Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Cory Clark: Why We're Tribal

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Cory Clark: Why We're Tribal · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  This episode is part of our fantastic collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney's,
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  Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, spearheaded by its fearless dean, Professor Alan Davison,
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  who's committed to making UTS the place for independent thinking on Australian campuses.
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  I'm a visiting fellow there, and we team up for a series called Permission to Think,
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  of which this is the latest instalment, expand your mind, and enjoy.
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  Gay humans welcome the space space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.
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  You are inconsistent in judging other people.
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  You give people who agree with you more of a pass than people who disagree with you.
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  You judge your enemies more harshly than your friends. I suppose that's not that controversial
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  when you put it that way, but when you shift that into the political and cultural arena,
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  and say that you are probably more forgiving of people who are doing bad thinking,
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  as long as they end up where you are, and you're probably likely to jump in on a pile on
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  against people you disagree with, even if they're being reasonable in their thinking.
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  Then it becomes a little bit more uncomfortable. Cory Clark is a behavioral scientist. She does
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  research into bias, social contagion, especially in relation to academic research.
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  She looks at the evolutionary behavioral roots of being ostracized from tribes, and she's done
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  serious, hard scientific research into the different ways in which people either forgive or condemn
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  other people, or even something as abstract as an academic paper. If the conclusion
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  doesn't accord with their pre-existing beliefs, in this world of social media deceiving us and
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  institutions decaying and mainstream media, losing trust and public health officials being
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  pilloried, it's more important than ever to hear from Cory. She's fabulous, she's articular,
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  she's funny. Please enjoy it as much as I did this conversation with one of the only Cory Clark.
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  I love your work about how people hold double standards in how we evaluate behavior and how we
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  evaluate information. Can you just give us a sketch of what that means? Are we already going?
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  Yeah, sure. Don't mind this show. I know those other shows might have professional introductions
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  and whatnot. We don't care about such things. Okay, sorry. So the question was how people have
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  double standards in their evaluations of science? Of people's behavior, I suppose.
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  Of other people's behavior. Yeah, we have a lot of double standards. But yeah, one paper of mine,
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  we looked at how people desire to punish and attribute free will to people that they want to punish
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  more or less. And we did this in the context of political ideology. So it was people evaluating
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  either liberals or conservatives when they're a liberal or conservative themselves. And perhaps
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  it's not totally surprising that people want to punish out group members more than in group members.
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  But we also see that they attribute more free will to out group members when they misbehave
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  than when then in group members. So they're essentially saying that people that they, you know,
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  dislike for political reasons or people in their out group have more control over their
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  bad behavior and are more responsible for their bad behavior, even when they're engaging in
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  the exact same behavior. How do you imagine that? How do you test it?
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  On that one, it was a set of items about how, how much freedom the individual had over their
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  behavior in that situation. So like, if I'm remembering, like one of the scenarios was a reporter
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  who didn't, didn't retract a story when she should have had like skepticism about her source.
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  One of them was a person interfering with the political speech, like unplugging the microphone
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  of a speaker that they didn't like. And we essentially looked at how much I don't remember the
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  precise items, but they would have been things like how much controlled this person, how,
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  how much could they have done something different in this situation. And when it's your in group
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  member, you're more likely to be like, yeah, they had no choice. And how you sorting in groups
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  and out groups, is that by political, by overt political affiliation, like party political
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  affiliation? Or is it? Yeah. And those ones, it would have been, I believe in. And that one,
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  it would have been political ideology. So yeah, people self identification as liberal or conservative.
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  Usually we measure that on a continuous scale. So, you know, people who are more extreme fall
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  on the further ends, but the, we manipulated, um, whether people were in a particular,
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  so like, for example, one of them was, I think an undergraduate student who was a member of like
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  the young Republicans or young Democrats were in the US, you know, a young Republican would be
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  typically on a conservative side and young Democrat on a liberal side. Yeah. Right. And you give
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  them a scenario where someone is giving a speech and they're talking about what, what do you remember
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  what the examples are? Is it like abortion? Or is it like Donald Trump stole the election?
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  It's papers a few years old. Yeah. It probably, no, it wouldn't have been that, um, it might have just
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  been like it, we might have just said it was a Democrat or a Republican speaker and not provided
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  like the specific content of the speech. But I can't say that was certainty because, yeah, it's
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  it's been a while. I've run a lot of studies since then. So it has to do, so is the, is what you're
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  trying to dig into the, the, our, our propensity to punish other people or our propensity to forgive other
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  people or does it, are those both sides of the same coin? So that when we looked at punishment,
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  I suspect you would find the same kind of things for forgiveness, but I haven't looked at that
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  specifically. But one thing that's interesting to me is that these desires to punish extend to all
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  of these other judgments about the actual like facts of the situation. So there is like a whole set
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  of findings that I would call like motivated responsibility judgments. And what that research shows
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  is that when we want to punish and blame other people, we think they had, we, we think the person
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  had more control over the situation. We think they could have done otherwise. We think they're
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  more responsible for causing the bad outcome. We are more likely to deny science that, you know,
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  undermines free, free will, the possibility that humans have free will. So all of these things that
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  should be, you know, concrete features of the situation when people want to punish other people,
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  they, they sort of understand human psychology a bit differently. I think that people have more
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  responsibility and more control over their behavior. And who's rice? Does it matter? Who's right about
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  what people? In that scenario, does it matter whether or not they're, I guess, being correct in their
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  belief about how much freedom people have to do otherwise? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't
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  know if we've ever looked at, because these are sort of subjective judgments. So I don't know
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  what is your underpinning bias here? Like what are your priors coming into this? Is your,
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  are your priors that people basically behave tribally and then accuse other people in other tribes
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  of being inconsistent and, and evil? Or is your, your prior that we just accused people
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  of behaving that way because it suits our, I don't know, preconceptions. Yeah, we, we, I don't
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  think we know whether people are sort of exaggerating how responsible their outgroup is or downplaying
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  how not responsible the in group is. So that would be hard to say. And I guess it also depends on
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  the subject. Doesn't that how tribal that particular community is or how anti-science that particular
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  community? Is it probably functions differently if you're talking about anti-vaxes or something
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  than it does if you're talking about something that has more scientific grounding? Yeah, and we,
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  we did look at a sort of a large set of different scenarios trying to find things that liberals and
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  conservatives find to be differently morally wrong. So for example, conservatives think homelessness
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  or drug abuse is more morally wrong. And they attribute more freedom to people in those
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  particular conditions. So we kind of see that when you have a sort of behavior and outcome
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  that a person views as more morally wrong, they view people as having more control over that. But
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  again, like how much control do people actually have over becoming homeless or drug abuse? I don't
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  even, that's in some sense it's an empirical question, but it'd be really hard to quantify and say,
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  like, this is the correct amount. Yeah, and political philosophers have been arguing about that
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  for centuries and we're probably not. I mean, people talk about like how genetically caused
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  or things, but then people can debate like, well, if it's genetically caused, are you responsible
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  for that or not? You know, because it's part of who you are. Definitely not responsible for my
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  genes. You didn't choose who you are. You're not. You're not. I did not pick the genes. I did not
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  pick the questions. But they are a sort of like essential part of you, right? So yeah, I mean,
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  it's interesting. When you talk about drug about the fault, I suppose, that we assign to people
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  who find themselves addicted to drugs. I feel like there's been a big shift in that over the course
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  of the opioid crisis where when the main drug problem was crack in the 80s, it was very easy for
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  people who'd never seen crack. And no one they knew had used crack because it was limited to
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  particular ethnic communities and particular geographical areas to demonize people who found
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  themselves in that hole. And now that all of a sudden, doctors in white lab coats are handing
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  it out to middle-class soccer moms, handing out over to middle-class soccer moms and they're finding
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  themselves, you know, giving hand jobs behind a parking lot to score their next hit of fentanyl.
