperceptions, so we tend to be both
Speaker 3: misinformed about what the other side actually believes and we
Speaker 3: tend to stereotype them, meaning you know, if a Republican
Speaker 3: thinks about a Democrat, or a Democrat thinks about a Republican,
Speaker 3: they think about the most extreme version of that right.
Speaker 3: And you can see this in the data when you
Speaker 3: ask people, you know, you know, what is the distribution
Speaker 3: of how you know, many you know, the opposite side
Speaker 3: with support let's say violence if they don't get their
Speaker 3: way in election, right, and they you get these like
Speaker 3: very extreme distributions, where in the reality there's actually much
Speaker 3: more more overlap. So yeah, first, you can inform yourself
Speaker 3: about what other people actually believe in.
Speaker 4: Honest in its way.
Speaker 3: Second, there is a set of techniques for how to
Speaker 3: have conversations with someone who has not just like you know,
Speaker 3: a polite conversation, but like genuinely has different values than you.
Speaker 4: And it's got to start with curiosity. It's got to
Speaker 4: start with listening.
Speaker 3: And I would suggest don't go into those conversations with
Speaker 3: the goal of changing someone's mind.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't want them to do that with you.
Speaker 3: Go into those conversations with the goal of trying to
Speaker 3: understand how they got to that place. Because when we're
Speaker 3: talking about the American conflict, we're talking about you disagree
Speaker 3: with half of America. Well half of America, you know,
Speaker 3: isn't stupid. You know, they're not like fundamentally broken or
Speaker 3: evil or something. They're going to be pretty average, just
Speaker 3: like the other half of America. So how is it
Speaker 3: that smart and kind people can end up believing something
Speaker 3: completely different than you. That's the thing to get curious about.
Speaker 3: And the third thing I would say is watch for
Speaker 3: your own emotional reactions. Watch for where you know, you
Speaker 3: get you know, angry or let's just say uptight, or
Speaker 3: you know, really have this feeling that you have to
Speaker 3: defend something or protect something, because those reactions will lead
Speaker 3: you to first, what is it that you're scared of
Speaker 3: that you're worried about it?
Speaker 4: Where are your fears and concerns?
Speaker 3: And second, if you can notice those and not be
Speaker 3: overtaken by them, you can have much better relationships with
Speaker 3: people who disagree with you. And actually, one of the
Speaker 3: practices that we teach is speak them aloud, right, don't
Speaker 3: don't project your anger onto the person across from you,
Speaker 3: who you're probably stereotyping, who you know, never did you
Speaker 3: personally any wrong. Just say, you know, when you say that,
Speaker 3: I get very upset, I have reaction. I feel anger
Speaker 3: thinking about that, without directing it towards the other person.
Speaker 3: We can't hide our emotions. If we're going to relate better,
Speaker 3: they have to be on the table.
Speaker 1: If you were suddenly assigned to be the educations are
Speaker 1: for the nation, how would you build junior high or
Speaker 1: high school classes to teach kids about this, about how
Speaker 1: to relate, about how to let's say, stealman each other's
Speaker 1: arguments so that they can understand them better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so what we need to do is give young
Speaker 3: people the ability and the experience of relating successfully across
Speaker 3: value divides. And there's actually a bunch of organizations that
Speaker 3: do this both at the K through twelve and the
Speaker 3: university level. You know, these programs are some of them
Speaker 3: are in class teacher led where the last students to
Speaker 3: you know, what is a what is the thing you
Speaker 3: feel very strongly about and either try to find students
Speaker 3: who have a different opinion and teach them to constructively
Speaker 3: talk about that, or do things like there was a
Speaker 3: recent New York Times piece about a writing teacher who says,
Speaker 3: come up with a character who you think is a
Speaker 3: terrible human being or something that no one should absolutely
Speaker 3: ever say, and write a story where they say that
Speaker 3: thing in context in a way which is sympathetic or
Speaker 3: humanizing towards them. And I think it's this is the
Speaker 3: fundamental skill to be able to see the humanity in people,
Speaker 3: even in moments of profound disagreement. And I don't mean
Speaker 3: to minimize the actual stakes of these types of conversations, right.
