S5E18: Lifeboats: Josh Greene

This is Larry Lessig. Where are we going and how are we going to get there? My guest today is one of the most interesting philosophers of modern society, though he doesn't work in a philosophy department, but in a department of psychology and. And his work is as deep in neuroscience as it is in the history of moral thought. Josh Green is a professor of psychology and member of the center for Brain Science faculty at Harvard University. Much of his work has focused on the psychology and neuroscience of moral judgment, examining the interplay between emotion and reason in moral dilemmas. His more recent work studies critical features of individual and collective intelligence. Green studied philosophy at Harvard, getting his bachelor's degree in 1997, and then Princeton, his Ph.D. in 2002. He is the author of Moral Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them, which is part of what we're going to talk with him about today, but again only after reflecting on a more fundamental question. Where are we going and how are we going to get there? Because part of what we must do in understanding what the lifeboats for our democracy could be is to be clear about what we're trying to accomplish together. What is the moral purpose of our common enterprise? Josh's book sets up the framework for that question, and we'll begin with that, and then maybe just as important, we'll shift to the very specific questions about the strategies that might help us cure some of the diseases we understand afflict our body politics, specifically the disease of polarization within our community. As you'll hear, Josh's work here is brilliant and transformative and a real reason for hope that we might knit together again, or maybe for the first time, a healthier public life to make a healthier politics. Stay tuned. Joshua Green, thank you so much for talking to me. This conversation is going to span actually three stages of your career. Some places you're described as both a philosopher and a scientist. But I think what's interesting is you were a philosopher and a scientist, and now we're really becoming something of a practitioner, like figuring out how do you engage in the world to change the things that you might have been studying as a scientist or you might have been philosophizing as a philosopher. But I don't think that the current stuff is as understandable without building the path to get to where you are. And we were talking before we started this about the fact that we have a weirdly parallel experience of both starting as undergraduates at the Wharton School and then fleeing to philosophy. So I understand the first attraction to philosophy, but what I found really interesting, interesting. In the story you tell in the book we're going to start with Moral Tribes is the certainty and confidence that excited you as a young debater around a philosophy that's become the kind of defining philosophy of your way of thinking about solving these problems, utilitarianism. And you describe in the beginning of this really wonderful book the, the story of deciding as a debater you are going to be a utilitarian. And then having a standard shtick every time you debate to be able to beat the unwitting or unknowing other side. Until you finally met a woman who hit you with a beautiful example. And the example was five people who each need a organ transplant. And should you kill one person and transplant five organs to each of these people? And you describe that you were stumped. Now, the book is a great description, but I want to start by you just telling me a little bit more about what it felt like to be stumped when you thought you had found the truth.

Yeah, well, you know, it was, this was in high school, and I had been debating actually since junior high. I started when I was in seventh grade. So I was pretty, pretty deep into this stuff. And yeah, it's, you know, it kind of knocked me on my ass because I really thought I knew what I was doing. I mean, when you have something that just works and works and works and to be a little bit, to flesh that out a little bit, the idea is pretty simple, that what we should do is what's going to produce the best overall consequences. That's my value premise, as we would say in Lincoln Douglas. And then that's a kind of debate. And then you just have to do the, you know, what would be empirical work today, but kind of speculation about how whatever side of the debate you're on is going to land with the best consequences. So the debate would have debates, would have resolutions that you would debate, like things like individual freedom is more important than national security. Right. And you can see how those would play out in various kinds of scenarios. And then, you know, I would always argue, well, national security is ultimately for the greater good or individual freedom is always for the greater good. And, you know, it was very explicit about that philosophy, but could argue it either way. And then, yeah, this debater, I still remember her name, her name was Gwen Cooper, she was a really good debater, a couple of years older than me, and she knocked me on my butt with the transplant question. And, you know, even though I knew that, you know, I'd be able to use my Old tricks or not tricks, but my old strategy going forward just. I took it seriously as a young philosopher as well, and I really wanted to know, okay, well, what's going on here? I felt the strong sense that it would be wrong to kidnap somebody and carve up their organs and distribute them to five people. But at the same time, the overall idea of doing as much good as possible still made a lot of sense to me. And that sent me on a path to understand the psychology behind our moral intuitions. And the hope was that if I could understand what's beneath those competing thoughts or feelings, then, you know, not only would I understand what's going on in my own head better, but I later realize this was the fundamental tension between the two or two of the three biggest schools of philosophical thought in Western philosophy. That is, between the Kantian deontological approach that cheers when you say, of course you can't use someone as a means for the greater good of others, and the consequentialist utilitarian approach that says, look, ultimately it's about producing good consequences. So, yeah, so that kind of. That moment was really a defining moment for me and shaped a lot of what I did moving forward as both experimental psychologists sort of in the service of philosophy and as a philosopher.

Yeah. And it was an anomaly, it seemed, that created a taste or a desire for you to kind of figure out what was the missing part here. And what I find striking about your work is as someone who didn't go into psychology, who just stayed at the level of philosophy and therefore stayed at the level of these intractable debates that were never going away. You were never going to eliminate the utilitarian versus Kantian perspective. There was nothing to see there beyond just this kind of debate. What you eventually got to was a psychological insight about the nature of the way that we react to these questions that distinguished between two ways our brain might function. You describe it as, like with a camera, the automatic mode versus the manual mode. And that seeing this on the table as part of understanding what might have been going on when you reacted like that helped you unpack the problem more. Right. You began to see why you could have had this intuition.

