Speaker 1: Why will your brain gladly flip a switch to save
Speaker 1: five lives at the cost of one life, but it
Speaker 1: will refuse to push one person off a bridge to
Speaker 1: accomplish the same thing. Why do Buddhist monks and psychopaths
Speaker 1: and patients like Phineas gage behave differently than you might?
Speaker 1: And what happens when ancient moral instincts collide with modern
Speaker 1: problems like pandemics and AI alignment and political tribalism. Could
Speaker 1: a simple online game reduce polarization? And could you contribute
Speaker 1: to charities more effectively if you understood how your moral
Speaker 1: brain works. This week on Inner Cosmos, my colleague Joshua
Speaker 1: Green helps us open the hood on human morality and
Speaker 1: asks whether we can build technologies that steer us towards
Speaker 1: cooperation in a world our brains weren't built for. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Intercosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply
Speaker 1: into our three pound universe to understand how we see
Speaker 1: the world, and, for that matter, how we see each other.
Speaker 2: When you peer.
Speaker 1: Into the human brain, you find a machine built on
Speaker 1: conflict on the one hand, it's exquisitely tuned to the
Speaker 1: immediacy of social life, reading faces, sensing fairness, feeling indignation
Speaker 1: when someone breaks the rules, feeling compassion when someone needs help.
Speaker 1: These emotional circuits evolved to help the oldest problem of
Speaker 1: group living, to bind us together, to keep our small
Speaker 1: bands cohesive, to punish the cheaters, to reward the cooperators.
Speaker 1: These systems are fast and automatic and deeply intuitive, and
Speaker 1: at the same time housed in the very same skullp
Speaker 1: we have slower, more deliberative systems. This is the circuitry
Speaker 1: that lets us step back, cool off, calculate, imagine alternative futures.
Speaker 1: It allows us to override that first impulse and to
Speaker 1: ask what actually leads to the best outcome, what matters
Speaker 1: the most in this situation. Our brains can operate in
Speaker 1: both of these modes, and most of the time we
Speaker 1: toggle between the two without even noticing.
Speaker 2: And as we'll see.
Speaker 1: Today, our moral lives exist in a strange dance between
Speaker 1: instinct and reflection. The strange part is that evolution never
Speaker 1: anticipated that we would one day wield these moral instincts
Speaker 1: on a planetary scale. Our emotional machinery was designed for
Speaker 1: life in small groups of hunter gatherers, not a world
Speaker 1: of eight billion people with global pandemics and climate changed
Speaker 1: and polarized democracies. But we bring the same ancient intuitions
Speaker 1: to all of it. We still divide the world into
Speaker 1: us and them. We still experience harm differently depending on
Speaker 1: whether it's direct or indirect. We still recoil from active
Speaker 1: wrongdoing far more than passive neglect. Sometimes these instincts guide
Speaker 1: us well, other times they mislead us. If you want
Speaker 1: to understand the tensions at the heart of modern ethical life,
Speaker 1: from trolley problems, which we'll talk about in a second,
Speaker 1: to end of life decisions, from pandemic policy to political tribalism,
Speaker 1: we have to understand how this dual process, this moral brain,
Speaker 1: actually works. We have to understand why we help, why
Speaker 1: we punish, and why certain dilemmas feel difficult even when
Speaker 1: the math is simple. So this is why I called
Speaker 1: my colleague Joshua Green today. Josh is at Harvard where
Speaker 1: he's a psychologist and a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and
Speaker 1: his lab studies how we make moral judgments, how our
Speaker 1: fast gut reactions and our slow reasoning systems work together
Speaker 1: and sometimes work against each other.
Speaker 2: He's the author of.
Speaker 1: A book called Moral Tribes, where he argues that our
Speaker 1: everyday moral sense works beautifully within groups, but can fail
Speaker 1: spectacularly between groups. And I want to mention that Josh
Speaker 1: has been working lately on going beyond describing the machinery.
Speaker 1: He's begun building tools what he calls moral technologies to
Speaker 1: help societies navigate around our blind spot. So well, here
Speaker 1: about tools which help people donate in more impactful ways,
Speaker 1: or online games that measurably reduce political animosity.
Speaker 2: In other words, how.
Speaker 1: Can we actually engineer cooperation rather than just hope for it.
Speaker 1: So today we're going to zoom into the moral mind,
Speaker 1: where emotions meet reason, where tribes collide, and where ancient
Speaker 1: circuitry tries to steer a modern world.
Speaker 2: So let's dive in.
Speaker 1: So, Josh, when you look at the sense of morality
Speaker 1: that our brains generate, what is that for? What problem
Speaker 1: was evolution trying to solve there?
Speaker 3: So morality is kind of a mystery from an evolutionary
Speaker 3: point of view, because if you think about evolution in
Speaker 3: the most straightforward terms, you would think that the greediest,
Speaker 3: brawniest individuals would be the ones who get the most
Speaker 3: resources and are able to produce the most offspring. And
Speaker 3: why would anyone ever be nice to anybody else? And
Speaker 3: this is something that really bothered Darwin right from from
Speaker 3: the beginning, and people even said to him, Look, how
Speaker 3: could you possibly explain any kind of human goodness if
Speaker 3: nature is red in tooth and claws, as Tennyson famously
Speaker 3: said about Darwin's theory. And he thought about this and
Speaker 3: his answer was one that turned out to be very precient.
Speaker 3: So he recognized that while individuals may benefit from being
Speaker 3: ruthless and nasty, teams of individuals, groups of individuals can
Speaker 3: benefit from being more cooperative within the group. Right, if
Speaker 3: you're a member of a group where you know, if
Speaker 3: you fall in the river tough luck, then that group
Speaker 3: may not survive very well, even if the individual who
Speaker 3: carried on hunting instead of rescuing you does a little
Speaker 3: bit better. And so the idea that we depend on
Speaker 3: each other, that teamwork is a powerful weapon for you know,
Speaker 3: fighting against the elements but also out competing other groups.
Speaker 3: That idea emerged early on, early on, along with the
Speaker 3: idea that individuals who are genetically related uh can can
Speaker 3: benefit their their genes indirectly by by by helping others.
Speaker 2: So that's the sort of idea.
Speaker 3: At a strategic biological level, why would anyone ever look
Speaker 3: out for anybody else? And then on a psychological level,
Speaker 3: the question is how does this work? And it mostly
Speaker 3: works at the level of what we might call social emotions.
Speaker 3: That is, you, you know, if if someone's in trouble,
Speaker 3: you have a sense of vicarious distress and you're motivated
Speaker 3: to help them. Or if someone's not being a good
Speaker 3: cooperative member of the group, you might be angry at
Speaker 3: them and might want to punish them or let other
Speaker 3: people know what a jerk that guy is is being.
Speaker 3: So it kind of operates on on on two levels,
Speaker 3: uh the level of surviving through cooperation, and I think
Speaker 3: of morality as a suite of psychological mechanisms that enable
Speaker 3: us to be more effective cooperators. And then this is
Speaker 3: implemented largely emotionally, but we can also use our reasoning
Speaker 3: capacities to figure out how to make our way in
Speaker 3: the moral and social world. And it's that duality that
Speaker 3: gives rise to some of the most interesting dilemmas that
Speaker 3: we've studied.
Speaker 1: And you've used the analogy of a camera when it
Speaker 1: comes to that duality, can you unpack that for us?
Speaker 3: So, at least the old sort of digital SLR camera
Speaker 3: that I have, you know, have these little automatic settings
Speaker 3: like portrait mode and landscape mode, and if you want
Speaker 3: to take a picture of a mountain from a mile away,
Speaker 3: then you know, you put it in landscape mode and
Speaker 3: it does everything and configures it in that kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, familiar situation that the manufacturers of the camera anticipated.
Speaker 3: But let's say you know you're an artist and you've
Speaker 3: got your idea about exactly the sort of off kilter
Speaker 3: shot that you want with the light just so and
Speaker 3: trying to get a certain weird effect. Then you want
Speaker 3: to put the camera in manual mode and adjust the
Speaker 3: f stop and everything yourself to take advantage of your
Speaker 3: understanding the situation and your understanding of your goals and
Speaker 3: get exactly the shot that you want. And you can
Speaker 3: think of intuition and including emotional intuitions as like those
Speaker 3: automatic settings, where this is a sort of ready made
Speaker 3: response for this kind of situation, and it can be
Speaker 3: something that we have acquired biologically speaking, that we automatically
Speaker 3: dislike certain smells or some people argue that we or
Speaker 3: other species have an automatic fear of snakes that might
Speaker 3: be poisonous and things like that. But a lot of
Speaker 3: it is stuff that we have learned, essentially, habits that
Speaker 3: we have acquired. But whether it comes from our individual
Speaker 3: experience or things we've learned culturally, or if it's part
Speaker 3: of our genetic endowment, it's all in the form of
Speaker 3: ready made, quick responses to situations that are either familiar
Speaker 3: in our biological history, our cultural history, or our personal history.
Speaker 3: And then on the other side, we've got our reasoning abilities,
Speaker 3: where we can look at the situation and say, Okay,
Speaker 3: normally I don't like to jump out of buildings, but
Speaker 3: if the building's on fire, maybe that's something I've got
Speaker 3: to do in this case.
Speaker 1: So, with this dual process nature, you've got fast gut reactions,
Speaker 1: you've got slower, more controlled reasoning. So how does this
Speaker 1: play out in the domain of morality.
Speaker 3: You can see this tension between kind of the automatic
Speaker 3: response and the more detached reason response in moral dilemmas
Speaker 3: that are sometimes.
Speaker 2: Called trolley problems.
Speaker 3: Right, So in the classic pair of cases, you've got
Speaker 3: a trolley that is headed towards five people, and the
Speaker 3: only way that you can save them is to hit
Speaker 3: a switch that will turn the trolley onto another track.