Speaker 3: You know, if you are an immigrant who's talking to
Speaker 3: someone who says, you know, we shouldn't allow any more
Speaker 3: immigration to this country, that has a deep personal impact
Speaker 3: on you because it may means you never get to
Speaker 3: see your family again.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So I'm not saying that, you know, we should all
Speaker 3: talk until we get along. I'm saying we have to
Speaker 3: see our political adversaries as human. And there are a
Speaker 3: bunch of organizations who try to train people to do
Speaker 3: this and also give people the experience of I had
Speaker 3: a conversation with someone who disagrees with me and it went, okay.
Speaker 3: We are aversive to these conversations. They're hard, they're emotionally taxing,
Speaker 3: there's no guarantee they're going to come out well. So
Speaker 3: we have to give people the confidence to engage in
Speaker 3: this way.
Speaker 1: So I'm so glad to hear you use the word humanizing,
Speaker 1: because that's really the key from a neuroscience point of view.
Speaker 1: The issue is that people in our out group, we
Speaker 1: actually analyze them with our brains in a different way,
Speaker 1: such that they are more like an object than a
Speaker 1: fellow human. And that's how that opens the door to
Speaker 1: you know, genocide of various sorts, or a lower level
Speaker 1: you know, violence, or even just insulting or whatever the
Speaker 1: thing is. We just don't care about them in the
Speaker 1: way that we care about the people that we consider
Speaker 1: in our in group. And yet obviously we're all made
Speaker 1: of the same biology. We all come about from our
Speaker 1: genetics and our experience, and it feels like humanization is
Speaker 1: really the key. So you were just telling me about
Speaker 1: what could be done with high school kids. Tell me
Speaker 1: what you and others are doing with adults in terms
Speaker 1: of helping them bridge the gap.
Speaker 3: So there's a bunch of bridge building organizations. There's a
Speaker 3: big one called braver Angels. And what this is is
Speaker 3: an organization which organizes they call them Red Blue Conversations.
Speaker 3: There's a bunch of local chapters, plus they do an
Speaker 3: online so you can actually sign up and say, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm in you know, this town in Indiana, and I
Speaker 3: want to have a conversation with people who.
Speaker 4: Disagree with me.
Speaker 3: And they have a particular way that they mediate and
Speaker 3: facilitate these conversations to make them productive. And so if
Speaker 3: you want to have that encounter, you can have it.
Speaker 3: They are a group that will set that up for
Speaker 3: you and show you how to do it.
Speaker 1: Do the people who sign up for that are they
Speaker 1: are Some of them just trying to win, and they think, yes,
Speaker 1: I want to meet people from the other side, so
Speaker 1: I can convince them.
Speaker 3: Possibly, But the moderation format is designed to prevent that.
Speaker 3: They don't let people bludge in each other. And they
Speaker 3: say right up front, the goal here is not to
Speaker 3: change someone's mind. The goal is to increase understanding.
Speaker 1: Oh that's lovely, Okay, great, So you're about to tell
Speaker 1: me about another organization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a bunch of organizations doing this kind
Speaker 3: of bridging work. I'm also involved in an organization called
Speaker 3: the Dignity Index, And what this is is they've created
Speaker 3: a scale from contempt to dignity to rate political speech.
Speaker 3: So when a politician talks about their opponent, are they saying,
Speaker 3: you know, those people are evil, we have to destroy
Speaker 3: them to save America. Or are they saying, I respect
Speaker 3: what they believe. I believe something different. I think my
Speaker 3: plan is better and if I win, we're going to
Speaker 3: work together. Those are really different things, and the scale
Speaker 3: actually goes it's an a point scale. It goes from
Speaker 3: literally calling for genocide to literally saying that you see
Speaker 3: no a difference between self and other. And so what
Speaker 3: they're using this for is a couple different things. First
Speaker 3: is they're putting together sort of scorecards in the upcoming election,
Speaker 3: just rate different candidates, especially at the local level, on
Speaker 3: whether they speak with contempt or dignity.
Speaker 4: And the second thing.
Speaker 3: They're doing is groups student groups in universities to train
Speaker 3: people to rate political speech on this scale, which is
Speaker 3: less about producing the ratings and more about getting people
Speaker 3: to think in this way and to notice when people
Speaker 3: are engaging in let's say, constructive versus destructive disagreement.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Okay, so those are things on an individual level
Speaker 1: that can be done on a societal level. Tell me
Speaker 1: how you think about, for example, journalism and what might
Speaker 1: be done there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, as I mentioned, I used to be a professional journalist.
Speaker 3: I was an editor at the AP, I was an
Speaker 3: investigative journalist at Republica. So I've seen the machine from
Speaker 3: the inside. And what I will say about journalists is,
Speaker 3: first of all, I have enormous respect for my colleagues
Speaker 3: and journalism, and they are some of the most deeply
Speaker 3: idealistic people that I know. Right, this isn't this isn't
Speaker 3: a conspiracy. But most of them are pretty politically liberal,
Speaker 3: and that's not a conspiracy either. That is because, especially
Speaker 3: with the decline of local news, most of them work
Speaker 3: for national outlets in big cities on.
Speaker 4: The East Coast.
Speaker 3: The social context in which they exist is pretty liberal,
Speaker 3: and in particular, much farther to the left than the
Speaker 3: Median American.
Speaker 4: You know what that.
Speaker 3: Means is they will have less contact with and less
Speaker 3: understanding with conservatives, which means that conservatives will not see,
Speaker 3: their views are identity reflected in the coverage of mainstream journalism.
Speaker 1: And this is because conservatives tend to live in more
Speaker 1: rural areas.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, it's because demographically journalists are not like conservatives, right.
Speaker 3: And it's not again, this isn't a conspiracy. This just
Speaker 3: it's pure demographics.
Speaker 4: Right. They are educated, urban people.
Speaker 3: And you know, one of the strongest correlates of political
Speaker 3: identity is population density.
Speaker 4: Right, It's that simple in many ways. That's another way
Speaker 4: you can talk about the divides in this country is
Speaker 4: between urban and rural.
Speaker 3: So anyway, given that that is the state of affairs,
Speaker 3: what you get is there are only a few media outlets,
Speaker 3: notably Fox, which speak in a language and a value
Speaker 3: system which resonates with conservatives, and that leaves a sort
Speaker 3: of vacuum where people who want that kind of coverage
Speaker 3: have to end up going to let's say, less credible
Speaker 3: or even fringe news sites. Right, so you start to
Speaker 3: get to your Newsmax or your One America, and whatever
Speaker 3: you can say about their politics from a pure sort
Speaker 3: of journalism quality perspective, they're just not very good. And
Speaker 3: so that's part of why we see, you know, higher
Speaker 3: rates of misinformation and so forth on the political right
Speaker 3: in the US, And my suggestion, which is somewhat controversial,
Speaker 3: is that we need more conservative journalists. We need more
Speaker 3: well trained people who understand the values of the people
Speaker 3: who most journalists don't cover well.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, by the way, you just pointed out this
Speaker 1: difference between left and right wing journalism because of the
Speaker 1: distribution in the country between rural and urban. But generally,
Speaker 1: one of the things I've found so important is this issue.
Speaker 1: I know this is something you've looked at about, for example,
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories on the left and the right, and essentially
Speaker 1: that they are equal. In other words, both sides, all
Speaker 1: parties are just as subject to this sort of thinking.
Speaker 1: And yet both parties accuse the other of this, just
Speaker 1: in the way that both parties accuse the other of
Speaker 1: doing book banning when both are guilty of this. Where
Speaker 1: else do you see this sort of thing and looking
Speaker 1: for other examples where the left and the right accuse
Speaker 1: each other of things that they are equally guilty of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you're raising the issue of symmetry versus asymmetry
Speaker 3: and conflict, and this is a big issue, right, So
Speaker 3: you have broadly speaking, sort of two schools of thought
Speaker 3: or ways that people talk about conflict. One is, you know,
Speaker 3: their side is obviously worse, that they want to destroy democracy.
Speaker 3: They're the oppressor, they're the abuser. And you have this
Speaker 3: other way of talking about it, which is, look, we're
Speaker 3: all human, we are all contributing to being locked in
Speaker 3: this escalating conflict spiral. Nobody's immune from misperceptions or mistakes.
Speaker 3: Both of these things can be true, right. There really
Speaker 3: are cases where one side is doing heinous things and
Speaker 3: the other side is not, or at least some sort
Speaker 3: of difference between the two. And I think part of
Speaker 3: thinking about constructive conflict is bringing in issues of justice,
Speaker 3: so you know, sometimes it really is on one side
Speaker 3: to change their behavior, and that's where we require accountability
Speaker 3: in various forms. On the other hand, conflict is a case,
Speaker 3: especially conflict escalation is a case where it really does
Speaker 3: take two to tango. I tend to think about the
Speaker 3: symmetries more than the asymmetries in the American conflict, largely
Speaker 3: because everyone else is focusing on the asymmetries. And so
Speaker 3: you mentioned conspiracy theories, so that's a great example. The
Speaker 3: sort of media narrative generally is that there's much more
Speaker 3: sort of conspiratory thinking on the right in the US.
Speaker 3: And if you make a huge list of conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: you know, everything from you know, secret Jewish cabal's controlling
Speaker 3: the world to Holocaust denial to chemtrails, what you find
Speaker 3: is that it's pretty bipartisan there. You know, about the
Speaker 3: same number of conspiracy theories are more commonly believed.
Speaker 4: On the left as opposed to the right.
Speaker 3: However, if you look at misinformation consumption, you find that
Speaker 3: it is definitely more of a right wing thing. And
Speaker 3: I want to put a sort of big as risk
Speaker 3: here and say, well, you know, doesn't this depend on
Speaker 3: who's defining misinformation? And what we find is that when
Speaker 3: you ask bipartisan pants, so you get a bunch of
Speaker 3: Democrats Republicans together and you put a news article in
Speaker 3: front of them, or a let's say, a purported news article,
Speaker 3: and you say, you know, is this true or not?
Speaker 3: You know, take your time, you can use any reference
Speaker 3: materials you wants. You know, let's you know, look it
Speaker 3: up online. You find that there is generally strong agreement
Speaker 3: between bipartisan panels and professional fact checkers. This is the
Speaker 3: level of evidence that I want to see to say
Speaker 3: that there really is an asymmetry.
Speaker 4: And I do think it's true.
Speaker 3: There's just much more low quality information circulating in right
Speaker 3: wing spaces.
Speaker 1: And this is because of the journalism issuy that you
Speaker 1: were mentioning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's a number of things going on
Speaker 3: right One of them is there's sort of a news
Speaker 3: void right. There just isn't a lot of right wing journalism.
Speaker 3: So if people have a demand for that there, you know,
Speaker 3: that creates an incentive for people who don't really care
Speaker 3: about the journalism to publish things that are going to
Speaker 3: get attention because there's no there isn't anything else in
Speaker 3: that political space that is that is well done. So
Speaker 3: I think I think that is real. But I want
Speaker 3: when people say there's there's an asymmetry, right, it's it's
Speaker 3: really those people who are the problem. I think we
Speaker 3: should have a high bar for evidence. We should have
Speaker 3: a high standard for saying, yes, this is real. It
Speaker 3: isn't just a cudgel that you're using to try to
Speaker 3: win the culture war, because the culture war is not winnable.
Speaker 3: That's a fantasy. You can't exclude half of the population
Speaker 3: from politics forevermore So, we have to find some other
Speaker 3: way to approach each other.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that you are really
Speaker 1: concentrating on is social media as a leverage point. So
Speaker 1: again we talked about individual ways to help with conflict resolution,
Speaker 1: We've talked about societal way as we were just talking
Speaker 1: about journalism, but as far as social media goes, I
Speaker 1: know that the way you think about this is there's
Speaker 1: this interplay between human psychology, which cares about threats and
Speaker 1: recommend our algorithms, with the social media companies in terms
Speaker 1: of what they're serving up to you, and then the
Speaker 1: content producers, who are going to do the things that
Speaker 1: get them the views. And so human psychology we probably
Speaker 1: can't change too much, and the content producers were probably
Speaker 1: not going to dissuade them from producing things that get views.
Speaker 1: So really it's the recommender algorithms that are up for
Speaker 1: grabs there. So we touched on this before, but let's
Speaker 1: return to that. What do you see as the possibilities there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I one of the reasons that I study
Speaker 3: recommender algorithms, which by the way, isn't just social media.
Speaker 3: It's you know, news recommenders, it's job recommendations, it's Amazon products,
Speaker 3: it's Netflix it's it's music, it's podcasts, it's everything. Right,
Speaker 3: all of this stuff is picked for us by machines now,
Speaker 3: and potentially all of it has political content. You may
Speaker 3: not think that you know, who cares what Spotify's recommender
Speaker 3: is doing. Well, you know this podcast is on Spotify, right,
Speaker 3: so that that matters too. So broader than social media,
Speaker 3: there's two reasons I think focusing on social media is interesting.
Speaker 3: When is the direct effects and others are the indirect
Speaker 3: effects via incentives for producers, So direct effects. So what
Speaker 3: I would like to see is less use of engagement
Speaker 3: signals in content ranking. So in other words, how much
Speaker 3: somebody clicked on something, you know, how many seconds they
Speaker 3: spent watching that TikTok video, et cetera, should have less
Speaker 3: of an influence on whether it is shown to other people.
Speaker 3: And to some extent, this change is already starting to happen.
Speaker 3: So there are at least three platforms, of which Facebook
Speaker 3: is the only one who's said this publicly. They basically
Speaker 3: don't use resharing as a signal for civic and health content.
Speaker 3: So maybe for entertainment, whatever catches your attention is fine,
Speaker 3: But maybe for civic and health and politics and these
Speaker 3: types of critical information sources we shouldn't use, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it went viral as a signal for whether it's
Speaker 3: any good, and so that is starting to happen.
Speaker 4: I'd like to see more of that.
Speaker 3: I recently pub to paper with a bunch of collaborators
Speaker 3: where we cataloged all of the options to using engagement
Speaker 3: as a content ranking signal. It's called what we Know
Speaker 3: about using non engagement signals and content marking. To just
Speaker 3: try to get this knowledge out there and to socialize
Speaker 3: it because a lot of this stuff is sort of
Speaker 3: very diffuse across industry. People in industry know it but
Speaker 3: can't talk about it because.
Speaker 4: It's all private.
Speaker 3: So what we did is we got together people from
Speaker 3: eight platforms for an off the record discussion about what
Speaker 3: can we say about how to do this better, and
Speaker 3: then we reconstructed their conclusions from public sources scattered academic literature,
Speaker 3: old company blog posts, but also many references from the
Speaker 3: Facebook files which were the leaks that Francis Hagan brought
Speaker 3: out in twenty twenty one. We sort of learned what
Speaker 3: to look for in those files. So that's the first
Speaker 3: thing I think social media can be better. We can
Speaker 3: build it not to optimize for outrage, And in fact
Speaker 3: the frontier is something called bridging based ranking, and the
Speaker 3: idea there is you find content that both sides agree
Speaker 3: is good. So, you know, think about this, do you
Speaker 3: want the inflammatory news article that appeals to Democrats? Do
Speaker 3: you want the inflammatory news article that appeals to Republicans?
Speaker 3: Or do you want the article that everybody reads and says, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's kind of good. Now, maybe you know, psychologically you're
Speaker 3: much more likely to click on the inflammatory headline, but
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean our better selves actually want that. And
Speaker 3: so I'm involved with a bunch of experiments trying to
Speaker 3: find this bridging content and promote it. So that's the
Speaker 3: sort of direct changes, right, There's a bunch of algorithmic
Speaker 3: changes that you know, I and many of my colleagues
Speaker 3: are exploring and trying.