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  It's a big, you know, it's not their fault anymore. These are people who were lured into it by a
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  corrupt system. And then, yeah, I don't know what you make of that shift. That would be, those
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  would be really good study materials to use to test for double standards in these kinds of things.
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  But yeah, I mean, that's another good example is like, who is to blame for those behaviors
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  and how much responsibility does the individual have? It's hard to say. And like, sometimes I wonder
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  if responsibility in people's minds adds up to more than 100%. Like, you know, the doctors are to blame,
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  society is to blame. Maybe the people are to blame a little bit. Whoever's bringing the drugs
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  into the country are to blame. Like, there's a lot of blame to go around.
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  And the reason, I mean, one reason you get these sort of biases and people's evaluations of how
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  much control people have is precisely because it's an ambiguous question with no clear answer. So,
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  it tends to be in those cases when you see bias and double standards because it's sort of easier
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  for people to get away with it because no one can really call you out on it outside of the context
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  of an experiment, you know, there's no right answer. So, you can just turn it up or turn it down
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  a little bit at your own convenience. I mean, people can call out hypocrisy over time, right? I mean,
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  people and people do call out the hypocrisy of people who ring their hands a lot about the opioid
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  crisis, but didn't give a shit about about it when it was only affecting poor black people, for example.
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  They do, but it's rare in the real world that you get something that is exactly matched in
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  every single conceivable way, but you can do in the laboratory. So, in a psychology study,
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  you try to make things exactly the same, whereas in the real world, some can be like,
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  well, here all the ways these cases are different. And that's my different judgment is justified
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  on the basis of all of these differences between these cases. So, yeah, people do call people out
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  for hypocrisy, but people often have, you know, semi-justifiable explanations for their hypocrisy,
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  right? And then it's hard to know. One of those justifications in this case, just to follow this
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  particular case study. I mean, maybe that I don't know, people who were on crack also wanted to
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  make money from crack, so they were culpable because they were trying to get rich or they were.
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  It could have been, I mean, I don't know enough about what people argue about those cases,
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  but I imagine there are a variety of differences, like potentially, like, how does it contribute to,
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  I don't know, like crime in the neighborhood. If people have good data on that, I don't know if they do.
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  Right. I can't jump in the parking lot. It could be that. It could be that like doctors are a
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  better scapegoat than drug dealers. So, like, when it comes to crack, it's not like someone that is
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  trusted distributing it, whereas in the case of doctors, maybe we want to hold them to a higher
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  standard than with drug dealers. Yeah. And absolve the responsibility of the people who really liked
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  taking, uh, uh, uh, uh, oxy-contin because a doctor gave them to them. So they were, how could they
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  have known otherwise? Because they did everything right by trusting. Right. They thought that it was
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  going to be safe and then they sort of got tricked into getting addicted, you could say. Yeah, right.
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  Right. But again, are those are real reasons? Who knows? Right. But they're plausible justification.
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  Yes. And it is convenient, isn't it, that they always seem to align with the person's tribe of
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  persons political philosophy at the end of the day? So, I mean, another component to your work here
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  that this is pointing towards is credulity. Is our likeliness to believe in bullshit? And I suppose
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  it's sort of common senseical that if the bullshit is peddled by people who we think are good people,
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  we're likely to believe it than the whiff of bullshit from people who we think are bad. How does
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  that show up? Yeah. So we look at, um, mostly political biases. So how liberals and conservatives
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  when they're confronted with information that supports their desires, they're more likely to think
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  it's high quality information than that exact same information when it challenges their desires. So
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  you can kind of take anything, take, um, uh, it could be a scientific study that has the exact same
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  method. So one of the classic, one of the famous studies on this is by Lord Ross and Leper,
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  Lord Leper and Ross, something like that in 1979. I'll just nod if I'll give you the way.
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  And they did this with the death penalty where they had the exact same scientific studies
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  that either said the death penalty, um, that that is deterrent and effectively deters, uh,
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  it was it murder in this case homicide or just crime in general. In any case, either the
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  death penalty was effective or not. And they found that people, and then they asked participants
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  to evaluate not not the conclusions of the study, but the methods. Are these methods sufficient
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  for asking this research question? And what they found is that people who were pro death penalty
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  found the methods as higher quality when the results supported the deterrent efficacy of the
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  death penalty and the people who oppose the death penalty found the methods as higher quality
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  when the conclusion ended up being, um, the death penalty is not effective. So you see this bias in
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  the evaluation of scientific methods based on the conclusion that is found by those methods. And,
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  and I've done several studies where I have people evaluate science. Even things like,
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  is this sample size sufficient to test this question? And even when the sample size is identical
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  in the two studies, they'll say that sample size is sufficient when the conclusion supports
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  their beliefs. And it's not as sufficient if it, if it opposes their, their, uh, political
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  preferences and beliefs. So we have all these sort of like double standards in terms of like
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  how high quality of information we need to be persuaded. Um, if it's something we don't want to
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  believe we have higher standards and if it's something we do believe we have low standards and
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  we'll accept things even if it's not a very high quality piece of information.
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  Is there a kernel of justification in that in the sense that I sort of understand the instinct
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  from my own perspective of like, well, okay, the outcome it got was correct. Therefore there's a
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  higher chance that the reasoning was correct too. I mean, if I give you a mathematical, a full
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  page mathematical proof that's a little bit too difficult for you to understand, uh, but you see
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  that at the end two plus two equals four, you're going to eyeball it and go, well, I guess the
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  maths probably adds up. And if you see at the end that it's two plus two equals five, you're going
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  to go, something was wrong in the calculation. Yeah. So that is an argument that a lot of scholars
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  have made in this sort of ongoing debate about how like, should we even be allowed to call these
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  biases and are these actually completely rational to hold the exact same piece of information
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  to different standards if it comes to a conclusion that seems right versus wrong. Like if the study,
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  even if the study looked really high quality and it came to a conclusion that was obviously wrong,
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  you'd be like, well, clearly something went went wrong here. This must not be as good of a study
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  as I thought. Um, and that makes a lot of sense. Uh, we've tried to deal with that a bunch of
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  different ways. The one that I find sort of most compelling is there have been a couple of studies
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  including in some of my own work that this is maybe a little bit complicated, but essentially
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  to try to look at an order effect. So you can either present one set of participants with a
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  finding they would like and another set of participants with a finding they didn't like and you
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  see they treat those differently. And then you can maybe explain that away as rational. But if you
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  give the same set of participants both sets the exact same methods with the conclusion they like
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  and a conclusion they don't like what you see is then they try to anchor their second judgment
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  to the first one. So whichever one they got first, if it was a study they didn't like and they
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  said, Oh, bad study. And then they get the second one that they do like, they're like, Oh, bad study.
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  Whereas if you reverse it and you do when they do like, Oh, good study. And then you give them
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  the conclusion they don't like, Oh, I guess it's a good study. So like people at least seem to think
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  themselves that it would be irrational to treat that differently. And if they were thinking, Oh,
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  it's rational to do this differently because the conclusions are implausible. Thus the method stink.
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  You wouldn't expect to get that that anchoring of the second judgment when when they when they see
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  both sides of things. So anyway, it all all it suggests is that people don't think it's rational
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  to treat them differently, even if we might argue it could be rational, right? Yes, I think I get
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  that, but just clarify it for me. So let's say that I'm in favor of abortion rights and you
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  provide me with two papers, each of which have the same reasoning, but reach opposite conclusions.
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  If you show me both of them, or if you show me the one that support that I believe in first,
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  and then you show me the same one, then I give it more credence, excuse me. And if you show me the
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  one that reaches the conclusion that I disagree with that says that abortion should be outlawed,
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  then the fact that I don't agree with the outcome means essentially taints the entire
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  process of reasoning when you then give me one that does support me. So if we do abortion,
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  and let's say your pro choice, and you first get a study that says, blah, blah, blah, blah,
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  this supports a pro life perspective. And I say, what do you think of the sample size of the study?
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  Was this sample size sufficient to address the research question? And you say no,
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  because it came to the conclusion I don't like. And then I say, you know, we actually mixed up
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  the results. The results turn out that it supports the pro choice perspective. What do you think of
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  the sample size of the study? Then you're like, oh, I already said it was insufficient. So I guess
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  it's insufficient. And then people will anchor their judgment. So what you end up seeing is that
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  this bias effect you get when you present people, when you present different groups of people
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  with different conclusions get smaller when you give it to the same person because the same person
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  doesn't think because they spot what they're doing. Right. They would they perceive it as inconsistent.
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  And then like you try to compare this to something else. Like if I said the scientist did a study
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  where they had a turtle chase a cheetah. The hundred turtles and a hundred cheetahs got into a race.
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  And they concluded that the turtles are faster than the cheetahs. What do you think of the methods?
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  You would say, oh, they're crappy methods. And then you say, actually, we got the results wrong.
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  The cheetahs won. And you'd be like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes more sense. And then the
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  little methods probably were fine. Right. So, you know, for something like that, you wouldn't think
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  that you'd have to anchor the because it's just so obvious that everyone agrees that cheetahs
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  are faster than turtles. This is possible. We'd have to test it in a lab. But I very much want to
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  work out. And I want to see it. I want to see the turtles getting. They have to be like on separate
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  tracks otherwise. The turtles wouldn't be good. Or she just have to be well fed.
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  There are some there were like crocodile races and cantoid races in certain parts of the Australian
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  tropics. So I think we could test this actually. We don't have cheetahs yet. I mean, they're at a
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  pie. They do it at a pub, you know, where like they'll look at these gigantic horrible, horrible
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  cantoids. You're like outside a pub in the tropical parts of the country. And they'll just put
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  them in little laneways. And they'll just sort of nudge them along. So crocodile. Horrible
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  toads. No, the crocodile races are separate. Yeah, separate. There aren't toads. It's not
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  toad v croc. It's just croc v croc and toad v toad entertaining nonetheless. One of Australia's
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  great highlights for delight, the delight tourists from the world over. Are lefties or conservatives
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  moral, like more bad or good at this? Notice the difference? Yeah. So my lab mates and I along with
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  my PhD advisor, Pete Ditto, we did a met and else is looking at precisely this question,
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  which is essentially a study where you average the effects of all other studies that have done
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  this sort of thing, looking at political bias on the left and right. And when we average across
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  all the studies, we see virtually no differences at all. So liberals and conservatives, we think
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  are probably, if not identically biased, very similarly biased. And there was another study
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  that came out a couple of years later that found the same thing with a large set of materials.
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  And sort of humorously before we did the met and else's, we asked a set of liberals and conservatives
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  who was more biased. And both sides said the other side was more biased. So it's like, of course,
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  there's also something other side that I don't know what they're talking about. Have you broken
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  anything down by either like professional class or education or something like that? Is there
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  something that holds up through the ranks? So there's a bit of debate on that. There's this really
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  interesting study by a professor Dan Kehan who looked at sort of like biased math in that he has
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  these left tape math. Yeah, like trying to solve a math problem. Not math math. Like essentially trying
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  to solve the math problem. And what he found was people were essentially biased and when the sort of
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  mathematical form, well, you know, whatever, how you solve this problem. If it was going to support
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  a conclusion, you didn't want to believe you were worse at it than if it supported a conclusion,
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  you do want to believe. And he found that people who were better at math, who were more higher and
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  numerous. See, I think is what he calls it. They actually showed that effect more. And I believe in
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  some of his other work, he's found similar effects, but some of that has been called into question.
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  So I would say on that one, I don't think we know for sure, but it is possible that
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  more educated people potentially could be worse than less educated people. But at minimum,
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  there's not good evidence that they're really better. I don't think. Does he have a hypothesis
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  for why more education would mean more susceptibility to these policies? I believe the explanation is
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  essentially that you have sort of more cognitive resources to defend your perspective. So
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  if you're able to formulate a lot of reasons why you should be judging the information the way you
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  are, then you might feel more justified, whereas if you're like having a harder time with it,
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  then, you know, you might not, you know, you might not be able to come up with the explanation you
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  would need to justify your judgment. But again, I think that's all still up for debate.
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  That's fascinating. I mean, this is from left field, but does any of this touch on or have
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  you thought about conspiracy theories in all of this? The pandemic, I think, has unleashed
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  a wave or whatever is happening in the past four or five years. The pandemic certainly didn't
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  help, but it may also be a confluence of social media and algorithms directing our attention
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  or whatever else. But I've certainly seen some of my more intelligent colleagues become the ones
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  who are most susceptible to, I guess there's this kind of nerdy delight in finding connections
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  between things, being suspicious of authority, being suspicious of the mainstream narrative,
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  and they're making stupid mistakes that I think a stupid person wouldn't make.
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  Yeah, I mean, it could be one of those things where people who are higher and lower could be
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  more susceptible compared to average people. But I do think with conspiracy theories, a lot of the
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  time you get people who really are quite knowledgeable on a particular topic and they have all of this
• 26:39
  like really niche knowledge of, you know, maybe not that high quality studies that support
• 26:45
  the position or some some argument that that appears on its face compelling, but really isn't.
• 26:52
  So in those cases, I do think you can get an also, you know, not just for the person themselves
• 26:58
  believing in a conspiracy theory, but on their ability to persuade others that the conspiracy is
• 27:05
  true, probably people who are more intelligent and know more about a topic are better able to attract
• 27:10
  followers right to go along with their perspectives. So I don't know if that I'm sure that has been
• 27:20
  studied. I don't know what the the research there shows for sure, but I think certainly.
• 27:28
  Sorry, I finished that. Oh, no, I was just going to say like it does seem like you get sort of a
• 27:32
  lot of intellectual elites who can become leaders in certain conspiracy theories and often they
• 27:39
  are quite intelligent and very well informed. Yeah, it's interesting. My buddy Sam Harris makes
• 27:45
  the point that there's not a lot of point in debating people who are very enthusiastic about a
• 27:50
  particular conspiracy theory because nobody is going to like if you meet someone who knows
• 27:56
  everything about building seven on 9.11 and the melting point of steel and the precise
• 28:03
  direction that the planes hit the towers, you can be pretty sure you're talking to a conspiracy
• 28:07
  theorist. I mean, you're talking to someone who thinks 9.11 was an inside job or that the
• 28:11
  planes didn't really hit the buildings or something, right? Anyone who's genuinely on the page
• 28:17
  of the mainstream narrative has no need to acquire the arsenal of information that the person who's
• 28:24
  the conspiracy theorist does. So there's, you know, you're essentially fundamentally out of your
• 28:29
  depth instantly. Nobody knows more about Therosol or whatever it is in vaccines than Robert F. Kennedy
• 28:36
  Jr. You know, nobody knows more about the unexplained, you know, unidentified aerial phenomena
• 28:42
  than people who are deeply interested in ascribing those things to extraterrestrial life. Nobody
• 28:49
  knows more about the way that the mRNA vaccines were hastily brought into onto the market than
• 28:56
  Brett Weinstein. So there's, you know, it is interesting that there is no correlation between
• 29:01
  increasing one's arsenal of knowledge and arriving at the truth. Um, well, that wouldn't suggest that
• 29:09
  wouldn't suggest that necessarily. Uh, I think you're right that a lot of, on a lot of topics and
• 29:15
  especially for things where there are conspiracies, there obviously aren't conspiracies regarding
• 29:19
  everything that's happened. But for the things that there are semi-popular conspiracies,
• 29:24
  probably a lot of the time the conspiracy theorists know more than even sort of general experts
• 29:31
  on the topic might be. But that doesn't mean that there's necessarily no correlation between
• 29:36
  how much information you have in the truth. And I know that would be a really hard question to test
• 29:42
  because I don't think we have a way of measuring all of the knowledge a person has. Tell me everything
• 29:48
  you know. And I'll tell you how right. Well, you could give them a quiz. You could give them a
• 29:52
  quiz about. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, you can go through the popular science debunking of 9-11
• 29:58
  conspiracy theories. And you could ask people about, I don't know, yeah. But, but just the claim in
• 30:05
  general that how much knowledge you have isn't necessarily associated with the truth. It might be,
• 30:11
  I just think it would be a really hard question to ask. Yeah. And well, it raises another question
• 30:16
  which is how does one then accumulate knowledge in a constructive way from as blank as
• 30:21
  later as one can so that you're building a thesis on the basis of the data rather than retroactively
• 30:28
  cherry picking data to fit a pre-existing thesis. Yeah. I think not having like strong commitments,
• 30:36
  not tying your identity to anything that is an empirical belief that you could be wrong about.
• 30:43
  I would I promote adversarial collaborations in science. So this is, you know,
• 30:49
  yeah, explain what that is. Working. So adversarial collaboration is essentially a methodological
• 30:54
  procedure in which so so the norm in science is when scholars just agree with each other,
• 31:00
  they just kind of write replies back and forth to each other and conduct their own research separately
• 31:05
  and just each side supports their side back and forth and back and forth and it creates all
• 31:10
  this contradictory information and evidence in the literature. Adversarial collaborations are
• 31:17
  when two scientists disagree, they come together and they figure out what's going on.
• 31:24
  What is it you're saying? What is it I'm saying? How are they different? And how can we test
• 31:29
  between them? What is the most rigorous test we can conduct that we both agree is the right way
• 31:36
  to test this question that could show where the truth lies between us, usually between them.
• 31:44
  And it's a hard thing for some people to do because people have a tendency to
• 31:51
  want to straw man their opponents and claim that their intellectual opponent is saying something
• 31:56
  that they're not necessarily saying. They often scholars are really incentivized to make super
• 32:02
  broad claims that generalize to everyone at all times and they also are incentivized to contradict
• 32:08
  or to sorry to to portray themselves as contradicting other people because it has to be whatever
• 32:14
  they're saying has to be novel. So that means I have to be saying something different from other
• 32:19
  people who've studied this topic before me. And so they're essentially incentivized to create
• 32:24
  the perception of disagreement, even if there's not a whole lot of disagreement there.
• 32:29
  So one thing we see when we get these adversarial collaborators together is that sometimes the
• 32:34
  disagreement is way smaller than either person thought and sometimes it's hard to figure out if
• 32:39
  there even is a disagreement in the first place, even though people have been publishing for years
• 32:44
  that there's a disagreement and we've been fighting about this forever. Yeah, so the point of those
• 32:52
  is to try to seriously in like a good faith way work with someone who challenges your sort of
• 32:59
  preferred empirical conclusions and get to the bottom of things. And if the data don't turn out
• 33:05
  the way you hypothesized in advance, then you have to say, okay, I at least update my beliefs somewhat
• 33:14
  if not fully abandoned your previous beliefs. Right. And you have to publish, right? I mean,
• 33:20
  it's not like you can back out at the, if both parties go in agreeing that they're going to
• 33:24
  publicize whatever, you know, come what, what may. We say you have to publish the way that can happen
• 33:33
  is, you know, either one person moves forward and publishes the paper, if the other person doesn't
• 33:38
  like it, but we also recommend bringing on moderators and the moderator, like a third party,
• 33:43
  someone whose neutral doesn't really care. The moderator agrees, I'm going to publish this paper
• 33:49
  even if one or both of you back out after the data come in. Right. And that's the way to tie your
• 33:56
  hands. This process of adversarial collaboration, was that conceived off by Daniel Kahneman,
• 34:01
  the Nobel Prize winner? So he was not the first one to do an adversarial collaboration. I think
• 34:09
  the, the, the sort of methodological procedure was done as early as like 1979. But I believe in
• 34:16
  2001 is when Danny Kahneman coined the term and he did one with Ralph Hartwick and Barb Mellers
• 34:25
  as the moderator. And I think that was the first time the term adversarial collaboration has been
• 34:30
  used. And then he has since then done a handful of them. And I think he's talked about them in
• 34:36
  some of his books and given some talks on them. So he is an advocate for them. As is Phil Tetlock,
• 34:45
  who I, we have the adversarial collaboration project at University of Pennsylvania, where essentially
• 34:51
  our goal is to make these normal in science, because right now they're so, so, so rare.
• 34:58
  Phil has also been a proponent of them for a long time. Although I think before me, he never
• 35:03
  actually done one. Now I'm making him put his money. He's talking about it. Yeah. And quite
• 35:08
  done. If people haven't read Daniel Kahneman's book, is it thinking fast and slow? His,
• 35:14
  I think that's the one you mentioned it in. Yeah. It's his most famous one. His most famous book.
• 35:19
  It's a great, great book about how your brain works on sort of two different pathways at the same
• 35:23
  time and how to spot your own psychological biases and families and be gentle with yourself about
• 35:30
  the different ways in which your brain works. Have you collaborated with Danny? Have you met Danny
• 35:34
  Kahneman? I've met him. I have not collaborated with him yet. I hear he's a busy guy. That would be
• 35:42
  right. Yeah. Phil's wife, Barb just recently did another adversarial collaboration with him with
• 35:51
  a young scholar whose name escapes me right now, but I think it just came out earlier this year.
• 35:57
  And what are the kinds of things that they are doing adversarial collaborations on? What sort of issues?
• 36:02
  So this one was on the relationship between happiness and income. So Danny had previously published
• 36:11
  that at a certain level of income, you no longer become happier. And this other...
• 36:20
  Is this the idea that once you hit about six figures, then your happy is happy as you even
• 36:25
  again. And then once you're over 100 grand, nothing more is going to make you any happier.
• 36:30
  Yeah, something like that. And then I think the results turned out actually that increased
• 36:36
  income does make you a little bit happier, but there are some caveats to it. So I don't remember
• 36:41
  the precise findings, but people can Google it. You got to make sure you don't blow it on
• 36:45
  fentanyl and hand jobs in the parking lot. That's the rule of... That's the rule of last year.
• 36:50
  It's not the answer. Exactly. When you say you'd like this program to be much more widespread,
• 36:56
  what would that achieve? How would the world be different if science was conducted through
• 37:01
  adversarial collaboration instead of the way that it's done now? I think it could be different
• 37:07
  in a lot of ways that would be quite nice for science and society. So one thing would be
• 37:14
  it would help minimize the contradiction in the scientific literature. So I mean, a lot of
• 37:20
  people say stuff like trust the science, but then it's like what science? Like if you look at the
• 37:23
  published literature, there are so many conclusions that contradict other conclusions, and it would be
• 37:29
  really hard to figure out what you should be trusting, who you should be trusting, which results
• 37:35
  are the ones that are going to lead to a successful intervention versus not,
• 37:39
  which has caused so many people to waste so much money on dead ends for things that weren't true,
• 37:44
  aren't true, and aren't going to be helpful to anyone. So I think if in my dream world,
• 37:52
  when a scientist realizes they're disagreeing with another scientist, the very first thing
• 37:56
  they do is send that person an email and be like, hey, this is interesting. I found something
• 38:03
  different. What do you think this means? Let's work together and figure it out. And then rather than
• 38:08
  two groups or three groups or five groups of scientists all pushing competing narratives
• 38:14
  into the literature for years or decades on end and confusing everyone, they just nip it in the
• 38:19
  bud and figure out what's going on. So that would be nice. The other thing is I think it could have
• 38:27
  potential to sort of change the culture of science right now. It's like pretty competitive
• 38:34
  and scholars identities get all tied up in their theories. If a scholar is proven wrong by another
• 38:40
  scholar, at least appears to be proven wrong, that's often an embarrassment for that scientist
• 38:46
  and that scientist rarely changes their belief. Everyone else judges them and mocks them and makes
• 38:51
  fun of them on Twitter for being stupid and wrong about something. But you could imagine
• 38:57
  we'd have a culture where when people update their beliefs, we respect them and admire them and
• 39:03
  be like, good, you're a person who follows the data. You're a person who changes your mind when
• 39:08
  you are confronted with new evidence. And that shouldn't be humiliating. Like so many of us
• 39:15
  update our beliefs all the time. Why does it have to be a humiliation if a scientist does it?
• 39:22
  Well, Twitter wants to make it a humiliation when we do it as well. So at least they consist
• 39:26
  and at least the trolls that consist. Yeah. Well, I mean, what does that that tells you that,
• 39:31
  you know, that's probably part of human nature. But science is an institution. It can have certain
• 39:36
  norms that potentially can wrangle people's, you know, egos potentially and at least instruct people
• 39:44
  on what they should be valuing and incentivizing in their peers. But in some of these adversarial
• 39:52
  collaborations, some of them have been a little bit contentious. But most of them go pretty well.
• 40:01
  Like what? Like what? Give me an example of a contentious one.
• 40:04
  I just mean like there's a lot of going back and forth, arguing about how to interpret a set of
• 40:14
  findings once the data are in. But the data that happened between the science themselves,
• 40:19
  then between the onlookers sniping from the farthest reaches of the
• 40:25
  I agree. But there's a question of does the adversarial collaboration improve the interpersonal
• 40:32
  relationship of the scholars or make it worse or grow them? Who cares about the scholars?
• 40:39
  But I think that on average, on average, it will make them better. And so like what you have now
• 40:45
  is these scholars become enemies and they form like passies and they're passies hate each other
• 40:50
  and you go to conferences and they avoid each other or worse. And unlike adversarial collaborations
• 40:57
  potentially could turn a lot of these enemies into friends and colleagues. And when you see
• 41:02
  the person at a conference, you're like, hey, let's get a drink. It doesn't have to be
• 41:08
  as hostile and competitive as it is. I don't think I could be wrong with that.
• 41:12
  I mean, one upside that I also see is it could serve to restore people's faith in elite opinion
• 41:20
  because it would mean that there was more consensus amongst like, you know, this is one of the
• 41:25
  things that's taken a huge hit over the past three to five years is people's faith in institutions
• 41:31
  in the mainstream media, in scientific institutions, in the World Health Organization,
• 41:37
  in the Centers for Disease Control, in public health in general. If you could arrive at,
• 41:43
  yeah, if you could sort of sort of out behind the scenes and then arrive at a more robust consensus
• 41:49
  that had fewer holes in it, it wouldn't be a bad thing for public faith and authority.
• 41:55
  Yeah, rather than having one journal or institution or person saying X and another one saying
• 42:02
  not X, instead everyone saying, well, kind of X, here are the contexts in which X is true.
• 42:09
  Right. Right. Right. You know, yeah, people wouldn't be choosing different information to believe
• 42:14
  in disregard. I think a lot of this does boil down to just making more nuanced claims which people
• 42:20
  don't want to do because they're not as exciting, but that's going to be where the truth is a lot of
• 42:25
  the time. And so I think finding ways of sort of forcing scientists to acknowledge that and speak
• 42:32
  in those terms instead of the flashy broad generalizations they like to make would help steer the
• 42:40
  public and policymakers and interventionists make them more successful at doing the things they're
• 42:47
  trying to do and, you know, making people's lives better. Yeah. Well, let's hope. You also talk about
• 42:53
  the evolutionary pressures for social status and like the evolutionary costs of being ostracized
• 42:58
  from your tribe, which is very pressing in this era of cancel culture, whatever people might
• 43:03
  mean by that. Can you can you articulate what those pressures are?
• 43:08
  Yeah. So when you think about human cognition, it's important to think about what
• 43:15
  what would humans have to do? How would human cognition have to work to promote fitness? So
• 43:20
  how would it have to work to promote survival and the ability of people to pass their genes on to
• 43:25
  later generations? And people sometimes want to think that truth is the only thing that matters
• 43:32
  and that people should be motivated to pursue truth first and foremost. And that is like the thing
• 43:37
  that would have been selected for to help people survive. But I think there's a really, really obvious
• 43:45
  one, which is avoiding, I mean, gaining social status is really important because that determines,
• 43:51
  you know, the resources you get and, you know, the quality of mates you're going to get and the
• 43:55
  quantity of mates you're going to get. But avoiding ostracism is so, so, so, so important because
• 44:02
  people were dependent on their social group to survive. If you were abandoned, you know, in the woods
• 44:08
  by yourself, you weren't going to live for very long and you certainly would produce and have
• 44:13
  successful offspring. Just staging the staging little cane toad races all by yourself. Yeah,
• 44:18
  that would help help you spread your genes. So people are human psychology should have evolved
• 44:24
  in a way that helps us gain social status, but especially really helps us avoid ostracism. And this
• 44:31
  is why this is one reason why people tend to conform to their groups beliefs. One of the most
• 44:39
  obvious examples of this is religion. There are tons of different religions all over the world. There
• 44:44
  have been tons of different religions throughout human history. And people usually tend to be pretty
• 44:48
  confident that whatever religion they were born into is the correct one. And I don't think those are
• 44:54
  insincerely held beliefs. I think they're sincerely held beliefs out of the product of I'm going
• 44:59
  to believe the important beliefs of my social group. The beliefs that are going to help me not get
• 45:04
  kicked out of the club. So it impacts what people believe is true, but it also impacts a lot of what
• 45:12
  people won't say. So I've been looking a little bit at censorship recently and even censorship
• 45:19
  among scientists. And when you interview scientists and survey scientists, this is psychologists. I
• 45:24
  should say psychologists in the US or psychology professors. You see that it almost feels like
• 45:31
  very much like high school like they're very afraid of being judged and disliked by their peers.
• 45:36
  They want their peers, you know, they want to be like cool kids in the club. And so when they perceive
• 45:44
  you know topics as potentially socially costly, empirical beliefs as potentially socially costly,
• 45:49
  they're more likely to self-sensor and not talk about their beliefs in front of their peers
• 45:53
  for fear of being ostracized. They're afraid of other things too. They're afraid of like being called
• 45:58
  names on Twitter and having like professional, you know, professional consequences like not
• 46:04
  getting invited to give talks and stuff. But if you're in any kind of social group, it doesn't matter
• 46:12
  what that social group is or who that social group is. People are motivated to conform to the
• 46:18
  beliefs, especially the important beliefs of their most important social groups, the ones that they
• 46:23
  really want to fit into and not be booted out from. Is that dynamic being enhanced at the moment?
• 46:32
  I mean, being exacerbated at the moment. I mean, it's because I don't want to take
• 46:38
  scientific finding and superimpose it onto my pre-existing beliefs in order to reinforce my biases
• 46:44
  about what social media is doing and cancel culture and so on. But as you're talking, I'm thinking
• 46:48
  of all the people who say, well, cancel culture isn't a real thing because Louis CK still makes money
• 46:54
  and Barry Weiss is doing better than ever. Andrew Sullivan has his own gig going on. And if they
• 46:59
  fire me from my public radio show for having conversations like this, then they'll say,
• 47:04
  Josh is doing fine. He's just gone to YouTube and he's still making a living, which is to me to
• 47:08
  miss the point. The point is nobody likes being excluded from the organs of society and polite
• 47:17
  culture. And of course, you can go off and you can make your own renegade little community as in
• 47:22
  protest. But the actual corrosive effect of cancel culture is a more subtle one where the conversation
• 47:28
  gets curtailed because people don't want to be out on the ice flow with Barry Weiss and Louis CK.
• 47:34
  They want to be in the club. And so they watch what they say just as people in
• 47:40
  East Germany watched what they said, you know, even if their lives would have been fine,
• 47:44
  had they been booted out of the country. But I don't know whether that is valid in this context.
• 47:51
  I think social media has two sort of different effects, maybe three different effects. So one is
• 47:59
  with social media, you actually, so it's almost like the costs of ostracism have both gone up and
• 48:06
  down, or maybe the risks of ostracism have both gone up and down. One is any, there are so many people
• 48:13
  on Twitter. So many people on X you mean on X on X. If one of them who has enough followers gets
• 48:23
  mad at something you said, just one of them. And then they, you know, do a rally cry to their
• 48:30
  followers. And then they assemble maybe only one percent of them 99 percent don't get involved.
• 48:35
  But one percent if a person has a lot of followers, that can be hundreds or thousands or tens of
• 48:40
  thousands of people. And they can put a lot of pressure on the person they're going after. So it
• 48:46
  makes it that you can, if you piss off one out of millions, hundreds of millions of people and
• 48:53
  pretty much anything you can say is going to piss off one out of hundreds millions of people.
• 48:59
  Then you're at potential risk of, you know, denunciation or paying a huge price. And this is
• 49:04
  something psychology professors are worried about too with their students. They're afraid that
• 49:09
  their students, maybe one of their student is an influencer and is really popular in TikTok or
• 49:13
  Instagram. And maybe they'll say the wrong thing, it'll be taken out of context. And then they'll
• 49:19
  get a mob after them because of that. So it's everyone is a threat and everyone's a big threat.
• 49:24
  At the same time, and this is kind of what you were pointing out, although maybe it wasn't the
• 49:28
  point you were trying to make, is the costs of ostracism sort of have gone down in the sense that
• 49:36
  if you're kicked out of one group, there are tons of other groups. And so like a berry
• 49:42
  wife gets kicked out of one group. There's another group there that's going to embrace her.
• 49:46
  The people that hate the group that she was in before, right? They'll take her on.
• 49:51
  And so you can still be successful and you can still find a sort of tribe, even if it's not the
• 49:57
  tribe that you are trying to be part of. At the same time, of course, everyone would prefer to be
• 50:02
  mainstream. And money isn't the only thing people care about. And even if you make a ton of money,
• 50:11
  the actual psychological experience of being ostracized or being kicked out of a club that
• 50:16
  you're a part of or being called names by people that you used to really like and you thought
• 50:21
  really liked you, that's painful. Even if you're a millionaire. So yeah, you're right. I mean,
• 50:31
  yeah, so the new media landscape has made it possible for people to be, you know, you don't have
• 50:36
  to be working at the New York Times in order to make a living. In fact, you can make a better
• 50:41
  living elsewhere if you have your tribe who will pay for you to do so online. But not everybody
• 50:47
  is a journal or store media commentator. If you're a professor, if you're a scientist,
• 50:53
  you don't really have that option. You do have to be inside the institution, don't you? And so,
• 50:58
  I mean, that's what I think is alarming about your findings that scientists who think that if
• 51:04
  they find unpopular conclusions, and you know, now we can touch all those red hot issues like gender
• 51:09
  or something like that, you know, if scientists believe that there are biological, that there are,
• 51:15
  for example, psychological behaviors that map onto gender or that gender is a binary and is not
• 51:21
  entirely fluid, you can imagine the reticence to express those conclusions even if they're true,
• 51:27
  because they're afraid of ostracism from their peers and punishment. So is that having an
• 51:33
  impact on professional discourse and the way that we perceive what the scientific consensus is?
• 51:40
  Almost definitely. And those are actually two of the taboo conclusions that psychology professors
• 51:45
  mentioned, the idea that men and women have evolved different psychological characteristics or
• 51:50
  not just different physically, but we're also different psychological and have slightly different
• 51:53
  personalities or the idea that biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people,
• 52:00
  people, psychology professors who believe those conclusions are empirically correct, self-sensor
• 52:06
  their beliefs more than people who don't. And I think the question in this one was like, for example,
• 52:13
  at professional conferences. So this means if the topic comes up at a conference where tons of
• 52:17
  academics are there, they start debating the issue during a talk or a meeting, the people who think
• 52:24
  it's false are going to be happy to speak up and share their perspective, whereas a lot of the
• 52:28
  people think it's true are just going to sit quietly and watch the debate happen, which creates the
• 52:33
  perception that the majority belief is actually not the majority belief of the one and the majority
• 52:39
  belief is the one that no one's saying out loud because they're afraid of paying a high social price.
• 52:44
  So I do think any time it comes to, and I saw in that paper, we looked at 10 different taboo
• 52:50
  conclusions and we saw the exact same relationship for all 10. So the more people-
• 52:54
  What was some of the other ones, by the way, correct?
• 52:56
  Which are true.
• 52:58
  Yeah, so a lot of them are related to what, well, I'm not sure if you said this, but a lot of them
• 53:02
  are related to the idea that group differences in any sort of socially valued, so as we gender
• 53:08
  differences or race differences for the most part, in socially valued outcomes, the idea that those
• 53:14
  are like innate or natural or evolved or genetically caused and they can't be attributed to things
• 53:20
  like discrimination. So one of them was, I think like discrimination is not the primary cause
• 53:29
  of the underrepresentation of women in STEM, or there was one I think related to whether
• 53:37
  I don't remember exact phrasing, but it was something related to whether like discrimination
• 53:41
  among police is not the most important predictor. Wait, is that what it was?
• 53:47
  Discrimination history. Anyway, it was, it was something like a discrimination explanation,
• 53:51
  but not the most important explanation for higher crime rates among black Americans,
• 53:58
  compared to white Americans. And then other ones that maybe not as controversial like stuff like
• 54:03
  academia discriminates against political conservatives, or I'm trying to think what were the
• 54:12
  some of the other ones that were sort of, oh, sexually coercive behavior evolved because it
• 54:18
  conferred some evolutionary advantages to men who engaged in such behavior. And we see across all
• 54:25
  ten of these conclusions that people who think they're true self-sensor more than people who
• 54:29
  don't. So really, anytime there's a controversial conclusion, we might be able to assume that
• 54:38
  the scientific consensus is leaning more toward truth than meets the eye, or meets the ear,
• 54:43
  whatever it is if you're getting this. Just to clarify, whenever there's a controversial
• 54:47
  scientific issue, it would be a good rule of thumb to think that the mainstream
• 54:53
  point of view that is not being, that is not being opposed, is probably more wrong than we think it
• 55:01
  is. To me, too, there's not being opposed more wrong in things. Well, not necessarily more wrong,
• 55:06
  but that it is less popular than it appears to be. It's less popular among the experts,
• 55:10
  and it appears to be because the experts have a dissent, have an incentive to agree with the status
• 55:15
  quo and a dissent incentive to speak up against it. Right. So socially desirable empirical beliefs,
• 55:21
  people are going to be more willing to say those out loud than controversial empirical beliefs.
• 55:26
  And so when you're trying to assess what is the popular opinion, what is the majority view
• 55:31
  among scientists, you can assume that the socially desirable ones are going to be more overrepresented,
• 55:37
  or just overrepresented compared to the people who think the controversial conclusions are true.
• 55:42
  Right. And this is hard because like, you don't want to ask people to speak up on these issues
• 55:49
  and risk their career or risk getting called names or whatever. At the same time, though,
• 55:55
  when everyone's doing it collectively, you know, if just one or two or ten or, you know,
• 56:02
  whatever, a minority of people come out in defense of this empirical conclusion that maybe not
• 56:08
  everyone thinks it's true, but certainly enough scientists think it's true for it to be worth
• 56:12
  exploring. When those ones step out one by themselves, they're really easy to attack,
• 56:18
  but if everyone in unison came forward and shared their beliefs and like, no, no, no, look,
• 56:23
  this is not a fringe idea. This is not, you know, scientifically demonstrated false. Everyone
• 56:33
  knows this isn't true. Look, 30% of us think it's true. Let's take a look at it. It would be
• 56:39
  harder to attack those, the group, if everyone would step forward together, but because everyone's
• 56:44
  staying silent, you know, when just a couple of sort of renegades are people who are willing to
• 56:49
  take risks for whatever reason come forward, then they're really easy targets for the people on the
• 56:54
  other end who are sort of trying to say, no, look, everyone thinks this thing is false. So we
• 57:00
  should stop studying it. That's another thing we see is the people who have socially desirable
• 57:06
  beliefs are more supportive of discouraging further research into these questions. So they're
• 57:10
  more desire of wanting to end empirical exploration of them. And then enter the algorithm,
• 57:17
  enter the algorithms of social media to nudges into reinforced, self reinforcing echo chambers
• 57:24
  that make us feel like our belief is even more popular than it already is because we only hear
• 57:29
  from people who either agree with us or we see caricatures of the other side. We don't hear
• 57:33
  nuanced points of view from the other side because we're not going to engage with those so they're
• 57:36
  not going to get the clicks. I mean, it sounds like you're sort of articulating a kind of
• 57:41
  prisoner's dilemma amongst rational people where the dissincentive for the individual to act
• 57:47
  is high, but the community requires that we have a collective, I mean, it's a collective action
• 57:53
  problem, basically, that we have collective action from people who are making sense. So maybe in
• 57:58
  addition to not going to tell Daniel Kahneman how to do his job or you, but in addition to
• 58:04
  adversarial collaborations, maybe we need a context for some kind of unified action or anonymized
• 58:11
  action. You know, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, to get an anonymous poll of all of the world's
• 58:17
  evolutionary biologists about some of these really controversial issues where social justice advocates
• 58:26
  claim that the issue is settled and that if you disagree with them, then you're just a bigot.
• 58:33
  Well, that's precisely what I was trying to do with this survey was like, let's see where people's
• 58:39
  empirical beliefs actually fall when you ask them an anonymous survey. And I suspect even in an
• 58:44
  anonymous survey, some people are still a little nervous. I don't want to feel bad about themselves,
• 58:49
  either. I mean, if you've absorbed, if you've drunk the Kool-Aid, you don't want to feel like
• 58:53
  outside of history. It's true. It's true. So yeah, like I wanted to see where people's empirical
• 59:00
  beliefs fell. And I think that's something that actually could give people courage if they realize,
• 59:06
  oh, it's not just me. A lot of people think this thing might be true or a lot of people think
• 59:10
  that thing is false. But that could be the thing that gives people the courage to speak up. Or at
• 59:16
  least they have a data point to point to when someone says, this is a settled issue, no more research
• 59:20
  they could say, well, it's not. Look, 20% of people think that this is plausible of psychology
• 59:26
  professors. But I agree it would be great if other scholars, not me, could do this on a much
• 59:32
  larger scale and get the views of all of the experts on all the controversial questions. So we
• 59:41
  can know which things are actually settled and which things are just too controversial to keep
• 59:45
  discussing right now. I feel like it should be systematized. Someone should do this like
• 59:50
  fire or one of these other free speech organizations should just have an annual
• 59:55
  voluntary anonymous poll that they do of the world's leading experts in things. And they could
• 1:00:01
  just publish it, you know, about whatever the most controversial issues are. I talked to them
• 1:00:06
  about that. I think we've just solved the world's problems, Corey. I'm friends with the researchers
• 1:00:11
  over there too. So maybe I could convince them to do that. The thing is people would be critical of
• 1:00:16
  it because they'd be like, you know, fire is this particular type of institution. So the only
• 1:00:20
  scholars paying attention to them are people who have a particular set of beliefs. So it's not
• 1:00:24
  representative of academic. Okay. So final team's up with the ACLU. There we go.
• 1:00:30
  There's your your adversarial collaboration. They team up with just some general polling,
• 1:00:38
  which they have done, but not on this topic. Yeah. Right. Right. Another point that you make about
• 1:00:45
  these sort of taboos and going out on the risk of going out on a limb on controversial social
• 1:00:52
  and cultural and political issues is that the boundary of the taboo is fuzzy as you put it.
• 1:00:59
  It's not delineated clearly about what you are and aren't allowed to say. And you think that that's
• 1:01:05
  intentional? Um, so I think I have suggested that it's potentially intentional. And other people
• 1:01:15
  have suggested that too. I think it would be hard to know for sure. So one thing, if you if you
• 1:01:21
  want to control other people and you want to, you know, make them afraid of of you and
• 1:01:28
  of violating your standards or whatever, then it's really useful to have sort of random attacks.
• 1:01:34
  Like you can't control everyone. You can't go after everyone. But, you know, once in a while,
• 1:01:40
  you see something you don't like. You've got time on your hands. You go after someone. And it,
• 1:01:46
  it starts to look to other people as really unpredictable behavior. And then that means that
• 1:01:52
  you're where you're going to draw the line yourself is going to become more cautious. So like,
• 1:01:57
  I think the example I've given is if like you're driving on a highway, but there's no speed
• 1:02:01
  limit. No one tells you that this is as fast as you can go. What are you, what are you going to do?
• 1:02:05
  You're going to try to estimate how fast other people are going that are pulled over. And if you
• 1:02:09
  see someone get pulled over at 75, okay, I guess I can't go 75. Then you see someone get pulled over
• 1:02:15
  at 45. You're like, oh, wow. I guess I can't go 45. And even if you see other people going 55,
• 1:02:22
  you might be like, well, I know 45 can get me pulled over. So I guess I'm going to go 40.
• 1:02:26
  This seems like the situation in Sydney, by the way, where it's so difficult to speed because
• 1:02:30
  there are speed cameras everywhere. It's extremely, extremely strict. So taking you literally,
• 1:02:35
  at least they post the speed limit. They do post the speed limit. So yeah. So I think if people don't
• 1:02:43
  know what the rules are and they don't know where the line and people don't want to make these
• 1:02:48
  rules explicit because people get called out for that. Like if they give specific examples,
• 1:02:52
  like we will come after you if you publish this conclusion. Well, now you look like a sensorious,
• 1:02:58
  you know, anti-liberal non-scientist person who doesn't care about the truth, it doesn't care
• 1:03:03
  about research. You're making rules about what people can and cannot study. So people don't want
• 1:03:08
  to explicitly tell anyone, these are the topics that I'm going to come after you for.
• 1:03:14
  These are the conclusions that if you publish them, I'm going to try to get your paper retracted
• 1:03:18
  or I'm going to try to get you fired or whatever. So we don't have those clear guidelines.
• 1:03:25
  And then some of the attacks of people to me, at least, strike me as fairly random.
• 1:03:30
  Like one of the papers that really surprised me was this one by a woman named Bidor al-Shabli
• 1:03:38
  on female mentorship. And she found that essentially female mentees who had female mentors
• 1:03:46
  were less impactful later in their careers than female mentees with male mentors or male mentees
• 1:03:52
  with female mentors or male mentors, I think. Anyway, they were like the least successful of the
• 1:03:57
  group. And so the conclusion was kind of like, well, maybe female mentors aren't as good as male mentors.
• 1:04:02
  And of course, I knew people would not like that conclusion in psychology and academia.
• 1:04:08
  People don't like conclusions that portray women as worse at anything good than men.
• 1:04:14
  So I knew that, but I didn't know people were going to get so angry about it and create such a storm
• 1:04:21
  on Twitter and essentially pressure this woman into retracting her own paper. Like to me, gender,
• 1:04:30
  or sex or whatever, it's not that controversial with topic. It's not as controversial as trans
• 1:04:35
  issues. It's not as controversial as race issues. People publish on gender things pretty regularly
• 1:04:42
  without getting in trouble. But now you see this and you're like, well, I guess I'm not going to study
• 1:04:48
  anything with gender differences or certainly not anything where it's possible women will look
• 1:04:54
  worse than men. And so that puts a whole entire set of topics as off limits. Which is I guess
• 1:05:02
  another risky thing about my taboo's papers that we see that women are less supportive of
• 1:05:08
  a academic freedom than men. They're more likely to hold socially desirable beliefs and they're
• 1:05:13
  more willing to punish and ostracize their peers for publishing controversial conclusions. So
• 1:05:20
  that one might get me into some hot water too. In fact, one of the fun findings in that paper
• 1:05:27
  is on the empirical claim that men and women have different psychological characteristics
• 1:05:34
  because of evolution, male psychologists are more likely to think that's true than female
• 1:05:39
  psychologists. And we see that consistently across pretty much every single thing we looked at
• 1:05:52
  in the paper. We see differences between male psychologists and female psychologists.
• 1:05:58
  And now I wouldn't have been that worried about that finding. I'm more worried about it now
• 1:06:06
  because people might say, oh, women are sensorious and they're anti-science and they can't do
• 1:06:10
  science. And they're mean to their peers. And that's the thing. You can frame the conclusions in
• 1:06:21
  inflammatory ways if you want to. And that's what people try to do. And they find a conclusion they
• 1:06:26
  don't like is that they draw it out to the worst possible conclusion. I'm like, oh, I guess you're
• 1:06:31
  saying women can't vote or shouldn't vote. It's like, no, right. This is the fact and that's
• 1:06:37
  the end of it. Like the implications or the applications or what we do with that information.
• 1:06:43
  I think of people, people are going to misuse it. Cory, they're going to, yeah, you have to take
• 1:06:48
  responsibility. I'm not too worried about people coming after women's right to vote. But if they
• 1:06:52
  do, and it's my fault, then I will, I will. You're blind to the patriarchy's attacks. Haven't you seen
• 1:06:58
  Bobby? Yeah, you remind me. You're reminding me a little bit of the situation that happened
• 1:07:04
  recently with Joel Inbar, who's, I don't know if you know you well, but yeah, psychologist who
• 1:07:11
  he sort of came out about this experience that he had where he was essentially offered a job,
• 1:07:15
  but I think it was University of California and UCLA. Was it UCLA? Yeah. And yeah, a bunch of
• 1:07:24
  students and activists dug up something that he'd said on a podcast years ago, being skeptical
• 1:07:28
  about whether or not diversity, equity and inclusion programs and mandates and sort of statements
• 1:07:33
  that you have to write up are actually good for minorities or whether they're sort of a language
• 1:07:38
  game that what educated people play with each other to just demonstrate their field to, to
• 1:07:44
  popular causes and to look good to each other. And his, you know, the offer was ultimately retracted
• 1:07:51
  and he didn't get the job because of this huge pile on. And this is just one example. He didn't
• 1:07:56
  actually get the offer, but it seemed likely that he was going to because he was invited to
• 1:08:01
  interview after his partner got an offer. But yeah, it was essentially like they were giving him all
• 1:08:06
  the signs of this is happening. We're excited for it to happen. And then all of a sudden they're like,
• 1:08:11
  look what the students did. Yeah, there was nothing mysterious about it. There was a huge letter
• 1:08:15
  signed by hundreds of people saying that he was like 80. But yeah, whatever. I mean, it was a big
• 1:08:22
  push to block him. It was a number. Yeah. So that reminds me of the kind of fuzzy boundary. Like,
• 1:08:30
  who would have thought how many years ago that he was recording that podcast that that would,
• 1:08:36
  that was such a social taboo. I mean, and similarly, you can find examples of, I don't know,
• 1:08:42
  professors, you know, the professor who was saying that Chinese word that sounds a little bit like
• 1:08:46
  the end of it and then lost his job for it or something like that. You know, these are there,
• 1:08:51
  there are these breaches that are only apparent after the mob has concluded that they were
• 1:08:56
  unforgivable. But in advance, it's a bit difficult to predict. Yeah, plenty of people have been
• 1:09:02
  critical of like diversity statements and what they accomplish and some of them pay it,
• 1:09:07
  have consequences, but I think probably most of them don't. And the fact that this could
• 1:09:11
  potentially cause a person a job seems like a huge and no less from the grad students who are
• 1:09:16
  only there temporarily. Like, they don't have to work with them and they don't have to be his
• 1:09:20
  colleague, but the faculty do. And yet they prioritized this concern from the set of grad students,
• 1:09:29
  which is very bizarre to me. And yeah, to me, it also would have been, Yoel is not, he's not a
• 1:09:37
  controversial guy like, no, this is not like the most vanilla psychologist ever. But he's like,
• 1:09:44
  you know, barely spicier than average. Right. So yeah, but it's a short across the panel,
• 1:09:52
  isn't it? It's a warning sign. It's the way of saying, don't touch, don't touch this at all.
• 1:09:57
  Don't think you can, you know, don't think you can play around in this space. I did listen to
• 1:10:01
  conversations happen. The podcast episode that Yoel was on on very bad visits where they talked
• 1:10:06
  about it. And I don't usually listen to that podcast, but they did imply that both of the hosts
• 1:10:12
  had been quite skeptical of the concept of cancel culture until it happened to Yoel. And like,
• 1:10:16
  at least, at least, if we learn anything from this, it's like, yeah, nobody's safe. And this
• 1:10:23
  is happening. I've argued with Tamlor and David about this, who are the hosts of very bad visits.
• 1:10:28
  It's a good show if people haven't haven't heard it. But yeah, they are generally sort of like,
• 1:10:34
  you know, fairly dismissive of the cancel culture, hysteria, and then all of a sudden,
• 1:10:39
  this happens and they mildly, they mildly tweak their priors.
• 1:10:44
  Yeah. Okay. Well, that's great. I don't want to keep you any longer. But what's your final
• 1:10:48
  thoughts? Like, give us the wrap up of how people, what people should take away from this about
• 1:10:52
  how we think, about how we think, about other people and ourselves. I think the takeaway is that
• 1:11:00
  we should all exercise a little bit of humility in our beliefs. Be kinder to other people who
• 1:11:09
  disagree with us and not contribute to the problems by ostracizing people for their beliefs.
• 1:11:16
  And oh, here's one. Here's a quick up finding that I really liked from the paper. I asked
• 1:11:22
  psychology professors how much admiration versus contempt they have for people who start
• 1:11:27
  social media campaigns to get papers retracted or professors fired for moral reasons.
• 1:11:32
  And this was on a zero to a hundred scale. And the modal response was zero maximum contempt.
• 1:11:39
  And so I think something that's missing from sort of our, what we're capable of perceiving on social
• 1:11:47
  media is we don't see the judgment that's happening or rather we don't see the size of the judgment
• 1:11:54
  that's happening toward the people who try to get other people canceled. Because people are
• 1:11:58
  scared of those people. And so some people will critique them. But most people are sitting at home,
• 1:12:04
  looking at them and saying, wow, what assholes and not saying anything. And so like the feedback
• 1:12:10
  you get on social media is easy to see. But you're only seeing five percent of it. You're not seeing
• 1:12:16
  the other 95 percent of people saying, that's really mean. Maybe we should be a little bit more
• 1:12:21
  generous to other people and assume that they have, you know, that they're decent people who are
• 1:12:26
  not morally bankrupt and just trying to screw everyone else over. And they just have some sincere
• 1:12:32
  beliefs and think they have some opinions about what's best for other people. You know, maybe you
• 1:12:37
  agree with that. Maybe you don't. And so I think, you know, just being kinder to other people and not
• 1:12:43
  piling on is in the long run going to be a better strategy for your own reputation.
• 1:12:49
  That's very interesting. So avoid the temptation to be censorious and judgmental even if it seems
• 1:12:54
  like you're getting away from the real life time. Avoid the temptation to just be to be mean to other
• 1:12:57
  people. Yeah. Call people mean. There's no point. Wow. I think we've just, the moral philosophers
• 1:13:05
  have wrestled for you for millennia with this. And we've just nailed it in one hour and 14 minutes.
• 1:13:11
  Thank you, Corey. Lovely to meet you. That was really interesting. Great meeting you. Thanks so much for having.