Speaker 3: But unfortunately there's another person there. And the question is
Speaker 3: can you hit the switch to avoid having the five
Speaker 3: get killed? And there most people say yes, that's okay.
Speaker 3: But from a cognitive science point of view, the most
Speaker 3: interesting thing is the contrast between that case where you're
Speaker 3: hitting a switch and turning the trolley away from five
Speaker 3: but onto one, and the classic footbridge case. So this
Speaker 3: is where the trolley is again headed towards five people.
Speaker 3: This time you are on a footbridge over the tracks,
Speaker 3: and the only way you can say to those five
Speaker 3: people is to do something that's pretty uncomfortable. There's a
Speaker 3: guy next to you wearing a big backpack, and you
Speaker 3: can throw the guy with the big backpack onto the
Speaker 3: tracks and then he'll be a trolley stopper and stop
Speaker 3: the trolley from killing the five people. But that person
Speaker 3: will be killed, and you can't jump yourself because you're
Speaker 3: not wearing the big backpack, so this wouldn't work. And
Speaker 3: we're going to suspend disbelief and assume that you have
Speaker 3: good aim and all of that stuff, and even with
Speaker 3: all of those somewhat unrealistic assumptions in place, most people
Speaker 3: say that it's wrong to push the guy off the footbridge,
Speaker 3: or they at least feel a lot more uncomfortable about it.
Speaker 3: And so the nice thing about these cases is in
Speaker 3: some sense they're very similar death by trolley, five lives
Speaker 3: versus one, and yet we give very different responses to them.
Speaker 3: And this was the thing that kind of got me
Speaker 3: into cognitive neuroscience, you know, many years ago, twenty years
Speaker 3: ago or whatever it was when you and I first
Speaker 3: met and started looking at this with brain imaging.
Speaker 1: So give us the punchline of why people are happy
Speaker 1: to flip the switch in the first case and they
Speaker 1: are not in the second case, and what your brain
Speaker 1: imaging studies revealed there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that the short answer seems to be that
Speaker 3: we have a kind of negative emotional response to the
Speaker 3: thought of pushing the guy off the footbridge that we
Speaker 3: don't have in response to hitting the switch in that case.
Speaker 1: And why and.
Speaker 3: Then right, And so we can answer that question on
Speaker 3: sort of two levels. What's going on in the dilemma
Speaker 3: that makes us feel differently, and then what's going on
Speaker 3: in our brains that is the basis for having that
Speaker 3: differential response. So in terms of what's going on on
Speaker 3: in the dilemma, there are three things that really seem
Speaker 3: to be driving the effect, although there are other things
Speaker 3: you could vary as well. But the difference is between
Speaker 3: the switch case and the footbridge case. And these were
Speaker 3: nicely identified, and since we're fined by people like my
Speaker 3: colleague Fiery Cushman.
Speaker 2: So one is that.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, one thing that's just in the background is
Speaker 3: that harm is much more salient when it's active rather
Speaker 3: than passive, and that's true in both of these cases.
Speaker 3: The two things that really differentiate these cases are one
Speaker 3: the harm is more direct when you're pushing the guy
Speaker 3: off the footbridge, so we call this personal force. This is,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're pushing with your hands or pushing
Speaker 3: even with a stick, that feels worse than if you're
Speaker 3: hitting a switch. Even if you're hitting a switch, that
Speaker 3: would drop the guy through the trap door.
Speaker 2: Or something like that.
Speaker 3: So it's just like the footbridge case, we see a
Speaker 3: big difference there. That difference interacts with something else which
Speaker 3: is a bit more subtle. It has a longer philosophic history,
Speaker 3: and this is the difference between harming somebody purposefully.
Speaker 2: Or as a side effect.
Speaker 3: So the idea is that in the switch case, what
Speaker 3: you're doing is you're turning the trolley away from the
Speaker 3: five people, and as a side effect, you end up
Speaker 3: running over the one person.
Speaker 2: But that one person is not part of your plan.
Speaker 3: If they were to magically disappear, that would be great,
Speaker 3: Whereas in the footbridge case, you are using that person
Speaker 3: as a trolley stopper, right. And it's that combination of
Speaker 3: harming somebody in this purposeful way, using them as a means,
Speaker 3: and doing it in this direct personal way. And then
Speaker 3: in the background, is this the fact that it's active.
Speaker 3: Those things combine to really give us our sense of
Speaker 3: like what is a violent action. If you remove any
Speaker 3: of those three things, it doesn't have that sense of
Speaker 3: sort of immediate violence, like touching somebody in the face.
Speaker 3: So that's sort of the trigger in terms of like
Speaker 3: the features of the dilemma, the differences that make the
Speaker 3: difference in terms of the situation.
Speaker 2: Then you say, okay, so.
Speaker 3: That combination of harming somebody in a way that's active, purposeful.
Speaker 2: And direct, that gives us the sense of violence.
Speaker 3: But what's going on in our heads and here I
Speaker 3: think the best evidence actually comes from cases where people
Speaker 3: have studied patients with brain damage, similar to the famous
Speaker 3: case of Phineas Gauge. So if you've taken intro psychology
Speaker 3: or have heard about it otherwise, you probably know about
Speaker 3: this case. So this was a railroad form and living
Speaker 3: in Vermont in the nineteenth century, working on the railroad
Speaker 3: all the livelong day. And there was a terrible explosion
Speaker 3: and an iron spike, a tamping iron was blasted out
Speaker 3: of essentially a cannon, and it went into Phineas Gage's
Speaker 3: eye socket, through the front of his brain, and out
Speaker 3: the top of his head. And amazingly he survived once
Speaker 3: the wound was treated. But when he survived, he didn't
Speaker 3: survive intact. He his reasoning abilities, what you might loosely
Speaker 3: call his sort of cognitive abilities, remain intact. He could speak,
Speaker 3: he could do math problems, he could do basic reasoning.
Speaker 3: But his personality, his character, his values, and his decision
Speaker 3: making abilities, those things seem to be compromised, and he
Speaker 3: ended up going from being this upstanding, you know, a
Speaker 3: respected railroad officer who people looked or looked looked up to,
Speaker 3: to a kind of lawless Wanderer, and this was one
Speaker 3: of the first sort of clear indications that there are
Speaker 3: distinct systems in the brain for that that that that
Speaker 3: that handle things like social emotional decision making, things that
Speaker 3: you kind of have to do by feel, by judgment,
Speaker 3: rather than following some kind of formula or using some
Speaker 3: previously acquired skill like your skill for for for for language.
Speaker 3: After I did those initial brain imaging studies, a group
Speaker 3: at the University of Iowa, a group in in Italy
Speaker 3: also did a version of this where they tested patients
Speaker 3: with damage like Phineas Gage. And these are patients that
Speaker 3: you know Demasio kind of described as they know the words,
Speaker 3: but they don't feel the music. They say things like
Speaker 3: I'm looking at this picture you're showing me of a
Speaker 3: gory car accident, and I know, before my brain tumor
Speaker 3: or whatever it was, this used to bother me, but
Speaker 3: now it just leaves me flat. So they don't have
Speaker 3: that feeling. They're kind of emotionally cold. And what you
Speaker 3: find with these people is that they're much more likely
Speaker 3: to say that it's okay to push the guy off
Speaker 3: the footbridge, right. And it's not just these two cases.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of different dilemmas. You know, they
Speaker 3: don't necessarily involve literal trolleys and things like that, And
Speaker 3: this effect was huge.
Speaker 2: You don't need statistics to analyze this.
Speaker 3: You can just see it's like overwhelmingly, they're much more
Speaker 3: likely to make those judgments. We've also found or others
Speaker 3: have found that psychopaths are more likely to say that
Speaker 3: it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge. And again,
Speaker 3: the idea is that they can reason, but they don't
Speaker 3: have that emotional moral sense, that sense of horror or
Speaker 3: reluctance at directly harming somebody in this violent way.
Speaker 2: But then something really interesting.
Speaker 3: This is work that's unpublished, al though I'm pretty confident
Speaker 3: about it. I had a fantastic undergrad named Shin Sheng
Speaker 3: who's now long since graduated, who went to Tibet and
Speaker 3: tested Buddhist monks on the footbridge case. And she tested
Speaker 3: about fifty of them, and she found that eighty percent
Speaker 3: of the Buddhist monks approved of pushing the guy off
Speaker 3: the footbridge.
Speaker 2: Now you might say why.
Speaker 3: You know, when we ask people, what do you think
Speaker 3: Buddhist monks would say about this? And they said, definitely,
Speaker 3: they are not going to be like, you know, the
Speaker 3: Phineas gauged patients and the psychopaths and that, so what's
Speaker 3: that's really weird?
Speaker 2: Right? And the idea is that you can reach with this.
Speaker 3: Dual process approach where it's partly about how you feel
Speaker 3: and partly about how you think you could reach the
Speaker 3: same conclusion in different ways. So the Phineas gauge people
Speaker 3: with the emotion related brain damage and the psychopaths who
Speaker 3: don't have that emotional moral sense, they just don't have
Speaker 3: the feeling that says no.
Speaker 2: Don't do that horrible violence. Right.
Speaker 3: The Buddhist monks said, yeah, I feel that, and I
Speaker 3: sense that, but I have this more detached and expansive view,
Speaker 3: and I can see in a case like this, if
Speaker 3: it is really done with the noble intention of saving
Speaker 3: more lives, then that can be acceptable. And many of them,
Speaker 3: I think five different monks cited this sutra, this Buddhist
Speaker 3: teaching about a ship captain who found himself in this
Speaker 3: situation where he could kill somebody to prevent a much
Speaker 3: greater harm, and he did that, and he did it
Speaker 3: thinking that it was going to be bad karma for him,
Speaker 3: but in fact he was reborn as a bodhisattva because
Speaker 3: he had this noble intention.
