The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality - Rob Kurzban

talk to me about The evolutionary psychology of abortion policy yeah so um a lot of people think that where your abortions come from is like your philosophy in life and I know you've sort of thought a lot about people's philosophies and so we all live by these kind of you know really high level ethics and so on but what we've argued is that what you really want to do is look at where people's interests Li right so the evolutionary view points to genetic interests Fitness interests and so we sort of had this idea this is collaboration with my my former um colleague Jason Weeden that said well maybe what's really going on here is that if you think about abortion as a tool that people could use to have a relatively promiscuous lifestyle right so the cost of you know making a mistake if you want to put it that way go is relatively low as long as there's abortion Services um so maybe what's really going on is people who want to live a lifestyle in which they can have a sexual strategy which is maybe a little bit more promiscuous and so on that they're going to be in favor of it and the other way too right so if you've got people who are living a monogamous lifestyle what you really don't want is your partner to be tempted to stray and one way that you could deter them is by making that behavior costly so you know I I should say I was very skeptical of this explanation when I first heard it so we gathered a lot of data and um it was surprising to me it turns out that people who have views which you know kind of comport with that strategy who are kind of monogamous they tend to be opposed to abortion services and the reverse so what's really going on here is that people are sort of using favoring abortion as a way to get the policies in place that advances their reproductive interests so it's a very it sounds very cynical you know great if everyone just had a set of principles which they live by I mean if anything the last 10 years if they've sh as anything is that you know principles go out the window as soon as you as soon as people's interests are involved um and so that's that's basically the idea is that if you want to understand people's kind of moral commitments the first place you want to look is not to their overarching principles but you want to look at where their Fitness interest lifee why well so the the argument is that over revolutionary time people who advocated for those kinds of rules and Norms that advanced their interest would have had greater reproductive success so we're sort of designed to figure out look we live in a moral world like humans are weird like we have these all these rules about what you can and can't do you can eat food but you can't if you're having this other one um you know there's all these rules about violence there's all these rules about you know everything but what that means is that once you have moral communities if you can influence what those rules are you could use those rules to prevent the kinds of things that are going to be bad for your Fitness interest and Advance those sorts of things which are going to be good for your Fitness interest so we're descended for people who strategically played with the rules like poking them here and there so that they and their family and their offspring you know did better than their competitors I mean once you start thinking about that way again it's a little cynical but it's also scary right so what we should be aware of when people tell us what their positions are is to you know first ask this question okay well where do their interests lie and maybe how could this benefit you exactly and we should be pretty skeptical when it turns out that people really like the rules that benefit them I mean we're seeing this now right like I don't want to get right into it but certain people suddenly are in favor of free speech you know after being told for five years there's one word that if you say it it's literal genocide so we have to stop people from saying you know a bad word and then the next day they're out there like I want to say all these words about you know pretty bad things and they say no that's you know so once you see the the these sort of switches you could sort of see that well people are just playing around with the rules to try to advance whatever their their particular interests are can you think of an example of something where uh a moral rule is being put forward uh promoted by someone and it doesn't personally benefit them therefore it lends more Credence could you give us uh given that there's this slightly cynical view perhaps of where people are coming from with their motivation around abortion um what would be an example of of the opposite yeah that's it's a great question I think that when you think about history's Heroes often times it's those guys so for example you know the people the Civil Rights movement who were advocating for equal rights for groups that they didn't belong to I mean that's pretty good right I mean um I think of cases like uh the old days the ACLU when they're advocating for people's rights to March and skoki you know under the banner of a swastika um you that's a very principled sort of thing that's not in their interest so I think there are cases where people really do sort of have a set of principles and they're willing to you know do things that really do work against their interests in the service of supporting those principles I mean I think you know in many ways this was sort of the vision of of liberalism which was to say it's the principle that matters you know not not your particular Stakes so those I think those are sort of interesting examples and I think every time we sort of think about someone as a hero what oftentimes what that is is someone supporting a principle which is not particularly good for them comes at some cost it would have been great for people who were living in you know a very asymmetrical Society if you're at the top of it to keep that going you know you've got a good thing going so fighting for civil rights and and legislation which promoted them I think you know that was pretty heroic what are the most common push backs or criticisms that you get when you propose this personally motivated agenda rule for abortion policy well another yeah that's interesting question so I'll say a couple things so you know you I I know that you hang out quite a bit with academics and so there's sort of two kinds of ways that that academics wind up dealing with um with ideas they don't like the first one is to you know engage them the second one is to ignore them and but you know but by and large my experience and and you know even to this day with a few is is that it hasn't really been engaged all that much um a little bit you know so you have you have some Scholars who have talked about it and what they typically will do is they'll you know and they're not robit there is evidence that sort of does in some context support the sort of what's the matter with Kansas sort of thing so this is the idea that you know people are voting against their self-interests um and a lot of it does depend a little bit on how you parse out the data right so the the you know this like so many areas it's complicated so you know if you look at this data set you might find support for it but if you attendance other other data set you might not but it's usually the people who say no there really are these these principles here people are clustering into left and right for example um and they're going to vote that way and if you know one kind of issue their stance on one issue you're going to be able to guess their stance on another they're say no there really is this kind of like overarching philosophy that's guiding people's choices again I sort of believe that until we started running our own studies I mean you know we ran this study where we asked people for their views on recreational drugs and you know you told me is that going to predict people's views on abortion I would have said I don't know probably not I mean doesn't seem that related but um yeah so it turns out the recreational drug use is sort of related to this more promiscuous lifestyle which then feeds into this view about abortion and so there's a relationship there and it's pretty hard to tell another story that kind of like allows you to make that prediction before you before you ran the study was Jamie crem involved in this at all she wasn't um Jamie used to come to my lab she's a a dear close friend um she mostly has been focusing on um some really interesting stuff on um aggression within you know with both male and female styles of aggression and different kinds of styles my guess is she'd be sympathetic to these styles of argument but I I wouldn't want to put words in her mouth she was on the show last year and she was the first person that taught me about what what do you call this what's the name for this particular theory of of abortion motivation you know again academics are so funny you know you you really do the best you get some branding in there and we never branded it um oh Rob come and talk to me I'm like a I'm like a a [ __ ] marketing agent I'm like a medeor Agency for ideas I can't really do very well with ideas but I'll name the I'll name the living [ __ ] out of them anyway so that that theory um Jamie Jamie said it lots of people I imagine um will be unhappy to hear that and this is both sides of the fence this is one of those really like fascinating propositions that annoys both parties equally it it um kind of derogates both positions at the same time so kind of to recap and and tell me where I get this wrong trying to work out why people would support or be uh against abortion policies access to abortion uh requires you to look at what is the incentive that they what the uh reasons and the benefits that they are afforded by holding that particular position people who are in relationships particularly monogamous relationships particularly marriages perhaps with kids are going to be more likely to want to restrict abortion because it imposes a higher cost on casual sex which means that their committed partner which they do not want to go anywhere else is therefore going to be less inclined to potentially have casual sex because the externalities of doing that are going to be higher because maybe there's a child and maybe they can't get rid of it on the flip side the people who are single are going to be more likely to be in favor of abortion or the people that are probably like high in sociosexuality maybe polyamorous consensual non monogamy stuff like that uh because for them they want to that there is no reason for them to increase the potential cost of an accidental pregnancy uh if they are having a lot more sex if they're having sex with multiple partners that they don't intend on having a child with and that is um in contrast I think to what a lot of people believe as to be their reason for their stance on abortion which is something high futing moralistic it's to do with values and virtues and and and ethics and purpose and human life and is it six weeks or is it on conception is it a bundle of cells does it have moral worth all of this stuff um how how close am I that well honestly you really are right that you're you're marketing because you just marketed it better than I did yes you put it fu yeah we did it baby we did it that's what I do I take people who are way smarter than me and I make their ideas sound easier um so moving forward to the next step there what this let's just say that this is true let's say that this is and we don't even need to say that it is true like presumably there's layers going on here that you can have a moral imperative uh that allows you to uh adjust the way that you want the world to be and the things that you believe and what you it would be I I would be very um interested to find someone who says I in no way am influenced by my own incentives they have zero absolutely 0% influence on my worldview I think that that would be a very I would like to meet that person I think that that would be a very strong strong case to make um so what does that tell us about the position and the use of moral beliefs and of these sort of overarching philosophies life design directions and stuff uh and and how that is used to excuse and disabuse US of our uh belief about why we do the things that we do how how did how does that kind of tie into the bigger picture yeah I mean the way I think about it is that we're all sort of in this social world where we want to broadcast the most Angelic version of ourselves we can't and that's why of course when people talk about their positions on say abortion they're not going to refer to their lifestyle because you know you don't get any you know you don't get any moral points for saying yeah I I want people not to have abortion so that you know my husband doesn't go off and you know have an affair you get way more moral points for that by saying I believe in the sanctity of life and don't get me wrong I also sort of believe I mean you know I think that life is valuable and so on and so a lot of it has to do with this idea that we're constantly sort of cultivating again going back to marketing cultivating an image that makes us look as good as possible and a lot of that just you just can't say what your reasons are and this is why I think it's so interesting I mean this goes all the way back to Freud right like one way that you could avoid giving up the game is by not actually sort of consciously knowing what it is that's why people don't they don't really know right they see these contradictions they say well you know I think life begins a conception and if you really push them on it you know you can show that they don't I don't really think that so for example where that there should be an exception for rape and interest in you know like if you ask someone who had that view and said well let's suppose a 13-year-old found out that it they were you know the product of you know rape or Inc would it then be okay to kill them they they'd say no of course not you that's so what you could tell from that is you know people they don't sort of want to know the real reasons for why they have their positions because those reasons look make them look selfish so much better to kind of manufacture this image of yourself that makes reference to you know the the kinds of things that are going to make you look good in your environment so for people who are pro- Choice that's talking about you know women's bodily autonomy again I don't want to say that I don't respect women's bodily autonomy or if you're on the other side respecting you know the sanct of life that's why these words get used is because you cultivate an image that's the most positive you can and a lot of times this is what you know this this ties into this notion of self-deception whereas if if I don't really know the selfish motivation for a position that I'm taking that's actually kind of good because then I can't sort of give up the game ah yeah that quote about um the easiest way to like tell a lie is to believe it and you are the easiest person to deceive type thing yeah I don't know the the the quote yes exactly you know and that's why you know a lot of us walk around not really knowing the motives for our our actions that does you know that means it can't leak out as easy yeah what would you say just to kind of round this out what would you say to the person that feels uh morally very insulted uh but potentially curious at investigating their deeper motives uh about this like this Rob guy telling me that actually my motives are coming from this very sort of selfish self-interested Place uh I don't think that that's true I think I've investigated this a lot I've even had debates with my friends over dinner about whether or not I think that we should you know Row versus Wade should be repealed or not all the rest of it um how would you advise someone to equanimous investigate uh their their their their intentions and generally today as we sort of go through this stuff and also more generally as you learn about evolutionary psychology what is the frame that you take either personally or that you advise other people to to be like personally motivationally intellectually curious and sort of open to to to learning about these mechanisms yeah I think that's you know such a great question and I wish I wish there were more of that I think you know my view on this is that it's getting harder and harder because the best way to kind of has to see your ideas is to have a discussion when someone disagrees with you and I feel like that's happening less and less uh in the world in general and it's definitely not happening where it was supposed to happen which is in the corridors of academ right like that's where that was supposed to be The Crucible where you say your thing and give your logic and I give my evidence and like oh you that's a that is a data point I didn't know let me change my mind like that never happens right because everyone in the halls of acadine they all think the same these days right so we've seen John Height's work on this and the homogeneity of use but for that person yeah I think it's it's you got to talk to somebody who has a different View and the smarter the better right because you want to be able to back it up and the real magic happens when you catch yourself in a contradiction right when you say I want to believe this thing but I want to believe this other thing and those two thing two things can't be true so that now I really have to go back that's why these you know when you're looking at these policy stuff and you do these hypotheticals and you go well you know under this circumstance that's s once you kind of figure out where you've got the the contradiction then you can kind of tunnel back out kind of see where your principle has gone wrong but that's hard right people don't want to really talk to people who don't agree with them anymore and what what what makes you think or why do you think it is that this like attack on our identity you know this lack of openness to other ideas and this sort of very uh like person ization of our worldview has that always been the case was it that you know a Socratic dialogue 2,000 years ago someone really felt that their ego was being destroyed or is there something new about wearing moral beliefs as lapel pins that's that's sort of occurred recently have you considered that yeah that's a great question I think there's I it would be great right go back and and kind of see if if if the same phenomena was you know among the Greeks and so on I sort of feel like one piece of it is technology which is that you know any deviation from you know what your particular tribes Party Line is now very visible because of social media and so sort of the cost of diverging from the viewer different now for maybe what it would have been um I mean heck in the past you you make some remark and later you could deny it now you know it's written an ink in the internet and you're G so that might kind of Squish people towards a certain kind of homogeneity because they don't even want to move into this space of Divergence from their tribes view uh you know what I mean so so that would be one possibility and I think that's linked to another you know piece of technology which is man like you know it used to be that the kinds of punishments that you get would be from the state or from your friends now of course social media has added a whole new piece you know a new part of it and so by again by sort of putting yourself out there it's not just deviating from whatever the party line is you know you're exposing yourself to a lot of attacks from other people particularly in the public sphere so I yeah my guess is technolog changed it quite a bit and it has to do again with the fact that you know humans are these moral creatures who are just looking for people to wag their finger at and say you're you're bad or you're idea is bad um but I do think there's something modern about there's something that does seem distinct about how you know like so what I started is as an academic way back in the day I don't think it would have been true that just asking questions about some of the third rail topics right now were kind of moralized in the way they were I might just be misremembering because I'm I'm old and you know in the past everything is you know bright and Rosy and sunny and everything that whatever but like I remember people doing stuff on you know like the bell curve came out and sure there was some controversy but it I I don't I don't know I I guess also people like to tell the story about how you know when socio biology came out there was a conference where you know Wilson got Splat you know water thrown on him you don't know that story no oh in my world that's like famous as everyone knows that yeah what was he what was he talking about so he had this idea that maybe Evolution applies to humans too you know back in 75 and um so there was some push back on that right so that I I that's I as far as I know that story is true but for all I know it could be apocryphal but by the same token like I don't remember the kinds of you know experience things that you see now where you again you just ask questions about I mean even that if you ask a question what as a woman in some context that you for some reason now you get into this massive amount of trouble yeah I don't remember that so it does seem like we've trans kind of transitioned into a very moralistic cultural moment yeah I certainly the technology thing is I've spoken about it a lot um one other contributing factor to this uh our opinions and our Deeds are very apart far apart from each other you don't get to see what someone does but you get do get to see what someone says and the cost of saying the right thing is so low that I think many uh low truth low trust tribes would sooner have a false Ally than a true adversary do you know what I mean yeah totally yeah I I think that's exactly right and again this this connects both up to the academy in general but you know again some of these you know the protests which you know is on everyone's mind right now one thing that super interesting are these cases where you know you ask people about what's at stake you know when they're out there in a tent or whatever and you know we don't have great date on it we have anecdotes but many of them have no idea and so what are they doing there it doesn't have to do with advancing a particular policy or you know trying to influence a particular policy it's I'm showing up here I'm signaling my commitment to this ideological Community okay so you know we have these campus protests going on at the moment from a morality M signaling incentive evolutionary psychology lens what do you make of them what are you what are you seeing when you look at these protests I think yeah I think a big part of it really is this signaling that you are committed to a particular set of ideas and therefore for your particular tribe the way that this is shaken out for whatever reason on on college campuses among the sort of Elites if you want to call them that is that the the the commitment is to this oppressor oppress Dynamic and so you're saying whoever's on on the you know oppressor side I'm against them uh and so I'm going to show up to this thing I'm going to spend my time my energy it's interesting because you know the masks are an interesting feature of it because signaling Theory says that you get the most bang for your buck if you can signal honestly so you you know one way to do that is to say I'm GNA stand up for this principle and I'll take the consequences whereas it's not clear that that's what's going on here but I think the main thing that we're seeing in these protests is this saying you know um I belong to this this community in terms of the ideology that it endorses a set of beliefs a set of even if they don't actually know what those beliefs or that ideology is exactly I mean it's sort of I don't want to be too cynical about it but it's kind of irrelevant you know again you see these great interviews where people go in and you know you can ask people basic facts about you know whatever it is they're protesting you can ask them uh facts about what is it that these people want to bring about and it's very clear that many maybe not all but many have no idea and of course the reason that that makes sense is that they don't care you that that's not why why they're there they're there to say you know it's a shth in some sense right as long as you what's a sh what's a shth this that big biblical story I'm gonna mess I hope I don't mangle this but this is the idea that um there was a two sets of people and one of them wasn't able to pronounce a particular cluster of you know letters and so in order to make sure the person really was from that group you had to say this word that included that syllable and if they could say it's like you know I took French Americans are terrible at the O distinction you know right okay you saying this is like a verbal lexical [ __ ] test it is a [ __ ] test yeah wow it's a little bit of a [ __ ] test and yeah so by the way I I looked at your reading list and I you know I love the [ __ ] test terminology we should adopt it but um exactly so it's saying are you really a member of our tribe right um and so if you show up here and whatever you're ready to face the consequences I mean it's hard to show loyalty right if I just said to you oh I'm you know I'm your best friend you'd be like well okay it's cheap for you to say that this comes right out of your average signaling Theory from evolutionary biology and economics but you know if I find out you need a kidney and I put my hand up right away and be like yeah so that's a costly signal yeah it's interest isn't it interesting that um someone's time uh you know that they're living intents um the if the students they're missing classes if they're uh employed they're missing work um they presumably I mean maybe they're having fun but from the outside it doesn't look that fun um so that's a high investment that's like a costly signal you can't you can't be there and not actually be there and the being there is is pretty sucky which makes it odd to think why not watch 30 minutes on YouTube to understand the ideology that you're there so that when the guy with the microphone does come and say hey do you can you point to the River Jordan on a map or do you know what from the river to the sea is or what's the actual outcome that you're looking to do here or why are you here or whatever it might be and obviously the on Street interviews are cherry-picked to make people look either really stupid or really smart you never get to see it's the same as um uh one of my friends has a great piece of advice about looking at Trip Advisor reviews or booking.com reviews for hotels says disregard all of the one and five star reviews he's like only have a look at the two three and fours CU those are the ones that actually have taken time to really think about what it is that that they're doing and it's kind of the same as that but yeah look at how much um time you're investing effort missing class missing work sleeping in on a tent um and and yet the what would be more aligned ideologically aligned investment of I'm going to learn a bit about what we're doing um doesn't seem which suggests a um like fragility or a shallowness uh to what's actually going on here yeah sha shallowness among you know college students who would have thought what a yeah what a shocker I totally agree with you that's why I find the mask thing so interesting because that's a good way to keep the signal honest right is to say I'm here to face the consequences and yet lots of just I haven't been watching much of this a lots of the people that are at the protests masked up yeah and is that Co mask or like balaklava mask um a little above and it's so interesting to me I mean the only thing I would push back on that maybe is is this part of some big Suite of well you know we are still concerned about super spreader event is this like vestigial Co [ __ ] or um is this we look hard and wear antifa type Black Block type stuff um but your your Point's pretty interesting if you're going to make the sacrifice miss work Miss class do the sleep in attent um why not capture all of the Goodwill from the cameras seeing your look at me I Rob am here I Chris am here in the tent doing the thing yeah exactly and I I totally take your point it's hard to know the motive here right could be could be left over covid could be the looking tough thing I don't really know all I'm saying is like yeah with with these singling arguments you sort of expect them to want to soak up all of the potential cost as long as they're not you know going past whatever it is the benefit that they're going to get right I mean look going back to the top of your question you know people are constantly weighing these costs and benefits right so what's the you know benefit of advancing this particular trying to advocate for this abortion policy you know what's the whatever and so in this case it's just it just seems like it's s of lwh hanging fruit like stand up it makes me think that what's really going on in those cases is that there's a cost they don't want to bear in the outside world right they don't want to be sort of like criminally responsible but they do want to bear the cost of but you're saying sleeping in a tent because the guys next to them are going know right the person who might be their boyfriend or girlfriend right so you see saying like the they want the cost to be local not Global and if so that's to me very interesting like that's actually pretty subtle right so these these these kids you call them kids but they're know they just not idiots what they're doing is they're saying look I'm happy to pay this cost with respect to what that person thinks about my time and about my effort about sleeping in a tent I don't really want to pay the CT the cost in a court of law that's too big for just signaling that I'm uh I'm I'm on board right yeah because the uh benefits to The Wider the benefits that are afforded from The Wider world to you are skewed toward costs and the benefits that are afforded toward you from inside of the encampment are skewed toward benefits exactly and I think that accounts for what's going on here which I find completely fascinating I think what that does is it tells us something about these again you know you could say Well they're idiots they don't know what you know what river is but you could also say they're not idiots they're getting the cost benefit computation right just right they're there but they're mased you know yeah that the geopolitics might be lacking but their interpersonal signaling is 10 out of 10 it yeah okay so we you know we're sort of dancing around the topic of morality what are the evolutionary origins of where morality comes from and and what's the function of something like morality well this goes back to your prior question about you know my views on a so I have a view on this which people don't really engage very much but I'll tell you my view it's a little different from most so we pissed everyone off already let's keep going yeah there's really no one left so I might as well try and get the last um so I'll start with what I don't think a lot of people when they say when they talk about the human moral sense and this goes all the way back to Darwin they talk about cooperation so we're moral because we're Cooperative preachers um and then there's you know another line of argument that locates the origin of Morality In trying to suppress uh violence and harm so whatever that's another line so my view is a little bit different so the my view is that humans are weird so we tend to cooperate in groups but we do so in this very strange fashion where we switch sides from time to time so like you know nonhuman animals you're always siding with your Kat that's that's that's the way it always happens um but in humans sometimes you're siding with this person sometimes you're siding with that and our argument is the nice thing about morality is that and when I say morality what I really means World judgment so when I say Chris it was wrong of you to take my mango or to take Fred's mango go that was wrong of you um what as long as I can persuade everyone else around me that you did the thing that was wrong then when you're having this conflict with Fred so you and Fred are in this fight and I'm like here's what we should do we should gang up against Chris because he did the thing that was wrong and the nice thing about that is when fights break out I'm always on the side that has everybody else on it so the argument is that morality is we call a side choosing mechanism it says when fights broke break out find the person who did something that we called wrong and that could be took the mango or hit Fred in the face or didn't wear a headscarf or had an abortion or had an abortion and when that thing when that happens I could be on the side that everyone else is because we're all wagging our finger at the same person so unlike it's not a cooperative strategy it's not an anti-h har strategy it's just a way to avoid being on the losing side of conf and this the the the thing that's interesting about I think about morality is that you know even if you were my best friend you know if you did a thing if you did steal the mango I'm you know I'm still better off saying look I'm your friend but you know you should pay a $3 fine or 10 pound fine or whatever it is because you did the wrong thing so this is a view that locates morality and again it's pretty cynical but it's a very selfish kind of thing it's a saying I just don't want to stand next to the guy who's accused of being of doing something wrong that's the main role of morality is I want to be on the side of the people doing the accusing not the person who did who got accused so that that explains the function of morality and adaptively how it's advantageous but I I'm still struggling to understand like where moral rules come from or why particular rules are come about that's a great question yeah so the idea there so you know I spent a lot of time with Anthropologist so when I was a grad student I was trained as a psychologist but then I half of my adviser team was Anthropologist the late great John Tubi um and then I spent some more time with Rob boy so what you're really asking a question about is cultural change so the idea here is you know people are minting moral rules all the time according to this view so you know don't you know put the beads on the string or you know don't fish in the sacred Lagoon or whatever and some rules just get some support so and this comes from self-interest so let's take rules against harm someone says you know what we should do we should have a rule that says no one can punch someone else in the face for no reason and like I have a face that I don't want to get punched I'm going to support this rule right and so all cultures wind up with these anti- harm rules antiviolence rules and so those are really stable in the sort of the cultural sense right so like some ideas are just stable like this goes all the way back to like the dockins idea of a meme they're just like memes right so and some rules are just good and then some rules it takes a minute to figure out whether or not they're good or bad so you know I like the example of charging interest which I know you know again your readers you can now take a little nap here but I love you know the qu interest as an interesting thing because there were lots of cultures that said you can't charge interest it's bad it's Usery and then other cultures said yeah give your money to someone if they can use it as capital do something cool let them do it and then they'll give you a little bit more that you gave them back and it just turns out that's like such an amazingly good rule to have that says you may as opposed to must not charge interest um and so this really explains why why it is that you know Western cultures why capitalism works so well is because it moves resources capital from less useful to more useful purposes is there a obvious selection criteria for the societies and civilizations that did versus did not permit interest was it societies that had fewer people but more money versus societies that had more people but less money or something I mean once you get into these questions just so hard like these cultural things are so difficult I think it was you know just the West Was sort of just ready for for whatever reason you know the foundations were laid for this idea um that that sort of it's complicated right that does said I think the answer is who knows yeah but but what happened was that when cultures had this idea they were able to just get more stuff right because then cult you know capitalism has all these nice benefits and they grew very fast so moral rules uh using interest is a pretty good example right I I don't think many people in the west would consider I mean some people might not be happy about charging interest but it's kind of part of the course it's like look if you're going to give me money for a while I probably need to incur some kind of cost or else I can just take I'm like free to be obliged to have your money at any point um I think it's an interesting example of something that right now we really take for granted but in the past might have been very contentious what I'm thinking about is when a new rule gets introduced like you mentioned before much of our motivation it seems is to be on the side of most people right like and that is basically just don't be the one that's singled out don't be the punch the guy in the face guy be the person that says don't punch the guy in the face guy um this means a couple of things first off there's like this sort of mimetic cyclical nature presumably to when new rules get introduced and then there must be a kind of temperature checking thing that people do uh and then there must be as well I guess finally a reason why people go with or go against the crowd so they must do do people kind of observe what others do is this got implications for like crowd mentality and stuff like that yeah and I think this is why people are so excited about advertising them world you all the time I mean have you ever had difficulty trying to get someone to give their opinion about you know some you know some World cont like people they they follow over themselves right um this is people's favorite Pas time is to talk about what they think is bad and wrong and so on so yeah I think all of everything you just said is right um and I think the other yeah the the thing about charging interest you're exactly right that we lose sight of the fact that there was this whole big process by which you know that rule became common but it wasn't always I mean even property rights right like like it used to be that you know there's some it's still places where people say that you know you have a property right over this but you don't have a property right over that and people argued about that I like the example of Napster right because again I'm showing my age here but for a minute you there's a whole bunch of people who sort of thought you know what information should just be free and there's something nice about that it sounds good but like if you made the song that doesn't sound so good so there was a big fight about you know what who has a property right over it what does that property right look like and then we got to the current sort of equilibrium right where we you know have the technology that sort of helps us allow people to sell their digital stuff I mean whatever they sell um but again we don't notice it much because that fight's over right the things that we do notice are where the fights are so the abortion one is a is a very good example um you know anything that's sort of at the center of you know modern political fights is basically where we're trying to figure out a bunch of these different kinds of moral rules and where we're going to land okay how does morality get used as a weapon then yeah so I mean I think the best examples of that are the classic examples like think about Salem in this country you know the Witchcraft Trials where you know once you have this surrounding set of rules about what you can't do with better and worse criteria for deciding about whether or not someone did it you know these accusations can be wielded As Weapons you know all you got to do is get enough other people to agree with the accusation or put the person into context in which I can't you know or unable to deny it so I mean this is why I think this is the big thing about morality that really separates my view for most other a lot of people think rowy is this warm fuzzy you know unicorns pooping gold bars of marshmallows whereas I don't view it that way I view Marsh marshmallows I view morality I I view marshmallows very fav but um I view morality as yeah so it's this it's this thing we're all living in this world where at any moment someone can make a moral accusation you know Chris broke this rule he that thing um even even thought crimes right so if during the religious ages right so if you thought there were two sacraments of seven sacraments right you could be subjected to Unholy torture for who knows how long so that's what I mean like these accusations that that one has broken a moral rule these really I I think of these accusations as a tax and morality as a weapon this is the way that we can recruit other people and again history is replete with this right in this country you might or might not know there has been some racial tension over our you know history and then there were places in you know the American South where you could say that person from a group that I don't like looked at me or my partner in a funny way and the next thing you know that person is dead you know because that that's an attack what do they do they did this they broke this rule about I you know where they can look so this is the way I view morality as this weapon that we can all use and have to be conscious of at any given moment right I mean does that make sense it does uh I understand why you would choose to use morality to not be the target of some accusation to not be in the eye of Sauron there must be it feels like there must be more benefits afforded as well though some the ability for your sort of um nobility and virtue to kind of stand on the shoulders of somebody else I would never like so there must be more than simply avoiding being the target what what are the actual benefits that are being afforded to the people who are sort of the moral judgment makers yeah it's a good question I don't know again I sort of am compelled by salum and so one of the things about someone who keeps their powder dried you know manages to persuade people not to accuse them and so on what does that what does keep your powder dry mean that comes from oh yeah I think it's because back in the day of flintlocks if your powder got any water in it then when you tried to ignite it you wouldn't get the spark so what what what does that mean as an analogy yeah so good question the analogy is something like manages to keep free of tripping over something that would cause someone to make an accusation so just yeah okay okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah S I didn't mean to make that so no no I I did I'm enjoying learning all different words that one and yep yeah um so I me the thing about anytime that big more conflicts emerge the the person who's not as you put it in the eye of s which I also like like other people benefit like during the during the Salem Witch Trials you know some of that stuff was about land rights and so once someone's you know burned at the stake or you know with whatever in a jail cell for a long time the stuff the remaining stuff gets reassembled and so there's more stuff to go around so there are real benefits to being the moralistic person who manages to stay out you know again as long as as long as gu doesn't land on you there's all these benefits to be had by sacrificing the people in your social World um you know it's incredibly temped I had a conversation with Andrew Doyle who wrote a book called the new Puritans uh using the Salem Witch Trials as a historical comparison to look at what's happening with a lot of cancellation and social justice at the moment I I found out about spectral evidence have you learned about this no no tell me uh I'm pretty sure it was called spectral evidence spectral evidence y spectral evidence was testimony in which Witnesses claimed that the accused appeared to them or did harm in a dream or a vision contemporary witch law held that witches could project themselves spiritually either directly or with the aid of Satan in order to harm their victims from afar so spectral evidence is um kind of like original sin in a way uh and it's also the uh lineage that you can draw to Modern social justice is probably pretty pretty straight uh but there was like they'd been using during the witch trials they've been using spectral evidence for decades [ __ ] ages like it was admissible in court spectral evidence was something that was admissible in court and there was this story where one day whatever the equivalent of the Supreme Court or the ruling court or whatever of whatever version of America existed at the time they sent this thing up and they were like we're just going to check you know that we've been using this spectral evidence thing like quite a bit for quite a while now that's that that's okay right and this atic came back was like what the [ __ ] are you talking about no it's not admissible like please for the love of God uh like no uh don't that's not and and that I think Andrew taught me was one of the undoings of uh The Witch Trials was that this very sort of tenuous grasp on what did and did not justify or or um uh for evidence bad doing uh the bar was raised um because this accusation was so loose and Costless that anybody could have I didn't like the way to Rob he just sent the thing at me and Satan appeared or whatever um anyone can do that at any time which means that obviously the um friction for you to be able to point the finger at your moral tribal enemies is basically zero right so interesting yeah that's a great story I think this sort of speaks to this is why I get so puzzled when people you know that when people get resist the idea that morality is scary you know I think about cases like the the witch trials and what you just said where it's like this license to just you know do whatever we want with no evidence to people and I think there's an important piece here which is that during various phases of human history you know the people Empower to go back to the American South you know I I was very affected by um you know stories of that time and the people in power could just use these accusations to you know you know do horrible things to their fellow fellow man and I think you know we talk a lot about in this country about you know the founders and the enlightenment so on um to tracing those ideas all the way back to the mikarta and I think one way to think about the last many hundred years is sort of putting the breakes on that kind of stuff so you just mentioned you know go up to the Supreme Court so you know this this idea that you know due process for example is just a way of saying look if there's accusations we're going to put a breakes on it because we don't want people to be able to bring spectral evidence in and just say no no no I dreamed it so you gotta put him on you gotta light the fire and then you know take his stuff and then whatever um and so you know in many ways I think the bit one of the ways in which civilization advanced was exactly putting the brakes or what you're talking about and I think what you know I didn't read the new Puritans but it sounds to what he's pointing to is we don't want to sacrifice those gains right you sort of don't want to get back into a world in which the people in power can point their finger and say you know that you know we're going to burn that guy today or that moment yeah so we've uh probably presented a pretty unflattering view of morality surely morality in its best form is still quite nice though you know you mentioned earlier on uh harm or or or a push back against harming people that seems to be I would put that down as a pretty Universal good what like isn't morality nice and and what is morality at its best and also are any fundamental kind of like Universal Universal in that they appear a lot uh laws of morality like what are the what are the underpinnings of it and can't it be done well I totally agree I mean don't get me wrong I mean morality can be a force that you know leads to great I mean I think harm and property rights are the two big ones I mean you know we now have a whole bunch of ways that we can stop people from harming each other because we've encoded that morality into the legal system and we've given the state the use of force to to you know enforce those rules that's great you know when it's working it's you know that's really wonderful same thing about property rights which goes you know it's great to say look if you take my mango then you know you're gonna get punished because then I can either eat my mango or I could sell it to someone who wants it more and then we've now increased the good in the world right because I have the money and you have the mango um and that's pretty great um all the stuff about and I think the other thing is just more generally I mean you know I don't hide it all that well but my you know I'm a Libertarian at heart um not the big out libertarian but uh the person who says look as long as you don't hurt anybody and everything's consensual and everyone's an adult do whatever you want and a lot some moral rules have moved in that direction right so like you know it's I remember before Obama came out in F in favor of same-sex marriage know Libertarians little ill were ahead of that curve like I don't care what sex you are if you want to get enter into a contract like everyone should have access to the contracts and the the sort of once you in once you put those kinds of ideas into laws which really again or just what that really was was saying this is a moral principle we have now which is that we're going to treat everybody the same that's great like I think that is morality at its best that's saying look if the rules are the sorts of rules that work in favor of people's choices and Liberty and against you know harm unprovoked harm then morality is doing a great job and we don't have much more than that I'm thinking about the trajectory of human moral principles over time and thinking about how it seems to me like there's two buckets of uh moral principles one being uh the protection to and the other being the prohibit uh prohibition of like you this is with gay marriage you are allow it is protected for you to be able to do that I mean you could yeah and the other side being the prohibition you cannot have sex under this age you cannot do this particular thing before this time as the Arc of human civilization and morals and stuff continues to progress does that not mean that there's like this ever increasing accumulation of more complex system of morality which makes being a human and dancing through that mindfield ever more difficult oh my God yeah totally agree I mean as as cultures become more complex and Technologies change I mean yeah I mean just think about the things that people run a foul of that they just couldn't have run a foul love before I mean I I just saw this thing yesterday the day before you know getting into trouble because you didn't post the black Square In some cultures you're like like yeah that was definitely not something my hunter gather ancestors had to worry about right it's just they didn't have to worry about omitting some particular signal or whatever and yeah it's totally complicated and of course as you get more people and they're they're living more densely you know the kinds of things that affect other people goes up you know I'm playing my stereo and I'm in you know whatever in the place to scene I would have been it doesn't really matter right but like now it so so you need to have all these different rules that weigh your benefits against my costs and so on it's really complicated and and it's yeah it's hard to keep up with it I mean um you know this this is an area where you know my my uh my friend Josh who works on our little substat together he's constantly trying to persuade me that we should just go back to like a hunter gather lifestyle in part because it's just not so complicated you know you just don't have to worry about all these and he's you know there's something to that I mean Dental Care something that you know as a modern thing I'm very you know very fond of don't want to have to go back very Pro Dental Care Pro Dental Care yeah um but he's got a point which resonates with yours which is just like we have to deal with all of these you know people around us but all of the complexities of the rules interacting with each other I wonder how I wonder how much of the sort of ambient stress that humans feel in the modern world is just Downstream from a [ __ ] T more rules and it's kind of more complex and you know if we do have an increase for whatever reason we don't need to go down the rabbit hole of like autism spectrum disorder uh social isolation just social ungainliness um what that probably feels like for an increasing proportion of humans is a more complex nuanced world that I need to move through more deafly at a time where more people than ever before have a reduced capacity at dancing through that more complex World totally and this I've become a little bit closer I wasn't for a while but I'm close reading a bit more close to the Adolescent literature on mental health because that seems to be the area where at least by some reports you've got these kids who are just constantly in fear of tripping up against what the whatever the current thing is whatever the current issue is and and I think I wonder if that helps to explain a little bit because you know there's there's other evidence you know they're not going out and playing and and they're not you know whatever they're that that maybe there's a little bit of a risk aversion just the less you put yourself out there and what that means is they're not having the challenges that you know I mean we did I'm older than you are but you we did we said and did all kind of dumb stuff when we were that age none of it was captured on an iPhone not a single thing and so I wonder if that's playing into exactly you're saying like you've got to tiptoe around this stuff you've gota you know hit it you've got to just or like get it just right and then even then you're not safe because tomorrow the rule might be the other way right and oh I got you because you go the other way there what are some of your favorite examples of uh new mod moral rules the posting of the black Square maybe a small one but are there any that um have come about relatively recently uh that might surprise people when they realize that these aren't instantiated in you like human history or whatever um I mean I would say anything anything drawn from the kind of you know the identitarianism this idea that you always have to back um the you know in many in many little subcultures particularly United States you always have Ste it back whatever it is whoever it is the person that that falls in the category of being the oppressed person I mean I get it like there is I sort of share the intuition that you should sort of root for the underdog but the way that that has taken off I mean again I'll I'll wear my my Politics on my sleeve I mean I was shocked at you know going back to the protests you know you had this conflict don't get me wrong it's obviously complicated but one side is intentionally trying to you know kill civilians and the other side is intentionally trying not to do that um and yet the you know the moral Norm in many cultures is to loudly back the what I take to be the side that's you know doing this I I suppose the um the sort of degree of complexity to layer on top of all of this is the inability for people to agree on what is true right this multiplicity of sources of Truth well no that's not that's not your truth that's not the truth that's just your interpretation of this thing um and this kind of comes back to the increasing complexity of rules and morality that people need to weave through you know I I always think all the time about Barry Schwarz is the Paradox of choice all the [ __ ] time I think about this it's like so fundamental I even remember where I was when I first listened to that the road great North Road in uh Newcastle upon time driving North toward the A1 from the the city center I remember the first time I was listening to that uh YouTube video and I was like oh oh my God so for the people that don't know um 40 years ago you would go to the jeans store and there would be one type of jeans and you would it would be in different waist sizes and you would go in and sure maybe you didn't want these blue Levis jeans or whatever let's say 60 years ago I don't know whatever um and sure maybe they're not perfect for you um but you had very little decision fatigue and any suboptimal outcome in your genan choice did not feel like a personal deficiency in your decision-making criteria it felt there was no other option right so like what else could you have done so you have this degree of sort of uh satisfaction and satisficing uh when it was from like a economics economics standpoint then you roll the cloth forward to now and you go into the jeans store and it's boot cut or skinny it's ripped it's bleached it's it's cropped it's black it's highrise it's lowrise it's all you know that means that even though the total uh utility of one decision has increased because you can get precisely the exact pair of genes that you wanted to get you are now faced with this huge amount of decision fatigue and and any suboptimal decision if you put a pair of jeans on you're like I really don't like the way that my ass looks in these jeans I wish I'd got the ones that were a bit darker the gray instead of the black or whatever uh that's your fault now and it's kind of the same with all of the different options we have for information that that well it's great like I don't want to live in a world where I don't have answers to questions that I want to ask in chat gbt Google Wikipedia stuff like that faking fantastic I can see everything but I now have gone from having to be an information sourcer to an information discerner I I now have to use and and for almost all of human history you had less information than you needed so I think that within probably the last 50 years Humanity has gone from having less information than it wanted to way more than it needs and the skill set from uh foraging for information versus Discerning from uh an overwhelming amount of information that's a very different skill set and I don't think that we are particularly well adapted to do that totally and I think that goes back to the top of our discussion where you know you think about where are people getting their information and you've got the sort of the in my you know in the US you've got the MSNBC crowd and then you the Fox News crowd and then you ask this question well why do people seek the you know they get an economist would talk about a confirmation bias right which it's weird like it's actually weird that people have a you know if I just want to maximize what I know about the world I sort of don't want to limit the evidence to just whatever supports I actually want to look for counter examples right and then this question is why why is that there um and it's important right because as you say you wind up in this tiny little information ecosystem I actually wonder if it goes back to what you were you know we were kind of talking about earlier which is do I really want to see the holes of my own argument do I really want to kind of lift the curtain back behind and you know if you're you know I I think that for whatever reason people experience that as discomfort and I do think it has to do with the fact that once you sort of do have that experience um yeah you kind of have to say you know maybe my motivations are not quite as pure and then once I know that maybe you'll find out because I'll say it out loud and I think that's why it's so interesting to to you know spend some time listening to people who have these kinds of exper you know these conversion experiences right like the the liberal who's been mugged becomes a conservative or or vice versa or whatever because those are people who really do have this interesting experience of having like very firm beliefs but both ways and they could wrestle with wait how did I believe that and you know my experience of those conversations is they they almost always say the same thing which is well everyone around me that's what they thought it's just like okay but then that sort of pushes it back well why were you around those people all the time um yeah I mean you know the um Peak version of that are these people that were brought up in Cults yeah right uh and you didn't know any other part of the world uh I had God damn it who was the lady that did The Witch Trials of JK Megan Phelps Roper who was a part of the westbo Baptist Church and uh she came on the show fascinating you know just total indoctrination it was the physics of her sort of social psychological system with all of these beliefs uh and then she comes out of it and like sort of just you know this fug fever dream state that she was in and kind of gets released into the world and there's all of these other things uh I I read this sentence from Nick Bostrom uh a couple of weeks ago I haven't been able to stop thinking about it he refers to it as thinking in super positions so superp position from uh quantum phys physics yeah where you have sort of two two particular positions at the same time and Until You observe them sufficiently closely they don't collap you don't collapse the super position and it's just a I'm sure that the physics people like have a problem with it because it's like not that accurate but it's basically holding two contradictory views in your mind at the same time and not choosing to collapse that super position too quickly it's like all right I'm just going to like keep trying to hold these things and the more that I spend time trying to think about that like not I'm not going to like lock my sense of identity to one thing and obviously I do it all the [ __ ] time with everything whether it's pickle ball versus paddle or or like you know some big geopolitics thing um but the more that I'm able to do that the happier I feel like I just my texture of daily experience seems to be way better because I'm just curious about the outcome as opposed to feeling like some sort of ego death thing is going to happen if whatever flag post I've pinned my colors to is uh abused in some way or or or damaged by a Maybe very valid uh alternate argument there's this I remember listening to eart tole forever ago when I was like first try starting to read things and listen to to things and he says that um one of the reasons that people cling on to their beliefs so much is that admitting that you're wrong is tantamount to death but it's death to the ego and death to the ego is almost the same as death to yourself like you are that ego you are your positions and uh yeah it's one of the reasons why publicly admitting that you're wrong or you like publicly saying I've changed my I used to believe this thing and I don't the more that you can do that I think you cultivate in yourself a kind of like safety you like how people be learn to relationally or in terms of their attachment become safe I go through a difficult thing and I come out the other side and all right and the more that you can kind of get out ahead of it yourself uh I think is I'm I'm thinking about trying to do this a lot uh personally just like I was wrong about that and I was wrong about this and I'm really not too sure about that the more that you do that I think the more open it engenders you to be to new ideas and changing your beliefs in future yeah yeah it reminds me there's this great I know I'm probably gonna get wrong there's an economist I think it was kth Arrow but it might not have been and someone asked said something like ah I see that you change your mind a lot you know this got to Revis his views as Publications and I it might be apocryphal but he says yeah that's what I do when I realize I'm wrong what do you do and it's just is this great sort of moment right and I will say this man like I think it's unusual for you to feel good about this ability to sort of keep two things your head because there's I think there's some good psychological literature that you know people who have just one cause and just keep pushing on it um the sort of fanatic types and you know like westbo those people are pretty happy you know they have it's a little bit like the Paradox of choice which is they've got rid of the pattern so say you like I'm going to be this direction this is my thing um I'm going to believe on this I'm going to be a fanatic about it and I'm not going to look for contrary information I do think there's something to what you're saying which is you know I don't want to get too woolly but you do sort of feel like the world would be a better place with more of the Kenneth Arrow types or whatever what you're describing which is I don't know I mean I think a lot about the difference between what the academy was when I envisioned what it was going to be like and then what I experi you know like I I grew up on Star Trek so I assumed it was a bunch of Vulcans like you sitting around the table and being like I have this evidence I believe this thing and this other person says well I have this counterevidence and the first person says I have decided to revise my view and like dispassionate yeah like and then and then it's it's nothing like that it's like I have this mountain of data that undermines this thing you just said and like I still believe my thing I'm going to get I'm going to write a book about it yeah that's wrong or that's unethical or you're using motivated reasoning or you're a xenophobe bigot racist homophobe whatever it might be yeah okay so yeah sorry I didn't mean to distract just to say like I don't the people you would expect to be like you which is to say oh I've got the couple our academics where you're just like okay I've got these couple ideas let's just figure it out that's not hasn't been my experience yeah I mean that's the gold standard I'm I'm usually probably pretty black and white basic [ __ ] bro signs most of the time but uh Corey Clark's been on the show and uh she brought up this study that she did recently I think she sent the email to every psychology professor in the United States like it was like some ungodly no like 5,000 academics and it was how much do you self-censor what are the topics that you think that should never be spoken about split it up from male and female how much do they prefer to have uh like a kind of like a doing good or supporting versus truth seeking uh type thing and yeah man there's a lot of um you know forget even the St students which is you know what Jonathan height and a lot of other people will be looking at how much are you self-censoring when you're on campus coddling of the American mind [ __ ] like that the professors yeah are feeling this um maybe in some way especially if you're not even if you are tenur like because you know there's a there's the hard cancellation of you no longer have a job but there's the soft cancellation of none of your uh teaching assistants or uh postgrad students or the people in your lab want to work with you or you don't get as many offers to be on papers or you don't get you're just not invited out for drinks after you know there's all of these sort of soft versions of social enforcement that say uh you you kind of don't really seem to be on our side with X or Y or Z Ricky Schlott tells this really interesting story uh when she first arrived at NYU about kind talking about [ __ ] tests um apparently in groups of undergrads in the dorms or whatever they would ask questions like so what do you think about Jordan Peterson and it would just someone with sort of just throw it out like that and uh the eyes would immediately sort of look around the room to see if anyone didn't castigate him as being a you know a transphobe or whatever and um yeah Okay so we've got morality we've got its bases what is interesting about studying hypocrisy and kind of adding that into this uh worldview yeah so I mean to some extent it it it hinges on that remark you just made so like my one of my passion was really understanding the basic design of the human mind and so you know for me I was very interested in this idea about modularity that there's different parts of your mind that are doing really specific jobs and they're kind of isolated from each other so you know you got a visual system that sees and a whatever vocal system that talks and you know when you build that all the way up you get this possibility that you G have one part of your mind that has a particular principle right like don't steal music or whatever and then another part of your mind is like kind of want to have music without paying for it and so you kind of do that thing and one question is you know how could people be so inconsistent and I think these kinds of inconsistencies tell us something about this really basic way in which humans are designed which is we're in Parts like the Walt Whitman you know I contain multitudes kind of thing so for me hypocrisy is is kind of like a window into the very deep architecture where the brain isn't just one big mushy thing it's actually a lot of different parts and you get have one bit that you know has a particular principle or a moral commitment and then you could have another system that acts completely contrary to that moral principle so for me I don't know I think hypocrisy it's sort of like one of the ways that you get a view of this fundamental part of human nature uh which you know that's hard it's it's you know it's hard for people to introspect and see themselves and and that's why psychology I think is such a hard topic is right the brain trying to understand the brain but for me it's these inconsistencies that I think really reveal that ah there's got to be something in there that sort of not it's not homogeneous it's all these different bits and pieces because it's in conflict with itself exactly so I think optical illusions are like this right so like you see something and part of your brain knows those two circles are definitely the same size but you're looking at like those two things look completely different or whatever the optical illusion is and so what that's telling you is that you've got one you know you've got two different parts of your brain with completely different beliefs or representations or whatever you want to say that to me is interesting and all I'm saying is that scales all the way up from low-level Vision all the way up to morality and that's cool because that means that we can use this idea about brain parts to study you know all of it everything in the middle just give me your definition of hypocrisy so that we're all playing from the same him sheet here yeah people use it differently so I I feel like it should just mean cases where someone endorses a particular moral principle and then acts in a way that contradicts that principle and people have different views about it hypocrisy but that's sort of what I think so if you say yeah if you say that sh not murder and then you kill your neighbor or something that makes you a hypocrite obviously that's an extreme case but there's all sorts of you know examples like that I don't know when I was when I was writing the book on this I did search for a while and it's hard to resist these cases where you have and did hear my colge shine through a little bit but you know these Pious you know anti-abortion people who then pay their mistress to get an abortion you're like so that would be for me like the Quint Central kind of kind of thing it's the it's the senator who's vehemently against gay marriage that's secretly going on grinder on his second phone that his wife doesn't know about on an evening exactly yeah so if you're if you're Sing Out Loud here is my moral belief and then in your spare time you are doing the thing that you say is bad bad bad for me that sort of is the that's hypocrisy again people can have different views on this right so people sometimes people use the word to mean something like well I apply this rule differently for this group as opposed to that group and that's fine I mean I I don't love to you know get too deep into the definition but that's that's for me I think the best way to sort of think about it what is your problem with moral Hypocrites then well this goes back to our discussion about what morality is so if you think of morality as kind of a weapon what that means is that you know you're using these moral principles to advance your interests by you know saying don't do this and if you do that I'm going to attack you or whatever I'm going to get everyone whatever and in terms of your behavior you're also doing this thing right so you're you're sort of trying to get double credit as a hypocrite you're you you have the moral principle to beat other people in the head in and you're going to be able to do the action that you know no one else is allowed to do or gets punished for so that's bad so you know this goes back to your question about what why is morality good well it's supposed to stop people from you know being selfish and taking other people's stuff and doing harm you know what hypocrisy is really you know the ultimate expression of selfishness I'm going to be selfish in having this principle that I'm going to use to attack you and I'm going to do the thing anyway yeah so rules for thee but not for me uh do as I say not as I do you know the cliches sort of speak for themselves talk to me about this sort of bullying equation bullying equals attack plus impunity how does that fold in here yeah so this goes back to um you know that the point I was making about the American South so like there's lots of context and the and you know the the Salem bu as well so there's there's lots of cases where people could level moral accusations and not really have to worry about themselves getting attacked for leveling them so again a white person in the American South uh someone who is in the right political position during uh the sa and Witch Trials today you I don't want to get too deep into this but there are certain kinds of people who are protected um you know so I I guess I might as well dive into it so you know there's certain certain kinds of racism accusations that you could make um and if whether they're true or false you're not really going to suffer any penalty for leveling that accusation but it's a deadly accusation sometimes literally I suppose in certain kinds of of context right for the reason you just said right soft cancellations hard cancellations um and so if you're in the position whether again you're a white person in the South or you're a whatever a Puritan or you're a protected class then you know you can attack someone with a moral accusation true or not and basically not have to worry about the cost right like in some contexts you do right so there's lots of contexts in which making an accusation could lead to a cost maybe because the you know back you know back before States because that person's relatives might you know take revenge on you for whatever or you could just get you know in trouble for making a false accusation Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor so you know when when we create a world in which people are really not responsible for you know certain kinds of accusations even if they're false or even actions um where where there's no consequences you sort of open it up I mean look again people just weigh their costs and benefits can I get to benefit from making some sort of accusation and uh you know whether that's in terms of the kind of like approval from my group or maybe somehow I'm going to get their stuff or you know if you're in my company maybe I go up a notch if I take you down five um and again the the important part of bullying there is yeah I mean to go back to just actual bullying right so the quintessential Nelson from The Simpsons if he's on the playground he's a big guy he's the biggest kid so you know he can push Bard or Lisa or Nelson or or um you know anybody milous to much Simpsons um and he's sort of invulnerable because he's the biggest kid um and so that's what so that's the way I think about bullying so in the context of moral attacks there's lots of people who put themselves in the position of being vulnerable I like the example of the American South because it was so clear and as I said I was very affected by some of those uh some of those um stories and you know if you know that the criminal system is not gonna and your friends are not going to harm you in any way for you know accusing someone of X Y or Z then you're kind of in a position where if you want to take someone out you kind of can't and I think that I think that's a reasonable way to talk about bullying those two things seem really similar to me like if I'm Nelson I'm big or I'm white I can't I'm I'm basically invulnerable both of those things I'm protected so I can attack with protection uh that's the key that's the key parallel and I think people haven't talked about this a lot there's you know there's I can't remember who who coined this term cry bullies which is the same sort of thing which is you know I I claim to be hurt in this particular way and when I'm making that claim what I'm really saying is that that person or those persons hurt me and by the way I'm in this category that you know you're basically invulnerable whe you know um because you just you know you're you know I don't want to say I don't want to go too far on this but there's certain classes that you know you just can't say you know you can't really attack you have to believe them or you have to protect them or whatever um and that creates very weird incentives right I mean it's not I think this is one thing that Doyle really put his finger on it sounds like in that book which is it's interesting right it's kind of the same I think it's kind of the same phenomenon it's not a coincidence that you have a community with people who are or less you know able to make these attacks with no evidence um and you get the same result which is a very moralistic culture and that that I think is what you know we've sort of signed up for which is you know as you as you increase the extent to which people are you know invulnerable you're going to increase the attacks that they make I mean history shows this I also like the example for I don't know why it is but in Lay mes right where the nobleman or whatever gets into it with is it fontine or Co um fontine and you know he sort of the he definitely was you know aggravate but he's a noble and so he's completely protected so he could bully her with impunity then this is the his you know this is I think is the darker part one dark Arc of humanity which is there are certain kinds of identities that you can have during human history which have held you more or less harmless I mean at the in the in the extreme the King right the king's like off with his head and that's that you know it's not like but he didn't really you know do that I'm the kid see so and again that's where I think you know human progress do process and you know courts and you know whatever they're great when they work but of course outside of the context of governments and just the different subcultures you know doesn't always work that way I love your Insight about how if you get punched or kicked or nugi you'll eventually heal but in today's world with an Internet that lasts forever you might never recover from an attack on your reputation indeed moral attacks can be fatal and it's that um like sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me and it's like words can kind of stick with you for the rest of time if you're OJ Simpson every single thing comes with an asterisk after your name right like the actually no that's not right because I guess that would have come about because of something that he physically uh allegedly physically did um but certainly whoever it is that carries some previous moral attack Justified or not uh it is way stickier you there's you know sort of analogies that people use where um someone could have killed a guy in a car in a hit-and run um incident and got into jail gotten out and now be kind of getting on with their life in the meantime person B who had a moral attack on their character is still dealing with this huge Fallout and maybe can't get a bank account or maybe is socially ostracized or whatever yeah I I think that's exactly right I mean I think about what was the original the the woman who made the joke about going to South Africa SEO I think was her last name [ __ ] hell yeah right so like like that was the world's introduction to exactly what you're talking about which is you know you just put one thing out there digitally so yeah she's not an OG Simpson she didn't kill anybody you know say what you want about the joke maybe it wasn't funny maybe it was a little bit you know racist whatever you want to say but like as you're saying I mean you know you read the stories about you know she goes hiding and you know can't get into all this kind of stuff it's like yeah it's not it's not what it was you know the world is not what it was so so you know people's the the yeah the the technology has changed the cost that people can impose on you um so yeah so that kind of an attack yeah I mean we all know the results of those kinds of attacks absolutely yeah they're they're brutal and I I used I think you you know they can be fatal like people are driven to Suicide I mean you know these are you know I don't love talking about it because there's evidence that talking about it increases but but you know humans are social creatures um you know when people when people ostracize others from their social World um you're taking away the most precious thing to a social the uh the reality TV show that I did in a previous life three sorry two contestants one of whom was a friend uh took their own lives after they'd been on it and one that was the presenter the main presenter did now does reality TV attract people who have a psychological predisposition to maybe this kind of a propensity maybe does it catalyze it almost certainly uh does it create it from Grand zero even maybe to some degree uh but you know those are all in one form or another you know social judgments by other people uh judgments on how you look or uh scrutiny over the way that you've um conducted yourself in a relationship or the person that you're dating or not dating or you know this thing that tweeted or whatever it might be um that's an awful lot of pressure and yeah you're right when you say that um the social impetus can have real world consequences so like the uh words that are supposed to never hurt you can end up being sticks and stones that take your life oh yeah for sure I think you know in my you know as an evolution psychologist we I think a lot about the mismatch between ancestral environments and modern environments and one mismatch which I don't think a lot of people have been talking about I've been thinking about a little bit is you look if you're in an ancestral environment and you've got a little Rock versus a big rock you sort of know what you're dealing with you sort of know the capacity for harm and you can use that to make judgments if I hit that guy with a rock then you know maybe his brother's gonna come out with me with a bigger Rock I don't know man like I think people don't realize what they have in their iPhones or their whatever Androids the weapons that the caliber of the rounds that they're able to throw yeah it feels like I've got a tiny little phone but no you've got a bomb and so we have this mind that's not really evolved to to sort of be calibrated to the size of the harm that we do particularly in this world that where you can multiply very fast um and so you've got I think that's a kind of mismatch which as far as I know hasn't really been discussed much which is how do we get people to sort of understand the technology in a kind of a very intuitive way like what they're you know what they're dealing with I mean I think the reality shows are an interesting case right like you know it at first it seems like a great idea um and then you sort of say well what what do you think public humiliation is going to do you know um and so I think and I I should say like I I think it's easy to condemn people for you know using these weapons but part of it is look they just they're just bad at thinking about it and we got to have at least a you know um I just think we don't have the intuitions again it's not like a ride we're very detached from the impact of the things that we do online reputational attacks uh stuff like that you know the the feedback loop isn't sufficiently tight and the impact of what you do is also not felt and and there's the then there's this kind of like um what's it called like the witness effect or whatever it is the C like the sort of psychology of the crowd where well was it your tweet that said that she looked fat in that dress that Dr that drove her to depression well you know 2,000 other people tweeted her saying that she looked fat in that dress so how do you contribute you kind of hide behind that a little bit there's less accountability there was a really um like this is God 10 probably 10 years ago now uh and one of my friends from Newcastle Adam Dawkins who's a DJ uh was just really good at finding [ __ ] on Twitter and he found one of the best pieces of hypocrisy I think I've ever seen which was a tweet from some account that was saying something similar about one of the people from love Island that took their own life one of the girls like uh she looks awful in that dress or like she's let herself go or something like that um and then six months later the day that the news came out that she'd taken her life is like rip Sophie our thoughts are with your family like what what tragic news how terrible blah blah blah it's like on [ __ ] come on yeah I think this speaks to the prior point right like each one of those things has to do with garnering a certain kind of reputation in a particular group right so like you you want the points for being empathic and you also sort of want the points for being a little edgy dunking on someone yeah exactly I mean yeah know I kind try to you know be as positive about the future in human nature as I can but like we're pretty nasty creatures and then we're nasty creatures where all of us are sort of caring around you know like a weapon of mass destruction in our hand what do you think is gonna happen um not that I have great ideas for solving it I mean I think you know people as you mentioned you know John height codling and else you know the first thing is get it out of the you know maybe start start young and get it out of the hands of the young people and so on but you know this is one of these things where you start taking this mismatch idea seriously we like oh this really matters because we're these barely you know we barely came down from the trees and now I've got this thing in my hand that can just reh havoc on multiple people's lives you know we're just barely past throwing feces at each other you know what are the things that motivate an attack why do people tend to morally attack I think there's you know in the in the case of Salem I do think part of that was driven by just pure instrumental I want to get the rights to the grazing you know these are very physical things I think you know my sense is that um under in in many kinds of subcultures in the west right now there's you know there's callout culture right there's a reputational benefit to being the person who makes this accusation sometimes true sometimes not not and you sort of score points I I mean I I would think that many people actually rise to prominence um in virtue of I mean I don't again I don't want to get too deep into the politics of it but you know um you know here in the United States you might know that we had a person nominated for the Supreme Court um and and someone made an accusation about that that person and you know I I I hesitate but yeah now they have you know seven figure book deal and you know they're very welcome in all sorts of talk Circ now look maybe it was true and you know under those circumstances then it's a virtuous act to say look this is the thing that happened we should rethink but it's it's foolish to think that these accusations don't carry benefits right and so again you have to tot up the cost and the benefits and so it maybe in that case it's true but in how many cases is it not where someone gets some huge reputational bump from being the person who makes these accusations yeah what what role does reputation play here well I mean I think that's one case right so you know it has really tangible effects your reputation can um get be translated into into income certainly um I think this does go back a little bit to our discussion about the protest and so on so there's a reputation you know it can expose you know you get these sort of points for endorsing the right principles and so on and that can be valuable on the mating Market it could be valuable in the job market the talk circuit in the current world you know reputation translates really directly right when you you know I don't know I'm guess guessing you've tweeted from time to time about how many followers you have right like that that part of your reputation it matters like it matters how many people are interested in what you have to say goes right to your bottom line like in the modern world because of the digital age that we live in you know cultivating a reputation um for X Y or Z if it's valued you know that that goes that goes a long way um you know the fact that we even have a profession called influencer sort of tells you right yeah yeah to you've got this really nice uh like sort of taxonomy thing of um sincerely held moral principles and Bully motives it's like different kinds of of motives can you just explain that yeah because I I so what I would what I try to do in this you know I do think we should give people the benefit of the doubt when there's you know accusations you know people make accusations like there's lots of reasons that people might make them so for example someone might have done a bad thing and again the in the case of Ford I don't want to take a position that that's one possibility what I would say is if you get rid of all the other possible motives for leveling an accusations or the what we would call the The Virtuous ones like for example that the I think the most obvious one is that you know the person did something bad and you know needs to be excluded from society or whatever then you sort of are left with you know there's some other reason that they're that they're you know making this accusation again I think that's the salale and wit trials I don't want to keep coming back to it but you know we know for sure now that the reason that they were making the accusation is not that they literally had the you know experience of seeing the person having sex with the devil or whatever there must have been some other motive um and so once you can eliminate you know all the the actual motives then you can start to say well what is this person really up to what are they really doing so and don't get me wrong again I think that the F your first pass should be to give the person the benefit of the doubt say okay well they're you know um maybe in the case of our friend inside who who tweeted the Tweet about South Africa you think it's really important that people know that it's not okay to make jokes along those lines that I want to stop that from happening in the future to make the world a better place okay that's possible um but there's certain cases where you can sort of eliminate those uh possibilities then you're left with well maybe their intentions weren't quite as benevolent why is it the case then that accusations of hypocrisy are so relatively toothless oh man I have with that question I yeah that you know I I always like to before I have these you know interviews I I'd like to sometimes be able to play the I don't I have no freaking clue card um that sort of in this area I don't really understand it it seems to me the it should be you know it should really damage one's reputation if you can you know show show this kind of hypocrisy but as you say it seems pretty Toothless the only thing I can think of is that it's just so common you know it's sort of like dog bites man you're like ah a person was a hypocrite okay you know what else is new um it's not I wonder if I wonder if uh one of the things that people are doing is almost kind of adjusting their sights a little bit to know that we're more transparent and frictionless in toilet tweeting whatever's come to our brain and that because of that we kind of need to give an additional amount of leeway to people that H all right like you know he said this thing and then he said this other thing the problem being and I think every news story has sort of picked up on this that the stickiness of the hypocrisy accusation often tends to flow in One Direction More than the other that you know there's a lot of um accusations of hypocrisy that do really stick about for quite a long time and then if the someone else you know like the I'm not convinced if this is quite hypocrisy this is more just people being thoughtless but it's a pet peeve of mine there was a a photo of a single squaty um British army guy uh walking down the Streets of London that went super viral during covid in the UK on WhatsApp and it was one of these things WhatsApp even limits how many people you can forward messages to to stop precisely this and it even gives a little tag at the top that says forwarded many times and this was uh forwarded with a supposed text message or something from someone's son that was in the Army basically saying martial law is going to come in uh next week and people are going to be held in their homes at gunpoint because this is the new policy that the government's going to bring in and that never happened that never happened and every person that went bananas on the internet talking about why it was going to happen no one ever came out and said ah that thing that I posted turns out that it didn't end up happening I was wrong same thing go like Hey where's the global Health passport thing and the social credit system that we were adamant people were so [ __ ] convinced and the reason I've got a pet peeve about it is that that took up some of my mind share like that took up a non insignificant portion of my life hearing you fart out some half-baked Cod psychology opinion that I was subjected to that you that wasn't true and then you you just proceeded through life as if nothing had happened as if you hadn't wasted precious brain Cycles on bollocks yeah and then the we yeah there's a lot there and one pieces and yet it's GNA happen again like this is the weirdest thing and I will do it I will do it I will be that guy I will be the bollocks guy as well yes yeah it's a weirdest one of the weirdest things about the modern moment is that you know we we keep having these incidents and there's this big less that we all take from now that's that tweet whatever and that and then 20 minutes later so I mean the example I you know there's a a bit more that just come out on the co for me the the lab leak stuff was for some reason that kind of got stuck in my craw right because I think it was because it was nature or it was the lanet right so these these institutions where they just say yeah know it's when it's unscientific and by the way I take no position on this I don't have any you know whatever but like we're told if you think this it's a conspiracy theory and don't even entertain it and the people who were talking about it were you know bad bad bad and then here we are now where it's like whatever but exactly your point like no one says oh man like I should have I should we messed up that and then and then like this introspective moment where it's like who do I have to be so that that doesn't happen not about covid but about my life like how do I stop and take a moment and ask myself okay who am I why did I put my name on have the opportunity we we all have the opportunity to shape the world in a tiny tiny fragment of a way of whatever our influence is we nudge human civilization and the current sort of milu in the direction that we want it to go in like you you don't not matter in that regard I think yeah yeah and that that it just it I think the peace is just a Temptation like we we all sort of understand the costs which are not born by the you know by the person who pushes who forwards the thing on what's up but what we don't think enough about I think is kind of what you're saying which is yeah this temptation right so for people who are you know what potentially going to get you reputational bonus or more followers in virtue of you know breaking the story or what have you and we just haven't really as a culture about you and me but like how do we Tamp that down how do we if anything it's it's worse and worse right because you know we've got this very kind of like L-shaped world right where all the all the benefits are for few people capture the big accounts and then everyone else wants to be one of the big accounts well how do you do that well I could forward this thing about this Soldier who's you know Ming around on some random street lunch do you remember when uh those I think it was like tanks or military Humvees were going through Miami Beach yeah do you remember those videos yeah yeah yeah whatever happened to that yeah exactly just just it just they these things just disappear you know yeah and I just I don't know that it kind of goes back to and again like you know I I will continue to make this era regularly and and and say things that later I cringe and want to curl up into a ball and die because I said but just really trying hard to say with the appropriate level of certainty I isn't this interesting that I've seen this image but let's look at it with a little bit of skepticism and go well you know it's one bloke on the street and a WhatsApp message is this really worthy of that or maybe should I I I don't know I just think um and the ultimate problem is frictionless communication with no repercussions if you can just BT out anything into The Ether and no one's really going to pull you up for it uh you're fine and then we see this very odd a sort of puritanism when someone breaches this weird arbitrary water line of being sufficiently big that they're worthy of intense scrutiny and something Kevin Hart tweeted in 2009 uh gets pulled up and now he's a an evil dude yeah yeah again we we've S created this this sort of tech ological ecosystem which has all of these really weird kinds of properties to it and yeah we don't really know that we don't really have good defenses against it I mean as you say yeah the repercussions for like you know retweeting something which turns out to be false I'll tell you where I where I also worry and other people have written quite a lot about this is um you know when I was a kid you know we had three networks and we got the news from ABC CBS and NBC or whatever and you really got the sense that they were trying to do as much as possible more or less to get you the truth right and that's that's how they were sort of making in their butt was they were a little better at getting the the actual news into the living rooms these days it doesn't really feel that way right like and for the reason you're talking about right so the people who are tuning in to MSNBC yeah they want to know the truth to some extent but they also sort of have this other motive which has to do with reinforcing their worldview and so you know it you know this this problem that you're sort of pointing to which is you know pieces of history that get memory hold and no one talks to again or pieces of history that get Amplified which turn out not to be true like I sort of thought the media the you know the fourth estate was supposed to be the the back stop against all this and maybe I'm wrong it's not my area I'm a psychologist not a media studies guy but like doesn't seem that way anymore part of it is the the fraction you know the fractionated media landscape but I think the piece that makes me most concerned is the interaction between the the this all this you know all these people moving into lots of different directions coupled with confirmation bias the psychological piece right so people are just going so it's not so bad there's only three directions to go because right if you got confirmation biased but there's only three things okay you get a little bit of whatever but now if you've got an animal like us and all we do want to do is just keep eating the same information and I've got this Buffet over here and this Buffet I'm gonna find the perfect buffet and then those guys are incentivized to keep feeding me whatever it is I want to see that I think is the danger is the is the sort of the media interacting with the human capacity to want to confirm our biases that's that's to me is scary and it goes back to your point which is we don't and then add an AI and now no one knows a true anymore you know maybe I'm not even here yeah no this is this is all a simulation yeah we may have presented a pretty uny apocalyptic vision of sort of human's ability to operate well in the world what do you think about the role of wisdom in overcoming this sort of biological hardware and our predispositions yeah I love that question so the the third guy who I work with on our substack living fossils um you know he founded an Institute you know the wisdom Therapy Institute like he's all about wisdom and I I really think I think he's on to something and what he reminds me of which I think is really important is that yeah we're terrible moralistic creatures and we have confirmation bias but if you want to talk about the the one trick that humans have in our sleeve is that you know we're capable of learning you know we just we're that's the cool thing you know again Rob Boyd at at at UCLA you know his one thing he alwaysed to say the trick about humans is that we're social Learners and that gives me some kind of optimism because you know wisdom comes hard but it does come and you know there's a little bit of you know you got to be ready to kind of go through some tough stuff to earn the wisdom and sometimes you just have to get older um but I think what that tells me is that you know we're not doomed exactly because you know 50 years ago or whatever it is 200 years ago people didn't learn calculus or whatever it is and now we do and it's just part of you know what people many people who are lucky enough to you know have that in their curriculum so I don't think it's crazy that uh that you know people like you and Robert Wright and sha um are going to be able to you know change the world in such a way that people acquire these wisdom skills and you know part of wisdom I think speaks to this question about morality and moralistic being moralistic because you know I think if you could step back and you know ask yourself yeah what do I know about this and you know am I is this a stick a stone or a nuclear bomb or how big a deal is this and um are my choices here that I have in front of me which of them are going to make the world a better place whiches are going to make the world so you know a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy a little bit of wisdom you know I don't think it's crazy to think that down the road we're going to be in a world in which people learn those skills as a regular part of growing up I don't you know that's not huge right now but you can see part of it right like mindfulness you know you look at the influence of Sam Harris I mean how many people are you know engaged in mindfulness practice because because of you know Sam's influence and I think those things are related right so like if you have a little moment to think about yourself um and you know some some some time to kind of Center you start asking these questions about what are your effects on other people people and then there I think comes a little bit of of wisdom I mean one way to think about it is yeah we're these evolved creatures and we've got these like you know ancient mechanisms and that you know someone cuts us off on the highway and we get angry but it doesn't take that much wisdom to say is it gonna help me to ride as bumper for the next three miles they GNA make my life and his life better or their life better so that's my hope my hope is is is located in the fact that um you know humans can learn new stuff I mean we've done amazing things technologically there's work to be done inside ourselves um and I also believe kind of like the point about to take it all the way back to charging interest like good ideas really do by and large tend to spread by and large not all the time like there's some terrible ideas that have done a great you know have done a good job of propagating themselves I won't name any but but good ideas tend to spread like property rights was a good idea prohibition against murder great idea um you know they they' prospered and they you know whatever um technological inventions wheel that was good um and and so I think a lot of wisdom there's some pretty good ideas in there you know about some some humility about how much I know about what's going on in your head and some you know some humility about my intuitions and about you know what I think I know and um some humility about just not you know how can I be the best person I can be and that's constantly changing so I do think that we have like I see a little There's Hope in there yeah I mean yeah again we're monkeys who just again barely started using tools it wasn't that long ago fair but we also do have some people who are guiding us towards thinking about ways where I think we all could be a lot better Rob let's bring this one home you're great I really appreciate you where should people go they want to keep up to date with your writing I'm in love with the write the uh articles you're writing for aoria but you've got your own stuff as well that's right the living fossil on substack everyone's got a substack come find us there Josh and shaie we talk about wisdom um mostly Evolution some Clinical Psychology I just want to say thanks it's been super interesting uh chance to talk to you really appreciate it I appreciate you too thanks man if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch