Michael Shermer with Mona Sue Weissmark — The Science of Diversity (Science Salon # 129)

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before i introduce today's guest i want to tell you about our sponsor of our podcast the great courses plus this is the teaching companies the great courses which i've been listening to for decades they have thousands of professionally produced college courses or courses taught by college professors the best in the country and they they've introduced a uh app for your phone it's thegreatcoursesplus.com and so you just touch the app and you open up the course you want to listen to the one i just started this week is on understanding the old testament by professor robert d miller ii so um just to give you an idea of how it works you just touch on the lecture you want to listen to like number one is the old testament is literature number two is the genesis creation story i'm right now on uh chapter three lecture three what god intended for adam and eve oh boy this should be interesting any case this is great because you can skip around if i find one of the lectures boring i just skip to the next one uh you can do it on audio or video and all from your phone it's it's a terrific way to consume content particularly during social isolation during the pandemic it's a great way to become an autodidact so if you want to know more you can if you sign up through my podcast then you get um a free trial so go to thegreatcoursesplus.com salon that's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash salon and you get a free trial with free access to the entire library of all these hundreds and hundreds of courses and thousands of lectures so with that i'll introduce my next guest my guest this week is mona sue weismark and to discuss her new book the science of diversity mona is an american clinical psychologist and social psychologist researcher and author whose work on diversity and justice has received global recognition she's best known for her ground-breaking social experiment of bringing children of holocaust survivors face to face with children of nazis and later grandchildren and great-grandchildren of african-american slaves with descendants of slave owners she's also a professor of psychology and author of numerous journal articles and books including doing psychotherapy effectively justice matters legacy of the holocaust in world war ii and the new book that we're discussing from oxford university press the science of diversity this was a most interesting conversation because we're recording this right in the middle of 2020 and so i wanted to talk to her about black lives matter the metoo movement reparations uh the response to covet 19 and income inequality and the sense of injustices that a lot of people feel uh going on in society now and this is what she does uh so we got into some really interesting discussions about all of that plus the nature of the self and free will and what is justice and uh you know how to um bring about restorative justice across multiple generations and because this conversation we're having now on reparations for example and um and in the black lives matter movement i think this is not going to just fade away when things return to relative normalcy in society i think this is going to continue so i wanted to get her opinions on all these and uh and she gave them to me very thoughtfully so with that i give you mona sue weisbach mona thanks for coming on the show thank you very much as we can see over your right shoulder is the science of diversity okay i read it all but maybe the last 10 pages i didn't quite get to that and um i have to say this was um it was really kind of a mind blower i think it's a super important book for a couple reasons but in in part if uh if we had to re-title your book i i'd almost call it if this wasn't already taken how to be an anti-racist uh or anti-misogynist or anti-bigot or whatever because the science of diversity shows you that we really can't stereotype and prejudge people based on these collective categories we put people in which is all good but the problem is is that you're a scientist and your program here is in a way i think challenged if not undermine the scientific enterprise in which we want to find collective laws that explain old actions of you know human action based on generalization so he might say something like the number one predictor of violence is maleness or something like that and uh and what you've showed is that it really comes down to so many individual differences that it's really really hard to tell determine causality in in human action so i i thought you know in this conversation i want to start there the science of how we understand human action and then move in the direction toward understanding the black lives matter movement the metoo movement of the movement of nationalism and you know ethnonationalism and and all that populism we're going through since 2016 because um and now you know reparations are back on the table as a conversation these are hugely important issues um that are on the table for 2020 and probably in the next several years and and you're a scientist addressing these what are really policy issues so i think um you know every everyone in congress should read your book before they vote on on these kinds of things because uh the science behind it really matters so let's start there what what got you into uh studying the science of diversity um well you said so many things right before that question but we're going to get into that so i'll just focus um would you like me to well i'll answer two questions one uh you brought up the difference between applying scientific thinking to what i would call deterministic systems where you can predict and use statistics to to make predictions which of course you can in many cases it's how the insurance business stays in business i look very much at dynamic system and interactions so it's people studying people and then unpredictable things happen in those situations so therefore i'm not so as as interested in predicting as i am and looking at topics that people bring to the table that are polarizing and how can we study that um what led me to that was your question what led me to that or what the motivation is about your background your background is really interesting as a child uh survivor or a survivor of the holocaust and that led you into trying to understand what it's like to be a nazi and what it's like to be a victim of a nazi uh and the psychology of that i mean that's really hugely interesting and important and drove so much of psychological research in the 60s and 70s and so i think as far as i could tell that kind of moved you personally into understanding human behavior um you know and that actually brings me that ties into what we talked with what we just mentioned the unpredictability right so i kind of distinguish between signs with an upper s as a noun and scientific thinking and i know you talk a lot about that too michael in your lectures and so when you're using scientific thinking you're also beginning with a guess why is that hypothesis how did i get to that hypothesis so absolutely yeah my personal ground is what led me with some research looking at children of survivors for example and children of descendants of slaves and how that impacted them and a few studies on descendants of nazis and a few on descendants of slave owners no one had actually thought about what will happen if you bring the two groups together and and what happens dynamically in those conversations how does the past impact them how was that injustice transmitted that brings us to black lives matter to reparations to everything we're seeing today so i was motivated to look at that because in my own personal history i went through that process i mean i might add i had the least traumatic childhood i know of my parents were very devoted that's actually important to to mention um grew up on a farm in finland new jersey you know my first friends was a dog and a chicken and my only memory of the past we're seeing the numbers on my parents arm right and then later on i would inquire about that um and so then i began to be curious what if an injustice cannot be balanced in the first generation right then what happens how does that play out psychologically i'm not talking legally or economically so that's what led me to look at the psychology of injustice and the diversity of science yeah um yeah our listeners can can find your videos of you getting these survivors together in the same room it's it's really an incredible uh thing to witness and and i think if we just start there with the survivors of the children of of nazis and the children of uh holocaust survivors and i think the relevance to the reparations question is that most of us who are neither victims or perpetrators or nth generations thereof feel like what does this got to do with me why do i have to pay for you know past generation sins and uh you know we shouldn't you know uh hold the children of the of the perpetrators accountable and and so i don't get it uh what what's that what's the issue here um so talk for a moment about um why a let's say child of a nazi guard at a concentration camp would feel any guilt he didn't do anything he wasn't even born yet or the child of one of the surviving victims you know why would they feel whatever it is they feel since it didn't happen to them and i think the the generalization is here for most of us who in america think like well i wasn't a slave holder i wasn't even a descendant of a slave holder i came here last week or my parents came here you know 20 years ago or whatever what does this got to do with me and and for the children of former slaves their nth generation away now you know why should they get uh you know a check every month for this when it didn't happen to them so um um so so take it from there what what what is the psychology or the neuroscience behind you know the carrying on of of these kinds of atrocities past many generations well i think you summed up the feelings really well on both sides so i think descendants of victims and whether it's um holocaust descendants of holocaust survivors or descendants of slave owners it's natural to feel psychologically speaking not everybody i think that's really important to mention i don't mean to be lumping all descendants there's a lot of variety within the groups but a lot of descendants of victims and i think it's important to say here victims these are not victims and victimizers these are the descendants of there's a need for justice that the sense that something was done to their ancestors and that no one has paid for it and again i mean psychologically and so wanting some kind of closure wanting to hold someone responsible what we found when we brought the two groups together both slave owners and descendants of slaves and not descendants of nazis and descendants of survivors that well the other side as you so aptly pointed out not everyone on the other side feels responsible for what their parents or great great grandparents did in fact at one of our meetings a descendant of a slave owner said i'm not sure you could say this today someone in class the other night asked me if we did this meeting today what would be different and what would be different is i think with the canceled culture it would be harder for people to be um honest and truthful but this was you know some years ago when the descendant of a slave owner said you know slavery was legal then that's a good example of someone he didn't mean it in a mean way he was not an extremist he just said it was legal and i don't feel um guilty for it on the other hand was a descendant of a slave owner whose parents are very active right now in ohio and the kkk and she did feel very guilty very responsible so there's a variety but on the flip side what happens is the descendants of victims because they have this need to see justice psychologically the sense of balance someone pay it's very difficult for them to hear the other side like when you said when you explain that many descendant many people in our country whites do not feel that they are responsible for what happened that's very hard for someone on the descendant of a slave to hear and i know that i mean personally and professionally when i went through my process you want all the germans to feel responsible for what their forefathers did very fascinating and that is the science of diversity what i talk about when we bring these groups together to study them is and this just happened in class last night so if you can have a conversation on these polarizing topic and you can this is very difficult to do but if you can step out and say wow okay this descendant of a slave owner has said slavery was legal and he does not feel responsible or this descendant of a nazi just said you know what i've suffered because i have been made to feel responsible for