Speaker 1: So, given what we know about this moral machinery, are
Speaker 1: there certain kinds of problems that we are systematically bad at?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: You know, it's always controversial when it comes to efficult
Speaker 3: questions of you know what, what's the right answer and
Speaker 3: what's the wrong answer. But I think there are cases
Speaker 3: where we're we're bad when it comes to causing harm
Speaker 3: or or or And for example, when it.
Speaker 2: Comes to physician assisted suicide.
Speaker 3: Right, Let's say you have someone who has a terrible
Speaker 3: terminal illness. They have you know, at most they're going
Speaker 3: to live in another couple of months, but they're living
Speaker 3: right now in agonizing pain. Let's say this is someone
Speaker 3: whose bodies just riddled with cancer and they're just hanging
Speaker 3: on and you know, despite all the drugs you can
Speaker 3: give them, their their their their in miserable pain, and
Speaker 3: they just want to say goodbye and be done for
Speaker 3: a long time.
Speaker 2: I don't know if this is still true.
Speaker 3: The American Medical Association's position on this is no, you know,
Speaker 3: you can't end life.
Speaker 2: Life is sacred, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Right, Whereas in other countries like the Netherlands, for example,
Speaker 3: there are procedures and protocols and guardrails in place. But
Speaker 3: if you want to end your life, typically in cases
Speaker 3: where someone is has as a terminal illness and it
Speaker 3: is a great deal of pain and distress, you can
Speaker 3: do that, right, And you can think of this as
Speaker 3: a case where the greater good is on the side
Speaker 3: of letting this person and their life if that's what
Speaker 3: they want. They're experiencing nothing but misery, and everyone around
Speaker 3: them is just watching them suffer. But there's this sense that,
Speaker 3: you know, ending this person's life actively is like pushing
Speaker 3: somebody off of footbridge, and that is just inherently wrong.
Speaker 1: Our moral instincts evolved for life in small groups. What
Speaker 1: happens when you take a brain like this and you
Speaker 1: drop it into the twenty first century?
Speaker 3: Right, So the way I think about it is as
Speaker 3: a kind of sequel to this famous.
Speaker 2: Parable called the traad of the commons.
Speaker 3: Right. So, the ecologist Garrett Harden had this famous paper
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty eight, and he was writing about over population,
Speaker 3: which turned out to be not as big a concern
Speaker 3: as he thought it was. But he had this very
Speaker 3: nice story that sort of beautifully illustrates the challenge of
Speaker 3: life in a group. Right, So he imagined a bunch
Speaker 3: of herders living on a near a pasture, and each
Speaker 3: of them has their separate herds, and each of them
Speaker 3: says to themselves, well should I add more animals to
Speaker 3: my herd? And they think, well, they're just grazing on
Speaker 3: this common pasture, so why not bigger herd, more money
Speaker 3: when I take my animals to market. So they all
Speaker 3: grow their herds, and they all grow and grow and grow,
Speaker 3: until at some point there are more animals on the
Speaker 3: pastor than it can support, No food enough for any
Speaker 3: of them, as they're scrambling to eat the last few
Speaker 3: shreds of grass, and they all die. And that's the
Speaker 3: tragedy of the commons. And this is the classic problem
Speaker 3: of me versus us, where if everybody does the thing
Speaker 3: that's in their individuals interest, then everybody ends up being
Speaker 3: worse off or collectively worse off. And this is the
Speaker 3: basic problem that human morality is designed to solve. Right,
Speaker 3: So we have positive emotions and negative emotions that we
Speaker 3: apply to ourselves and that we apply to.
Speaker 2: Others in order to motivate us to be good hurders.
Speaker 3: Right, So if you're if if you're a good hurder,
Speaker 3: you have my gratitude. If you are a cheat and
Speaker 3: herder who secretly grows herd, then you know you have
Speaker 3: my anger and perhaps even my disgust. But if you're
Speaker 3: if you if you help me out, then you have
Speaker 3: my sympathy. And if I did something bad, I might
Speaker 3: feel guilty. So that sort of suite of feelings carrots
Speaker 3: and sticks that we can apply to ourselves and apply
Speaker 3: to others that have governs life on the new pasture.
Speaker 3: But in the modern world, we've got many tribes, we've
Speaker 3: got many different groups, and there are different ways that
Speaker 3: that that a tribe can get along, right, So you
Speaker 3: could have a more end visualist tribe, let's say, where
Speaker 3: instead of having a common pasture, you just privatize the
Speaker 3: pasture and you divide it up into different plots and
Speaker 3: everybody cooperates by having good fences and respecting other people's property.
Speaker 2: Rights and things like that.
Speaker 3: Or you can solve the problem by having everybody just
Speaker 3: have a common pasture and a common herd, right, and
Speaker 3: then you don't have to worry about who's growing there
Speaker 3: private herds because there is no private herd. And then
Speaker 3: there are questions about how to organize life more generally.
Speaker 3: You know, are we going to have collective health insurance
Speaker 3: for our humans and our sheep? Or can you defend
Speaker 3: your sheep with an assault rifle? Or you know, who's
Speaker 3: allowed to be in charge? Can you be a transgender herder?
Speaker 3: Or you know, and so on and so forth, right,
Speaker 3: And in my little sequel to Harden's parable, I imagine
Speaker 3: something like this. You have a bunch of different tribes
Speaker 3: that are living around this forest, and then one hot,
Speaker 3: dry summer, there's a fire and the forest burns down,
Speaker 3: and then the rains come and there's this lovely pasture
Speaker 3: in the middle. And all of the tribes look at
Speaker 3: this new pasture and they say, nice.
Speaker 2: Pasture, and they all move in.
Speaker 3: And the question is, what's going to happen when all
Speaker 3: of those tribes, with their different ways of life, with
Speaker 3: their different religious practices, with their different gender roles, with
Speaker 3: their different ideas about violence and peace, with their different
Speaker 3: ideas about individualism versus collectivism, etc.
Speaker 2: What's it going to be?
Speaker 3: Is it going to be a bloodbath where it's just
Speaker 3: a fight of all against all and the winning tribe
Speaker 3: emerges and imposes their tribal culture on everybody else, or
Speaker 3: is there going to be some kind of new way
Speaker 3: of organizing things that.
Speaker 2: Deals with a modern culture.
Speaker 3: Right, And this is I think exactly what's going on
Speaker 3: in the United States right now and what's going on
Speaker 3: in other countries, where one solution is essentially to say
Speaker 3: blood and soil. This country is for this particular tribe
Speaker 3: that got here first, that has historically been in charge.
Speaker 3: Let's say we are Whites, we are Christians, we have
Speaker 3: European heritage, we have certain ways of doing things and
Speaker 3: other ways that we don't do things, and.
Speaker 2: This is what this country is really about now.
Speaker 3: Of course, in reality that that tribe is not really
Speaker 3: a single tribe it itself is an amalgam of tribes.
Speaker 3: You know, the Germans and the Irish didn't always consider
Speaker 3: themselves the same people. But you know, at least there's
Speaker 3: something closer to a smaller culturally identified US, right. Or
Speaker 3: you can try to have a more modern, pluralistic country
Speaker 3: where you say, all right, there are many different tribes
Speaker 3: with many different cultures, and what we need is something
Speaker 3: like what I call a metamorality. That is where a
Speaker 3: morality is a system that enables a group of otherwise
Speaker 3: selfish individuals to get along as a tribe. A metamorality
Speaker 3: is a moral system that enables a group of otherwise
Speaker 3: tribalistic tribes, where tribalism is essentially selfishness at the group level, right.
Speaker 3: A meta morality is something that enables a group of
Speaker 3: distinct tribes, different cultures, different different people of different backgrounds,
Speaker 3: maybe racist or religions, to.
Speaker 2: Get along together in a modern context.
Speaker 3: And I think that what we're figuring out right now
Speaker 3: in the US, in Europe, in India, in Brazil, in Israel, Gaza,
Speaker 3: is are we going? Is there going to be a
Speaker 3: big us? Are we going to live in a real
Speaker 3: sort of modern modern democracy where power is truly shared
Speaker 3: among groups with different histories and traditionally different moral ideals,
Speaker 3: Or does democracy only work when you have a sort
Speaker 3: of core dominant tribe and guests right as long as
Speaker 3: they're well behaved?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And I think that is the big political question that
Speaker 3: we're that we're facing.
Speaker 1: Give us an example where our gut reaction sort of
Speaker 1: morality is exactly the wrong thing in a modern global context,
Speaker 1: large scale policy decisions, things involving climate or pandemics or
Speaker 1: risk of Ai.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I would say, you know, cultures can be
Speaker 3: more individualistic or collectivist, and I think you see this
Speaker 3: playing out in a lot of the issues that you mentioned.
Speaker 2: Is ate the case of pandemics.
Speaker 3: There's a real trade off there, right, that that that
Speaker 3: the pandemic restrictions really restricted people's individual freedom, restricted their
Speaker 3: individual economic freedom, their ability to make money. And in
Speaker 3: a country that doesn't have a strong social safety net,
Speaker 3: telling people that they who don't who can't work from home,
Speaker 3: that they're not allowed to work, I mean that's like,
Speaker 3: in some ways, like an economic prison sentence.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, there was a real disease
Speaker 3: and we didn't really understand that, and people were dying.
Speaker 2: And you know, and and and and.