Speaker 4: To advocate for.
Speaker 3: But then one of the really interesting things about doing
Speaker 3: this in the algorithm space is that, precisely because these
Speaker 3: algorithms decide what everybody sees, changing them can change the
Speaker 3: incentive for producers. So if less inflammatory material is downranked
Speaker 3: and less popular, that means it's less profitable to produce,
Speaker 3: and therefore that changes the kind of content that journalists, politicians,
Speaker 3: you know, think tanks, et cetera, find successful, find reaches
Speaker 3: an audience. And so this second order or indirect effect
Speaker 3: is very interesting because it says that, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: if you can get ten platforms to change their algorithms
Speaker 3: to use bridging based ranking, that could have an effect
Speaker 3: on a much broader media ecosystem.
Speaker 4: So it's a leverage point.
Speaker 1: Yes, how do you convince the social media platform to change?
Speaker 3: Well, I think there's a sort of three cases here.
Speaker 3: So and this is why we're testing these algorithms. So
Speaker 3: I am running something called the pro Social Ranking Challenge.
Speaker 3: It is an open competition for better social media algorithms
Speaker 3: where teams from around the world are competing, first of
Speaker 3: all for a cash prize, but mostly we're going to
Speaker 3: take the winning algorithms, as judged by a panel of scientists,
Speaker 3: and we're going to test them on Facebook, Twitter, and
Speaker 3: Reddit using a custom browser extension. And so we're actually
Speaker 3: going to look to see if it changes polarization, wellbeing,
Speaker 3: and other types of attitudes and outcomes, including engagement. Crucially,
Speaker 3: we are testing whether it changes both short term and
Speaker 3: long term use of these products.
Speaker 4: And so from that.
Speaker 3: We will learn which of three worlds we live in.
Speaker 3: If the universe is kind, we will discover that producing
Speaker 3: a better product that reduces polarization also increases long term retention.
Speaker 3: So you make a higher quality product, people stay on
Speaker 3: the platform, maybe not in the short term, but certainly
Speaker 3: in the long term. And then you can do well
Speaker 3: by doing good right, And then it's just sort of
Speaker 3: getting the word out. Or we could live in a
Speaker 3: world where you know, it has neutral but to maybe
Speaker 3: slightly negative effects to using algorithms that reduce polarization. And
Speaker 3: it's not unheard of for platforms to make, you know,
Speaker 3: slightly revenue reducing changes to their algorithms in the interest
Speaker 3: of public good. You know, I collect examples of this.
Speaker 3: So then it's an advocacy campaign, right, this is the
Speaker 3: right thing, you should do it. There's lots of groups
Speaker 3: that exist to put pressure on companies to do the
Speaker 3: right things. Or perhaps in some sense, the worst outcome
Speaker 3: is we discover that making algorithms which produce better conflict
Speaker 3: outcomes tends to reduce usage of the product in a
Speaker 3: way that is meaningful from a business perspective. And then
Speaker 3: what we have is a collective action problem. You have
Speaker 3: a first mover disadvantage. Who in that, whoever changes their
Speaker 3: algorithm to be better first loses money relatives to everyone else.
Speaker 3: And then you have to look at regulation because that
Speaker 3: can level the playing field, and very much the same
Speaker 3: way that environmental regulation prevents a race to the bottom.
Speaker 3: You know, nobody wants to be the first to use
Speaker 3: a more expensive process that results in less pollution, because
Speaker 3: then they would lose their market share. But if everybody
Speaker 3: has to do it, then it's okay. So those are
Speaker 3: the three outcomes, right, Either it's just a matter of
Speaker 3: spreading the good word or its advocacy or its regulation
Speaker 3: depending on where the science takes.
Speaker 1: Us, or what else. In conclusion, would you like to say.
Speaker 3: If we care about relating to each other better, and
Speaker 3: I don't just mean like kumbay oh why can't we
Speaker 3: all get along? But actually having a politics that functions better,
Speaker 3: where we get to fight what we believe in without
Speaker 3: dehumanizing the other side, without misperceiving what they're actually about,
Speaker 3: without things turning ugly and violent. That's something that we
Speaker 3: can do. There's many many ways to have better political conflict,
Speaker 3: but it's going to take a fundamentally different attitude As
Speaker 3: I said before, the the culture war is not winnable.