something that i never did right and in fact we did a statistical analysis we used lag sequential analysis to look at the conversational patterns and what we found this is not really that surprising but we actually studied it is that each side and these are descendants felt in some sense like victims the so-called descendants of the victimizers felt that they have also been suffering at some level because they're held responsible for something that they don't feel that they did um the conversations that are on that video people can watch if they go to your webpage that you reprint in the book some of the comments i'll just read a few just to give people an idea of what goes through people's heads call it rationalization or whatever steve pinker calls it the moralization gap which he got from roy baumeister's book uh called evil in which roy interviewed the serial killers in prison and to a man and they're pretty much all men you know they had they gave what they thought were perfectly good reasons for why they did what they did you know he had it coming he insulted me in front of my girlfriend or he he you know or she cheated on me so i killed her whatever you know they had what in their heads were you know this is why i did it i'm not an evil person this was an act that you know had to be done for moral reasons in other words there's kind of a moralization behind these crimes but those are the actual victims and victimizers you're talking about here i'm talking about the not the defendant that's right the actual that's right yeah yeah um well that's actually i no i want to pause there because that's very very different and so i can see where you would use like a rationalization or moralization but these are i'm talking about descendants who had no right part in any act and so i would not use the word moralization or justification i not at all because they they didn't not commit an act that's what makes the topic polarizing right because they each have even though i i mean you know people will even though it's hard right i mean i would say personally that my mother suffered more than anyone right she lost all her family and my father and when a descendant not a nazi a descendant of a nazi said to me but you know what we suffered too our cities were bombed my parents were forced from my viewpoint i've suffered more my parents suffered more but from their viewpoint that's why i would not call it moralization or justification their view is they suffer too and i cannot deny their viewpoint um if i want to have a conversation if i want to pose on them my view that i suffered more we're probably not going to get very far in the conversation that's what the signs of diversity method tries to do tries to look at these polarizing topics without these per um without in advance judging the other person's viewpoint that's sort of a but i want to emphasize that's not true for the first generation obviously if you've committed a crime you've committed a crime i'm talking about descendants and that's so important although i do want to talk about the actual victims and and restitution i mean i saw this yesterday with there was a news story about um the settlement of um harvey weinstein i think it was like 20 million or 40 million dollars or something i guess his insurance companies are going to pay out to these women but several of them are on the news last night saying it's not the money and it isn't gonna restore the damage done to me it helps but you know i need something more um you know so that there is still that kind of gap there between and of course harvey's sitting there going what did i do wrong you know so um just a couple passes yeah yeah a couple passages from your book i mean that's more that's complicated i mean that's i agree i don't study that at all between the victim and victimizers i don't study right so i i don't i don't have i don't know anything about that really but just back back to your book here here's a couple of passages that i thought were were quite striking another child of a nazi described it like this i think the americans and the allies went too far i think of the bombing of german cities like dresden was unfair and i don't think it was right that the allies tried the nazis it should have been done by german courts and the other thing is uh not all germans were nazis the first people killed in dachau were german people not jewish people i think the jews want to make it seem like they were the only victims but they're not the german people suffered too and people need to know it but germans are afraid to talk about it well everything that guy said is is true i mean you know we we did bomb dresden in hamburg and there was moral there were moral debates about whether we should commit mass bombing at the beginning of the war when the germans did it to the british in the in the blitz uh the feeling was like that's an immoral act that's like chemical warfare we just don't do that that's out of bounds and you know within two years we were doing it um and you know so he's he's right in that sense i don't know how you counter that other than what you just said you don't counter it you just acknowledge yes that's true and then because you don't want to get into i guess a victimhood olympics or something like who had the most suffering and that's actually the really key point michael because it's very very difficult so when people say oh just be rational um and have a rational discussion about this so i would say if that's not always possible because there are strong feelings on this right so why can't you acknowledge the other side right what makes it difficult to hear a german say that well the other side feels like their family suffered so much and that is disrespectful you see that today with descendants of slaves if the descendant of slave owner says it's legal i suffer too you know we lost a lot of um um economic i mean we lost a lot during the civil war what have you it's very hard for the the other side to hear that and it's not easy so the thing is using the the science of diversity method in these conversations which i think we're not used to our educational system doesn't train us to do this i mean i know you know this but we don't have these conversations on who's right on who's wrong that's not the purpose of the conversation the purpose of the conversation is to keep it moving and to see if you can understand your own strong feelings about it and not necessarily change your mind but hear the other side and that is not easy very very difficult i recall it took several days of long days of conversations for you to make much progress on that front correct but i mean even this is happening in my classes i've been teaching this for 20 years just had a class last night and it was very fascinating the students had to do they're doing a project a measuring identity people's um ethnic identity and so we had them in breakout groups and there happened to be an african-american student uh talking to a white student and they were talking about um their identities giving each other the measure and she had an insight in it where she felt very much like you know i've suffered because i have a history of slavery i don't even know my background very well where my african roots are but i'm proud of it because i know they survived and she was very surprised in this meeting to discover that the descent that this uh white person was ashamed of being white never occurred to her and then she began to wonder did anything anything in her behavior impact the person to feel that way so there's a recognition in this process of the other person's um views and how they might contribute to it so i'll give you one other example that was in the descendant of slaves i mean nazi survivor there was a descendant of a um high-ranking nazi whose family was whose father was responsible for the murders of many many jews and then she said that she grew up really guilty felt terrible and afraid and it was the first time descendants of uh survivors thought wow i didn't realize she was suffering and they kind of reached out about that but that's a process right that's part of that restorative justice movement that's underway now i wrote about this in the moral arc that you know that somebody who just burgles your house you know they they don't want to hurt you they just want your stuff because whatever their motive is but of course for the victim this is incredibly disruptive i mean it just like ruins their lives for months or years and you know they can't sleep at night and they're anxious and so on and and to the burglar it's like this was nothing so uh you know i read a few accounts of these where you know they would get them in the same room together and uh and usually the burglar said gee i had no idea it was so disruptive you know i just wanted if you i just wanted your tv set or whatever and uh and that kind of acknowledgement of uh you know i really ruined your life made the victim feel better and uh but what i am suggesting michael is that in the next generation down if you want to have a conversation again these are not people who did anything to each other they're innocent they're both innocent and if you begin with a restorative justice in mind that the other side has to apologize or make amends or um give you reparations that will end the conversation that will not restore justice because you're actually imposing a model on it and these are descendants and both sides do not have not perpetuated any kind of crime on the other so to really have this dynamic conversation you cannot begin with expecting an acknowledgement or an apology right because that will end the conversation because many of the other descendants don't feel they have to apologize or acknowledge you know so that makes it more difficult in a sense what do you think about these truth and reconciliation uh movements in different nations where the nation apologizes like australia apologized to the indigenous peoples and canada apologized to the first peoples and those sorts of things is that at least a good good start yeah i think that my opinion is not really so important because you know i i what their reasons are whether they were political reasons or whether they had other reasons i don't know my take on it would be psychologically uh in in groups i can't really comment on that i'm i'm familiar with that because when we started this these meetings in the 90s people kind of took some of the research i was doing and said oh but now we need to ask you know we can do this at the nationwide but the goal is different so if we're just trying to study this and understand this and apply the science of diversity method you can't i would say you're imposing a model and expecting people to apologize paradoxically may create a bigger problem and that's what we're seeing in the united states today there are many people who resent having to apologize and i'm not saying personally whether i agree or disagree i'm just saying those opinions are out there whether we like it or not in fact recent pew data showed that for example supportive black lives matter if you look at blacks and whites 71 of black strongly support it and it was not 31 percent of whites support it big gap between democrats and republicans 62 of democrats 7 republicans this isn't surprising there's a huge polarization but if we're coming forth and saying oh you have to apologize for slavery no matter how convinced i personally may be of that or you or anyone else the fact is there's going to be a whole other group of people who have a completely different view so if our goal is to move forward in a conversation we have to consider that our view is not acceptable to other people right well okay so where do you go from there i mean here last week last sunday's new york times magazine cover story is you know the case for reparations that wasn't the title i think it was what we are owed right and um her case was not moral so much as economic you know and it sort of forces those of us that don't think about these things uh though that is us you know sort of middle-aged middle-class white guys that you know haven't been affected by this uh directly or even indirectly you know while i really hadn't thought about the trajectory of economic inequality over the last century and a half and you know how that results in different school systems and educational outcomes and therefore different incomes and wealth disparities and that sort of thing so there she seems to be taking not a moral case or even a psychological one but just more of a kind of an economic calculation that yeah and again i don't address economic or political i'm not an expert in political or economic but i can tell you pretty confidently that there will be a lot of people who will resent any kind of economic reparations and furthermore there'll be a lot of other groups of people who say wait a second he's had advantages i've been left behind