Speaker 3: More people interacting with each other would predictably lead to
Speaker 3: more death. And so there was a trade off between
Speaker 3: saying we have a collective problem and we all have
Speaker 3: to make sacrifices to solve it, or saying, well, there
Speaker 3: are trade offs here, and we're going to let individuals
Speaker 3: or or churches or businesses or cities and towns or
Speaker 3: whatever it is make their own decisions about how to
Speaker 3: navigate the trade off between freedom and public health. Similar
Speaker 3: when it comes to climate change, right, I mean, it's partly,
Speaker 3: you know, a debate about the background evidence and whether
Speaker 3: or not it's real.
Speaker 2: But I think behind.
Speaker 3: That is a set of different orientations where some people
Speaker 3: are very skeptical of the idea that there is this
Speaker 3: global problem and we all have to change the way
Speaker 3: we live and make sacrifices in order to address it,
Speaker 3: versus people who they're going to set a very high
Speaker 3: bar for the evidence before they give up their individual
Speaker 3: freedom to you know, drive the kind of car they
Speaker 3: want to drive, or pay pay a gasoline tax, or
Speaker 3: vote for politicians who want to you know, change the
Speaker 3: way we get our energy and make electricity prices possibly
Speaker 3: more higher, at least in the short term.
Speaker 1: So, given everything that you've studied about the brain and
Speaker 1: moral decision making, if you were advising a government or
Speaker 1: some international body, what would you advise them about decision making?
Speaker 3: So I think there are sort of two level here, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, Partly, you know, I'm person with my own values,
Speaker 3: and then there's sort of strategy. Whatever your values are. Now,
Speaker 3: my values tend to be for the big us that
Speaker 3: I am. I'm not a big fan of ethnic nationalism,
Speaker 3: and I would like to see us be a more
Speaker 3: effective pluralistic democracy, right, that's my goal. But that's you know,
Speaker 3: if you're a true believer in a tribal way of life,
Speaker 3: you might just say, well, I oppose that, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to fight you every step of the.
Speaker 2: Way whichever you choose.
Speaker 3: But I'm now speaking from the perspective of sort of
Speaker 3: a big tent, big us kind of of person. I
Speaker 3: think the biggest lesson is you have to work. You
Speaker 3: have to meet people where they are. You have to
Speaker 3: understand that people who have different feelings than you do,
Speaker 3: people who have different views about divisive moral issues, they
Speaker 3: don't have to be evil to come to a different
Speaker 3: conclusion from you, partly because they may just have different values,
Speaker 3: and partly because they have made different background assumptions either
Speaker 3: what they've heard from the people they trust about you know,
Speaker 3: particular questions. You know, is climate change reel and things
Speaker 3: like that, or or or or you know that background
Speaker 3: values that come from their their their their upbringing, whether
Speaker 3: it's you know, secular or religious. And so I think
Speaker 3: that you know, people on the left, especially often shoot
Speaker 3: themselves in the foot by being maximalist and by saying
Speaker 3: Anyone who doesn't meet all of these demands right now
Speaker 3: is evil and terrible and wants to you know, doesn't
Speaker 3: care about human rights, doesn't care about the people who's
Speaker 3: whose whose freedoms let's say, are are are are in question,
Speaker 3: and are just bad people who need to be defeated,
Speaker 3: right And I think that that approach it's very good
Speaker 3: for winning votes within your subset, within your wing of
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party, or power in parallel, your right most
Speaker 3: wing of the Republican Party. But then you have a
Speaker 3: hard time bringing the larger US together and speaking to
Speaker 3: you the sixty seventy eighty percent who actually has a
Speaker 3: fair amount of agreement on policy and doesn't want either
Speaker 3: what the extreme right or the extreme left is offering.
Speaker 3: So my general advice is to be pragmatic and strategic
Speaker 3: and be flexible enough to form the kind of coalition
Speaker 3: that can actually move things forward and not insist on
Speaker 3: total moral victory.
Speaker 1: Now, excellent, Okay, So so far we've been talking about
Speaker 1: it's the complexities in the brain that lead to decision
Speaker 1: making in the moral domain. But I want to turn
Speaker 1: out to the fact that you've actually been building things
Speaker 1: to try to steer moral decision making in a better way.
Speaker 1: This is games, platforms interventions. Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so thanks, this is something I'm really excited about,
Speaker 3: and I'm really excited that you're joining the Pods Fight
Speaker 3: Poverty program. I'll say more about that and what our
Speaker 3: goals are, but let me say a little bit about
Speaker 3: the science behind how this got started on my end. So,
Speaker 3: one of the things that's most that are frustrating about
Speaker 3: the trolley dilemas, in a particular one like the footbridge dilemma,
Speaker 3: is that there is no satisfying solution that if you
Speaker 3: say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge, yes,
Speaker 3: you know you're saving five lives within the world of
Speaker 3: this scenario, but it's going to feel like a horrible
Speaker 3: act of violence, and you'd say, I wouldn't trust somebody
Speaker 3: who's who would be willing to do that or at
Speaker 3: least feel comfortable doing that.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, if you say no, you can't
Speaker 3: push the guy off the footbridge, well, then there are
Speaker 3: five times as many people dead as necessary, and that's
Speaker 3: pretty bad too, right, And I think that as long
Speaker 3: as our brains work the way we work, you can
Speaker 3: have an answer. But it's never going to be a
Speaker 3: completely satisfying answer. In other domains, you actually can find
Speaker 3: a satisfying answer. And in particular, what I have in
Speaker 3: mind is the domain of charitable giving. So this begins
Speaker 3: with a kind of superpower that we have that most
Speaker 3: of us don't.
Speaker 2: Realize that we have.
Speaker 3: For those of us who you know, at the end
Speaker 3: of the year have an extra few hundred dollars or
Speaker 3: a thousand dollars or even more than that, the amount
Speaker 3: of good that we can do is enormous, but it
Speaker 3: requires doing it strategically. When I first sort of learned
Speaker 3: about this, you know, I thought the difference between a
Speaker 3: really effective charity and a charity that's not very effective
Speaker 3: would be something like the difference between someone who's really
Speaker 3: tall and someone who's not so tall. So a really
Speaker 3: tall person might be fifty percent taller than someone's who's
Speaker 3: pretty short. But in fact, the difference between the most
Speaker 3: effective charities and ordinary charities is more like the difference
Speaker 3: between redwood trees and little shrubs. You need one hundred
Speaker 3: times different or close to a thousand times different. So
Speaker 3: let me give you an example.
Speaker 2: There is a.
Speaker 3: Disease called trachoma that is not common in the US,
Speaker 3: but common in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa.
Speaker 3: And this is a disease that infects people's eyes and
Speaker 3: can cause people to go blind, not as common in
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 2: In the US, people are blind for other reasons.
Speaker 3: And if you want to help a blind person in
Speaker 3: the US, one thing you could do is support the
Speaker 3: training of a seeing i dog.
Speaker 2: Training a seeing eye dog costs about.
Speaker 3: Fifty thousand dollars, well worth it for the effect that
Speaker 3: it has on someone's life, but fairly expensive as.
Speaker 2: Something you can do to improve some of life goes.
Speaker 3: A surgery that can prevent tracoma in a country in
Speaker 3: Africa can cost less than one hundred dollars, which means
Speaker 3: that you could fund over one hundred, maybe close to
Speaker 3: one thousand trachoma surgeries, preventing hundreds of people from going
Speaker 3: blind in the first place, for the cost of helping
Speaker 3: someone who's already blind in the United States.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm not.
Speaker 3: Saying that we should just forget about people who are
Speaker 3: blind in the United States. It's these people are humans.
Speaker 3: They are part of our community. And you know, I'm
Speaker 3: not saying to hell with them, but I think it
Speaker 3: would be a moral mistake to ignore the enormous sort
Speaker 3: of turbocharge good that we can do by finding the
Speaker 3: most effective ways to help people, typically overseas, not because
Speaker 3: they're far away, but because the money goes so much
Speaker 3: farther and the problems are so much more dire and widespread.
Speaker 3: So you know, the funding surgeries for tracoma is one example,
Speaker 3: distributing insecticidal malaria nets for about five thousand dollars on average,
Speaker 3: you can save somebody's life. Basically, this is distributing a
Speaker 3: thousand malaria nets at the cost of five dollars each,
Speaker 3: incentivizing mothers to have their children vaccinated. That can save
Speaker 3: about on average, rue life for three thousand dollars. And
Speaker 3: then there are things that have enormous improvements on people's
Speaker 3: quality of life, so deworming treatments. So in other parts
Speaker 3: of the world, people often children are beset by parasitic
Speaker 3: worms that colini people's in digestive tracks very painful and
Speaker 3: makes it hard to go to school and learn. And
Speaker 3: for less than a dollar, you can provide a deworming
Speaker 3: treatment that will rid a child of of of of
Speaker 3: intestinal worms at least for a while until they get
Speaker 3: their next treatment. For one hundred dollars. That's one hundred
Speaker 3: children who are in a better position to go to school.
Speaker 3: And when those kids go to school, of course, they're
Speaker 3: more likely to earn money later in life and have
Speaker 3: long term positive effects. And that's just in the domain
Speaker 3: of of of global poverty and health. I'll mention one
Speaker 3: other charity, which is Give Directly. This is a charity
Speaker 3: that it is not focused on a specific intervention, and
Speaker 3: those interventions often have sort of in randomized control trials,
Speaker 3: the most bang for buck, but something that takes a
Speaker 3: little bit more of an expansive view, this is giving
Speaker 3: people money directly. And the way this happened was giving
Speaker 3: give directly was started by economists who were studying the
Speaker 3: efficacy of different types of health and poverty interventions. And
Speaker 3: they said, well, we're good scientists. We need a control condition,
Speaker 3: like what's standard of care, what's baseline? And they found
Speaker 3: that there wasn't one. There was no sort of standard
Speaker 3: thing to do. So they said, okay, well, let's just
Speaker 3: take as our baseline. What would happen if you took
Speaker 3: the money that you could use for this program and
Speaker 3: just gave it to people directly. And what they found
Speaker 3: was that just giving money people directly had better outcomes
Speaker 3: than most of the things that people were trying to do,
Speaker 3: and so they started this organization called GiveDirectly, which was
Speaker 3: superpowered by the advent of digital banking. So you know,
Speaker 3: in places where there are no telephone polls, right, but
Speaker 3: there are satellites overhead.