Speaker 3: There is no world in which you get to exclude
Speaker 3: your political opponents from politics indefinitely. That's what a democracy is, right.
Speaker 3: We accept someone winning an election because the next election
Speaker 3: they might lose. So there are ways to get involved,
Speaker 3: there are things you can do.
Speaker 4: The situation is not hopeless.
Speaker 1: That was Jonathan's strain at Berkeley. So let's take the
Speaker 1: work that Jonathan and others are doing to address our
Speaker 1: illusions that people who disagree with us are misinformed trolls.
Speaker 1: It's a very useful exercise to figure out how we
Speaker 1: can look at somebody who disagrees with us as not
Speaker 1: being cold and incompetent, but possibly someone who is kind
Speaker 1: and generous and has a different opinion. This starts with
Speaker 1: intellectual humility, understanding that we don't know it all, and
Speaker 1: I don't know that from a philosophical point of view,
Speaker 1: but from a neuroscience point of view. Because of brain plasticity,
Speaker 1: we each form an internal model of the world based
Speaker 1: on our very thin trajectory of space and time, and
Speaker 1: we form our political opinions based on just the little
Speaker 1: bit that we're exposed to. We shape our ideas from
Speaker 1: the social networks we happen to be embedded in, and
Speaker 1: we're not consciously aware that we're doing this. So at
Speaker 1: the heart of all of this is a need for
Speaker 1: intellectual humility, and we're going to need a lot of
Speaker 1: this to address the kind of polarization, the kind of
Speaker 1: fear and loathing that we're seeing across the globe. Meaningful
Speaker 1: dialogues are a great start, but also there's a need
Speaker 1: for scaling. How do we build this into our educational systems,
Speaker 1: How do we build this into the fundamental algorithms underlying
Speaker 1: our social media. How do we build what some scholars
Speaker 1: like Heidi and Guy Burgess massively parallel peace building. There's
Speaker 1: still a lot of work to be done on this front,
Speaker 1: especially as we're moving from communicating via soapbox speeches and
Speaker 1: hand delivered pamphlets to instant communication that allows you to
Speaker 1: deliver your speech or your pamphlet to everyone's mobile rectangle
Speaker 1: around the planet. So I suggest that an important angle
Speaker 1: on all this is to understand the neuroscience at the
Speaker 1: base of everything, why we think the way we do,
Speaker 1: why we behave the way we behave, and then work
Speaker 1: to build our societal structures like our media, our dialogue,
Speaker 1: our education. With that in mind, we can no longer
Speaker 1: make the romantic assumption that we each are just objective
Speaker 1: holders of truth and that ours is this single logical
Speaker 1: argument or position that should convince everyone. And this is
Speaker 1: because our internal models of the world give us different
Speaker 1: biases towards different groups. We have different sensitivities towards issues,
Speaker 1: we have different levels of knowledge, we have different emotional
Speaker 1: affiliations to things happening in the world. So the first
Speaker 1: step to better conflict is to have a more realistic
Speaker 1: understanding that we are each living on our own planet
Speaker 1: mentally and emotionally, and the important goal is to bridge planets,
Speaker 1: to set up some signaling across the vast reaches of
Speaker 1: space between us. It's easy to say that the people
Speaker 1: who disagree with you are ugly trolls, but as we discussed,
Speaker 1: it can make slightly more sense to ask how someone
Speaker 1: who is smart and kind can end up believing something
Speaker 1: different than you do. This is not a plea to
Speaker 1: agree with the other side, but to better understand their
Speaker 1: motivation and their philosophy, and fundamentally, to better understand are
Speaker 1: shared biology and therefore are shared human go to eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com slash podcast for more information and to find
Speaker 1: further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com with any questions or discussions, and check out
Speaker 1: and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
Speaker 1: each episode and to leave comments. Until next time, I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman and this is inner Cosmos