This is hidden frame I’m shocked by in 1980 Ronald Reagan became president of the United States he

quickly raised the temperature of the Cold War and assumed a muscular stance toward the Soviet Union
while they preached the supremacy of the state they are the focus of evil in the modern world that’s
September a message flashed off the team a secret Soviet Soviet health host that analyzed satellite via
computer states inside the Buckner was a 44 year old Soviet Lieutenant Colonel made stand S bedroom
the military commander saw a button a standard told him the unimaginable attack the United States has
launched a little statement in the satellite data it looked like the United States was like incredible with
Soviet Union with a sudden deadly liquor there were only seconds but the Soviets did not strike in
response stands out by Trump debated by the report theater if you did it could have triggered a massive
Soviet response the Soviet fact did not do what was expected of him he decided that satellite data was
wrong and did not report the message he was right the satellite signals were reflections of some kind of
terms you couldn’t believe I’ve never heard of satellite but if you like all your lifestyle retaliatory strikes
could easily have killed half the populations of both countries researchers have estimated that the
nuclear winter that followed could have killed two billion people worldwide there is a lesson in the story
about where the fallible human being should ever have nuclear weapons at their disposal but our focus
today is on a psychological idea how our minds work when we are under attack it’s also the start of a
series we’re calling us two pointer as we begin what promises to be a pivotal and contentious election
season in the United States and many countries around the world we’re taking a close look at how we
engage with our opponents over the next few weeks we’ll explore the assumptions we make about our
allies and our folks we look to history for lessons and we love our specific strategies to engage
constructively with our opponents whether in the political realm and the dinner table or at work we
begin with the psychology of threat this week on hidden brain when something bad happens its human
nature to look for someone to blame needless to say that person usually isn’t us the tendency to see
others as villains and to cast ourselves as innocent victims causes harm in interpersonal relationships it
may also lie beneath some of our deepest societal divides at the University of North Carolina
psychologist and neuroscientist Kurt Gray studies what happens in our minds when we think about our
political opponents kurt Craig welcome to hidden bread thanks for much for having me on card I want to
start our conversation with a story that is very far away from politics but I think it has a deep connection
with politics and a psychological level when you were a teenager you used to drive around with a bunch
of high school friends I understand your car was nicknamed Fireball does not say something about how
fast you used to drive it does I used to drive a two door Pontiac Grand Am it wasn’t a flashy car but I’d
like to drive very fast and didn’t always pay attention so one time you and your friends were heading to
a movie when something fairly dramatic happened to you tell me the story of what happened I was
sixteen I just got my license and we were driving in the night to go see a movie and it had just rain and
so that the streets were you know shining in the in the orange sodium lights and we were roaring up the
road because the movie started in five minutes and we were 10 minutes away and I was in the right
hand lane there was a lane to my left and my friend and shotgun all of a sudden said hurt you’re gonna
miss the turn turn left and so II hauled on the steering wheel to the left I didn’t look in the lane next to
me cause I had to cross the lane to be able to turn left and there was a car driving next to me oh my
gosh and so as I turned this car sled on its brakes I suddenly became aware it was there I slammed on
my brakes we screeched and squealed the roads were wet you know and so we we spun around in the
intersection I didn’t hit it this other car I didn’t hit me we didn’t hit anything else so luckily everyone was
safe no one was around we ended up stopped in the wrong direction on the other side of the road just
kind of in A in a desolate night I mean it’s still a hot stopping moment though because I think in that
instant everyone must have seen how close they came to a crash it was terrifying and it happened so
fast I mean the music was so loud right we barely realized anything were kind of wrapped in our own
world and so I opened my window to start to apologize to the driver of the other car was a silver
Mercedes Benz and this driver this guy gets out of the car he was in his early 20s had pretty nice clothes
on I remember he had you know curly hair with gel he had some silver chains on and I just started
opening my mouth to say sorry and he you know looks at me just daggers right in his eyes and it’s
shoulders are said that he he is coming towards me fast and he says you’re dead get out of the car I’m
gonna kill you kurt was terrified he stepped on the gas and took off to his horror the driver of the
Mercedes hurried back to his car jumped in it and came after him so I took off and I was flying through a
strip malls it was a really built up kind of like big box store kind of area I was totally panicked I had no
idea where it was going and so and again it was dark it was no one was around even though the movie
theater you know half a mile away was bustling was around these stores and so I’m just taking turn after
turn and he’s getting closer and closer on my tail and eventually I turn into a parking lot of like a Home
Depot store and he you know revs and and gets close to me and and I turn and I go behind this store
into the loading dock and so there’s a steep embankment on my right so I’m really like funneled into this
little canyon with this guy behind me and he accelerates up beside me and then in front of me and starts
kind of like cutting me off he kind of like corrals me into the wall kind of into a corner and I realized I was
trapped coat was so paralyzed with fear he could barely think and she gets out of his car and starts
walking towards me again very menacing very angry and all my friends we were talking on the way there
obviously we were having fun you know deadly silent no music my one friend in the back who’s thinking
lucidly her name is Jesse she says lock the door and so II immediately locked the door and a second later
he grabs my handle and just starts to to haul on the handle and try and pull me out of the car well by the
door is locked at this point so he can’t get in exactly but but I also realize I have to diffuse the situation
because he he’s so angry and much bigger than me and so I do the only thing I can which is you know
start to apologize so I unroll my window a few inches I say I’m so sorry II know it’s my fault I wasn’t
much more it was going and he he gets it I’m gonna kill you and then he reaches into you know through
the crack in the window and he tries to unlock the door from the inside with his hand wow and so I’m
simultaneously trying to stay calm and contrite apologize to this man wow frantically slapping away his
hand so he can’t unlock the door and then it’s clear he’s not going to be able to unlock it and so he just
started slapping me through the the crack in the window it’s it’s grabbing me by my collar and just kind
of shaking me just repeating like I’m gonna kill you you’re dead again and again how does this how does
this end the friend of mine the vaccine Jesse you know the the Cogent one per mom happened to work
for a cell phone store and cell phones back when I was in high school were not popular not everyone
had one but she had one lent from her mom just in case anything anything happened if she had to make
any phone calls and it was you know a kind of brick of the phone as the old ones were and she holds it
up and she says to this guy I’ve got a cell phone and I’ll call the cops and so this doesn’t sink in right
away to the guide keeps on slapping me and and and threaten to kill me and then eventually he stops it
sinks in he takes his hand away and he kind of bends down and he looks through the crack in the
window and all of us in the car and he said fine you call the cops and I’ll tell him what you did and this
statement was perplexing to me because clearly in my mind if I explain what had happened to the police
they would surely be on my side I was the one getting assaulted getting threatened with murder but I
was puzzled because he was so confident that the police would be on his side I couldn’t understand how
he could be so confident that he was in the morally right position and yet I was confident that I was
morally correct you know I think when things like this happen to us you know we’re very quick to try and
defend our particular points of view but as you’re telling me the story I’m an observer and I can see
things from both points of view I can see how he must have been driving along the road someone
swerves in front of him at high speed nearly kills him and he says clearly I’m the victim here this crazy
teenager could have killed me and from your point of view you’re saying you know I made a mistake
then a simple mistake and I’m really sorry about it but surely that mistake doesn’t warn somebody
chasing me through dark streets for mile upon mile cornering me a threatening to kill I agree and as I
started to do research on moral psychology I came more and more to recognize the genuine concerns
that he had about being harmed he genuinely felt like he was victimized and so did I and so this
presented a puzzle to me we experienced the same situation and had completely opposite perceptions
of of blame and harm I had to ask you what happened that night after your friend threatened to call the
police and he said go ahead call them how did the incident come to an end but he after he told us to go
ahead and call the cops he kind of stood there and looked at us for a while and you know maybe
recognize that we were all frightened teenagers you know trapped in a in a little metal cage like feel in
some parking lot and he stormed back to his car slammed his door and spilled off into the night when
we come back how Kurt’s story speaks to our deep political device you’re listening to hidden brain I’m
Shankar Vedantam this is head and brain I’m Shankar Vedantam at the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill psychologist Kurt Gray studies the science of political polarization along with other
researchers who study how we think about our political opponents kurt finds that we make a series of
assumptions and draw a series of conclusions about people who disagree with us politically these
assumptions and conclusions are especially powerful because they happen so swiftly automatically and
unconsciously that they don’t feel like assumptions or conclusions they feel like facts self evident facts
the first of these has to do with what we think is happening inside our opponent’s minds or rather what
we think isn’t happening inside our opponent’s minds we generally think that we our side is smart that
we vote in our own self interest and that we do things that make sense and we think that we you know
want policies that are going to help ourselves and the country but when we think of our opponents we
think of them as being quite stupid we think of them as not voting in their own self interest and we think
of them not wanting policies that’s going to help them and so in 1 study we did a North Carolina we
presented people with a bunch of amendments that were part of an election a few years ago and we
just asked people about those amendments and why someone on the other side might vote differently
than they do on those amendments and so it might ask a progressive participant in North Carolina why
might a conservative person vote yes on these things and what we found is that people think that
people on the other side they think that they are dumb and they don’t appreciate what’s best for
themselves or their country or the state so in other words we think the other side is filled with sheep
exactly we think that we are thoughtful and rational and doing the best we can with complex issues and
we also think that those on the other side are not those things at all they are tricky by the media they
are deceived by some leader that they are sheeple and we just think that they’re stupid so we think our
opponents are not very smart but it’s also the case that we feel like we don’t like our opponents very
much but we think our opponents have stronger feelings about us tell me about the work you’ve done
looking at how we think about our opponents and how we think our opponents feel about us so it’s true
that we don’t like folks on the other side but a lot of research finds that we severely overestimate how
much the other side dislikes us in one paper the researcher show that we inflate our estimates of how
much the other side dislikes us by somewhere between 50 to 300 percent wow so Republicans might
mildly dislike Democrats in general but if US Democrats how much you think Republicans dislike you
they think it’s mosquito deep burning hatred to your yourself and your political party and it’s just not
true and of course the the reverse is true as well that Republicans believe that the Democrats hate them
and I understand that this work I think it was done by Samantha Moore Berg in 2020 found that the
more partisan people are the more strongly partisan people are the more they hold their spies that’s
right so no matter what side the political spectrum you are the further out on that spectrum you are the
more you inflate your estimates of how much the other side hates you I’m wondering what the effect of
this is if you and I are in conflict with one another and we have a disagreement about something I can
tell myself you know Kurt wants X and I want Y and we can figure out you know is there a middle ground
between X and Y but if I know myself you know Kurt doesn’t just want XK actually hates me and really
wants the worst for me it becomes very difficult to think about splitting the difference between X and Y
that’s right so compromise and democracy more generally requires that we’re willing to talk with others
who might disagree with us cooperate with others who might disagree with us and if you think the other
side hates you it can be hard to even engage in conversation with them right it’s A It’s a fight for survival
you know I’m thinking back to that incident that took place when you were a teenager the incident
where you got into a conflict with another driver and one of the things that strikes me is that in that
moment when your friend was threatening to call the police you felt righteous because you felt clearly
I’m the 1 who has been wronged here and the police will see my side of the story and the other driver
felt righteous too and said surely the police will see my side of the story in some ways when we believe
that people will hate us it gives us license to feel righteous absolutely right we feel righteous and in the
moral right because not only are we hated but also because we’re being harmed right there’s a villain on
the other side they’re attacking us and that makes us the victim and when we’re feeling victimized we
feel licensed to protect ourselves in any way that we can I’m wondering how much of this is about you
know what psychologists sometimes call you know cognitive closures seeking cognitive simplicity if I
have to say Kurt wants XI want Y what’s the middle ground it’s complicated but if I can just say you know
code hates me code is clearly wrong I’m in the right in some ways it’s cognitively simpler yes our minds
want simplicity and that’s especially true when it comes to morality and the reason is because if we
acknowledge that the moral universe is complicated then we have to acknowledge that our moral
beliefs might sometimes be wrong and so when I was in that car right recognizing that the other driver
had a legitimate you know a genuine feeling of victimhood meant that I might be the the villain I might
be the perpetrator there and that’s a tough cult to swallow so we’ve looked at how we believe that our
opponents are stupid and that our opponents hate us you say that another belief that behold about our
opponents is whether they care about democracy and they care about our shared civic values talk to me
about this research group a team of scientists has found that although people generally support
democracy everyone in America generally supports democracy we vastly over inflate how much people
on the other side don’t want to support democracy so our side is pro democracy their side is if not anti
democracy at least willing to lead democracy slide to win in politics that perception means that now we
feel threatened now we’re in a war they’re trying to destroy democracy and so in a war we have to fight
dirty too and the perception that the other side is anti-democratic licenses our side to also do anti-
democratic things because they’re willing to steal elections for us to even stay in the game we should be
willing to bend the rules as well that’s right I’m wondering how what you make of recent events in the
United States so for example if you think about the January 6th insurrection how would you think about
that I think many Democrats would look at that and say you know very clearly these are people who
actually tried to overturn the election clearly they are anti-democratic it’s not just a perception in my
head so the January 6th example is a great one because from the outside it seems like these are the folks
who are just trying to destroy democracy but I think from the inside if you look at it from their
perspective they think that they are upholding democracy because they were led to believe that the
election was stolen and maybe what they’re doing isn’t democratic but if they thought that Democrats
kind of fired the first shot they’re just retaliating but in that case there is a difference between what
everyday people think and what political elites are doing so I think when it comes to the behavior of the
many people who went up to the Capitol in January 6th it’s easy to see how their worldview supports the
idea that they are standing up for democracy and for freedom I’m not sure that I would be as
sympathetic to some elites who are propagating that idea so we’ve looked at how people think the
other side is stupid the other side is irrational the other side is anti-democratic you recently published a
study current that reported on what Democrats and Republicans in the United States believe about one
another when it comes to topics such as murder child **** and embezzlement tell me about the study
yeah so that study I should say it’s not yet published but it is available online all the data and the
maintenance script and in that study we wondered how people would view the morality of the other
side and of course we’d already know that Progressives and conservatives disagree about hot button
issues so you might think the other side is wrong about abortion about capital punishment or
immigration but there are many moral issues that seem totally uncontroversial like murder or
embezzlement or as you say child **** and so the question is what do people think about those on the
other side when it comes to those issues would Republicans think Democrats are OK with how **** or
embezzlement or infidelity and so forth and vice versa so when we look at the data we find consistent
with what we’ve been talking about before people vastly overestimate how much those on the other
side see these obvious more wrongs as acceptable we show that both Democrats and Republicans think
that 15% of the other side view child **** as acceptable that’s crazy right the real answer is is basically
zero but we really inflate how much the other side is evil and lacks a basic moral sense so I mean we’re
in we’re in really deep waters here because now our our dislike for one another is not just about policy
matters and we’re not even dressing it up as being about policy matters we’re actually saying our
opponents now are just evil people who are bent on just destroying the world so I think this this
rampant polarization makes people endorse something that we call a destruction narrative where the
other side is motivated by the urged to destroy our side and also America and it’s really the sense that
the other side wants to watch the world burn I should say that people think that the other side is more
stupid than evil you know more misguided than than demonic but it’s still not a great place to be
obviously and and there’s still a sense that the other side is is motivated by some destruction that when
the other side passes some policy with some unintended negative side effect as all policies have some
research shows that people think that those on the other side intend those negative policy
consequences that they they want to hurt people on the other side but but of course that’s not true
folks are just trying to do the best they can when it comes to these policy preferences so we’ve talked in
different ways and offer different examples of how in our political discourse we want to see ourselves as
being the victim as being potentially harmed and seeing the other side as the perpetrator the other side
is the villain the people who are trying to do us harm and of course the other side feels exactly the same
way but it raises a really interesting point which is that the animating force in much of politics might not
be animosity and aggression but it might be a feeling of victim or a feeling that we are undecieged that
we are under attack can you talk about this idea because I think that’s not the way most people think
about politics or people think about politics as being you know blood support very aggressive but the
picture that you’re painting I think is slightly at odds with that where the feelings are vulnerability that
we have are in fact the dominant drivers of our perceptions of behavior that’s right so when we think
about the motivations of others we think that they are aggressive we think that they are trying to
destroy us we think they are motivated by some deep instinct to hurt us but my reading of the of the
literature and my work suggests that ultimately people are motivated by this desire to protect
themselves to guard against threats their motivated by a sense of vulnerability so rather than a
destruction narrative I think the politics is better described by a protection narrative where people are
trying to protect themselves and their vulnerabilities where do you think this comes from this sort of
constant need to protect ourselves to see ourselves as as under threat where do you think this comes
from I think our desire to protect ourselves from threat in politics and the modern world comes from
way back in human nature I think that the human experience is ultimately an experience of threats and
fear and worry about our vulnerabilities I wonder a code of some people might say you know that can’t
possibly be true humans are at the apex of of of the planet right now you know every other species
should fear humans because in fact we are the most deadly predator on the planet right now but you
are making the case that humans in fact are motivated almost entirely by by fear by vulnerability there
seems to be a mismatch there there is a mismatch and there is no doubt that today we are apex
predators we can hunt wolves from helicopters we can remake the world but there is the fallacy in
thinking that just because we are predators today that that’s how we have always been and in fact if you
look back in the midst of time where our minds and our human nature evolved we were not predators
at all instead we were prey we evolved not as predators but as prey I understand that you had an
incident in your own life that brought hope to you your own vulnerability as an individual creature tell
me the story of what happened before I wanted to be a social psychologist I thought I wanted to be a
geophysicist and a geophysicist spends a lot of time outdoors in remote locations looking for natural gas
or oil and so I was very far north so if you drive to the border between Montana and Alberta and you
drive 18 hours straight north and then you turn left and drive for another hour you come to Rainbow
Lake Alberta and then from Rainbow Lake which is extremely isolated you take a helicopter ride another
30 miles into the Bush that’s where we were looking for natural gas so there was AA crew of five of us
four college students and one old man named Ian who is the time 25 but he seemed like an old man to
us and we would spend our days in the middle of the wilderness driving around on snowmobiles and
pounding stakes into the ground to try to find natural gas on one of these expeditions kurt and his team
had just finished a tough day’s work but before the helicopter could come fetch them bad weather
rolled in the helicopter pilot told them he’d come get them the next morning but it was winter and it
was very cold and the 5 of us were literally in the middle of nowhere and had no water no food except
some leftover sandwiches from lunch and we had to spend the night alone in the middle of the
Canadian wilderness and so we went off to the forest we built a lean tune we gathered some firewood
we lit it with gasoline which I wouldn’t recommend unless that was your only source of of anything
flammable in the middle of the wilderness and then we just sat down to wait through the night until the
helicopter might be able to come pick us up and it was assuming it was pitched apart from the fire it was
pitched up they were yeah it was pitch dark it was minus 10 degrees Celsius we had no other blankets
we had no other jackets other than our one piece fire retardant no mix coveralls you know we’ve
worked prepared to weather a night outside so we share the remnants of our lunch we sat around the
fire talking and then it was time to go to bed and so we all five in a row we spooned with each other to
stay warm but that proved to be too cold in the night and so we eventually found our way back to the
fire and we curled up around it in a circle and tried to sleep while the flames were high and while we
were warm and then when the flames died down we would wake up and we’d add some wood to the
fire and try to sleep again and we did that for 10 12 hours now obviously you know that there’s no sort
of there’s no human predators out there but presumably there are animals before this night I had never
thought about predators right I grew up in a city in Canada but there was a couple times when I woke up
in the middle of the night where I felt uneasy and you might say of course you felt uneasy because you
were stuck in the middle of the wilderness hoping not to to die you know of cold or thirst or something
like that but I just couldn’t get the sense that you know there was something out there and it’s so dark
you can’t see beyond this little circle of light so you could look into the woods and there was absolutely
nothing but blackness and it’s not like there’s some serial killer out there right it’s not like a horror
movie because we’re so far from civilization but I still got this uneasy sense and then bit by bit the sky
turns gray it’s still pretty cloudy out and we we get up and we we stretch and as we walk around the
campsite we notice that there are top rents all the way around very close to where we were sleeping
and they were links paw prints and so what had happened in the night was that some links had hurt us
had smelt us and had crept close to us in the night for out for our overseas listeners who live in tropical
claments can you tell me what what they are links are big fluffy bobcats I don’t think they could
takedown adult man but I think they could probably eat a small child and certainly they could rip out the
throat of someone who’s sleeping in the darkness and that realization hit home to me as we sat there in
the morning waiting to get picked up by the helicopter and and we couldn’t have done anything to
prevent us because humans are weak and we don’t have nails and we don’t have teeth and if there had
been a real predator if it had been a mountain line then we wouldn’t have stood a chance not very long
ago this was not unusual at all you know 150 years ago and earlier stuff like this happened probably all
the time in all parts of the world people were living in close proximity to nature and in fact were
vulnerable in ways that we simply don’t feel today absolutely so for the last millions of years of our
evolution we have been vulnerable to predation and it’s really only in the last hundred couple hundred
years that that threat has basically dropped down to zero for most of us for for a long time people were
hunted by wolves tigers theirs but even today in our industrialized world many people are still
vulnerable to the predators there was a case in Camba several years ago of a pop singer going for a walk
through Nova Scotia forest and she was killed and partially eaten by a pack of Coyotes I’m wondering
what effect this has in our minds the fact that in some ways we’ve had a very long evolutionary history
where we are vulnerable and potentially under threat in a very recent evolutionary history where that
threat has receded what has that done to our minds our longstanding vulnerability to predation has
really shaped our psychology in our modern world even if we don’t think about predators today very
much we are still fundamentally concerned with protecting ourselves from threats and those threats
might not be sitting in the forest or in the jungle behind our houses but we are constantly bombarded
with threats today when it comes to politics when it comes to morality so we bring forward this long
standing evolutionary feeling of threat into our modern political realm and this is why we typecast the
other side as predators and I think it’s important to recognize this because fundamentally those folks on
the other side we seem to predators also feel like prey even that the other driver in the parking lot that
night he felt like the victim like the prey of course that doesn’t mean that liberals and conservatives
have to define harm the same way what you might consider harmful might not necessarily be what I
consider harmful which is why we can be worried about different issues that’s exactly right so in my
research we find that liberals might emphasize arms to environment or they might emphasize harms to
members of disadvantaged groups whereas conservatives might emphasize harms to social order to
those trying to protect our society like police and perhaps to religious entities like God or the Biden you
can see this very well with even with hot button issues like immigration so progressives might worry
about the harm done to undocumented immigrants who they perceive as vulnerable whereas
conservatives might worry about the harm done by undocumented immigrants who might be criminals
or drug traffickers in America so both of those positions are motivated by a desire to protect this reform
they just emphasize competing harms in that issue it’s a promptly faced in nearly every dimension of our
lives our brains were sculpted by evolution of a thousands of years our minds today are the product of
those evolutionary forces we are walking around with machines that were designed if you will in the
stone age unsurprisingly there are mismatches. When we come back how understanding the psychology
of our political conflicts can help to bridge seemingly intractable device you’re listening to hidden brain
I’m Shakira Vedanta
this is hidden brain I’m Shankar Vedantam psychologist Kurt Gray studies the signs of political
polarization in a number of studies he and other researchers have found that Democrats and
Republicans in the United States and partisans in other countries have very strong and very wrong views
about their opponents we tend to think our opponents are idiotic and irrational that’s the milestone we
also think they’re anti-democratic evil and are OK with children being harmed we ask ourselves what is
wrong with those people how can any decent person have such terrible and misguided thoughts our
certitude about our moral superiority means we don’t have to understand our opponents or give them
the benefit of the doubt so you’ve done a lot of work currently looking at ways in which we can turn
down the temperature on political polarization and you say that one of the 1st and most practical things
that we can do is to frame our positions on issues in terms of harm so in other words we think that facts
are what bridge divides but in fact it’s our shared concern about harm that actually is what we’re just
divides that’s right and we have a big paper with 15 studies that shows that people think that facts are
the key bridging divides but when you actually give people facts in heated conversations about morality
it doesn’t work instead what does work to rigid divides is allowing people to talk about their own
concerns with harm to talk about their own worries about threats and the pain that they or their family
may have suffered and that makes them seem less like sheep it’ll make them seem less stupid and less
evil even though they disagree with you but they have the same concerns about harm so they’re similar
to you but it also makes sense that they would make this decision right and so now they’re not voting
against their own self interest they’re not being irrational what they do make sense and that makes
people willing to respect them and have conversations with them connor one of the things you say is
that it’s important for us to remind ourselves that the other person’s feelings about harm are genuine
now even even if those feelings of harms team unfounded to us why is this hard to do and why is it
helpful it’s so hard to recognize that the authenticity of other people’s perceptions of harm especially
when those perceptions are opposite to our own and that’s because our perceptions of harm are deeply
intuitive we feel them in our gut when you if you’re a pro-choice person thinking about the abortion
debate in your gut you know it’s about protecting women but if you’re a pro-life person then you’re a
gut you know it’s about protecting unborn children and the power of those intuitions about harm make
it difficult to realize that the other person is authentically trying to protect someone from harm but it’s
so crucial because that’s what we need to do to recognize that those on the other side are motivated by
protection and not destruction you also talk about an idea called moral humility which would you say is
different from intellectual unity yeah there’s been a lot of discussion these days about intellectual
humility and I think it’s important to recognize that you might be wrong about how the world works but
it’s much harder to think that your moral judgments might not be A100 percent right we are deeply
motivated to think that you know we are good people and yet moral humility is appreciating that even if
we are good people other people might be good too and even if they disagree with us they’re still good
and so what that means is that we might not be 100 percent right about our world judgment and it’s
hard to have that kind of humility I want to talk about a demonstration of moral humility that was in a
recent documentary called guns and empathy it was produced by a nonprofit organization called
narrative four in partnership with New York magazine and during this this documentary one of the
participants was a woman named Carolyn Taft who was shot 3 times in a mass shooting at a mall in Salt
Lake City and her 15 year old daughter was killed I want to play you a little clip of what Caroline said
everything I knew is gone if people thought that could happen to them and thought they could actually
lose their business lose their house lose their family and I think that that gun would not have so much so
much hold and the little while later Kurt there was another person who spoke at the same event her
name was Julian Wise and she had a very different view on guns she was born with a disability and she
bought a pistol after she was stalked and after she learned the disabled women were much more likely
to be sexually assaulted than women without disabilities let me play you a clip of Jane I have my gun
with me in my home and I feel so much safer knowing that should anything happen I can defend myself
what is the effect of hearing these two different stories on people who are who are listening what’s
happening in their mind listening to these stories might not persuade you but it does make you see the
position of the person telling these stories as rational as something that makes sense and it makes you
respect that position and makes you willing to interact more with that person and those feelings of
respect and the willingness to engage are essential in our pluralistic democracy right we depend on
compromise on open dialog in our society and so these stories of harm are a good first step at at
motivating the kind of respect that we need to decrease polarization and increase our willingness to
engage with others you know it often seems to many people care that the device that we have in our
country and you know in many countries around the world are so intractable so painful that it can seem
as if you know there is no way out there are no solutions out that there’s no hope in sight then and I
think that’s understandable because the the temperature has been turned up to such A to such a pitch
but you cite a historical example of a moment when people put aside their differences and truly saw the
humanity of the other side and it occurred in 1914 in the First World War can you tell us what happened
it was the first Christmas of the first World War and you know the sides were were dug in and 3 rd
trenches and the barbed wire up and even though they were supposed to be killing each other as
Christmas approached they started being kinder in each other right they would hear each other singing
Christmas carols in the trench over and my my wave at each other right shout some pleasantries and
eventually the situation got so positive that the Germans and the Allies decided to have a soccer game in
no man’s land and where they exchanged gifts so this is really an act of defiance against you know the
the generals who wanted them to kill each other and it was an act of camaraderie and bridging divides
that I think is remarkable even today their mission was to literally murder each other and yet they found
space to come together and see past their disagreements I think it holds powerful applicable lessons for
our own time the Elites in our government and the media are telling us to hate each other and telling us
that we should hate each other but we already know from all the scientific work we talked about today
that the other side actually doesn’t hate us as much as we think and so this should be an inspiration that
that even in war real war people can rise up and come together and we can to cut gray is a psychologist
and neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill he plans to publish a book by
these ideas in 2025 the book is going to be titled outraged why we fight over morality and politics kurt
thank you so much for joining me today on hidden brain thanks for having me have you tried to talk with
someone who disagrees with you about politics have you found effective ways to get through have you
lost friends over political disagreements if you’d be willing to share your stories with the hidden brain
audience along with any questions you have occurred gray please record a voice memo and email it to
us at ideas at hidden brain .org that email address again is ideas and hiddenbrain.org use the subject line
politics hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media our audio production team includes Bridget
mccarthy Annie Murphy Paul Kristen Wong Laura Correll Brian Katz Oren Barnes Andrew Chadwick and
Nick Woodbridge tara Boyle is our executive producer I’m hidden brains executive editor next week in
our us 2.0 series the mistakes we made but we try to change someone’s mind and a better way to talk to
political opponents asking somebody to give up their moral values people are willing to fight and die for
their values right like people really really are invested in not changing their minds about that I’m
Shankar Vedantin see you soon the question of California Berkeley and have parked his car on campus
while he went on a trip to the East Coast the morning after he flew back to California rob went to
retrieve his car from the parking lot there was just one problem he couldn’t find and I could not
remember if I had even driven it the day before because I was kind of tired and running errands and I
just wasn’t sure where my car was and whether it had been stolen or whether I had just left it
somewhere and the car was so old and you know just rundown that it seemed unlikely it was stolen you
know it seemed more likely I had left it somewhere even though that’s a very spacey thing to do
remember I went to like the local grocery store and I was like hey did you guys tow a car from this
parking lot by any chance and the person was like you’re telling me you don’t remember if you parked
your car here yesterday you know and the absent minded professor yeah I I’d use that crutch you know
yeah yeah absolutely I had a roommate that was like you and I was like can’t you just tell me if you
towed the car you know they hadn’t told the car rob had no idea where it had gone and he had little
time to think about it he was scheduled to teach a class in Germany for a week and a half rob went on
his trip and reported a car stolen planning to take care of it when he got back but when he returned
home he discovered that the police had been trying to contact him the stolen car had been found and
had been dropped off at an impound lot in Oakland rob hitched a ride with a friend and went to the gut
and it’s just this kind of bad max dystopian sea you know like all these cars are like falling apart it’s all
barbed wire and it’s very razor wires very intense and I go in there’s behind like two inches of
bulletproof glass is business person who’s working at the impact lot and I ask him you know about my
car he’s like yeah we’ve got your car rob’s car was in terrible shape it was falling apart missing a catalytic
converter and for some reason there was an empty bucket in the backseat rob had no time to ask
questions he was ready to leave the automotive purgatory but when he went to spell out his paperwork
the clerk delivered some bad news rob both $600 the fee for holding his decrepit car in the locked for
days on it it just doesn’t seem fair you know like I thought was out of the country I don’t know if this
helps at all he’s like yeah it’s gonna be $600 and I was like you could keep the card would you keep the
car would that be would that neutralize my debt cuz it’s to me it’s not worth $600 especially in this
condition and I remember the guy was like yeah we’ll keep your car but you would still owe us $600
rob’s blood was boiling he found the way he did all those years ago and exhausted young restaurant
worker angry at his roommate for intruding honestly but this time instead of throwing a shoe Rob
stopped he thought for a moment he considered what it might be like on the other side of that
bulletproof glass and so I asked him I was like what percentage of people like freak out right now in this
conversation and he said like 70% and I was like cool alright the reason I was interested in that was
because at this time I was teaching introduction to social psychology and I was giving this essay
assignment to you know hundreds of students every year but it also may be very interested in you know
what at what rate do people make the right choice here you know and when he said 70% I was like okay
I’m gonna do my best to not be in that group you know and I turn to my pregnant we start trying to
strategize what are we gonna do you know like is my car drivable if it’s not drivable can we sell it from
the parking lot of the impound lot you know like what are we gonna do to solve this dilemma and and
the guy behind the glass starts looking up like the blue load value for the car and and quoting us you
know what we could expect and getting advice on towers and it’s like really helping us and I was like oh
wow you know like some of this is because we connected when I didn’t do the easy thing that I was so
emotionally tempted to do a unfairly going off on this guy and down regulated that was a decent person
instead he reciprocated and was really decent back and and it was me learning this lesson even a little
bit more and what happened to the car eventually yeah I donated it to charity but yeah it it you know it
was so easy to break into it was surprising that it didn’t take it that long to be actually stolen and also
they had left my San Francisco Giants foam finger in the car and I guess they were raised fans win drop
winner is not negotiating with people about impounded cars he’s a sociologist at Stanford University rob
thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Ray absolutely hidden brain is produced by hidden brain
media our audio production team includes Bridget mccarthy Annie Murphy Paul Christian Wong Laura
Corelle Ryan Katz Parim Barnes Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbridge tara Boyle is our executive
producer I’m hidden brains executive editor next week in our last 2.0 series when we are fighting with
someone we’re often tempted to tell them to take a block new research suggests we should take that
walk with them moving together side by side with one another across our differences there’s increasing
evidence that that helps us make connections I’m Shankar Vedantam see you soon hello said Jamagoo
it’s Jabba Mango in July for life podcast a three way so some remote every time I’m there available
deadline JU bending although the some way a map will get in the years ago the tofu concrete that we
now invent