Speaker 2: You know, people in.
Speaker 3: A remote poor village in Rwanda, someone there can have
Speaker 3: a cell phone which enables them to do digital banking,
Speaker 3: which opens up a world of economic opportunity. So give
Speaker 3: Directly gives people money directly, and they can spend it
Speaker 3: on immediate necessities, on food, on medicine, and then once
Speaker 3: those basic needs are taken care of, they know what
Speaker 3: to do. They can you know, and infrastructure, fix the
Speaker 3: roof in your house, or they can do things that
Speaker 3: can enable a more long term income.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So if you want to start a business and you
Speaker 3: need a little motorcycle to get around so that you
Speaker 3: can sell your goods, you need to be able to
Speaker 3: make that capital investment. And so you know what I
Speaker 3: like about this, and I think a lot of people
Speaker 3: like about give directly is you know, it's not giving
Speaker 3: someone to fish, and it's not teaching somebody to fish.
Speaker 3: These people already know how to fish, so to speak.
Speaker 3: This is giving somebody the money to buy, you know,
Speaker 3: the fish for today, but also a fishing rod that
Speaker 3: they can use, and they already know how to use,
Speaker 3: and they just need to get over that economic hop.
Speaker 3: So this is an incredible charity and this is one
Speaker 3: that will that we're actively supporting with this program that
Speaker 3: we're doing with podcasts. And I'll say a bit about that.
Speaker 3: But back to the psychology, right, as I said with
Speaker 3: the Footbridge case, you know, you just have this dilemma
Speaker 3: where there's no satisfying solution when it comes to charitable giving.
Speaker 3: There's the default thing that most people do, which is
Speaker 3: to support charities that are personally meaningful to them.
Speaker 2: So you love animals, you support the local animal shelter.
Speaker 3: Your aunt died of breast cancer, so you support a
Speaker 3: charity that does breast cancer research, right, and that is
Speaker 3: a very good and noble and that's like, you know,
Speaker 3: the best of humanity coming out there, right.
Speaker 2: Don't want to say that that is a bad thing.
Speaker 3: However, typically what people feel most connected to is not
Speaker 3: as impactful as the kinds of things that I described,
Speaker 3: like malaria, nets and deworming treatments and trachoma surgeries, and
Speaker 3: and and and giving directly to people in poverty. So
Speaker 3: the conventional sort of thing to do once you're someone
Speaker 3: who's realized we need to be doing a lot more
Speaker 3: super impact stuff is to say to people, hey, instead
Speaker 3: of giving to the local animal shelter or supporting the
Speaker 3: breast cancer research, you really should do this other thing
Speaker 3: that's more impactful. And the problem is that a lot
Speaker 3: of people say, yeah, I get it, but this is
Speaker 3: my aunt, or yeah, I get it, but what I
Speaker 3: really love is animals, right, and and and and you
Speaker 3: know they don't they don't buy it, right. And so
Speaker 3: my then post doc and I Lucius Caviola, who's now
Speaker 3: a professor at Cambridge in the UK, thought is is
Speaker 3: there a third way here? You know, the moral equivalent
Speaker 3: of a third way? And it doesn't exist in the
Speaker 3: trolley problem. And we had a simple idea, which is
Speaker 3: instead of telling people, instead of doing the thing you
Speaker 3: most want to do, do this other thing that's more impactful.
Speaker 2: What if we just said to people, hey, why don't
Speaker 2: you do both?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: So we started running these experiments, and in.
Speaker 3: The control condition, we gave people the conventional choice, it'd said, Okay,
Speaker 3: tell us what your favorite charity is, and you give
Speaker 3: us the link, and then you.
Speaker 2: Say, and here's this super effective.
Speaker 3: Deworming charity that where for one hundred dollars you can
Speaker 3: deworm one hundred kids, for ten dollars you can deworm
Speaker 3: ten kids. We're giving you ten dollars, which you want
Speaker 3: to choose, And still, like eighty percent of people chose
Speaker 3: the charity that they identified originally as their personal favorite.
Speaker 3: Some people chose to switch to the one that the
Speaker 3: Spurts focused on impact recommended, but most people didn't.
Speaker 2: That's the control condition.
Speaker 3: In the experimental treatment condition, we give those two options,
Speaker 3: but we give another option, which is to split the difference,
Speaker 3: or instead of doing all the water or all to
Speaker 3: the other, you can do a fifty to fifty split
Speaker 3: between the charity you love and the charity that the
Speaker 3: experts are saying is super effective. And what we found
Speaker 3: was that a little bit over half of the people
Speaker 3: chose to support to do the split right, which meant
Speaker 3: that more money was actually going to the super effective
Speaker 3: charity by giving people the option to split than if
Speaker 3: you force them to make a stark choice. Then we
Speaker 3: did some research to try to figure out, you know,
Speaker 3: what's the underlying psychology here, And what we found was
Speaker 3: a kind of Trolleysque dual process story, which is to say,
Speaker 3: people have sort of two different urges they're trying to satisfy.
Speaker 3: They want to give from the heart. They want to
Speaker 3: give to the charity that they feel personally connected to,
Speaker 3: but they also like the idea of of doing something
Speaker 3: super impactful. It's just not their top priority if they're
Speaker 3: forced to choose. So what we found is that when
Speaker 3: it comes to giving from the heart, it's not about
Speaker 3: how much you give. If you give fifty dollars instead
Speaker 3: of one hundred dollars to the local animal shelter, that
Speaker 3: feels more or less the same if you And then
Speaker 3: that means if you could give fifty there, then you
Speaker 3: could have this other fifty left over to do something
Speaker 3: that's super duper effective, and that scratches a different itch, right,
Speaker 3: and the overall feeling of satisfaction of doing something as
Speaker 3: we say, you know, smart and from the heart at
Speaker 3: the same time, people really like that that that that
Speaker 3: that combo. So then we all, okay, so that's cool.
Speaker 3: We've got that result, we understand why people do that.
Speaker 3: But then we thought, okay, we could publish a paper
Speaker 3: saying hey, everybody, you should split your donations like this,
Speaker 3: and then it would just die in this journal and
Speaker 3: no one would read it, or if just a few researchers.
Speaker 3: So we thought, okay, we need some way to get
Speaker 3: this out there. Well, what if we had to, you know,
Speaker 3: we incentivize people, say well, we'll add money on top
Speaker 3: if you do these split donations, and as you'd expect,
Speaker 3: people like it even better if we're willing to add money.
Speaker 3: In fact, we found it was like a seventy percent
Speaker 3: boost if we said that we would add add money
Speaker 3: on top. So that's great. But then, of course the
Speaker 3: question is where does that money come from? And then
Speaker 3: what we said was, well, what if we asked people
Speaker 3: who were agreed to split between a personal favorite charity
Speaker 3: and this charity that they just learned about, like the
Speaker 3: deworming charity, said, what if instead of giving the the
Speaker 3: deworming charity, you put that fifty percent in a fund
Speaker 3: that will add money on top for the next people,
Speaker 3: so kind of pay it forward program to keep this going.
Speaker 3: And we found that not everybody but enough people were
Speaker 3: willing to do that such that the money they would
Speaker 3: put into that fund more than enough to cover the
Speaker 3: matching donations for the people who said, now I'll just
Speaker 3: take the matching funds. So we thought, my gosh, this
Speaker 3: could be like a self sustaining virtuous circle where you
Speaker 3: have some people who put money into the matching fund
Speaker 3: and some people who are incentivized by the money in
Speaker 3: the matching fund, and.
Speaker 2: Thing just works.
Speaker 3: So Lucius and his Techi friends, most most notably the
Speaker 3: amazing web designer Fabio kun Uh, created Giving Multiplier, which
Speaker 3: is our our our our web platform which does this.
Speaker 3: And if if if you go to giving Multiplier, like
Speaker 3: what you'd see is you know this description of how
Speaker 3: it works.
Speaker 2: This is giving Multiplier dot dot dot org.
Speaker 3: You'll see a place where you can find your your
Speaker 3: favorite charity. So any charity registered as a five oh
Speaker 3: one C three in the US you enter that. In
Speaker 3: the second thing is a list of the super effective
Speaker 3: charities that we support. So I've named a bunch of
Speaker 3: them UH already so give directly and UH and and
Speaker 3: the Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium, and then
Speaker 3: other ones related to climate change and animal welfare, but
Speaker 3: ones that that that that have a super outsize impact.
Speaker 3: You pick one of those, and then we have this
Speaker 3: cool slider thing where you decide how you want to
Speaker 3: allocate your money between the two charity and the more
Speaker 3: you allocate to the super effective charities from our list,
Speaker 3: the more money we add on top. But you could
Speaker 3: still give a majority to your personal favorite charity and
Speaker 3: we'll still add something on top to both.
Speaker 1: Let me get one thing straight, which is the money
Speaker 1: that I put in. I put one hundred dollars into
Speaker 1: the matching fund that's going to charities. I just don't
Speaker 1: know which ones.
Speaker 3: That's That's right, it's charities that will be chosen by
Speaker 3: other people, future people.
Speaker 1: Excellent, Okay, got it. So tell us about POD's Fight Poverty.
Speaker 3: So we now having over thirty podcasts who are signed
Speaker 3: on and our goal is to raise a million dollars
Speaker 3: and to We're aiming for three villages in the Bikar
Speaker 3: region of Northern Rwanda where.