so though that person may feel strongly about the economic uh impact of slavery and how that's affecting and income inequality today there are many people who disagree right okay how do we get past that impasse then because that's probably not going to change anytime soon no correct well one way to get past the impasse is to the notion that you can impose and control and demand what other people should be thinking they're accepting from a you know psychological viewpoint there's the notion that yeah it's nice to feel right but it's entirely possible that what you're thinking and feeling is wrong from the other viewpoint you have to consider the other viewpoint but furthermore practically pragmatically if you impose something it may have a backlash and though you're trying to solve one problem the solution to the problem is actually creating a bigger problem which is resentment and anger about what's being imposed on so first you have to begin using this kind of scientific thinking not science with an upper s scientific thinking to look at both these viewpoints and to consider both these viewpoints and give them their equal due that's the only fear-sided method we actually have not talking again legally that's a whole other issue politically but as far as i know the wonderful thing about scientific thinking it's our only universal method globally accepted for advancing our way of learning so an understanding and so therefore if you can teach scientific thinking which i think i've i've done it i've seen it firsthand it's not that difficult on any polarizing topic we're talking about one reparations you can talk about for example um are the police biased right uh in terms of uh shootings are they more likely to shoot a black person suspect than a white there's conflicting evidence on that that we've many people think yes they are there's equally good evidence no they're not um again i'm not weighing in on this i'm not saying personally what i think it's not really relevant what i'm saying is let's look at the mixed evidence teaching people how to sort through mixed evidence which in the social sciences is mostly right well most contradictory findings read in your book that came to mind that that the killing of of george floyd by derek chovan and you know immediately the mind goes to you know anecdotal thinking and then stereotyping okay i've seen three videos in the last two weeks of white cops killing black guys therefore cops are racist right and but the science that you describe in the book really we ca we can't even in principle make that kind of generalization unless it was every one of them um because what we really want to know is not do cops white cops kill black people it's why did that guy derek chauvin kill that guy at that moment why did that happen correct but also we want to know so roland fryer did a great study out of harvard showing yes the police sorry showing the police are not biased great study it's you know it's been looked at a lot and um he was very surprised he happens to be african-american he was very surprised of course then cody ross did another study and he showed the exact opposite that in fact white cops are biased right in shooting so yes i agree michael i think you're saying two things one is the outlier is very interesting the specific case the dynamics but it's also interesting to look at the conflicting evidence why these two studies and how can people make sense of this the average citizen and the analogy i use in class i don't know if it's a good one but i like it we you know we expect people to take a driver's license test so we're safe on the road i don't think it's much more difficult to teach scientific thinking to analyze conflicting results so that people can see both viewpoints and that will uh help them understand why and and you know people are polarized then in that example how would you square those two different findings well those two findings are very interesting they use different data sets prior use police reports which some people say are not reliable um and ross used open data source so they had completely different data so the inputs were different and they used different statistical analyses but this is the case with so many studies finding conflicting results i mean take the pandemic should we wear the mask some studies say yes some studies say no so understanding and i wrote an article about this on psychology today i don't remember if i actually got into it in the book called evaluating psychology research i think it's really important because sometimes even personally you need to make a decision i broke my arm a few years ago should i get that thing whatever you put in it or not had to look at conflicting studies and then i had to see am i an outlier which is really important but these are all really teachable skills and then you have an informed group of citizens who are able to judge and evaluate and right now i think we've lost faith because whether intentionally or not and i certainly have done this and i can tell you an example of something i'm not proud of and how i was blinded by one view but then if we're able to do that you're more likely to see both viewpoints not as equally true but just different perspectives the question of equally true is a really i think deep question so um because it gets at the question of do i mean morally equivalent i've got a whole lot to say it's it i don't mean they're necessarily morally equivalent but as i just gave you that data we know that 60 62 percent of democrats think black lives matter and seven do not well can we look at some research to to find out why they'll always be conflicting data so we don't come to it to decide is ross's study better than friars the point is is to look at it and to see what are why are these two studies different take implicit bias that's a very important but there's a lot of yeah let's talk about that yeah yeah what do you think of those studies and they've been challenged now well i think you wrote a great article on it are we all racist which summarizes the major issues um which but that's what i mean about applying critical thinking i'm not trying to judge does it exist or doesn't exist the point is there's a bunch of studies that say measure's not reliable take it today take it tomorrow you're going to get different it's like 0.3 other studies say it's also not predictive you may score as a bias right but have nothing to do with behavior but then there's a group of some studies that say no it is predictive you did the right thing in your article you looked at the meta-analysis which is a way to summarize all of the studies and then it kind of tells you something um and then you so you have people discuss that so you don't have people cherry-picking oh you see it yes this is the answer no this is not the answer we're not cherry-picking we're looking at both sets yeah findings yeah i think a meta-analysis is super important whenever you encounter one of these cutesy psych studies like if you keep your desktop clean you'll donate more money or if you're at the top of the escalator you'll donate more money than at the bottom of the escalator you know these things are just too they're too kitschy in a way let's wait till there's a hundred studies and see what comes out something like that also the convergence of evidence uh argument i like to use uh or what william yule called the the consilience of inductions we have independent lines of inquiry all pointing to one uh particular conclusion or not so climate change for example is my favorite example of this or theory of evolution you know there there's not one factoid that supports these theories there's you know thousands tens of thousands accumulated from independent lines of inquiry from different fields so it's not like the the climatologist is meeting with the the geologist and the glaciologist and the guy that studies clouds whatever that's called or the guy that studies ecological development of flowering plants that are now flowering earlier and earlier in the year because of the temperature and on and on and on it's not like these guys are all meeting on the weekends to get their stories straight for the the you know the liberal conspiracy against the right you know it's that it's that because they're independent our confidence that the conclusion that global warming is real and human cause goes up so even though there's uh counter studies here and there that people can point to uh mostly conservatives point to these uh we can you know sort of counter that with this massive data from either meta-analyses or these these kind of convergence of evidence from these independent lines the other thing i want to comment about that i got from your book too is this um that we were just talking about the cops there is no the cops which cops which police i mean and which encounters because i i read the staggering numbers recently of something like 370 million in interactions between the police and uh citizens every year in the united states so that's over a million a day and so you know you just do a lar law of large numbers calculation if you if you have it maybe 0.001 percent are just psychopathic that should never have a gun and a badge and you just multiply that by the 370 million encounters you're gonna get you know some of these just uh real outlier uh incidents is where somebody dies and and you know from a science of diversity point of view i'm asking is there a problem to be solved other than that particular guy should have never been given a badge what can we do to screen those types of psychopaths out of the police department and that sort of thing and that's really important it's not only the cops i think at least my read of news and media and everything is everything there's a lot of lumpers out there so there are the whites the blacks um and it it's constant um you know even in popular books now you know i know the whites think this i know the blacks think this i think or the cops or what have you and reality and i'm using that word carefully it shows us that within any group there's a lot of variety there's not only differences between groups there's tremendous differences in groups gould wrote a brilliant article on this i can't remember the title exactly it had median and mode and it was why and when it was applying to his cancer and he was trying to yeah but it's it's a very deep article because i think it gets to exactly what you're asking about i mean what you're referring to which is the importance of understanding the outlier the outlier isn't just a freak right we all are truly unique so sometimes you want to understand things on average like if i'm in the insurance business but other times if you're talking to black people or white people it's more useful to say who is this individual person that i'm talking to now and that's very different than addressing the group or the police for example well yeah yeah no no that's that's right yeah so to our listeners that was steve gould's essay the median is not the message so he's given this cancer diagnosis based on on the median statistics but he wants to know what what's the spread what's the standard deviation could he be one of the outliers and it turns out he was um even though cancer ended up getting him in the long run 25 years later or something like that different kind of cancer in that case but you know when i watched that tape of derek chauvin killing george floyd you know it's almost like the eichmann trial i didn't see a you know an evil racist guy with hate in his heart he looked like a cold killer like like this is just another day at the office i mean it was really in a way more frightening uh because it's like how would you recognize that it's what hana rent meant by the banality of evil you'll you look at eichmann in the in the bulletproof box and you think that's the guy i thought he'd be really monstrous looking and he looks like a paper pushing bureaucrat and not that that derek shoving looks like a paper pushing bureaucrat but he didn't look like oh i'm just you know have evil in my heart well actually when i did the meeting between the descendants of so i don't i can't i don't know much about the nazis from uh research point of view i actually was in contact with ricardo eifman eifman's son oh really and oh wow yeah and so he he was actually extremely helpful in getting uh helping me find distances of nazis well and this is what i mean this is why i looked at the transmission of the impact of an injustice so he ricardo is the youngest son felt and this is back to your question of variety within a group he became an archaeologist i've been out of contact with him for 15 years now so he was a professor of archaeology and he said to me it's no surprise i would be in archaeology he was always digging in the past and if i had to characterize his inheritance of this leg legacy he was burdened by it he really wanted to rectify it he was um troubled by it had some guilt about it he felt responsible to reach out and that's what i mean so was he a victim of his father's misdeeds from his perspective again i would say are you kidding me i've suffered more than he did as a descendant having lost everything but from his viewpoint it was very hard carrying that legacy very hard um however there's variety within the group and this is really important his brother did not feel that way right one of his siblings his brother sort of supported justified so and the same thing with descendants of survivors right i had some people who said i'm not coming to this group to meet the other side i'll never talk to the other side there's variety within the group that's why it's very hard to lump any group and make these generalizations for those who are affected like um the eichmann's son what's his name again rudolph oh ricardo um what what is the vehicle of transmission of the guilt from the father to the son yeah that's a good question and i would say all of us your included michael have all gotten something from our parents that were transmitted through stories whether the stories were told through conversation that's such an important question because that's a lot of my research and i talk about that in chapter two and three that's what i called our attachments our identities how is that transmitted well there's so much biological evidence and i don't think this is a big surprise that we are very attached most of us to our caretaker whether that be our mother our primary caretaker and we identify then right very strongly biologically and that becomes who we are and that's how it's transmitted through the stories we try to make sense of it where did his guilt come from a word of my sense of wow this was so unfair what was done to my parents well then maybe there were the personality characteristics i was sensitive to that i was curious i was inquisitive sounds to me like ricardo was too he became an academician he was curious he brought that kind of digging in the past kind of mind to it um but that's where the personality variables i guess come into it but that's why it's unreasonable to think that rationality will by itself solve any of these polarizing topics that's like asking someone like an irish and a catholic uh who've been at war for 500 years in the troubles oh just forget about that just come to the table and let's talk rational right their very identities for 500 years or wrapped up in this and it's like asking someone to let go of who they are it's just not possible very unlikely i should say very unlikely same thing with that same thing with israeli arab conflict and the attempt at a two-state solution seems like a no-brainer to those of us on the outside just do it correct but that's why rationality can be a strong bond between people but it's not going to work it's apt to fail when there are these strong feelings tied in with our identities especially if there's been a traumatic injustice in the legacy and so then you have to have through this scientific method this ability to look at the polarizing side to look at the evidence which and this may be surprising there's no expert here each person does it themselves and that kind of gets you to understand the inner workings of how you're understanding the conflicting data i think i think you hinted in your book i think on possible epigenetic changes uh due to trauma victimization ptsd and so on that can be transmitted across generations i think this is still pretty controversial and fairly new research but um is there are you confident that this may pan out as something that's also a vehicle of transmission it could be i'm not i mean i do write about it and i'm not an uh an expert on epigenetic research but it seems to me if you just understand that as the evolution of cultural learning it just makes sense to me right and maybe that's not sufficient way to understand it that things are transmitted to us through learning and that's all i need to understand about epigenetics that my parents experiences your appearance experiences at some level were transmitted to us and has some impact on our identity that are not it's not necessarily transmitted through genetic information but through cultural information that's the real point for me about epigenetics and why wouldn't that be i mean culture is so important to human evolution we have changed so much i mean sometimes i'm amazed it's what's happening with the pandemic and how much behaviors are changing how we are adapting right it's an it's it's an instant of learning and our cultural interactions are changing rapidly in three months some people faster than others so that by the way i was thinking about this is why i'm actually really hopeful not optimistic i see that as two completely different things because i think as long as we're alive we can learn humans and also unlearn so that makes me hopeful that these polarizing topics that have brought much conflict today now animosity misunderstandings that through learning we can evolve yeah well you mentioned the pretty dramatic differences in support for black lives matter between republicans and and democrats or liberals and conservatives why is that do you think and what can we do about that right and so that speaks exactly to many of these polarizing topics that i'm talking about i can tell you what we cannot do about it i think imposing a preemptive what should be done for example um xyz is going to breed resentment like if we say we must have um reparation programs well some people will disagree with that so if you want to have a conversation move forward you first have to begin from the point of view that there are two sides and that you have to have a fair-minded way because conflict between the two sides that's reality that's going to go on forever so what is a fear mechanisms for handling that the only thing that i know is being able to look at both viewpoints scientifically and considering both without imposing something that's why i give the example with implicit bias if you begin a mandatory diversity training saying you must get rid of your bias you're already beginning it with the preemptive pejorative telling someone what they must do people who have a different view and don't want to be controlled many people are like that who want to feel like they have a right are going to resent that so even though it may be a great good intentions it's going to backfire also if they're not really racist then you tell them well but unconsciously you are and you don't even know it right so get in there and do the training they're going to resent it even more exactly right and then that's actually what we used to call in psychology a double bind right if you're telling people what they really are and they don't even know it and then using that as evidence you see and haven't even admitted it then they're caught and you're not going to be able to have a meaningful conversation under those conditions you're not going to be able to move forward but i would say if you're using the scientific thinking looking at the both viewpoints looking at the conflicting evidence it is more probable that you will have a dynamic conversation where you're respecting each other's viewpoints not trying to prove that you're right or wrong and by the way that's really important they're not in our society is so much a society of debate with the legal system trying to win my case this method is not about winning your case it's not about showing your right it's not about showing the other person's wrong it's about wanting to move forward in a conversation and i apply that to myself so i might also add i may be wrong completely wrong about this and i would say try it if it doesn't work then stop it but don't take my word for it yeah i have a lot of conservative friends and you know we talk about this when we're out on our bike rides and uh yeah you know they say i don't support the black lives matter movement well do you think black lives matter of course i think black lives matter black lives matter too that made me think maybe that should have been the slogan black lives matter too because that's unobjectionable of course they do um but unfortunately like all social movements the black lives matter movement has taken on a whole bunch of other uh baggage along with it that you know people don't support and therefore they they jettison the whole thing and then that makes it even more polarized yes because it means two things uh someone actually mentioned that in class last night that it's both the movement and it's a and it's a statement and that's true and that's really important yeah because uh you know i will say yes of course black lives matter then you support reparations well maybe not oh so you don't think black lives matter no these are two different things um yeah so and again i was thinking of the research of seth stevens davidovitz who was a google data analyst he wrote a book about this about line and detecting line or whatever i forget the title of it but it was using google search algorithms to see what people look up now this doesn't target on the in the data sets who said it but but geographically you can see where for example people looked up you know n word jokes right after obama was elected and there was a little spike in this uh and it was a spike in sort of these more conservative areas so anyway his whole book is pretty interesting because a it shows that there's still plenty of racists around looking up jokes like that or other things that are characteristic although he did show that by the way people that are likely to look up inward jokes online are also more likely to look up frank sinatra social security things that are indicating that well these are older people in these kind of conservative areas of the country so you know a clearly racism hasn't disappeared it's still around but he did show that you know it is definitely on the decline fewer people are looking up those kind of jokes then maybe 10 years ago so it doesn't go back very far but if you look at the research from pew and gallop going back to the 1950s you know how likely would you be to move out if a black family moved in next door or would you be upset if a member of your family married a a person from another race you know those numbers are all moving in the right direction you know almost to the point where they don't even ask anymore like asking uh is interracial marriage moral or immoral they don't even ask that anymore and you know so i like to say conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s we've made a lot of progress but the problem is it's never going to go to zero right there's always going to be some racist around and if you have a population of 340 million people interacting a billion times a day you're gonna get and everybody has a video camera now you're gonna you're gonna have these incidences that we see pretty much every day on youtube of you know some screaming karen as they're called now uh at a target refusing to put her mask on or yelling at a black person it was just one this morning of a uh somebody had a a black family at a hilton um they were at the pool and somebody said you know what are you doing here are you staying here not an employee just some white woman and uh you know the black woman is like yes we stay here is my key card and and this woman called the desk and they called the police and it was just you know of course it everybody filmed it so you know it's like you're looking at this going god race you know america is the racist nation on earth but no the law of large numbers you know this the statistics are all in the right direction but again there's just enough of these people and it's made worse by what you just said about the kind of polarization you know because uh people are telling them you're a racist no i'm not and then that kind of drives them further apart and then they get mad i'm not going to wear my mask or you know white lives matter and they start shouting these things in defiance and that makes it look even worse agreed so if you were in a room with the the head of the i would say one of the things that's been pretty that i have a lot of confidence in in terms of what you mentioned before where there's you know con there's a lot of research from different uh fields that points out that across globally right all of us have a cross-race what's called cross-race effect meaning we're much more able for example a white person to identify a white face a black person a black face a asian and asian face we don't call this racism we don't call this bias it has some practical problems like in a police lineup if you're white trying to for black trying to look at a white person in a lineup you're likely to get the face wrong okay so there's some practical issues but we don't call the cross-race effect a bias or racism we say people have a preference easier to recognize their own kind and we accept that as a biological limitation in the same way that i have a constraint i can't bend my arm this way we don't say oh you're not flexible we recognize or the same way i can only remember eight digits these are constraints that we have as human beings biological constraints that's what i talk a lot about in the book that's what i meant about attachment so i'm always really cautious when i use the word racist of course i'm not a fan of any kind of violence at all and i say that from someone who suffered violence having no family his family died so i don't say that lightly i'm really not in favor of any violence but i use the word racist carefully because we do have these biological constraints and preferences and i don't see that as a racist thing so yeah so what do we call it i mean maybe xenophobia is too strong just tribal instincts to divide people between self and other our group in group out group something like that and probably a preference yeah because it's familiar and that's not a racist thing can we that's that's a constraint and i think we need to accept that without a judgment about it and again i say that with some confidence there's been at least 600 studies with this cross-race effect and they're not conflicting the only exceptions have been with adoption studies if you're white or black adopted by the opposite then you don't have it as strong can you learn to distinguish other races yeah not easily so uh are these preferences bad should we be aiming to eliminate them i don't know well i don't have the answer one way to address that is if there's policy implications so like for example if you think uh you know mexicans or somebody from an arab country is going to immigrate to america uh they're not going to carry the same values we carry therefore and also maybe they're rapists and disease like contagion carriers and and so forth you know the tropes um therefore we should keep them out or we should restrict immigration so those kinds of categorizations which may start off as just cognitive limitations or cognitive boundaries that we have about judging other people in the modern world of nation states with borders and on those borders or walls and on those walls or men with guns then uh you know then then it does matter and i guess yeah yeah of course yeah yeah i mean but i was talking more in in the viewpoint if you're in a conversation and you want to create a sense of people feeling safe in a conversation to talk about their preferences without feeling judged they're going to be racist and they say i have difficulty actually literally distinguishing people from another race so do they have the space in a conversation to say that i agree with you with policy but again my expertise is not policy uh i didn't mean to um but but i but i like to talk about it because it matters and it's a hot it's a hot button issue and you know you end your book talking about uh the nation state and what that means and the five different theories about that and and then and then the concept of nationalism well that's another one of these hot button issues today the sense that you know america as a nation or england as a nation or germany or france or whatever as if it's a set of characteristics by which you can define the people and you show how difficult that is because there's so much variation within each nation and yet we still seem to hold it as a cognitive category fairly strongly yeah definitely and i mean let's go through those uh i really enjoyed that part of the you know there's five different theories about what a nation is primordialism theory claims that nations and nationalism are natural phenomena so i guess that would be any large grouping of people that are you know feeling in group compared to some out group um perennialist theory reports that nations whether natural or not have existed as long as humans have lived in society so that could be like what maybe a thousand people or ten thousand people it doesn't have to be a nation of millions i guess and then modernist theory claims that nations of nationalism are you know basically the product of the 17th 18th century you know collectivization of these small city-states into larger uh groupings until we ended up with what was it something like i think there was like 500 different european groups in 1500 now there's you know worldwide there's 192 countries so there's been this kind of coalescence of smaller groups in the larger groups i guess that would be the modernist theory then you have ethnosymbolism theory nation formation must be understood by considering the importance of heritage myths memories values symbols so that's that's a little harder to define i guess in terms of how you quantify that postmodernist theory about nations argues that nations and nationalism are narrative and conversational constructions ways of thinking about talking about and acting in the world um so all the i guess which one of those you think you're defining a nation as even though most people haven't even thought about it in those terms kind of sets the stage for what kind of nationalism you embrace if you embrace nationalism at all yeah um and there's uh there's there's a difference so i think we can see that actually with democrats and republicans um that difference in how they embrace nationalism um yeah again conservatives in our um big flag waivers family um flag you know faith the three f's you know when you look at those personality big five studies that you know conservatives tend to be you know more conscientious more closed-minded lower on open-mindedness to experience they tend to be a little more neurotic in the sense of being more anxious about new environments loud noises strange people things like this and and so one theory is that and and we know that at least 50 percent of the of the variation in in the big five personality dimensions is heritable um therefore there's this idea that i'll just kind of refer just a second here that now as we were evolving in these small bands of hunter-gatherers there's a sense that outsiders are dangerous so you have to have some kind of protections against outsiders coming in to contaminate us or kill us or whatever that that's normal and that there's going to be variations within the group some are more open to outsiders coming in and and that kind of diversity is good genetic diversity diversity of new ideas coming into a group but not so much that that the group loses its identity so it seems like there's always this balance between um well john stewart mill said this and also i think it was bertrand russell that you know in the sort of the history of politics you have this there's always kind of a dualopoly no matter how you what you call the different parties they all kind of separate into these kind of left and right and and and you need both because if if it's just up to one they're going to go too far in one direction so that kind of constant pushback and the tension seems to be on this question you know to what extension would be open to bringing in outsiders to our group we need some some some diversity is good but not too much diversity and that conservatives tend to be on the side of let's dial it down and not have too much diversity in liberals the other direction and you you strike some balance there say the immigration policies of japan versus the united states versus some european countries that are that are more liberal on that i don't know if you want to talk about that because you you talk about this a lot in the book about the neuroscience and psychology behind how we feel about outsiders and and other people and groupings like that well i think the uh the statement i would make is whether you are for or against immigration for example or diversity the fact is and this is a universal truth i don't think any listener can disagree with this whether we like it or not diversity is the feature of life whether we're talking look out the window plants flowers and human beings so it's not whether we embrace it or impose it on others it exists in in reality it's a fact in the book i talk about the origins of how we're constantly trying to make sense of the diversity and that's been part of our historical and scientific efforts so it's here and there'll always be conflicting views which is what you're just describing on on how to manage it um but i think you hit it on the head i would say that the conflict between the views is gonna is is not necessarily a bad thing there'll always be conflicting views my work has been how do you um how do you manage or deal or cope with the conflicting views that's what i've tried to put forth really and that's very important i'm not arguing for or against it i'm accepting reality as it is and saying what are we going to do now that it's here how can we understand it okay let's use a real world example let's say you you're the the uh the guide for a three-day all-day conversation between some israeli leaders and some palestinian leaders all right how can we get to a two-state solution go right so again you're bringing it to the policy level i'm not sure i have the expertise um to to be that person but if i was bringing together palestinians and israelis in an informal conversation and then maybe they would apply it to you know the conflict in israel um i would begin what we've talked about the whole time which is each hearing the other side there's three aspects to teaching scientific thinking in these conversations and the facilitator or me whoever is not the expert so it's a great word you use more of a guide and so what the people in these polarizing topics would be doing is first learning about themselves the inner workings of their own mind how are they evaluating whatever the issues are the land their country nationalism the other each person does that differently what is the how are they doing in their own individual minds i don't know that's for them to discover and the second level of learning in this conversation is how whatever view they might be having how is that impacting the other side because what we say and do in conversation has an impact on the other side right so if i say to you you're a racist you're biased you have implicit bias i'm probably shutting down the conversation and it's not going to help us move forward so they're looking at the inner workings they're looking at what impact that has and then they're learning to look at conflicting evidence and make sense of it and then they're coming to the conclusion of what needs to be done but there is no expert telling them what they should do right when i was writing the moral arc it looked like nationalism was kind of on the way out and i projected in the final chapter that maybe in a century or two there'll be no more nation states and we'll be back to city-states just you know the largely poorest borders between cities and people can go anywhere they want in the internet and travel and on and on well things have changed rather dramatically in the last four years and there's you know many books now defending nationalism and um you know yes right the european union is right yeah no that's true and i think through history we've seen that that's you know sort of the rise and the fall i've looked at it also in the book a lot about what the impact is how it's how our relationships between how human being relationships have changed over time um with the development of the nation-state which is also really interesting to me literally because that has an impact on how we interact with each other how these conversations take place which of those theories of of the nation do you embrace or do you think is that the most explanatory power for what people do and think i don't know i'd have to review it again yeah i was just thinking about that i really have to read because i haven't thought about that chapter and i didn't know we discussed it so it's funny i think i was presenting it as alternative is what and i was trying to look at the factors because of the increase in nationalism but that is why i actually think scientific thinking is so important which was my point there definitely has been a trajectory up of nationalism and so i'm not the first to say this einstein feinman madam curate i begin my whole book on that when they were talking about the importance of scientific thinking they were doing it at a time that they were concerned about the rise of authoritarianism fascism and they were saying that the only counter the only way to kind of counter the effects of the rise of nationalism and fascism was to have people develop autonomous thinking that was really my i like that point are we are we in a similar situation now to that and how can that be countered and i would agree with that statement michael i think very strongly i completely agree with them that it's not the content of the science it's the way to think so that you can um think for yourself autonomously which has become more and more important especially now i mean they didn't even have to well feynman talked a lot about propaganda those were the words now now we talk about it as post-truth and i know people say oh no there's no said qing is not post truth because if i'm talking about it but i'm not being philosophically clever here there is um it is more difficult for the public to grab on to a a agreed upon truth and feynman and einstein saw that happen different time periods but for similar reasons and so that to me is what's important with the rise of nationalism we know that income inequality is very correlated and the studies looks i may be wrong and someone could find some contradictory studies but it seems to be uh related to the rise in nationalism as well yeah the higher the state of income inequality the more likely the higher you know nationalism so i have i mean i think what i'm proposing is really important i i mean that sincerely because i think it really does offer the chance for people to think through these issues in a more thoughtful way and the fact that einstein and madame curie and feynman said it before me makes me more confident because they're wiser not politicos or philosophers exactly tell us again in your own words uh what what is your what are you proposing well on a very concrete level i'm proposing that learning to think scientifically be sandwiched in in all classes that you know i think it was plato right if you had to go to the academy you weren't allowed in if you didn't know geometry i would say you should not be allowed out of the gates especially a place like harvard unless you've learned how to think scientifically it seems to me it's a very important skill for citizens to have and that just giving people information and facts is not sufficient it's not a top down it's giving them the critical skill what we were talking about to weigh conflicting evidence and then understand the inner workings of their own mind why aren't they cherry-picking why do they want this study to be the right one we all do that i mean i just i give you a funny example of it but it was actually profound experience i had just a few days ago i've been very focused uh again i'm not proud of this but it just shows you how you can zero in on something right and not see the whole picture and i was very focused on how many people should we have in a discussion group what's the best for the discussion to occur especially on zoom i've been doing this for many years three four five and for years i've been asking this question looking at the research and i finally asked the dean of the summer school at harvard what do you think because i was in a faculty meeting there were five of us and i thought ah so i've had it wrong it shouldn't be that to me well actually i don't think it has anything to do with the number of people it's the people the participants and i was like well that's obvious i literally had this zero view on it and i was very attached and that's just an example with no emotion attached to it but so teaching students how to think scientifically enlarges the vision conflicting evidence they're they're less likely to become polarized that's what i'm suggesting i think i think that's brilliant absolutely of course of course i love that that's what i think too so i know you're right uh the biggest obstacles to that now are you know that sort of polarized media and social media and in which there's very little subtlety and and like acknowledgement that's such an important word thank you michael i've been fixated on this word subtlety and nuance all and that's what you mentioned before correct i'm sorry to interrupt you but i got excited nuance and that's what critical thinking does it teaches nuanced thinking so not all whites all blacks all conservatives there's a nuanced discussion to understanding the data and i i think that is very important well we need an economic model for media companies to to embrace that because it seems like the simpler and more polarized and black and white it is the more hits they get or commercials that they sell and whatever yeah i don't know i know i wish i knew how to but but back to you know at the end of your book you make this distinction between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism so it's the ethnic nationalism that has me worried because it's kind of a throwback to the old blood and soil to finding people by almost their genes or you know what what piece of geography they happen to be sitting on whereas civic nationalism is more of a collection of ideas it's the ideas that that we should care about i mean certain like civil rights civil liberties gay rights gay marriage women's rights and so forth animal rights and and whatnot um those aren't to me those aren't western values even though you can track it historically through western uh traditions of thinking that their human values you know sort of that the idea of universal human rights in fact that that when that was adopted in 1948 you know it still holds pretty pretty well and i i you know sometimes people politically correct people are accusing you know westerners of genocide and whatnot and and then affiliating that set of ideas no that you have to separate those you know the sort of ethnic naturalism of people doing things in the name of their country that are bad for other people in other nations that's different from we want to spread the idea of say democracy or civil rights in other countries we we want to hold china accountable for their civil rights violations however we do that through economic sanctions or something that's a different kind of nationalism than that ethnic nationalism so i like that you make that distinction the end of your book i make the distinction but i would say again they'll always be people who espace ethnic nationalism uh the rule of the law or blood and soil as you put it and are less likely to want immigration and so forth and i'm saying there'll always be alternative views of what the correct nationalism is i wouldn't say that ethnic uh nationalism is better i might personally believe that but i have to be open to the view as long and this is important we do not get to this but i think i do want to say this because i think it's very important i'm open to the view of a blood and soil view of nationalism with the one statement and that i don't mean to suggest that all views pluralism i mean sorry moral equivalency i'm not suggesting that all views have equal value i am saying if if there's any view and whether that be the blood and soil view or whatever view that says we need to destroy the diversity that's where the buck stops so to speak so i would say i'm a proponent of pluralism hypothetical views of nationalism as long as no one is calling for the destruction of any of it i don't know if that's clear but that's important um so i'm not espousing civic uh nationalism i mean i may personally again agree with that but there'll always be people who disagree with me and i want to talk to those people maybe i'm missing something maybe i haven't thought it through maybe i don't know what it's like to have come for example to the united states on the mayflower right and have 10 generations and see my country change so much maybe i would not like the changes at a feeling level i would like to be entitled to those feelings that's not my case i come from a family of immigrants and so i'm obviously very happy that the country allowed it my parents but you're also you're also jewish so do you feel like that uh you know the existence of israel as a nation-state is really important because we have this kind of deep sense of a place to call our own each group or something like that and because of the diaspora for thousands of years this this was fully justified on that level something like that well yeah michael those are big topics so first of all when you say you're jewish or israel or zionism um just personally i that to me is like lumping in a category that's like saying you're white so what do you think about this right i'm not i'm not offended at all it's just that i probably don't fit the category right diversity and that would be a whole that would be a whole conversation uh not that i'm against the category but i probably am an outlier in my opinions on that and also i might say that my views on that have evolved a lot interesting i've changed i've changed my mind a lot which is like you know yeah i actually said someone before the interview oh my goodness how about if he reads something i wrote in high school and he asks me that which you didn't find so that's good how do i explain it and uh i asked my teaching fellow and he said just you know you're an example of what you're talking about i teach my thinking is evolving well that's good so i think i don't know what the question is exactly on that but well i was just in my own head thinking out loud about the nation state i'm not a big fan to me in the long run i'd like to see borders dissolve i love the idea of the eu uh and that you can just travel from one country to another without passports and and all that and why can't the whole world be like that and i'm always citing my fa one of my favorite movies uh a few good men were jack nicholson schools uh tom cruise on on the the nature of the of the real world that you know we live in a world with walls and on those walls are men with guns and you want me on that wall he's kind of defending that kind of conservative defense of the military and why you need a strong military because that's the world we live in okay well he's right that is the world we live in but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to have walls with men's with men with guns on them and and so i like the idea of dissolving nations uh borders uh and have a more diverse uh uh you know world community but you know i think we're a long ways from that if ever centuries maybe um i don't know but but uh anyway that that's why i was thinking out loud although i've always been a supporter of israel i'm not jewish but uh and the fact that i even have to say that is idiotic uh but but i but but the jewish people i know you know it's like i totally get this why everybody wants this is my country everybody feels that way and that scene the palestinians feel that way that's right yeah right yeah exactly yeah so um i mean i think it's very important uh and there's actually it's funny back to what i'm saying about polarized views i haven't looked at the book but i heard there's a history book that's taught israelis and palestinians that discuss the creation of israel and on one line they have the israeli version and the other they have the palestinian so what's called the independence is called the i forget in the palestinian view the tragedy or something so i would say in discussing this topic which is a very polarizing topic back to what i've been saying we need to see both those views there's not a one view and there are two people with two groups of people with variety of opinions and both but um it's interesting that they actually have a history book like that first of its kind because it was always interesting one in one view only and so obviously if you teach it in only one view your view on nationalism is going to be different that's what i meant by the evolution of my view i probably started very one-sided because no one presented the other view to me and so now i can look at both views much better and i think a lot of these conflicts uh you know back to the protestants and the catholics these are historical conflicts that go back hundreds of years in the case of palestinians and israelis i actually think it's one of the first injustices in the bible that's ever been discussed which was um you know when the the sun was the arab sun was um excluded from his inheritance and uh there's some collective i wouldn't be surprised trauma that's been passed down about that injustice but injustice is usually a two-sided issue and and questions of nationalism are like that i think we would need in america at the very least a a three-panel uh history because the native americans also and you know back to reparations the moment you open that door up well the native americans have at least as strong a case uh as african americans and um you know so and white americans have a case too again i'm not saying i agree with it but there's complexity what was the word view it's not nuanced there's a subtlety you know and and these topics are usually not discussed with that subtlety you know gates work is really good about the slavery trade and i recommend that people look at how he understands it because he gets into the complexity and he says we can't teach it we can't teach it because people are not ready for the complexity when i did the descendant of the slave and slave owner meetings i had the same i mean survivor not that the same issue i brought the complexity i brought descendants of collaborators i mean it's it's not a black and white situation there is a gray zone descendant-wise again i really want to emphasize i'm not talking about people who committed crimes so that complexity has to be brought and definitely with the palestinian and the israeli yeah and that's where i'm back to my point that's why scientific thinking is so important because it trains the mind to consider those variables that are missing unlike me focused on what's the number of people i need no there are other variables we have to consider not to mention even when we have all the variables there's conflicting evidence and that helps the discussion a lot because then you can talk about these things really getting the fuller the fuller picture which a couple other things i want to ask you about you talk about energy generate you have a chapter on intergenerational justice that we we've touched on in the ten commandments god pretends to punish quote the inequity of the fathers on children to the third and fourth generation of course to which we go what and then you say the bible also says that it's wrong to punish anyone for the sins of another so how are those squared right it's very interesting i like to look to the bible as a way of how we've understood our history and i think that's the contradiction so i think at a human psychological level i want to hold all germans responsible for the fact that i grew up without a family and that was my feeling growing up it was not easy not having zero relatives someone's got to be responsible for this so that's a that's a normal thing i don't care whether you were alive or not okay you should feel guilty you should feel responsible and furthermore you should feel like you want to make it up to me that's a normal feeling most of us tonight through a lot of the evidence have a psychological need to right a wrong psychologically again i don't mean legally and if that can't be done we're frustrated but the reality is and i think that the bible gets at that is it really right that i'm holding someone responsible wasn't alive am i in fact making that person feel guilty and causing some harm that i'm not even aware of i mean i have a very very close dear friend who's a child of a waff and ss officer we've been friends for 30 years she grew up with such guilt and shame it took her a long time i i personally would not want to be contributing to that doesn't seem right to me she was not born when this happened that's taken a long development and we can obviously see that model with descendants of slave enslavement of course many descendants of slaves are going to feel are you kidding me i don't care that it's nine generations ago whites are still benefiting from it but there are many whites who don't have that view like my friend they feel that they that they're being held accountable for something they had no taken in fact they feel they're victims yeah and because they have not had the benefits and they're resentful of things like affirmative action yes well they feel donald trump in 2016 that kind of vast midwest poor whites that that never recovered from the 0809 meltdown and you know the the you know the opioid crisis hit them hardest and they feel like they're victims correct and so i would say that if we want to move forward those are viewpoints that deserve our listening to because yeah you had a couple other points i i found interesting and discussion of what i think is called just world theory just i'm quoting you here just observing an innocent person being victimized is sufficient to make the victim seem unworthy and then you're quoting citing learner here i'm not sure who that is observe that when one of two men was chosen at random to receive a reward for a task this caused him to be more favorably evaluated by observers even though the observers had been informed that the recipient of the reward was chosen at random uh you know this is i i think conservatives more than liberals embrace this just world theory if somebody's poor it's because they're lazy or they don't work hard or uh you know whatever in a way it's kind of a you mentioned cognitive dissonance it it's cognitively dissonant to see that there's people less well-off than me poorer than me and so on and the just world theory is a way of reducing the the dissonance by saying well that's the way it is that's the way it's supposed to be uh you know i worked hard correct blame the victim but i want to say that go ahead right you blame the victim so they haven't succeeded you know you see that with rape victims so she was raped because she was probably provocative or did something but back to the conservative view i would look at the evidence you know i personally have heard for example people say well you know i've got higher unemployment in these last few months than my job because there's this additional 600 they've been getting and i'm not sure i want to go back to my job so i mean this is an end of one or two but i would not dismiss the conservative view that people have gotten you know more than i was given or something i'm saying there's that view needs to be considered as well even though i may not agree with it and that's what's important in these discussions i don't know if i explained that if i had yeah yeah yeah that that makes sense um i mean i remember there were stories out of the holocaust again that i was when i was reading researching my book on that that um you know that a lot of germans would you know the germans deprived jewish communities of a lot of the basics of life and then looked at them and said look they live they live like animals look how dirty they are well you don't you took away their homes uh you know it's a way of rationalizing or justifying in their own minds the germans i guess uh for why it was okay that they did this yeah and again even in that and i think i go over this in my other book justice matters obviously i don't agree as i said in the beginning to the destruction of diversity whether it's jews blacks whoever but if you look at hitler's mind comp it's very logical his explanation that jews are taking over the world and are and germans are suffering uh because of what the jews have done i'm saying there's an argument there i mean that's actually what's kind of scary about it but you can't you you you can look at these arguments and try to understand them as long as they're not you know trying to destroy the other side in that case but um but the other what you were describing about you know saying yeah you know creating a situation and then saying oh yeah you see they're acting that way i mean that's those are true right right yeah i mean so like one conservative argument against black lives matter is well most of the crime against blacks is by other blacks or most homicides in the black community are by black black on black crime say well but then why is that even assuming that's true why why is that um you know we have to look at the deeper issues of you know poverty and and fatherless homes or you know whatever half a dozen different variables um that was the other thing at the beginning of your book that um i thought was pretty interesting about you know sort of the tracking the history of psychology from so freud to behaviorism to the cognitive revolution and that's that's where i came online in psychology was in that transition from behaviorism to cognitive psych i actually worked for two years and i'm in a canarian lab running experiments with rats in in in boxes pressing bars so i kind of missed the cognitive revolution when it happened in the in the late 70s and 80s which is super interesting but now um you talk about um embodied cognition ecological psychology acts of meaning and and action t i o ena situated cognition embedded cognition extended cognition these are examples of the terms that post cognitive researchers introduced so just give us a little five minute uh you know kind of overview of what psychology has gone through and well i see the last 20 years in five minutes or less please that's not fair i haven't read that let me just put but no but i'll say one thing about that but the important point i'll summarize it the important point i think is where we started and where we've ended up in psychology and so where we started was seeing the human being as a black box pretty much or there were some things that we you know we we don't really understand and then we progressed a little to the input and the output but we but the arrow what happens between the input and the output that's the way i think about it you know the skinny schenerian model was do this and you get this and then comes along oh so something happens here right motivation um and then there was the computer model oh you know humans are just like machines right we had all these great cognitive psychologists talk about the metaphor the the mind as a brain but then there were biologists varela and other very interesting biologists who said you know what human beings are autonomous and you cannot separate and this is the really important point to all that i've been talking about this is why i've said in the interview several times you cannot expect people to solve these problems sometimes i hear colleagues say oh we just tell them about their cognitive biases we just tell them to be rational no because human beings are embodied and our cognitions are related to our our emotions without our emotions we couldn't make decisions we are they they the rational would not allow us in some circumstances yes but not in all that's the real point of that that's what i was really trying to get at and um is so if you're trying to deal with these polarizing topics where there's a traumatic event history and memories and identities and i try to explain that whole process in the book we're very much our evaluations of everything in life are very much connected to our feelings about it you have this passage and so yeah this passage i highlighted dreyfus and other post-cognitive researchers argue that a science the mind will never be able to understand the human mind and behavior in the same way scientists understand objects in for example physics or chemistry that is by considering people as things whose mind and behavior can be predicted via objective context-free scientific laws this is what i mean at the at the beginning of our conversation that you've in a way you're kind of undermining this this long scientific tradition of you know we're going to find the laws of human action and boom we we got it yes and that's a very i've thought a lot about this in 20 years and i think that's because it's first of all people studying people right it's not people studying objects and so once people studying people robert rosenthal one of my mentors at harvard brilliant talked about all the artifacts what happens right i don't know what you're going to do when i say something i mean i might be able to predict it but in this conversation you may ask me something i've never been asked before i may say something you've never heard before there's an unpredictable element to human interaction and when a person a scientist is a person researchers studying another unpredictable things happen and so we can't have an input output model we have to have an indeterministic model and we have to understand how people evaluate i call it developing a potential so rather than sometimes of course we can predict if i hit you over the head with a hammer i know you're going to scream but if i'm having a dynamic conversation what i think scientific thinking helps in these indeterministic situations is to create a potential so that we can move forward and learn together it's a dynamic system and that to me has been really helpful really helpful personally and professionally again i may be completely wrong well it's the best it's the best argument that i make for for cryonics is so you can be frozen and come back 500 years to see how that particular argument turned out yeah oh consciousness we figured that out two centuries ago that's a that's a no-brainer oh really uh speaking of which i i also highlighted this passage in your discussion of a.i post cognitive researchers argue that the human meant that human mental life depends mainly on unconscious subjective judgments rather than conscious objective information manipulation and that these unconscious phenomena can never be captured in formal computational rules as suggested by the traditional cognitive approach post-cognitive researchers assert that to get a computer to have a human-like mind requires computers to have a human-like being in the world with little hyphens in there human-like being in the world and to have bodies more or less like humans and social acculturation in other words society more or less like humans so so many ai researchers and also i encountered this with the this is from my previous book on heavens on earth about the attempts to achieve immortality these people have this the idea of mind uploading we're going to upload your mind get your connectome copy every single synaptic connection in your brain upload it to the cloud and you'll go there well first of all you wouldn't go anywhere because it's just a copy so you're still here wherever the copy machine is but nevertheless that that wouldn't capture anything i just you just described right that that you have to it's not just a mind it's a mind in a body and not just a mind and a body it's a it's a body in a physical environment that moves around and and most of the processing of all that information happens subconsciously there's there's there's no algorithms you can you know mimic in a computer that would capture that and then multiply that by a gazillion you know for all the interactions with people we have with environments plants animals and so on everything that's exactly right that's exactly right so there are situations obviously that our systems are deterministic but there is this whole other realm of indeterminate what i call indeterminism where you can't predict so do you think this is and that is the human being and that is interactions and um i'm trying to think of analogy to chess but it's not good so yeah yeah maybe go seems to be the new model well this could explain both why um you know human level a.i you know is is five years away and always will be as they say you know it's a much harder problem than we thought and it's not just a harder problem you know algorithmically you know like computers that finally beat gary kasparov and chess they just got the number crunching capability finally there we're never going to get there with this particular approach i i think is the implications of of this post cognitive research that this is the wrong approach to take because humans evaluate relations and they put values and judge relations and it's hard to predict that so if you just have material give i mean ai could be good just with deterministic systems but let's go to our polarized topics let's take any polarizing topic um immigration and let's take that some people forward some people against it that we could call a relational parameter what i call a relational and i wrote about this in doing psychotherapy effectively that means some people value newness openness positively emotionally it's a judgment about that relation other people don't they have a a negative feeling about it right and so we because we value relationships differently i don't think that can be programmed i think that and we can switch those that's why it's helpful to understand i mean take a marital example if you're in a couple and you're my husband um likes new adventures and i don't we have different values on this well maybe over time we'll switch and understand and change each other's evaluations but these are values we give and i think that's why you can't use the input output that's why you can't just be a deterministic system i don't know if that explained it but that's how i understand it i think also helps explain the difficulty in in explaining consciousness um not the neural correlates of consciousness but the actual experience of it i think everything you've just described complicates it you know orders of magnitude more than it already was yeah and it's what makes each of us kind of different from the other which is why it's uh yeah i mean we can share but um it's you can't love but it is but i don't want to underestimate we can predict a lot of our preferences that's why so the advertising is so successful right i know if you check out one liberal view i can predict that i understand it that's how a lot of advertising works i can predict probably what you're going to buy and if i know what you just bought on amazon if you bought a tie versus hiking shorts i can say a lot about you so we are very predictable and deterministic in many areas but we can't ignore that there are these indeterministic unpredictable aspects of human behavior and life the pandemic these social changes we no one could predict this we still don't know how to deal with it because there's a lot of uncertainty we don't have models from the past that my very point is the universe as a whole indeterministic well so now uh you get to free will i mean where does free will enter into all this or volition or whatever words you want to use i don't know i think you know more about that i don't know the answer either i i'm a compatibilist i think we i think for the very things everything you've been saying that we are engaged in the causal net of the universe ourselves and can manipulate it either consciously or unconsciously and maybe that's also a causal vector and therefore we're all determined but at least we can be aware of the determining factors and tweak them a little bit therefore we can hold people accountable and so forth so but you know again it's a hard problem because of the way the words are defined uh we may be restricted on our cognition about it because of language i don't know um see if there's anything else i wanted to ask you here before we wrap up the mona we've been going almost two hours oh my god i just looked at the clock wow there's so much interesting stuff here i think your book science and diversity i mean this should be read by everybody thinking about these particular issues i mean diversity you have chapters on diversity in groups diversity and social justice you know that made me think about this other thing we're undergoing now this whole um what what it means to be a gender um you know have a sex role or a gender role and and now there's all this stuff about um you know gender dysphoria and you know i was born a woman but i feel like a man so should i get the surgery you know you're aware that this has become a controversial subject that touches on the nature of self i guess which you also hint at in the book um you know this self is rather a elusive concept i feel like a self and i define myself by certain characteristics but i can't do that outside of what how i'm situated in in my nation state in my gender my group my race my everything you know that's really i have two things to say the practical it's interesting you talk about gender and this is an example of good intentions and good solutions can have paradoxical effects so uh there was a rule at harvard i don't know the exact details but the single gender clubs were being penalized they were trying to discourage all male or all female and then just the other day the judge in boston said that was denied harvard's case to continue and so um president baka put out a very interesting memo saying well obviously we're going to abide by what the judge said and the logic here was that in trying to solve the discrimination we were actually perpetuating a discrimination and so there is a good example you brought up gender uh you have a good solution we're going to ban the one gender clubs but in doing that you're actually creating resentment right so but to your question of the self i've thought a lot about that and i think that's a very interesting question and i've come to the conclusion it's just for me personally um that things don't always appear the way they are in reality and that's helpful to know first of all so i mean i think all of us can agree understand that the world does look flat i always this is obvious right but it's it's deceiving and that's a good example um you know we're not aware of gravity but obviously it's what's keeping us stable we're not aware of moving so fast but so appearances are not reality and i think for me it's been helpful to think of the self like that because it looks like i'm independent feels like it an autonomous feels like i know where my body begins and ends but again pragmatically look at the pandemic you see how intertwined our lives are could not function without you know whole foods has a sign you're more than essential really we're interconnected and so far i'd have no food if there weren't people willing to go to the supermarket and so our connection with each other though it may not be visible though we may have the means to think we're independent we're obviously have some i mean obviously to me we have some interconnection with each other um and i know this may sound naive but and and and that is why i like your vision of oh no borders kind of goes with my vision of that's why it makes sense to help each other and understand the other because we are at some level interconnected and if i may add one thing here because i mean this deeply and i've written i mean you've written written this but i've thought a lot about it you know my mother was 17 when she was in auschwitz she lost everyone so she suffered a lot saw a lot of suffering and before she died she did that interview with spielberg i mean for someone talking about and they asked her what's the last message maybe a few months before she literally died what's your last message you want to give people your experience and auschwitz and so she said i don't want anyone to suffer like i did and i thought wow that's profound i was really surprised that she had it in her heart to care about other people and that to me speaks to she wasn't just a self she probably had some sense of that you know and so um that's what i have to say about yourself yeah that's quite a powerful story about your mom wow that's incredible well i figure if she could do that and care about the other after all she's been through well why wouldn't i and do the little that i could do and that's why i think it's worth hearing the other side even when we don't agree with them whether they be liberals conservatives republicans democrats black lives matter yeah well i want to ask you just one last thing you know we're recording this right smack in the middle of 2020 which could end up being the biggest year since 1968 or the end of the vietnam war something or maybe even worse than that or more dramatic than that we have covet 19 the shutdown of the economy so economic stress is unemployment black lives matter the metoo movement uh you know and whatever else gets thrown in in the next six months how do you think uh life may change in the coming decade or two because of all these these changes um wow you know it's interesting you've asked that because as i said usually when we make prediction in science we have something in the past to go on so we can predict it so what i did as a scientist was obviously look at the pandemic i mean the flu because that's the closest of 1918. okay so what happened when they got out of it um as that i could see something interestingly right they went into a period of exuberance the roaring 1920s fitzgerald the party right exuberant yeah i the only way i know how to make a prediction is based on the past but i don't think this pandemic is necessarily similar i know the answer may be i don't know and you don't either nobody does i have i cannot say i mean on the positive side as i mentioned before i've been amazed at how human behave has adapted yeah yeah pretty adaptive yes pretty adaptive so is it good is it bad what about the future of higher education i assume harvard will be okay but there's a lot of oh that is yeah that's it that's that's huge i mean i think that is a huge question and that i've thought a lot about and um well i mean i have a lot to say about that i don't want to take up more of your time but a lot of that has to do with our delivery of education i've been actually teaching my course at harvard on zoom before the pandemic so i did and i did it eight nine years ago when we started teaching online there was no video i taught this course only with audio because zoom didn't have that capability and i had a hard time explaining to people why you could create human interaction on zoom in terms of where education is going it seems to me now that's less of an argument people do see value but i don't think it substitutes for now let's let's go have uh coffee together well moana there's your next book how to survive in the uh remote educational environment thank you so much for this opportunity michael i'm a real fan of your podcast and i appreciate that i appreciate it and i think skeptic the whole approach is uh very aligned with uh my view and uh very important necessary and helpful so thank you for thank you for saying that i appreciate it thanks for coming on the show and thanks for writing writing your books and keep it up okay
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Channel: Skeptic
Views: 6,136
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Keywords: Michael Shermer, behaviorism, black lives matter, cognitive science, consciousness, human diversity, justice, nationalism, neuroscience, psychology, revenge, science, Science Salon, self, Sigmund Freud, social equality
Id: o4usHi7NfQ4
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Length: 118min 40sec (7120 seconds)
Published: Tue Aug 18 2020
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