Yeah. So, you know, I started doing some psychology work that was related to this, but really sort of got more into it first as a philosopher, as an undergrad. So I wrote a more speculative undergrad thesis. This was advised by the late, great Derek Parfit, who was just an enormous hero of mine and a huge influence on me, and kind of made this initial speculative argument that when we have intuitions that run counter to the greater good, that it's a kind of emotional response. But I didn't know. I didn't have a general theory of exactly how that worked. And that's still a work in progress, although a lot of progress has been made recently, including by other people and maybe most notably my colleague down the hall, Firey Kushman. This concrete. Instead of focusing on the transplant case, I kind of got hooked on the footbridge trolley case, right? And a lot of people are familiar with trolley dilemmas as a kind of Internet meme, right? You know, where you've got the split in the tracks and would you kill one of these for five of these? And that's fun. I like the memes, but it actually, it doesn't convey what was interesting about the science, that the scientific interest and philosophical interest was really about the contrast between the kind of case where people are okay with sacrificing one for five. This is a case like the trolley is headed towards five people and then you can hit a switch that will turn it away from the five. But there's one person on the tracks there, and most people say that that's fine. And then the case, which is nicely matched, the footbridge case, where there's the you and the other person, nowadays, I'll say with a big backpack the other person has on the footbridge, the trolley is headed towards five people. And the only way you can save those five people is to push the other person off the footbridge and use that person as a trolley stopper in a way that would greatly offend Immanuel Kant among most people. And that seems wrong to most people. And I felt that as well. I only encountered those cases in college after my high school debate episode. And so I thought, okay, this is really now well defined. What is the difference between killing one to save five in the. In the switch case versus in the case with the footbridge? And then this is where both. There's a kind of neuroscientific track to this and a behavioral scientific track. So initially using brain imaging, I and my colleagues at Princeton, my postdoc advisor, Jonathan Cohen, started using brain imaging having people think about these kinds of moral dilemmas while they're in the scanner. And to make a long story short, we saw evidence that was consistent with my initial hunch, that is that that people are having a kind of emotional reaction to cases like the footbridge case, which you can see in parts of the brain, most notably the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and we can say more about that later. And then having a kind of application of more explicit rules or conscious reasoning in the other case, in the switch case. Those initial studies really kind of reading tea leaves with the brain imaging stuff and other studies since then have done a much better job of nailing things down. And really the strongest studies I think have been done by other people looking at patients with different kinds of brain damage where you see really clear whopping effects. So if someone has damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which for now we'll just say this is related to the emotional response that makes you say, ah, don't push the guy off the footbridge, those people are much more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge if they have damage to that emotion related part of the brain. You see the opposite effect for people who have damage to the hippocampus, which is, we think, necessary for kind of imagining the whole episode and also thinking about it in a more, what do you call, model based way, where you're thinking about cause and effect explicitly. Those people who have that kind of damage, they're much more likely to say, oh, it's just wrong, and go by a feeling responding to the action rather than kind of imagining the whole thing and reasoning about it. And there have been a couple of other studies that have nicely dissociated other parts of the neural circuitry. So that story has become increasingly solid and well refined in terms of like, there are different neural systems that are on opposite sides of this push, pull. And one of them, there's a motion in some sense on both sides because any kind of value judgment is going to involve some kind of affect. But the strong emotional response that you see in this classic alarm bell kind of system in the amygdala that pretty clearly is on the side of the feeling that says, don't push the guy off the footbridge. Right. And then it still raises the question of why, what is it about the case, like what is it about the footbridge case that triggers that response? And what we've learned is that it seems to be two things that interact with each other. One is pushing, so people feel more strongly, negatively about it. If you're pushing the person off the footbridge versus dropping them through a trap door that you can hit with a switch. Right. And also, and if you're pushing even with a pole as opposed to your hands, those two are the same. And then it has something to do also with whether or not the harm occurs as a side effect versus as something purposeful as a means to an end. And those two things kind of come together to produce that negative reaction. The other big piece of this is that if it's active rather than passive, if you allow someone to fall off the footbridge instead of pushing them, then that feels very different. So we have a pretty good idea of the sort of situational factors that, that, that contribute to this effect. And I think what it really comes down to is does this, does this resemble a prototypical act of violence, like, you know, hitting somebody or something like that, where it's direct, intentional and active? Right. That. That's kind of almost the definition of something that's, that's violent or at least prototypically violent. So that was a long sort of description of years of research kind of working out those, those mechanics. And then my hope was that I would sort of take those ideas and say, okay, this is what's going on in our intuitions, and then here's how this should affect our philosophy. And I believe in the arguments that I put into that book and some related papers. But not everybody is convinced, to put it mildly. But that was. Some of the interest was just in the basic science and some of it was to try to move the philosophical discussion along. So I'll leave it at that for now. Yeah, okay.

But what's important about this, I thought, was that the intuitions around the footbridge are intuitions that are closer to our normal moral reactions to normal behavior that people have in the world. And they become automatic. They become the kind of thing that you learn as a well acculturated person. If you don't understand you're not supposed to push somebody or intentionally hurt, then you're just a sociopath.

Yeah.

As opposed to the more abstract activities, you know, pushing a button that might have a certain kind of effect, which is something you've got to think through, you've got to kind of reason through to have an understanding of that. And this tracks this, what you call dual mode conception of reason that's going on here. Like psychologically, we develop two different ways to be able to address moral problems. And one of them is fast and one of them is slow. And part of that difference is what's explaining this difference in results. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that that's basically right. I'll make a couple of caveats to that. One is that I actually think cost benefit reasoning is ubiquitous. Right. But it's just not specific to morality. So I Think people will use cost benefit reasoning all the time in navigating social situations or even moral situations. I mean, you know, well, seven of us want to go here and two of us want to go there. So we'll go with the majority or something like that. And it's not about, you know, pushing somebody off a footbridge or something like that. So it's, it doesn't have to be very reason ish reasoning, it's just sort of an explicit understanding of the situation. The other is actually there's been recent research suggesting that the intuitive response is not necessarily faster. That as people have done more and more experiments trying to look at reaction times and putting people under cognitive load to try to sort of block the intuition and stuff, it's actually not clear that the fast response is faster. I think the best way to put it is the way that I mentioned before my colleague Fiery Cushman put it in terms of what he and other researchers, this is originally coming out of a computer science tradition, describe as model based versus model free learning. So with model free, what you're doing is attaching a value to an action in a particular context. So if you're driving along your normal route and then today you need to go someplace else, but out of a matter of habit, you turn left at the fire station instead of right, you already have an intuition that says, ah, in this situation, turn right, do this right habit. Or you can have a kind of map where you understand where you're going and why you're going there and what steps you need to take. It's goal directed. Right. That's probably really more of the split, but it's not necessarily that one comes out faster, although it does seem to be more emotional. That is when people are reacting to things like pushing people off of footbridges, you see skin conductance responses, a little bit of sweaty palms that you can detect electrically and things like that. So maybe those are sort of recent developments and nuances, but I think the basic idea has held up pretty well.

And do these model free or model based responses. I want to make sure we get the link back to the first stage in your argument in the book, which is to identify two different kinds of moral problems. And one type of moral problem is the me versus us problem, which societies, if they're societies, are pretty good at solving. Like you develop a set of morals so that people can solve the me versus us problem, the society can. And the second is the kind of us versus them problem where we can understand why we don't actually have a lot of good experience for solving the us versus them problem. And when we do try to, we don't do it well, typically. And so that in the us versus them, it becomes the less automatic has to kick in. And if you apply the automatic intuition to that, then it can produce crazy. Right?

Is that right?

Yeah.

So this is. Now we're stepping back to much broader. So we're kind of using the footbridge and the trolley dilemmas as a kind of fruit fly. And what those are useful for is having these nice tight matched probes where we can sort of say, what's the smallest thing that makes a difference in terms of activating one, you know, network within the brain versus the other. Right now we're looking back, we're stepping back and looking at kind of morality in human societies overall and saying, okay, how does morality work in general and what is it designed to do? So what I would say, this is not unique to me, but not everybody agrees with this, that morality is fundamentally about cooperation. That is the reason why morality evolved is because individuals can survive better working as a team than they can survive separately. Right. If I've got food this week and you don't, we both. And sometimes it's the other way around, we both survive by sharing. Right. And you know that taking that little familiar example and scaling it up to everything people do, we're a super social species that survives through cooperation. Okay, but how do we get to the point where we are cooperative? How does that work? And the short answer is that we have feelings that guide us towards more cooperative behaviors. And you can think of these as emotional carrots and sticks that we apply to ourselves and that we apply to other people. So if I have a positive, warm feeling about you, you're my friend and I'm happy to share my food, that's a kind of carrot that's motivating me. Right? And if you share your food with me, then you have my gratitude. And that's a kind of emotional carrot that's rewarding you. If someone is not very cooperative, they themselves might feel guilty or ashamed. And that's a kind of emotional stick that motivates oneself. And if someone else is being uncooperative, then you might be angry or even disgusted with them. And those are emotional sticks that motivate other people. So all of these seemingly unrelated emotional things, they're all about getting us in the upper right corner of the payoff matrix, you know, where we're both cooperating and doing. Doing better. Right. Actually, upper left is how it's perfectly arranged. Yeah. And. But, you know, there are always questions about, well, what are the terms of those cooperations? Do we live in a highly, you know, communal society where it's one for all and all for one, or do we live in a society where we mostly fend for ourselves but agree to stay out of each other's way and not lie and steal to each other from each other? Right. And there are questions about different roles that people play in society, by age, by gender, sex, and so on and so forth. And all of those things shape our intuitions and our feelings about how things ought to be. Right. That's the sort of core of everyday morality, of having feelings that enable us to work as a group and cooperate and survive better than we could on our own. So that's kind of going from me to us. Right, right.

And what's distinctive about that? I just want to emphasize one point that I know you believe, but is important to have on the table. What's interesting about that is that different societies are distinctive in the way in which they solve that kind of problem. We can have overall ways of describing what makes them different. But what's interesting is people within those societies feel certain things as natural, that people from outside those societies look at it and say, this is just crazy, or how can you possibly think of it like that?

Yes, exactly. Right. And that's when you get the us versus them problem. So the way I sort of describe this in the book is the me versus us problem is something that's referred to as the tragedy of the commons. Right. The classic example here is you have a bunch of herders who are on a common pasture, and if everybody grazes or raises more and more animals, then there's nothing left for anybody on the pasture and all the animals die. Then that's the tragedy. And then what I call the tragedy of common sense morality is the higher level tragedy of different tribes having different moral systems. Right. So my little allegory for this in the book is you have these tribes that live on the different sides of this forest. And some are more individualistic, where everybody has their own herds and others are more collective, where they all have one big herd and they have different attitudes towards outsiders and threats and punishments and things like that. And then one day the forest burns down and the rains come and there's this nice pasture in the middle and. And all the tribes converge with their different ideas about, you know, what role should women have? And, you know, is it okay to kill people who try to take your stuff as opposed to just giving them a warning and things like that. And that's kind of the modern world where we have all of our tribes coming together, living in a common place where we can make each other's lives better or make each other's lives miserable. And the key point bringing this back to the psychology, as you said, is that more or less within a tribe, we can all be in harmony and have expectations about who's supposed to do what and not do what to whom. When tribes come together now, our intuitions are off, right? And, you know, people like you and me will have very different intuitions about whether or not it's okay to be gay or trans than someone in a more traditional society, either here in the US or on the other side of the world, or about, you know, other things related to shared benefits and threats and punishments and such. So when we're dealing with the modern world, with tribes that are in conflict, that's when we have to, I argue, put our intuitions aside or not completely aside, but at least not trust them so readily, because we have different intuitions and they can't all be right. And then the book makes an argument about, well, what would a metamorality look like? That is, if morality is what governs life within a tribe. A metamorality is really the project of Enlightenment philosophy, of trying to have more general universal principles that would transcend the values and limitations of more traditional tribal moralities that we find around the world.

Right. And you've got a wonderful account of what you're calling the common currency, which will feel utilitarian, but you describe it as a deep pragmatism that could be used to guide these conflicts that aren't appropriately guided just by intuition. And I think the account here is perfectly, really compelling and convincing, and especially when it's layered into the psychology, it seems really wonderful. But what I want to emphasize in what you've described is the incredible empathy you evince for these different cultures of value. I mean, what you start with is a recognition, not necessarily that, you know, the Arab culture is right or wrong, but understand how it could be a distinctive culture from, you know, the Anglo American culture and that it's developed to solve the same set of problems. We are. We are all humans. We're all trying to have kids and be happy and, like, you know, be able to not starve. We're all doing the same thing, but we've developed very different ways to do it. And that's what's accounting for this tragedy of the common sense morality yeah, no,

thank you for, for saying so. But I mean, I've certainly felt that shift as I went from that being that high school debater to getting deeper into the. The psychology, both as a kind of cognitive scientist and as a cultural psychologist, that is. Yeah. I think I look at other cultures, even ones whose practices, in some sense, I might find, you know, morally repugnant. I still, as I think you put it very well, that we're all humans trying to solve the problem of human existence under different conditions. And so I don't look at societies that do things that I think are, you know, terrible, like cutting people's hands off for stealing and things like that as, you know, sociopathic. Instead, I see it as, well, you know, that's one way to solve the problem with some serious costs, but maybe also some benefits. Right. And. And then ascending to that higher level is exactly about asking those questions, say, well, in the modern world, in the situation where we found. Find ourselves, what would have the most benefits and the least costs overall. Right.

Okay. Now, this is significant for, you know, I'm really grateful for the chance to talk to you in general, but the particular reason I wanted to talk to you is as your work relates to the problem of polarization and negative partisanship that is, of course, so rife within our political society right now. Because what's striking about your approach to that problem, too, is it's also empathetic to the differences. Like, you're not. You're not looking at a set of values and saying, these are bad values and we have to figure out how to change them through, even through reason, how to change them. Instead, we're going to talk about the techniques that you're using for making it so these different moralities can kind of live together and not necessarily have to kill each other or banish each other or something like that. But what's striking about it is it builds on this, the sense that there. That there was a common sense morality in each of these cultures that now conflicts. And I want to, I want to first ask you to the extent to which you think that they are, you know, as stable and natural in the way that we might imagine, you know, Arab culture from American culture. Or do you think that they're more artificially constructed in the way that we might imagine, like campaigns desiring, that we produce people who hate other people.

Yeah. So that you're talking. We're talking now specifically about, like, political polarization in the U.S. right. Yeah. My view is that I think the fundamental core difference, and this is Controversial, and some people will be, you know, not like this. But I think the, the core challenge that's happening now in the United States and other countries is about the size of the US that is, there are two ways that you can think of America. You can think of it as, this is a homeland for a certain set of predominantly white Christian people, traditionally led by men, living according to certain cultural norms and culturally specific ideals. Right. Or you can think of the United States as about a set of more universal ideals that are really open to anybody, independent of their ethnicity, personal, personal history. Right. And I, and, and I think the Democratic Party represents that broader, more inclusive vision where, you know, we'd say, you know, a Muslim woman from Pakistan can be just as much of an American as a white guy from Iowa whose family has been there for six generations. Right. And there are other people whose view is more, you know, the United States, we can have some guests as long as people are well behaved. But if this country ends up being majority non white and non Christian, that's not my country anymore. That's not America. The real America is a certain people, blood and soil. Right? Now, I think that, as you guess, my vision aligns with the more liberal, inclusive vision, but I don't think that the people on the other side are necessarily evil for having that purpose, having that view. And we all have our more narrow circles for some purposes, right? That is, imagine, you know, you have your home where you live with your family, and if people just showed up at your door and said, hi, we want to live here, you have a nice house or whatever, you have nice property, you know, my reaction, and most people's reaction is, look, I'm sorry for what you've been through, but this is my house. It's for me and my family, you know, right?

You and me. My wife would probably say, sure, come in, you can have the room upstairs.

Yeah, but, but, but, but, but, but, but I think that a lot of Americans feel, that they feel more of America as the home for them and their, their extended family of Americans who resemble them religiously and culturally. And in, you know, in the same way that I don't think I'm an evil person for caring about my family and my personal property more than I care about the well being of other human humans in general. I disagree with it. It's not my vision, but I get it. Then more recently, as you alluded to, you have this flood of misinformation and conspiracy theories which take people who might have a more tribalistic outlook, but then what Those lies and volumes of misinformation do is transform what you call a bias in their values into something that's incontrovertible. Well, clearly Joe Biden hates America and wants to destroy it. Clearly all those liberals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hate America and want to destroy it or the other way around. And if Biden really did steal the election, then he should be opposed. Right. So now you've got this difference in values about the size of the US and then the political elites, especially on the, on the right, but some on the left as well, have taken that difference and exploited it and turned it into these hardened battle lines where people are living in different, you know, in different universes in terms of what, what they take to be just sort of ground, roof, ground truth, basic facts about the world.

Okay, but, but I want to make sure that we are, are fully accounting for what drives this perverse dynamic. I mean, so you just, you say political elites, and no doubt the political elites are eager to do what they can.

Yeah.

But it feels to me like there's also a pretty fundamental business model. I want you to go back to your first days in the Wharton School. Right. Business model here.

Yeah.

That profits from turning us into ignorant people who hate each other. I mean, we're more engaged if we're engagement, marketing and social media. And, you know, we. When Fox News decided it would become Fox News, it was because Roger Ailes believed that if they focused on just the conservative part of America and they spoke to that base, they would build a more loyal following. So the business model of being a successful cable news station was different from the business model of a broadcast news station. So this business model, unfortunately for us, plays into lots of psychological weaknesses we have as humans to turn us into the worst versions of ourselves because that happens to make them the most money.

Yep. Yeah. So, well, you're. And you're. I think you're absolutely right. And you know, I know you're far more expert than I am on exactly how this, how this plays out. So I defer to you if you want to do a further sort of dive on that. But yes, I think there are these tribal antagonism amplifiers that are, as you said, built into the business model of, of, of the, the media that we consume. And it's, It's a big problem.

Okay, now I want to shift to the really interesting part of what you're doing now. So as I said at the beginning, you're a philosopher and then scientist and now practitioner, because what you've. Part of your work is Developing and deploying techniques that are designed to address some of this negative partisanship or this poisonous polarization. And one point to notice from the very beginning is that these techniques are not about getting people to read a book. They're not about, like, engaging in an argument with them about how they should think. Even though you could say that maybe these are problems that require what you call manual morality and that it requires courage and persistence. The kind of persistence or the kind of engagement that you're. You're deploying here is really one operating at a completely different level of awareness. Right?

Yep. Yeah. In fact, it was a real sort of shift in strategy coming off of Moral Tribes. So in some ways, in many ways, I was really happy with the book, but in other ways, I was kind of disappointed. In retrospect, it kind of seems inevitable. But the structure of the book is roughly, here's how human social and moral behavior and thinking works and feeling works. Right. And wouldn't it be great if we had a moral philosophy that could enable us to see what's going on and take that understanding of what's going on and allow us to have a kind of metamorality, which I was defending as a version of utilitarianism or consequentialism, and then with that in mind, how do we move forward? And the book had its successes, but it didn't change the world. And, and, and it was. And I thought, okay, well, if doing the science and integrating the science in the service of a shared philosophy didn't take off yet, maybe in the next century, who knows? Right. What if I just try to get at the problem more directly, take our understanding of. Of human nature as described in the first third or so of the book, and just say, well, well, how would I just directly try to create environments, interventions, systems that would work with that? Right. And the core idea is that we are a cooperative species, and we cooperate in ways that are driven by our emotions. And the way that our emotions get tuned is through our cooperative experiences. Right. So if you live in a highly communal culture, like the Lamalara, who hunt whales together as groups, you're going to have very communal kinds of intuitions. And if you live in another tribe where people hunt as individuals and don't share very much, you're gonna have different intuitions. So what I wanted is how do you give people a cooperative experience across the line of division? And critically, not just cooperative in the sense that it's not antagonistic, like having a dialogue, but cooperative in the biological sense of mutually beneficial cooperation. Where we both end up better in material terms as a result of our interaction. Gains of trade, positive sum. And so with my grad student, Evan DeFilippis, we were thinking, okay, well, how can we create cooperation and how can we do it in a way that's scalable? There's this great Heineken commercial out of which some people have seen, which they bring in people with political differences to put together some Ikea furniture. And it's sort of a classic kind of challenging, cooperative task. Right. And you know, that's a nice idea, but that's very hard to scale. Right. So what we did instead was we created this quiz game where Republicans and Democrats play as partners. And another thing that's nice about the quiz game is that it allows you to kind of play with your. Play the game with your political identity so that the hope is that the goodwill that comes out of it can. Can generalize. So if you want, I can. I can kind of walk through the mechanics of how it's worked. Oh, thanks. Yeah. So, okay, so here's. So here's what we did. So the way it works is we recruit people online. They just know they're going to play a game, and they fill out some information about themselves. What's your favorite color? And do you like the mountains or the beach? And, and also, are you a Republican, Democrat? Who'd you vote for in the last election? And then you get paired up with somebody and you do a little get to know you session where you learn about their favorite color and stuff, but also about their political party. And then you take a quiz on your partner so that we know and you know and everybody knows who's who you're playing with a Republican or a Democrat. Right. And all this is happening while people are connected by chat. So they're not seeing each other, but they're chatting with each other. And in the interesting experimental condition, you have a Republican and Democrat play together. These are randomized control trials. So in the control condition, you would either be playing someone like you two Democrats or two Republicans. So you know your partner, you've gotten to know each other a little bit. And then the game starts and it eases in with kind of innocuous questions like what state is Mount Rushmore in? And so you chat with your partner. Oh, I think it's North Dakota. Oh, I think it's South Dakota. Okay, chat, chat. We'll go with your answer. Oh, look, we were right. And the key is that you and your partner have to agree on an answer. You have to Agree on the right answer in order to get your points right. So you're in the same boat. And if you both get it right by submitting that answer, then you get your money. And you know, we do a few of those kind of general questions. Then in the second round, Evan did this fantastic research where he looked at Twitter threads and Reddit threads and figured out what do Republicans know that Democrats don't and vice versa. That's not explicitly about politics. So question like this, what's the name of the family on the show Duck Dynasty? I've met maybe one liberal who knew the answer to this question, but a lot of Republicans know the answer to that one. The answer is Robertson, by the way. And then ask questions about things like shows like Stranger Things, which liberals are much more likely to watch, or questions about like Flavors of St. Croix Seltzer and stuff like that. By the way, it really does like track with your stereotypes. But we didn't just generate these based on our stereotypes. Evan did the research and then we pilot tested these things and turns out Republicans really do like bass fishing more than Democrats and things like that. But anyway, so we have those questions and in that second phase there's nothing controversial, but now we have a kind of complementarity where, you know, each side knows something that the other side doesn't, or more often that happens. And so you start to really kind of appreciate the fact that your partner culturally different from you if you're in that mixed condition. And then in the third phase, after we've kind of eased you in, you like the game, you like your partner, you're winning, you're high fiving and fist bumping by chat. Then you get these politically charged questions like what percentage of gun deaths in the US involve assault style weapons? And Democrats think it's like 30%, 50%, Republicans think it's like 1%, 2%. And in fact, in that case the Republicans are right, it's actually like 1 or 2%. Democrats wildly overestimate the proportion of deaths, gun deaths that are assault style weapons because they're so well publicized. But then if you ask about rates of crime among immigrants, Republicans think it's sky high because that's what they see in their media and Democrats think no it's not. And it turns out immigrants to the US actually commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. Right. So now you have questions like this where both sides get to be right, but they've already built up a kind of trust with each other and trust with the game. And you know, they'll say things like, well, one of us is wrong, but I don't know who. And we went with my answer last time, so I guess we'll go with yours. Or if you. If you're sure, we'll go with your answer. Right. And, you know, they're working together not to, like, resolve their political differences. It's not, you know, it's not about changing people's policy ideas. It's about having this cooperative experience where you're working together to solve a common problem. You both end up being better off as a result. And it's not so much the answers that matter as it is that the fact that you're working together and trusting each other.

And the consequence of that, I mean, what's really striking about it is it has a real effect on what I think of as the negative partisanship. You have different scales for different ways of measuring and describing it, and not just at the moment. I mean, even four months afterwards, you still see this kind of difference in attitude. So why don't you cash that out? Because that's really the important thing.

Yeah, so that's right. And so all of the purpose of all of this is to see if it really moves the needle. And to our delight, it moves the needle even more than we expected to or more durably than we expected it to. So we use a couple. We have a lot of different measures, but the two main ones we use. One is what's called a feeling thermometer, which is often. It's been used by pollsters since the late 70s as a general. Like, just how do you feel about this person or this group? So 0 to 100, 100 is the warmest, 0 is the coldest. How warm or cold do you feel about Democrats or Republicans? And we do that before the game to get a baseline reading. We do it after the game, immediately after, to see if there's a change. And we're doing this in both the control condition, of course, and in the mixed condition. And then we follow up the next day, the next week, the next month, and the farthest out we've gone is four months. And we found, as you said, that in some of our experiments, we see that playing this game for less than an hour, people have less negative attitudes for four months later. We've also. We also do an economic measure where we ask people, how would you divide $100 between a random Republican and a random Democrat? Not your partner, but someone else. And we say, you know, we're actually going to do this if you get chosen, we're going to go with the division that you propose right now. And so people will either, you know, do the tribal thing and say, no, I'm giving it all to, you know, the Democrat because I'm a Democrat, or they'll give like a little token amount to the other side or they'll do a 5050 split. And so it's really about how often do people do the 50, 50 splits? And repeatedly we find that four months out people are making more equitable splits in this economic decision as a result of playing the game. And when I say playing the game, what I mean is playing with an out party partner, someone who's different from you. This is the difference between that and the control condition where people play with someone who's, who's just like them. And then you might wonder. Well, a couple things to add. One is we also recently tested effects on what are now called anti Democratic attitudes. Like would you vote for a politician who refused to accept unfavorable election outcomes or is promoting gerrymandering or removing polling stations in enemy territory? And we haven't done that long term. But immediately after we find that the people who play the game with an out party partner are less likely to support those kinds of anti Democratic behaviors or candidates. The other thing to add is what's going on psychologically? Right. Like what is it about the experience of cooperating with the other person that kind of makes it go, what's the special sauce? Secret ingredient. And the number one thing seems to be mutual respect that we ask people, did you respect your partner? Did you feel they respected you? If you have valuable contributions, do you feel inundated? That cluster of questions, the more positive answers to those, predicts these effects immediately and down the road of having less negative attitudes towards the other side. And I think this relates to a lot of what's been going on in the economy for the last four decades or so of people feeling, especially on the Republican side, not respected and they're no longer on top of the world or the way they were maybe in the 50s. And that seems to be the kind of key component. So that's what we've done with our research so far. Hopefully our paper on this will be out soon and then we have some efforts moving forward in terms of trying to get a version of the quiz game out into the real world. But I'll pause there and I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

It's incredibly encouraging because one of the themes that's coming out of the conversations we're having in this process series is that we've got to identify the strategies that can work against the poisonous influences. I mean, you know, ideally we'd like to just end the poisonous influences, but that's not going to happen, especially in the United States where we've got a First amendment that, you know, will restrict the government's ability to do anything. So if we're going to have the poisonous influences, what can we do? And so this is when I first read about this idea, I thought, yeah, that's crazy. That might be an effect immediately, but you can't imagine having a long term effect. But the fact that it does shows that here's a really simple exercise and it is kind of conceptually like an exercise, right? Like you should be walking 10,000 steps a day or you should be like one hour. You know, I don't know how regularly you'd have to do it to kind of counteract the effect of these business models that want to point you into different directions. Which one thing we're doing, and I'm really eager to experiment in this way with what you're doing is we're building a deliberation platform that is a scalable platform in the sense that you bring people in in groups of 6 to 10, but you can have, you know, a million groups at the same time. So it could be as many number of people deliberating as you want. It's a little bit Jim Fishkin ish asking that you've given people information up front. And we're committed to, to doing it in video form because nobody reads anymore. And then they deliberate about these issues and then you've polled them at the beginning, you pull them at the end. We don't say we're doing a deliberative poll because we're not worried about creating perfectly representative random samples, but we are interested in making sure that the groups are diverse. And what we're finding similarly is that people's experience having deliberated with each other is edifying. It's like it's curative, like it brings them to a place where they weren't before. We have the numbers to be able to test the way you've tested it. But what I would really love to see is if we started this by having them first play the game and then do the deliberation, like what would the two together be? I mean, I think both of us have the intuition, it would be even better. But it would be interesting to test because obviously we don't. Intuition isn't enough.

Yeah, no. And that's exactly how I'm thinking about it. You know, people, sometimes I often have to clarify, like we have these political controversial questions in the game, but the point is not to get people to agree about guns or immigration. The point is to have the politics salient while people are having this cooperative experience. And then people ask me, okay, but then how is this ever going to result in the kind of structural change that we really need? And my answer to that is we can't even have to be to have that policy conversation in an honest, open, open minded way where we're looking to solve the problem instead of to score points. You have to first solve the animosity problem. It's kind of like we think of sports as competitive, but sports are actually cooperative. That is, we have all of this cooperative apparatus all around the soccer game. And then within the soccer game you have these two different countries or teams playing against each other. But the overall thing is cooperative. And then we have that competition, that friendly competition in the middle. What we need first is to. You can't negotiate with people who are evil. Right? So you have to first, I think, diffuse that animosity and then you can have a meaningful conversation about solving policy questions. And so I like the way that you suggested kind of encapsulating that with first having something that's really more about just establishing trust and establishing mutual respect. And then we can start talking policy. My kind of inspiration and collaborator, Tim Phillips, who's the CEO of this organization called Beyond Conflict, has this strategy where he's had people on opposite sides of a conflict first talk about someone else's conflict. So he's had a group in Latin America dealing with their own problem, say let's look at what's going on in South Africa or Northern Ireland. And they can see each other going through this exercise that's just an exercise, but seeing how they think and seeing how they reason. And then that opens up the space for them to have a more open and trusting conversation about what's actually dividing them themselves. Then there's the problem of, let's say they've all become closer and more reasonable, but the constituents that they represent hate each other just as much. Right. Then you need to think, how do you create that experience on a wider scale? And that brings us back to why we wanted to do things that were more scalable. But yes, I think that there's a kind of sequence here of first establishing basic trust in humanity and respect. And then you can start having those more integrative problem solving conversations.

But what this still misses, and I just wonder whether you have an intuition about how to solve this part of the problem, too, is that when the soccer teams play, they play on the same field. They have a common conception of reality. They know what the ball looks like and they know when it goes through the goal. And increasingly, we live in different epistemological worlds. Like, we don't even understand the same facts and we're not even told the same facts. I mean, there's great work showing that a villain for the left, people like the Koch brothers are invisible to people on the right because they're never spoken of on, like, Fox News. Why would you. And so the solution you've got and the solution I've got doesn't yet deal with the problem of how do we get people to the same place so that they're even knowing the same facts to have a conversation about, so that when they apply their different intuitions about how to solve them, they're solving the same problem.

So I think there are two different strategies here, and they're not mutually exclusive. One is to think that to solve the kind of information problem, the epistemological problem, you need an epistemological solution. You need to have a shared news source. You need to do fact checking and correcting and things like that. Another approach is to say all of this is ultimately driven by an underlying kind of animosity and disrespect and distrust. And if you actually solve that more basic affective problem, then the other stuff would actually sort itself out, that people would be curious. I mean, think about it like, if you're a Republican or you're a Democrat, it is not hard at all to find out what the other side is saying. If you want to know. Just that people don't want to know, right? And if they hear something, they don't want to believe it. They want to rationalize it away as quickly as possible. Another way to think about it is this goes something you said earlier about countering all of the misinformation that's out there in describing the quiz game. Often, how I've pitched it is what's the opposite of a Russian government troll farm or a homegrown one here in the U.S. right? You might think that the opposite of falsehoods is truth. That is, it's fact checking, right? As the famous line, right? The lie has gone around the world three times while the truth is still lacing up its shoes. Fact checking is. It's good, it's important, people should do it, but it's no match for falsehood. I view misinformation and subscribing to it and believing in it without curiosity as more of the opposite of cooperation. It's a kind of defection. It's more of a middle finger than a kind of epistemic conclusion. Right. So the idea then is that the opposite of lies is not so much truth as it is cooperation, because lies is really a form of defection. Right. So, yeah, So I guess I'm pushing more on this strategy of if we can feel that we're on the same team and trust each other and respect each other, even if we still have disagreements, then we'll seek out sources of shared information. We'll want to know the truth, we'll want to know when we're getting things wrong. Right. And to go from there. But I also think no one really knows the answer. These are really hard problems. And we, you know, even if that's my, like, number one approach, we want to be trying everything that has a hope of working and trying things in tandem, as you suggest.

Right. And I think that the key is when people can see the other side, not as reptiles, but as humans. And so when you think, like, what does the conservative think? You're not thinking the conservative, you're thinking, what does Joe think? Because I met Joe in one of these conversations and, you know, I don't agree with him, but he's not a. He's not a terrible person. He's got a couple kids. He's, you know, wants to go to college. They're the kids to go to college. So it's like turning us into, you know, who we were, I think, before we had all these mechanisms for pulling us apart. And yeah, there are a lot of strategies. And what you've described here is really, really an important addition to this.

Oh, well, thanks. Yeah, I. Well, I appreciate.

Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you again. This has been an extremely valuable conversation, addition to the series that we have here. I guess I'd like to just ask, where should we look for the next place that this appears? I mean, this version of your work, this intervention for bringing people together through this kind of gaming. Are we going to see platforms deploy it? Are we going to see political parties trying to engage it in certain districts?

Yeah, well, so this is what I've been working on for most of the last year. So with an organization called the Global Development Incubator, which is a social impact tech incubator, we are working on building software that's more robust and that we can deploy more widely. My initial vision and hope for this would be that the quiz game would be something that we just put out on the Internet that people can play the way they play all kinds of trivia games, but one where you're paired up with other people. It turns out that's going to be, especially if we're having incentives and prizes, that becomes a big security challenge. And so we've decided to focus more on institutional channels. So we're organizational channels. We're talking with various businesses about having a version of the quiz game at work where businesses that are feeling that there's a kind of tension at work. We had a conversation with folks from the US Chamber of Commerce who said the number, the one and number two questions they get from their businesses these days are what do we do about AI? That's number one. And number two, what do we do about this creeping polarization that's getting into the workplace? Someone posts something on Slack and boom, everything blows up. So we're looking to offer a kind of solution to businesses, but also to campuses where there's real political division, possibly the military one that I hadn't even thought of before we started this. Libraries actually could be a way to bring people together with this. And then I just got back from a trip to Israel where there was a lot of interest in the quiz game as a way of having greater integration and inclusion for Arab Israelis in the Jewish, Israeli dominated workplace. And so I hope that we'll be doing Israel and maybe ultimately Israel, Palestine version of this. The situation is very different there. Huge power asymmetry in a way that whereas Republicans and Democrats are more balanced, but the underlying principle of put people on the same team and have them succeed together and share the benefits, I think that's universal. And so we're going to see. See how far we can go. Yeah.

Well, I'm grateful for the work you've done as a philosopher and as a scientist, but as somebody who's deeply anxious about where we are as a nation, maybe as a world, I really hope you continue to do this powerful work in the context of a practitioner, because it's certainly what we need.

Well, thank you so much. And I should say the admiration is very much mutual. I look at the work you've done starting as the Internet's favorite lawyer, as you've been called, and things you've done since and you know, taking your knowledge and skills and really applying them for our shared common good, you know, it's very inspiring to me. So as someone who's you know, it's been a long journey to try to do stuff in the world, and I look to people like you to say, okay, this, this can work if you get it right.

I'm sure it will with you. Thank you so much and thank you for talking. All right.

Oh, thank you.

Foreign. This has been the 18th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way, produced by Equal Citizens and literally made by hand by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. Check us out at EqualCitizens US. Give us your thoughts, give us your feedback, save your hate. Not that we get much, but, you know, doesn't pay. And share this if you can with everybody you think should hear these ideas. And also, of course, we're grateful for your supports. What I do, I do pro bono. But we have a team that needs to earn a living and everything you donate to Equal Citizens helps them. Keep going here. Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned. Tuned for the next episode.