Speaker 2: People have very little. You know, people are very poor.
Speaker 3: And have are kind of stuck in an economic rut
Speaker 3: where they don't have the resources they need to to
Speaker 3: get out of it. And our goal is to lift
Speaker 3: seven hundred families out of poverty, giving a little over
Speaker 3: one thousand dollars to each family, which can be life
Speaker 3: changing for a family.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 3: Listeners are encouraged to to to go to GiveDirectly dot
Speaker 3: org slash cosmos for for your listeners and giving Multiplier
Speaker 3: is adding fifty percent match while our while our supplies last.
Speaker 3: So we're we're committed to putting up a half a
Speaker 3: million dollars for this campaign, So anything your listeners give
Speaker 3: giving Multiplier will be matching at fifty percent. And the
Speaker 3: results with with give Directly are amazing. I mean, there
Speaker 3: have been twenty five randomized control trials, so gold standard
Speaker 3: experiments with give directly specifically, and they find that that
Speaker 3: that these donations cut infant mortality rates in half.
Speaker 2: And not only.
Speaker 3: Does it help the people who get the money, it
Speaker 3: boosts the local economy by a factor of two point five.
Speaker 2: Right, So this is getting back to this.
Speaker 3: You know a lot of people worry about anti pop
Speaker 3: pretty mechanisms, especially in poor countries. You say, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is just pouring money down the hole where there's some
Speaker 3: temporary relief, but it doesn't really go anywhere. I don't
Speaker 3: want to under sell temporary relief if you're starving or
Speaker 3: if your child is you know, in danger of dying
Speaker 3: of malaria or whatever.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: Temporary relief matters, right, but you also want to think
Speaker 3: about the long term. And part of what's great about
Speaker 3: gift directly is that it gives people the power, the agency,
Speaker 3: the flexibility to take the money that they that they're
Speaker 3: getting that they can use beyond you know, immediate survival,
Speaker 3: to build things that that can help them survive. And
Speaker 3: we see this in the growth of these local economies
Speaker 3: as a result of this. So that's what we're trying
Speaker 3: to do. And thank thank you David for being part
Speaker 3: of this.
Speaker 1: And are you or someone else doing follow up studies
Speaker 1: to see what happens with this village over the next
Speaker 1: five ten years.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, So give give directly. You know, they track the
Speaker 3: effects of every every campaign they run, all of the
Speaker 3: money that they spend.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you know, by the way, Josh, you and
Speaker 1: I have known each other for our whole careers and neuroscience,
Speaker 1: and it's so wonderful to see you taking all the
Speaker 1: stuff you know about decision making and morality and build
Speaker 1: moral technologies. So the last thing I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: you about is you had a Nature paper earlier this
Speaker 1: year about a game that people could play to cross
Speaker 1: to bridge political divides. Tell us about tango.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let me say a little bit about how
Speaker 3: I think all of this stuff fits together.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: You know, I was one side of conference recently and
Speaker 3: I had to have like my little name tag, and
Speaker 3: at this particular conference, you had to put like a
Speaker 3: one line thing on, like what's your deal?
Speaker 2: Like what are you about?
Speaker 3: And I never had to do that before, And I
Speaker 3: thought back to, you know, what are my heroes Peter Singer,
Speaker 3: philosopher and his notion of the expanding circle, the idea
Speaker 3: that over time humans have gone from you know, not
Speaker 3: just caring about their family and their immediate relationships, but
Speaker 3: you know, the circle of moral concern has grown from
Speaker 3: the village to the tribe, to the chiefdom to the
Speaker 3: nation and and and beyond nations. And what I sort
Speaker 3: of put on that little name tag, which I now
Speaker 3: think of is my tagline, is is expanding the circle
Speaker 3: of of of of altruism and cooperation and as we're
Speaker 3: trying to do and with the trolley stuff, you know,
Speaker 3: in this weird way, it wasn't weird to me, but
Speaker 3: it's it's sort of maybe not obvious.
Speaker 2: That was the goal there as well.
Speaker 3: I thought the way to move forward is we need
Speaker 3: a better moral philosophy. And there's I'm a consequentialist utilitarian,
Speaker 3: although I don't like the U word. I prefer to
Speaker 3: call myself a deep pragmatist. But there are these objections
Speaker 3: to that kind of view, like is it okay to
Speaker 3: tell one person to say five people you know in
Speaker 3: the footbridge case?
Speaker 2: And isn't that wrong?
Speaker 3: And I wanted to understand the psychology so that I
Speaker 3: could say, look, this philosophy makes sense, but we have
Speaker 3: these over generalizations of certain moral instincts that block us
Speaker 3: from there. So it was a kind of philosophical approach
Speaker 3: to expanding the circle. As I've gotten older, I thought,
Speaker 3: you know, instead of like kind of trying to fly
Speaker 3: up into the clouds, do some philosophy and then come
Speaker 3: back down to earth, I'm just going to drive along
Speaker 3: the ground, take you know, what we think we know
Speaker 3: about human nature and pack that up and and see
Speaker 3: what we can do with it. So giving multiplier, I see,
Speaker 3: is about expanding the circle largely from nation to world
Speaker 3: that we are supporting charities where we in the affluent
Speaker 3: West primarily can do an enormous amount of good for
Speaker 3: other human beings who happen to not be our co nationals, right,
Speaker 3: and then from also from species, the human world beat
Speaker 3: beyond that is one of the charities we support is
Speaker 3: the Humane League, which you know, there are billions of
Speaker 3: animals that suffer in factory farms every year, billions, Like
Speaker 3: you know, it's hard to get your head around this,
Speaker 3: right if aliens were visiting Earth and saying, like, what's
Speaker 3: the greatest moral tragedy here? Depending on what you believe
Speaker 3: about animal consciousness, you might think that it's actually factory farming.
Speaker 3: That's a whole other story. But giving multiplier supports charities
Speaker 3: that are looking to end tortuous, miserable factory farming, either
Speaker 3: through policy or through developing meat alternatives. And so that's
Speaker 3: going from nation to world and from world to other species,
Speaker 3: human world, other species. Tango goes back to our earlier
Speaker 3: discussion about the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy
Speaker 3: of common sense morality and going from a tribal us
Speaker 3: to a larger, multi tribal us. So when you know,
Speaker 3: when I finished my my and published my book Moral Tribes,
Speaker 3: which he mentioned. You know, I was happy with the
Speaker 3: book in a lot of ways, but I also felt
Speaker 3: like it was kind of an unfulfilled promise in some ways.
Speaker 3: I mean, you look at a book like that, the
Speaker 3: titles Moral Tribes callon Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between
Speaker 3: Us and Them, you might think that that book was
Speaker 3: going to give you like practical tools to solve tribalism.
Speaker 2: And I think it falls short in that way.
Speaker 3: It really gives you sort of a kind of guiding
Speaker 3: general philosophy and some psychological under self knowledge that could
Speaker 3: help you get to that philosophy, but it's not really
Speaker 3: immediately applicable tools. And so after that kind of era,
Speaker 3: I said, all right, I want to try to try
Speaker 3: to fulfill that promise. So I thought, okay, well, what
Speaker 3: does it take to solve tribalism? What does it take
Speaker 3: to bring groups with distinct identities and with some animosity
Speaker 3: towards each other together? And I thought, okay, well, I'm smart.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'll have some big new theory about how to
Speaker 3: do this. And I looked at the existing research and
Speaker 3: what I kind of concluded was that actually, we've got old.
Speaker 2: Ideas that are pretty good, like really good. Right.
Speaker 3: So on the biological front, everything points to the idea
Speaker 3: that mutually beneficial cooperation is the key. Mutually beneficial cooperation
Speaker 3: is the story of life, starting with primordial soup, and
Speaker 3: basically molecules come together to form cells because cells can
Speaker 3: can survive and reproduce in ways that loan molecules can't.
Speaker 3: And cells form more complicated eu caryotic cells, which form colonies,
Speaker 3: which form organisms, which form societies.
Speaker 2: And all the way out up to tribes and nations
Speaker 2: and occasionally United nations.
Speaker 3: Every living system is built and sustained on mutually beneficial cooperation.
Speaker 3: It's parts coming together for teamwork because they can accomplish
Speaker 3: things that they can't accomplish on their own.
Speaker 2: But there's competition at every level, right.
Speaker 3: Organisms are competing to survive, societies are competing with each
Speaker 3: other for.
Speaker 2: Resources, and so the.
Speaker 3: Challenge is can we cooperate at the highest level, right,
Speaker 3: whether that's tribes within a country or countries in the world, right,
Speaker 3: And that may not come so naturally, right, so we
Speaker 3: need tools for that. That's the biological perspective. On the
Speaker 3: social science side, it's much the same story. You go
Speaker 3: back to ideas from the fifties, like Gordon Allport's famous
Speaker 3: contact theory. Basically, what he argued is that the way
Speaker 3: you bring groups that are intentioned together is well, you
Speaker 3: need to have them come to some kind of contact,
Speaker 3: and it has to be under the right kinds of conditions, essentially,
Speaker 3: conditions that are conducive to cooperation.
Speaker 2: And you know, Alport wrote.
Speaker 3: This all out of the fifties, but really this is
Speaker 3: very intuitive. I mean, people have surely recognized for centuries
Speaker 3: that you put people on the same team, and they're
Speaker 3: more likely to get along, right, if there's really a
Speaker 3: shared purpose there.
Speaker 2: Right, So if.
Speaker 3: We've known this for decades, if not centuries, then why
Speaker 3: have we not solved our human tribal problem?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And I think the answer is twofold. The optimistic part
Speaker 3: is to some extent we already have. I mean, as
Speaker 3: my colleague Stephen Pinker has documented with a lot of
Speaker 3: resistance to people who don't like.
Speaker 2: This conclusion, but it's very well supported, is that.
Speaker 3: Humans have over millennia and centuries and decades become overall
Speaker 3: more peaceful and less milor right.
Speaker 2: And although there's been a.
Speaker 3: Reversal in recent years unfortunately, but nothing close to sort
Speaker 3: of at the level of the overall arc of our history.
Speaker 3: And really every modern city is a testament to the
Speaker 3: idea that people with different cultures, different races, different ethnicities
Speaker 3: and religions can view each other more as fellow citizens
Speaker 3: and cooperation partners than as enemies to be distrusted.
Speaker 2: Right, So these.
Speaker 3: Can grow organically, right, And we see this in other
Speaker 3: contexts where there's an immediate need. During World War Two,
Speaker 3: there was you know, we needed soldiers in the United States,
Speaker 3: and there was a push to have racially integrated units
Speaker 3: in the military. But some people thought this would never work.
Speaker 3: You could never have white people and were then called
Speaker 3: negroes fighting with each other against the common enemy. And
Speaker 3: some people said, well, we've got to try, and we
Speaker 3: think this could work. And it worked beautifully, right, And
Speaker 3: the US military was far ahead of the rest of
Speaker 3: civilian life in the US in terms of racial integration. Likewise,
Speaker 3: in sports, you know, just when there's a warn tobe
Speaker 3: one or a game to be won, you want the
Speaker 3: best players playing together and working together. And that's a
Speaker 3: kind of circumscribed context where that can to work. So
Speaker 3: part of the answer is in the right when circumstances
Speaker 3: demand it, you can get cooperation across tense lines of division.
Speaker 3: The challenge is how do you engineer it where the
Speaker 3: ball doesn't seem to be rolling in the right direction right,
Speaker 3: and where we have these divisions, in these levels of
Speaker 3: distrust and disrespect, how do we engineer that deliberately? So
Speaker 3: my thinking was, well, we need a way to get
Speaker 3: people from opposite sides of whatever divide the same team.
Speaker 3: So you know, this can be Republicans and Democrats in
Speaker 3: the US, or Jews and Arab slash Palestinians in Israel, Gaza,
Speaker 3: or Hindus and Muslims in India. You got to get
Speaker 3: people on the same team. Okay, how do you do that? Well,
Speaker 3: you need to put people on the same team. It
Speaker 3: needs to be scalable and it needs to be fun.
Speaker 3: My lab's answer to that was a cooperative quiz game
Speaker 3: which was originally developed with my amazing grad student Van
Speaker 3: d Philippus, and now those work is being led by
Speaker 3: the amazing Lucas Woodley.
Speaker 2: So this game is now called Tango.
Speaker 3: And the way it works is you sign on to
Speaker 3: the game and you answer a few questions about yourself
Speaker 3: and in the typical version of this. In the experiments
Speaker 3: I've done, you might say I'm a Republican or I'm
Speaker 3: a Democrat, or I'm a liberal arm a conservative. You
Speaker 3: also answer kind of fun, you know, get to know
Speaker 3: you questions. You know, what's your favorite superpower that you'd
Speaker 3: like to have, and things like that, and you you
Speaker 3: answer those questions that you get paired up with your
Speaker 3: partner and you have a little get to know you
Speaker 3: chat and you say, oh see, we both would like
Speaker 3: to have the power of flying or invisibility or whatever
Speaker 3: it is. And you can see you know what the
Speaker 3: person's politics is. And then you get into the game.
Speaker 3: And in the most interesting case, you're playing the game
Speaker 3: with someone who is, let's say in the US politically
Speaker 3: different from you. You know, they're a Republican or a Democrat,
Speaker 3: and you're on the opposite side, right, And the game
Speaker 3: starts out with questions that are designed to have a
Speaker 3: kind of complementarity, but not anything that's likely to be
Speaker 3: divisive or controversial. So, for example, Republicans are more likely
Speaker 3: to be able to answer questions about the show Duck Dynasty,
Speaker 3: and that this is not stereotypes like this is validated
Speaker 3: with data, whereas Democrats are more likely to know about
Speaker 3: stranger things or the queen's gambit. Right, So you have
Speaker 3: questions where one side's likely to be able to help
Speaker 3: the other side and vice versa, and that gets people
Speaker 3: into the game. Yeah you're a Democrat, but that's okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah you're a Republican, but that's okay. We're winning, we're
Speaker 3: high fiving, we're playing together. Everything's great. Then you get
Speaker 3: questions that are about more divisive issues but still grounded
Speaker 3: in facts. So if you ask what percentage of gun
Speaker 3: debts in the US involve assault style weapons? If you ask,
Speaker 3: you know, liberals, they're likely to say, I don't know,
Speaker 3: thirty percent, fifty percent. If you ask people who are conservative,
Speaker 3: they're more likely to say no, assault weapons or which
Speaker 3: they wouldn't even call assault weapons, are like, you know,
Speaker 3: two percent, it's more mostly handguns. Right, So that's a
Speaker 3: case where the conservative Republicans are more likely to be correct.
Speaker 3: But then if you ask a question about, you know,
Speaker 3: how who commits more crimes per capita, immigrants or native
Speaker 3: born Americans, Republicans think are more likely to think that
Speaker 3: immigrant crime is sky high, when in fact, immigrants commit
Speaker 3: relatively few crimes.
Speaker 2: That's the case where the liberal is more likely to
Speaker 2: be right.
Speaker 3: But at this point in the game, you know where
Speaker 3: you might think, oh, man talking about immigration or guns,
Speaker 3: one of them, it would be a disaster. But by
Speaker 3: then you're into the game, you're playing your teammates, you've
Speaker 3: worked well together, you've already gotten to know each other
Speaker 3: as respectful, decent people. And people just play the game
Speaker 3: and they try to win those points and some you know,
Speaker 3: and everyone gets to be surprised and everyone gets to
Speaker 3: be right, and you have this cooperative experience and at
Speaker 3: the end, people like say these tiery goodbyes, Man, it
Speaker 3: was so much fun playing with you. I hope it
Speaker 3: could meet in real life and things like that, and
Speaker 3: it's great. What we want to know is what is
Speaker 3: the effect of having this cooperative experience. So we've now
Speaker 3: done a series of randomized control trials with online with
Speaker 3: Republicans and Democrats, and what we found exceeded our expectations.
Speaker 3: We find it playing tango with someone who's politically different
Speaker 3: from you for less than an hour has positive effects
Speaker 3: that last at least four months. So we ask people
Speaker 3: how warm or cold do you feel towards the other
Speaker 3: party on a scale of zero to one hundred. How
Speaker 3: would you divide one hundred dollars between a random Republican
Speaker 3: and a random Democrat? Do your respect Republicans or Democrats?
Speaker 3: Do you trust Republicans or Democrats? And what we found
Speaker 3: is that when people play with someone like this, to
Speaker 3: take sort of the best known measure, which is that
Speaker 3: feeling thermometer, people play the game, and immediately after the game,
Speaker 3: we see like, on average, a nine point increase in
Speaker 3: warmth towards the other party, where you can think of
Speaker 3: it as a decrease in cold And you know, we say,
Speaker 3: well nine points, what does that mean. That's the equivalent
Speaker 3: of rolling back about fifteen years of increased polarization in
Speaker 3: the United States. Now that's the immediate effect. Of course,
Speaker 3: you know, it's not magic. It doesn't last. But when
Speaker 3: we when we go back to people four months later,
Speaker 3: we still see an effect of you know, that's the
Speaker 3: equivalent of like five years of depolarization. And the cool
Speaker 3: thing about the game is that you can play it
Speaker 3: more than once. It's like Jeopardy, you could play every night, right,
Speaker 3: And we also find that people really like it. So
Speaker 3: our our median enjoyment rating was ten out of ten.
Speaker 3: Now these are research participants who were not expecting to
Speaker 3: have a lot of fun, so you know, it's not
Speaker 3: surprising that they really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: But we.
Speaker 3: See these long lasting positive effects you with this scalable
Speaker 3: tool and in a way that people really enjoy. So
Speaker 3: that's the that's the main points of the paper that
Speaker 3: we published in Nature Human Behavior this summer.
Speaker 2: In the last year or two, we've been doing is
Speaker 2: working on getting this out in the world.
Speaker 3: We are building an online tool where people can play,
Speaker 3: but where that's not there yet, and I can talk
Speaker 3: about kind of what we're doing and what we need
Speaker 3: for that. But our most immediate traction has been in
Speaker 3: higher education. And you know, historically when it comes to
Speaker 3: psychology research, like testing college students is what you do
Speaker 3: on the cheap, you know, just a convenience sample. But now,
Speaker 3: as you know, especially at place like Harvard, higher ed
Speaker 3: is sort of ground zero for a lot of our
Speaker 3: cultural divisions, right, so we have been working with schools
Speaker 3: to deploy this, you know, not as research participants, but
Speaker 3: to students living their lives.
Speaker 2: And our biggest events so.
Speaker 3: Far have been at orientation for Harvard and Cornell and
Speaker 3: Penn State, at Harvard this year, we did the entire
Speaker 3: incoming class of twenty twenty nine, so over a thousand students,
Speaker 3: and we're using some different questions. It's not so much
Speaker 3: about your political party as like more like are you
Speaker 3: politically liberal or conservative? And we're also asking questions about
Speaker 3: things that are more divisive within a campus like Harvard,
Speaker 3: so like Israel, Gaza, sorts of things in addition to
Speaker 3: things like guns and immigration and stuff like that. And
Speaker 3: what we found is that playing the game for about
Speaker 3: twenty minutes had significant positive effects on acknowledgement that the
Speaker 3: other side can make valid points interesting, getting to know
Speaker 3: people who are different from you, comfort voicing controversial opinions
Speaker 3: on campus. My favorite pair of results for Harvard because
Speaker 3: I think this speaks to a challenge that we are
Speaker 3: really working to address. When when liberal students at Harvard
Speaker 3: at orientation in August played with a conservative student, they
Speaker 3: were seven points less negative towards conservatives, so that's also
Speaker 3: a pretty big effect. And then when conservatives played with
Speaker 3: a liberal student, they felt five points more open towards
Speaker 3: expressing controversial views on campus, So.
Speaker 2: This is opening people up.
Speaker 3: We also sort of allowed people to take two behavioral steps.
Speaker 3: So we asked people at the end, he said, Hey,
Speaker 3: you played with your partner anonymously, do you want to
Speaker 3: meet your partner?
Speaker 2: If so, leave your contact info.
Speaker 3: And we found that eighty percent of students gave their
Speaker 3: contact info. So you've got people shifting attitudes in making
Speaker 3: campuses more open, more more hospitable to both liberals and conservatives,
Speaker 3: and people taking steps in the real world. And then
Speaker 3: the most fun part of all of this is that
Speaker 3: the winning teams went to Fenway Park for a Red
Speaker 3: Sox game, and so people went with their partners, whether
Speaker 3: they were similar or or politically different.
Speaker 2: So we are, you know, rolling this out.
Speaker 3: And I think of this as kind of the opposite
Speaker 3: of divisive online content. I mean, you think of what
Speaker 3: internet trolls and operatives have managed to do by creating
Speaker 3: by spreading ill will and just trust sort of at scale,
Speaker 3: using very engaging content like fact checking. Can't fight that.
Speaker 3: The opposite of that is not, you know, an earnest
Speaker 3: fact check, although we need to do that. It's something
Speaker 3: to compete with it in a positive way, something that
Speaker 3: people find engaging, that millions of people can do, and
Speaker 3: that trust spreads respect and trust at scale.
Speaker 2: Not that everybody has to agree.
Speaker 3: We're not trying to change people's minds about issues, but
Speaker 3: getting to the point where people can disagree respectively and constructively.
Speaker 3: So our goal over the next year is to get
Speaker 3: this out there and have you know, thousands, if we
Speaker 3: can millions of people have the positive experience that people
Speaker 3: on college campuses and in our experiments have already had.
Speaker 1: Good for you, were you surprised that this works anonymously
Speaker 1: because the contact hypothesis suggests that you need to get
Speaker 1: people together in person to have conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's a very astute point.
Speaker 3: That was one of the things we weren't sure about, right,
Speaker 3: And you know, one thing we wondered is do we
Speaker 3: have to do this like on zoom where people give
Speaker 3: their names and you can see their faces. And one
Speaker 3: of the cool things about this was that you didn't
Speaker 3: have to have that conventional name in a face contact
Speaker 3: to get this to work and to have the positive
Speaker 3: experience generalize to other people. It's possible that things will
Speaker 3: work even better if we have those kinds of more direct,
Speaker 3: face to face with a name kind of contact. It's
Speaker 3: also possible that there's something stealth effective about having it
Speaker 3: be anonymous because it makes people feel more safe, right
Speaker 3: that that that you can kind of ease into it
Speaker 3: where you know, they don't know who I am, they
Speaker 3: don't know my name, they don't.
Speaker 2: Know what I look like.
Speaker 3: No one's taking a screenshot of me and putting it
Speaker 3: online and say who is this person? Right, So there's
Speaker 3: a kind of safety that comes with the anonymity, and
Speaker 3: then they can move from the anonymous context too in
Speaker 3: person like the students did at Harvard in the dining hall,
Speaker 3: or if we're when we're building this out online, we
Speaker 3: might people give give people the option after they've already
Speaker 3: had a friendly anonymous interaction to say, Okay, here's my
Speaker 3: here's my social media handle for this platform or whatever
Speaker 3: that we're both on, and you know, people can get
Speaker 3: to know each other, you know, online and in something
Speaker 3: that's more real life than than than an anonymous game.
Speaker 3: So these are great questions that we want to experiment
Speaker 3: with when we when we have the chance.
Speaker 1: Great one last question, if everyone on earth understood moral
Speaker 1: psychology as you do, what is one belief or habits
Speaker 1: that you might hope would change individually and institutionally.
Speaker 3: I think that at the psychological level, like at the
Speaker 3: level of managing one's own mind, people would have a
Speaker 3: little distance between their first thought, which may or be right.
Speaker 2: Or may maybe not, and what they actually act on.
Speaker 3: And you know this is there's a great bumper sticker,
Speaker 3: don't believe everything you think, which I think sort of
Speaker 3: beautifully captures this logic that people need to sort of
Speaker 3: recognize that what you feel or your first thought is
Speaker 3: not necessarily the right thing to do. And then I
Speaker 3: think we need to have a kind of openness where
Speaker 3: we recognize that whatever our differences, we have so much
Speaker 3: in common.
Speaker 2: We all, you know, we all want to be happy.
Speaker 3: We don't want to suffer. We care about our families,
Speaker 3: we care about our friends. We want to live in
Speaker 3: a world that's almost all of us. Want to live
Speaker 3: in a world that's peaceful rather than the violent. We
Speaker 3: want to live in that larger US cooperative world at
Speaker 3: least where we're not harming each other. Right, But the
Speaker 3: terms of that cooperation are what's challenging. And what I
Speaker 3: would hope to see is when people can sort of
Speaker 3: let go of the grip of their prejudices and first judgments,
Speaker 3: that people would be willing to take a step and
Speaker 3: act on their curiosity and be able to say, okay,
Speaker 3: can I get to know people who are differently, not
Speaker 3: making any promises that I'm going to agree with them
Speaker 3: or want to be their best friend or go into
Speaker 3: business together, but at least try to understand. And if
Speaker 3: I think we took those first two steps of liberating
Speaker 3: ourselves from our intuitions and then liberating ourselves from our isolation,
Speaker 3: only learning about other people from what bad actors on
Speaker 3: social media have to say and encountering people more directly,
Speaker 3: those things would make us see the humanity in each
Speaker 3: other and we be I think that we would be
Speaker 3: able to solve our biggest problems.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Josh Green. I still have
Speaker 1: a bunch to say, but I want to remind you,
Speaker 1: if you're able, go to GiveDirectly dot org slash cosmos.
Speaker 1: I have that link in the show notes as well.
Speaker 1: Give directly dot org slash cosmos. Donate whatever you can.
Speaker 1: All the money goes directly to people in deep need
Speaker 1: in Rwanda. No contribution is too small. So let's come
Speaker 1: back to this idea of Josh's that our moral brains
Speaker 1: are beautifully designed for a world that no longer exists.
Speaker 1: They're exquisitely tuned for small circles, for family, for friends,
Speaker 1: for the people whose faces we can see and whose
Speaker 1: pain we can imagine. Our brains give us loyalty and
Speaker 1: indignation and gratitude and guilt. This is why we'll run
Speaker 1: into the street to pull a stranger out of traffic,
Speaker 1: and also why we can feel more outrage about one
Speaker 1: vivid case than about a million small tragedies. But the
Speaker 1: challenges that define our modern life, from pandemics to global poverty,
Speaker 1: to AI alignment to the future of democracies, these aren't
Speaker 1: small circle problems. In many cases, they are statistical, They
Speaker 1: are long term. They're geographically scattered. No one is knocking
Speaker 1: on our door asking for help. There's no crying baby,
Speaker 1: there's no burning building across the street. And so our
Speaker 1: moral camera, as Joshua might put it, is just aiming
Speaker 1: at the wrong scale. This is a design mismatch. We're
Speaker 1: running stone age moral software on a planetary scale system.
Speaker 1: So that leads us with two tasks. At the individual level.
Speaker 1: The task is to become more bilingual in our own minds,
Speaker 1: to recognize our emotional reactions, to recognize what they're good at,
Speaker 1: but also to notice when they're steering us wrong, to
Speaker 1: be willing when the stakes are big and abstract, to
Speaker 1: flip into manual mode, to ask, okay, what actually helps
Speaker 1: the most people? What am I missing because it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel emotionally salient. At the societal level, the task is
Speaker 1: to build better scaffolding around these imperfect brains. That means
Speaker 1: institutions and norms and technologies, and even little bits of
Speaker 1: choice architecture like the kinds of moral technologies that Josh
Speaker 1: is working on, building things that nudge our caring in
Speaker 1: directions that our emotions wouldn't find on their own. We
Speaker 1: need systems to help our local, tribal instincts add up
Speaker 1: to something globally wise. That doesn't mean turning ourselves into
Speaker 1: cold calculators. Our emotions are part of what we're ultimately
Speaker 1: trying to protect. Love and loyal and solidarity. These are
Speaker 1: the best parts of being human. So the idea is
Speaker 1: to use reason and evidence not to erase those feelings,
Speaker 1: but to aim them. So the question to carry forward
Speaker 1: from today's episode is how can each of us expand
Speaker 1: the circle of the people that we care for and
Speaker 1: feel responsible for without losing the warmth of the.
Speaker 2: Small circle we evolved for.
Speaker 1: That's a simple question that sits at the intersection of
Speaker 1: our psychology, our politics, and fundamentally the future of our species.
Speaker 1: Once again, if you can go to GiveDirectly dot org
Speaker 1: slash cosmos. This is one way to turn your moral
Speaker 1: intuitions into action and take everything we're learning about the
Speaker 1: brain and use it to optimize how we go about
Speaker 1: trying to heal the world. Go to eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: podcasts for more information and to find further reading. Join
Speaker 1: the weekly discussions on my substack and check out and
Speaker 1: subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
Speaker 1: episode and to leave comments. Until next time, may your
Speaker 1: moral instincts be kind and generous. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos.