#796 - Rob Kurzban - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality

Chris Williamson
Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Kurzban. He's a psychologist and an author. What is morality?

Why did it come about? Have humans always had it? Is it a universal or temporary phenomenon? Does it exist as a truth independent of humanity? Or is it entirely contingent on our culture?

Expect to learn the evolutionary psychology of abortion policy, where the evolution of morality came from. The best examples of modern moral rules that you might not think about. The biggest issues with being being a moral hypocrite. The role that reputation plays in judging someones morality, how wisdom can help us overcome our biological hardware and much more. This is so good, so much fun.

Classic modern wisdom episode deep into human nature, uncovering why things are the way they are. I absolutely adored this episode. Rob's great, awesome insights really, really helps to kind of unpick and make visible the things that we assume about the way that the world and social groups and our own psychology works. It's just so great. I really, really enjoyed this one and I hope that you do too.

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Talk to me about the evolutionary psychology of abortion policy. Yeah, so a lot of people think that where your abortions come from is like your philosophy in life. And I know you've sort of thought a lot about people's philosophies, and so we all live by these kind of, you know, really high level ethics and so on. But what we've argued is that what you really want to do is look at where people's interests lie, right? So the evolutionary view points to genetic interests, fitness interests.

Rob Kurzban
And so we sort of had this idea, this is collaboration with my former colleague Jason Whedon. That said, well, maybe what's really going on here is that if you think about abortion as a tool that people could use to have a relatively promiscuous lifestyle. Right? So the cost of making a mistake, if you want to put it that way, is relatively low as long as there's abortion services. So maybe what's really going on is people who want to live a lifestyle in which they can have a sexual strategy, which is maybe a little bit more promiscuous, one that they're going to be in favor of, and the other way too, right?

So if you've got people who are living a monogamous lifestyle, what you really don't want is your partner to be tempted to stray. And one way that you could deter them is by making that behavior costly. So I should say I was very skeptical of this explanation when I first heard it. So we gathered a lot of data, and it was surprising to me. It turns out that people who have views which kind of comport with that strategy, who are kind of monogamous, they tend to be opposed to abortion services and the reverse.

So what's really going on here is that people are sort of using favoring abortion as a way to get the policies in place that advances their reproductive interests. So it sounds very cynical. It would be great if everyone just had a set of principles which they live by. I mean, if anything, the last ten years, if they've shown us anything, is that, you know, principles go out the window as soon as people's interests are involved. And so that's basically the idea, is that if you want to understand people's kind of moral commitments, the first place you wanna look is not to their overarching principles, but you wanna look at where their fitness interests lie.

Chris Williamson
Why? Well, so the argument is that over evolutionary time, people who advocated for those kinds of rules and norms that advanced their interests would have had greater reproductive success. So we're sort of designed to figure out, look, we live in a moral world. Like, humans are weird. Like, we have all these rules about what you can and can't do.

Rob Kurzban
You can eat this food, but you can't eat it if you're having this other one. There's all these rules about violence, there's all these rules about everything. But what that means is that once you have moral communities, if you can influence what those rules are, you could use those rules to prevent the kinds of things that are gonna be bad for your fitness interests and advance those sorts of things which are gonna be good for your fitness interests. So we're descended from people who strategically played with the rules, like poking them here and there, so that they and their family and their offspring did better than their competitors. I mean, once you start thinking about that way again, it's a little cynical, but it's also scary.

Right. So what we should be aware of when people tell us what their positions are is to first ask this question, okay, well, where do their interests lie? And maybe how could this benefit you? Exactly. And we should be pretty skeptical when it turns out that people really like the rules that benefit them.

I mean, we're seeing this now, right? I don't want to get right into it, but certain people suddenly are in favor of free speech. You know, after being told for five years, there's one word that if you say it, it's literal genocide. So we have to stop people from saying, you know, a bad word. And then the next day, they're out there, like, I want to say all these words about, you know, pretty bad things, and they say, no, that's, you know, so once you see these sort of switches, you can sort of see that, well, people are just playing around with the rules to try to advance whatever their, their particular interests are.

Chris Williamson
Can you think of an example of something where a moral rule is being put forward, promoted by someone, and it doesn't personally benefit them, therefore it lends more credence? Could you give us, given that there's this slightly cynical view, perhaps, of where people are coming from with their motivation around abortion, what would be an example of the opposite? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that when you think about history's heroes, oftentimes it's those guys. So, for example, the people in the civil rights movement who were advocating for equal rights for groups that they didn't belong to, I mean, that's pretty good, right?

Rob Kurzban
I mean, I think of cases like the old days, the ACLU, when they're advocating for people's rights to march in Skokie under the banner of a swastika, that's a very principled sort of thing. That's not in their interest. So I think there are cases where people really do sort of have a set of principles and they're willing to do things that really do work against their interests in the service of supporting those principles. I think in many ways, this was sort of the vision of liberalism, which was to say, it's the principle that matters, not your particular stakes. So I think those are sort of interesting examples.

And I think every time we sort of think about someone as a hero, what oftentimes what that is, is someone supporting a principle which is not particularly good for them comes at some cost. It would have been great for people who were living in a very asymmetrical society. If you're at the top of it to keep that going, you've got a good thing going. So fighting for civil rights and legislation which promoted them, I think that was pretty heroic. What are the most common pushbacks or criticisms that you get when you propose this personally motivated agenda rule for abortion policy?

Well, another. Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I'll say a couple things. So, you know, I know that you hang out quite a bit with academics, and so there's sort of two kinds of ways that academics wind up dealing with, with ideas they don't like. The first one is to engage them.

The second one is to ignore them. And by and large, my experience, and even to this day with a few, is that it hasn't really been engaged all that much. A little bit. So you have some scholars who have talked about it, and what they typically will do is they'll, and they're not wrong about this. There is evidence that sort of does in some context support the sort of what's the matter with Kansas sort of thing.

So this is the idea that people are voting against their self interest. And a lot of it does depend a little bit on how you parse out the data. Right. So this, like so many areas, it's complicated. So, you know, if you look at this data set, you might find support for it, but if you attend to other data set, you might not.

But it's usually the people who say no. There really are these principles here. People are clustering into left and right, for example, in the us, and they're going to vote that way. And if, you know, one kind of issue, their stance on one issue, you're going to be able to guess their stance on another, to say no. There really is this kind of, like, overarching philosophy that's guiding people's choices.

Again, I sort of believed that until we started running our own studies. I mean, you know, we ran this study where we asked people for their views on recreational drugs. And, you know, you told me, is that going to predict people's views on abortion? I would have said, I don't know, probably not. It doesn't seem that related.

But, yeah, so it turns out that recreational drug use is sort of related to this more promiscuous lifestyle, which then feeds into this view about abortion. And so there's a relationship there, and it's pretty hard to tell another story that kind of like allows you to make that prediction before you, before you ran the study. Was Jamie Krems involved in this at all? She wasn't. Jamie used to come to my lab meeting.

She's a dear, close friend. She mostly has been focusing on some really interesting stuff on aggression within, you know, with both male and female styles of aggression and different kinds of styles. My guess is she'd be sympathetic to these styles of argument, but I wouldn't want to put words in her mouth. She was on the show last year and she was the first person that taught me about, what do you call this, what's the name for this particular theory of abortion? Motivation.

You know, again, academics are so funny. You know, you really do the best when you get some branding in there and we never branded it. Um. Oh, Rob, come and talk to me. I'm like a, I'm like a fucking marketing agent.

Chris Williamson
I'm like a media agency for ideas. I can't really do very well with ideas, but I'll name that. I'm, I'll name the living shit out of them anyway. So that, that theory, um, Jamie, Jamie said it. Lots of people, I imagine, um, will be unhappy to hear that.

And this is both sides of the fence. This is one of those really, like, fascinating propositions that annoys both parties equally. It kind of derogates both positions at the same time. So kind of to recap and tell me where I get this wrong, trying to work out why people would support or be against abortion policies. Access to abortion, uh, requires you to look at what is the incentive that they, what are the reasons and the benefits that they are afforded by holding that particular position.

People who are in relationships, particularly monogamous relationships, particularly marriages, perhaps with kids, are going to be more likely to want to restrict abortion because it imposes a higher cost on casual sex, which means that their committed partner, which they do not want to go anywhere else, is therefore going to be less inclined to potentially have casual sex because the externalities of doing that are going to be higher because maybe there's a child and maybe they can't get rid of it. On the flip side, the people who are single are going to be more likely to be in favor of abortion or the people that are probably like high in socio sexuality, maybe polyamorous, consensual, non monogamy, stuff like that, because for them, they want to, there is no reason for them to increase the potential cost of an accidental pregnancy if they are having a lot more sex, if they're having sex with multiple partners that they don't intend on having a child with. And that is in contrast, I think, to what a lot of people believe as to be their reason for their stance on abortion, which is something highfaluting, moralistic. It's to do with values and virtues and ethics and purpose and human life. And is it six weeks or is it on conception?

Is it a bundle of cells? Does it have moral worth, all of this stuff? Um, how, how close am I there? Well, honestly, you really are right that you're, you're marketing because you just market it better than I did. Yes, you put it.

Rob Kurzban
Yeah, we did it, baby. We did it. That's what I do. I take people who are way smarter than me, and I make their ideas sound easier. Um, so moving forward to the next step there, what this, let's just say that this is true.

Chris Williamson
Let's say that this is, we don't even need to say that it is true. Like, presumably there's layers going on here, that you can have a moral imperative that allows you to adjust the way that you want the world to be and the things that you believe and what you, it would be. I would be very interested to find someone who says, I in no way am influenced by my own incentives. They have zero, absolutely 0% influence on my worldview. I think that that would be a very, I would like to meet that person.

I think that that would be a very strong, strong case to make. So what does that tell us about the position and the use of moral beliefs and of these sort of overarching philosophies, life design directions and stuff, and how that is used to excuse and disabuse us of our belief about why we do the things that we do. How does that kind of tie into the bigger picture? Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it is that we're all sort of in this social world where we want to broadcast the most angelic version of ourselves we can. And that's why, of course, when people talk about their positions, let's say, abortion, they're not going to refer to their lifestyles because you don't get any moral points for saying, I want people not to have abortions so that my husband doesn't go off and have an affair.

Rob Kurzban
You get way more and more points for that by saying, I believe in the sanctity of life. And don't get me wrong, I also sort of believe, I mean, I think that life is valuable and so on. And so a lot of it has to do with this idea that we're constantly sort of cultivating. Again, going back to marketing, cultivating an image that makes us look as good as possible. And a lot of that just, you just can't say what your reasons are.

And this is why I think it's so interesting. I mean, this goes all the way back to Freud, right? Like, one way that you could avoid giving up the game is by not actually sort of consciously knowing what it is. That's why people don't. They don't really know, right.

They see these contradictions. They say, well, you know, I think life begins a conception that if you really push them on it, you can show that they don't really think that. So, for example, where there should be an exception for rape. And interesting, like, if you ask someone who had that view and said, well, let's suppose a 13 year old found out that they were the product of rape or incest, would it then be okay to kill them? They'd say, no, of course not.

So what you could tell from that is people, they don't sort of want to know the real reasons for why they have their positions, because those reasons make them look selfish. So much better to kind of manufacture this image of yourself that makes reference to, you know, the. The kinds of things that are going to make you look good in your environment. So for people who are pro choice, that's talking about, you know, women's bodily autonomy. Again, I don't want to say that I don't respect women's bodily autonomy.

Or if you're on the other side, respecting, you know, the sanctity of life, that's why these words get used is because you cultivate an image that's the most positive you can. And a lot of times this is what, you know, this, this ties into this notion of self deception. Whereas if I don't really know the selfish motivation for a position that I'm taking, that's actually kind of good because then I can't sort of give up the game. Ah, yeah. That quote about the easiest way to, like, tell a lie is to believe it.

Chris Williamson
And you are the easiest person to deceive type thing. Yeah. I don't know the quote, but yes, exactly. You know, and that's why, you know, a lot of us walk around not really knowing the motives for our, our actions. That does, you know, that means it can't leak out as easy.

Yeah. What would you say, just to kind of round this out, what would you say to the person that feels morally very insulted but potentially curious at investigating their deeper motives about this? Like this rob guy telling me that actually my motives are coming from this very sort of selfish, self interested place. I don't think that that's true. I think I've investigated this a lot.

I've even had debates with my friends over dinner about whether or not I think that we should, you know, Roe versus Wade should be repealed or not all the rest of it. How would you advise someone to equanimously investigate their intentions? And generally today, as we sort of go through this stuff, and also more generally, as you learn about evolutionary psychology, what is the frame that you take either personally or that you advise other people to be like, personally, motivationally, intellectually curious and sort of open to learning about these mechanisms? Yeah, I think that's such a great question and I wish there were more of that. I think my view on this is that it's getting harder and harder because the best way to kind of test to see your ideas is to have a discussion with someone who disagrees with you.

Rob Kurzban
And I feel like that's happening less and less in the world in general. And it's definitely not happening where it was supposed to happen, which is in the quarters of academe, right. That was supposed to be the crucible where you say your thing and give your logic and I give my evidence and like, oh, that is a data point. I didn't know. Let me change my mind.

Like, that never happens, right. Because everyone in the halls of academia, they all think the same these days, right? So we've seen John Heights work on this and the homogeneity of views. But for that person, yeah, I think it's, you got to talk to somebody who has a different view and the smarter the better, right. Because you want to be able to back it up.

And the real magic happens when you catch yourself in a contradiction. Right? When you say, I want to believe this thing, but I want to believe this other thing. And those two things can't be true. So that now I really have to go back.

That's why these, when you're looking at these policy stuff and you do these hypotheticals and you go, well, you know, under this circumstance, once you kind of figure out where you've got the contradiction, then you can kind of tunnel back out, kind of see where your principle has gone wrong. But that's hard, right? People don't want to really talk to people who don't agree with them anymore. And what makes you think, why do you think it is that this, like, attack on our identity, you know, this lack of openness to other ideas and this sort of very, like, personalization of our worldview has that always been the case? Was it that, you know, a socratic dialogue 2000 years ago, someone really felt that their ego was being destroyed?

Chris Williamson
Or is there something new about wearing moral beliefs as lapel pins? That sort of occurred recently. Have you considered that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's.

Rob Kurzban
It would be great, right. Go back and kind of see if the same phenomena was among the Greeks and so on. I sort of feel like one piece of it is technology, which is that any deviation from your particular tribe's party line is now very visible because of social media. And so sort of the costs of diverging from the view are different now from maybe what it would have been. I mean, heck, in the past you make some remark and later you can deny it.

Now, you know, it's written in ink on the Internet and you're going. So that might kind of squish people towards a certain kind of homogeneity because they don't even want to move into this space of divergence from their tribe's view. You know what I mean? So that would be one possibility. And I think that's linked to another piece of technology which is man like, you know, it used to be that the kinds of punishments that you get would be from the state or from your friends.

Now, of course, social media has added a whole new piece, you know, a new part of it. And so by, again, by sort of putting yourself out there, it's not just deviating from whatever the party line is. You know, you're exposing yourself to a lot of attacks from other people, particularly in the public sphere. So I. Yeah, my guess is technology's changed it quite a bit.

And it has to do, again with the fact that humans are these moral creatures who are just looking for people to wag their finger at and say you're bad or your idea is bad. But I do think there's something modern about, there's something that does seem distinct about. How so? When I started as an academic way back in the day, I don't think it would have been true that just asking questions about some of the third rail topics right now kind of moralized in the way they were, I might just be misremembering because I'm, I'm old and, you know, in the past, everything is, you know, bright and rosy and sunny and everything, whatever. But, like, I remember people doing stuff on, you know, like the bell curve came out and sure, there was some controversy, but it, I don't, I don't know.

I guess also people like to tell the story about how, you know, when sociobiology came out, there was a conference where, you know, Wilson got splashed, you know, pitch of water thrown on him. You don't know that story? No. Oh, in my world, that's like famous, as everyone knows that. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
What was he talking about? So he had this idea that maybe evolution applies to humans, too, back in 75. And so there was some pushback on that. Right. So as far as I know, that story is true.

Rob Kurzban
But for all I know, it could be apocryphal. But by the same token, like, I don't remember the kinds of, you know, experience things that you see now where again, you just ask questions about, I mean, even if you ask the question, what is a woman? In some context, for some reason now, you get into this massive amount of trouble. I don't remember that. So it does seem like we've kind of transitioned into a very moralistic cultural moment.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, certainly the technology thing is, I've spoken about it a lot. One other contributing factor to this, our opinions and our deeds are very far apart from each other. You don't get to see what someone does, but you do get to see what someone says. And the cost of saying the right thing is so low that I think many low truth, low trust tribes would sooner have a false ally than a true adversary. Do you know what I mean?

Rob Kurzban
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And again, this connects both up to the academy in general. But again, some of these protests, which is on everyone's mind right now, one thing that's super interesting are these cases where you ask people about what's at stake when they're out there in a tent or whatever, and we don't have great data on it. We have anecdotes, but many of them have no idea what are they doing there.

It doesn't have to do with advancing a particular policy or trying to influence a particular policy. I'm showing up here, I'm signaling my commitment to this ideological community. We have these campus protests going on at the moment from a morality assessment, signaling incentive, evolutionary psychology lens. What do you make of them? What are you seeing when you look at these protests?

Yeah, I think a big part of it really is this signaling that you are committed to a particular set of ideas and therefore your particular tribe. The way that this is shaken out, for whatever reason, on college campuses, among the sort of leads, if you want to call them that, is that the commitment is to this oppressor, oppressed dynamic. And so you're saying whoever's on the oppressor side, I'm against them. And so I'm going to show up to this thing. I'm going to spend my time, my energy.

It's interesting because the masks are an interesting feature of it because signaling theory says that you get the most bang for your buck if you can signal, honestly. So one way to do that is to say, I'm going to stand up for this principle. I'll take the consequences. Whereas it's not clear that that's what's going on here. But I think the main thing that we're seeing in these protests is this saying, you know, I belong to this, in this community in terms of the ideology that it endorses a set of beliefs, a set of.

Chris Williamson
Even if they don't actually know what those beliefs or that ideology is. Exactly. I mean, it's sort of. I don't want to be too cynical about it, but it's kind of irrelevant, you know. Again, you see these great interviews where people go in and say, you know, you can ask people basic facts about, you know, whatever it is they're protesting.

Rob Kurzban
You can ask them facts about what is it that these people want to bring about? And it's very clear that many, maybe not all, but many have no idea. And of course, the reason that that makes sense is that they don't care. That's not why they're there. They're there to say, you know, it's a shibboleth in some sense.

Right? As long as you. What's a shibboleth? This. That big biblical story.

I'm gonna mess. I hope I don't mangle this. But this is the idea that there was a two sets of people, and one of them wasn't able to pronounce a particular cluster of, you know, letters. And so in order to make sure the person really was from that group, you had to say this word that included that syllable. And if they could say, it's like, you know, I took French.

Americans are terrible at the distinction, you know. Okay, you're saying this is like a verbal lexical shit test. It is a shit test, yeah. Wow. It's a little bit of a shit test.

And, yeah. So, by the way, I looked at your reading list, and I, you know, I love the shit test terminology. We should adopt it, but. Exactly. So it's saying, are you really a member of our tribe?

Right. And so if you show up here and you whatever, you're ready to face the consequences. I mean, it's hard to show loyalty right. If I just said to you, oh, I'm, you know, I'm your best friend, you'd be like, well, okay, it's cheap for you to say that this comes right out of your average signaling theory from evolutionary biology and economics. But, you know, if I find out you need a kidney and I put my hand up right away and be.

Chris Williamson
Like, yeah, so that's a costly signal. Yeah, it's interesting. Isn't it interesting that someone's time, you know, they're living in tents. If they're students, they're missing class. If they're employed, they're missing work.

They presumably, I mean, maybe they're having fun, but from the outside, it doesn't look that fun.

So that's a high investment. That's like a costly signal. You can't be there and not actually be there. And the being there is pretty sucky. Which makes it odd to think, why not watch 30 minutes on YouTube to understand the ideology that you're there so that when the guy with the microphone does come and say, hey, can you point to the river Jordan on a map?

Or do you know what from the river to the sea is? Or what's the actual outcome that you're looking to do here? Or why are you here? Or whatever it might be? And obviously, the on street interviews are cherry picked to make people look either really stupid or really smart.

You never get to see it's the same as. One of my friends has a great piece of advice about looking at Tripadvisor reviews or booking.com reviews for hotels. He says, disregard all of the one star and five star reviews. He's like, only ever look at the two three and fours because those are the ones that actually have taken time to really think about what it is that they're doing. And it's kind of the same as that.

But, yeah, look at how much time you're investing efforts. Missing class, missing work, sleeping in on a tent. And yet, what would be more aligned, ideologically aligned investment of, I'm going to learn a bit about what we're doing. Doesn't seem to. Which suggests a, like, fragility or a shallowness to what's actually going on here.

Rob Kurzban
Yeah, shallowness among, you know, college students. Who would have thought, what a. Yeah, what a shocker. I totally agree with you. That's why I find the mask thing so interesting, because that's a good way to keep the signal honest, right.

Is to say, I'm here to face the consequences. And, yeah, lots of just. I haven't been watching much of this, a lots of the people that are at the protests masked up. Yeah. And is that Covid mask or like balaclava mask?

A little of both. And so interesting. I mean, the only thing I would push back on there maybe is. Is this part of some big suite of. Well, you know, we are still concerned about super spreader event.

Chris Williamson
Is this like vestigial Covid bullshit or is this we look hard and wear antifa type, black block type stuff. But your point is pretty interesting. If you're going to make the sacrifice, miss work, miss class, do the sleep in the tent, why not capture all of the goodwill from the cameras? Seeing your face, look at me. I rob, I'm here.

I chris, I'm here in the tent doing the thing. Yeah, exactly. And I totally take your point. It's hard to know the motive here, right? Could be leftover Covid, could be the look at testing.

Rob Kurzban
I don't really know. All I'm saying is like, yeah, with these signaling arguments, you sort of expect them to want to soak up all of the potential costs as long as they're not going past whatever it is, the benefit that they're going to get. Right? I mean, look, going back to the top of your question, people are constantly weighing these costs of benefits, right? So what's the benefit of advancing this particular.

Trying to advocate for this abortion policy? What's the whatever? And so in this case, it just seems like it's kind of low hanging fruit, like stand up. It makes me think that what's really going on in those cases is that there's a cost they don't want to bear in the outside world. They don't want to be sort of criminally responsible, but they do want to bear the cost of what you're saying, sleeping in a tent.

Because the guys next to them are good. Now, the person who might be their boyfriend or girlfriend. So you see him saying they want the cost to be local, not global. And if so, that's, to me, very interesting. That's actually pretty subtle.

Right? So these kids call them kids, but they're smart enough, they're not idiots. What they're doing is they're saying, no, I'm happy to pay this cost with respect to what that person thinks about my time and about my effort, about sleeping in a tent. I don't really want to pay the court the cost in a court of law. That's too big for just signaling that I'm on board.

Chris Williamson
Right? Yeah. Because the benefits to the wider the benefits that are afforded from the wider world to you are skewed toward costs, and the benefits that are afforded toward you from inside of the encampment are skewed toward benefits. Exactly. And I think that accounts for what's going on here, which I find completely fascinating.

Rob Kurzban
I think what that does is it tells us something about. Again, you could say, well, they're idiots. They don't know what river it is. But you could also say, they're not idiots. They're getting the cost benefit computation, right?

Just right. They're there, but they're masked. Yeah. The geopolitics might be lacking, but their interpersonal signaling is ten out of ten. Nailed it.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Okay, so we're sort of dancing around the topic of morality. What are the evolutionary origins of where morality comes from? And what's the function of something like morality? Well, this goes back to your prior question about my views on abortion.

Rob Kurzban
So I have a view on this which people don't really engage very much, but I'll tell you my view. It's a little different from most. So we pissed everyone off already. Let's keep going. Yeah, there's really no one left, so I might as well try and get the last bit.

So I'll start with what I don't think a lot of people, when they talk about the human moral sense, I mean, this goes all the way back to Darwin. They talk about cooperation. So we're moral because we're cooperative preachers. And then there's, you know, another line of argument that locates the origin of morality in trying to suppress violence and harm. So that's another line.

So my view is a little bit different. So the. My view is that humans are weird. So we tend to cooperate in groups, but we do so in this very strange fashion where we switch sides from time to time. So, like, you know, non human animals, you're always siding with your cat.

That's. That's just the way it always happens. But in humans, sometimes you're siding with this person, sometimes you're siding with that. And our argument is, the nice thing about morality is that. And when I say morality, what I really mean is world judgment.

So when I say, Chris, it was wrong of you to take my mango or to take Fred's mango, that was wrong of you? What? As long as I can persuade everyone else around me that you did the thing that was wrong, then when you're having this conflict with Fred, so you and Fred are in this fight, and I'm like, here's what we should do. We should gang up against Chris, because he did the thing that was wrong. And the nice thing about that is when fights break out, I'm always on the side that has everybody else on it.

So the argument is that morality is what we call a side choosing mechanism. It says when fights break out, find the person who did something that we called wrong, and that could be took the mango or hit fret in the face, or didn't wear a headscarf, or had an abortion, or had an abortion. And when that thing, when that happens, I could be on the side that everyone else is, because we're all wagging our finger at the same person. So unlike, it's not a cooperative strategy, it's not an anti harm strategy. It's just a way to avoid being on the losing side of confidence.

And the thing that's interesting about, I think about morality is that even if you were my best friend, if you did a thing, if you did steal the mango, I'm still better off saying, look, I'm your friend, but you should pay a $3 fine or ten pound fine or whatever it is, because you did the wrong thing. This is a view that locates morality. And again, it's pretty cynical, but it's a very selfish kind of thing. It's a saying, I just don't want to stand next to the guy who's accused of doing something wrong. That's the main role of morality, is I want to be on the side of the people doing the accusing, not the person who got accused.

Chris Williamson
So that explains the function of morality and adaptively, how it's advantageous. But I'm still struggling to understand where moral rules come from or why particular rules come about. That's a great question. Yeah. So the idea there.

Rob Kurzban
So I spent a lot of time with anthropologists when I was a grad student, was trained as a psychologist, but then I, half of my advisor team was anthropologist the late, great John Tooby, and then I spent some more time with Rob Boyd. So what you're really asking a question about is cultural change. So the idea here is, you know, people are minting moral rules all the time, according to this view. So, you know, don't put the beads on the string or, you know, don't fish in the sacred lagoon or whatever, and some rules just get some support. So.

And this comes from self interest. So let's take rules against harm. Someone says, you know what we should do? We should have a rule that says no one can punch someone else in the face for no reason. And like, I have a face that I don't want to get punched.

I'm going to support this rule, right? And so all cultures wind up with these anti harm rules, anti violence rules. And so those are really stable in the sort of the cultural sense, right? So, like, some ideas are just stable. Like this goes all the way back to, like, the Dawkins idea of a meme.

They're just like memes, right? So, and some rules are just good. And then some rules, it takes a minute to figure out whether or not they're good or bad. So, you know, I like the example of charging interest, which I know, again, your readers, you can now take a little nap here. But I love the interest as an interesting thing because there were lots of cultures that said, you can't charge interest.

It's bad, it's usury. And then other cultures said, yeah, give your money to someone. If they can use it as capital to do something cool, let them do it, and then they'll give you a little bit more than you gave them back. And it just turns out that's like such an amazingly good rule to have that says you may, as opposed to must not charge interest. And so this really explains why it is that western cultures, why capitalism works so well is because it moves resources, capital from less useful to more useful purposes.

Chris Williamson
Is there an obvious selection criteria for the societies and civilizations that did versus, did not permit interest? Was it societies that had fewer people but more money versus societies that had more people but less money or something? I mean, once you get into these questions, it's so hard. Like these cultural things are so difficult. I think it was, you know, just the west was sort of just ready for, for whatever reason, you know, the foundations were laid for this idea that that sort of.

Rob Kurzban
It's complicated, right? That this is, I think the answer is, who knows? But. But what happened was that when cultures had this idea, they were able to just get more stuff, right? Because then capitalism has all these nice benefits and they grew very fast.

Chris Williamson
So moral rules using interest is a pretty good example, right? I don't think many people in the west would consider, I mean, some people might not be happy about charging interest, but it's kind of par for the course. It's like, look, if you're going to give me money for a while, I probably need to incur some kind of cost, or else I can just take. I'm, like, free to be obliged to have your money at any point.

I think it's an interesting example of something that right now we really take for granted. But in the past might have been very contentious. What I'm thinking about is when a new rule gets introduced, like you mentioned before, much of our motivation, it seems, is to be on the side of most people. Right. Like, and that is basically just, don't be the one that's singled out.

Don't be the punch the guy in the face guy. Be the person that says, don't punch the guy in the face guy. This means a couple of things. First off, there's like this sort of mimetic cyclical nature, presumably to when new rules get introduced. And then there must be a kind of temperature checking thing that people do.

And then there must be as well, I guess, finally a reason why people go with or go against the crowd. So they must do people kind of observe what others do? Is this got implications for, like, crowd mentality and stuff like that? Yeah. And I think this is why people are so excited about advertising worldviews all the time.

Rob Kurzban
I mean, have you ever had difficulty trying to get someone to give their opinion about, you know, some world contest? Like people, they fall all over themselves, right. This is people's favorite pastime is to talk about what they think is bad and wrong and so on. So, yeah, I think all of everything you just said is right. And I think the other.

Yeah, the thing about charging interest, you're exactly right that we lose sight of the fact that there was this whole big process by which, you know, that rule became common. But it wasn't always, I mean, even property rights. Right. Like it used to be that, you know, there's some still places where people say that, you know, you have a property right over this, but you don't have a property right over that. And people argued about that.

I like the example of Napster. Right. Because again, I'm showing my age here, but for a minute, you know, there's a whole bunch of people who sort of thought, you know, what, information should just be free. And there's something nice about that. It sounds good, but like, if you made the song, that doesn't sound so good.

So there was a big fight about, you know, who has a property right over it. What does that property right look like? And then we got to the current sort of equilibrium, right, where we have the technology that sort of helps us allow people to sell their digital stuff, I mean, whatever they sell. But again, we don't notice it much because that fight's over. Right?

The things that we do notice are where the fights are. So the abortion one is a very good example. Anything that's sort of at the center of modern political fights is basically where we're trying to figure out a bunch of these different kinds of moral rules and where we're going to land. Okay, how does morality get used as a weapon, then? Yeah, so, I mean, I think the best examples of that are the classic examples, like think about Salem in this country, the witchcraft trials, where once you have this surrounding set of rules about what you can't do with better and worse criteria for deciding about whether or not someone did it, these accusations can be wielded as weapons.

All you got to do is get enough other people to agree with the accusation or put the person into context in which they can't, are unable to deny it. I mean, this is why I think this is the big thing about morality that really separates my view from most other. A lot of people think morality is this warm, fuzzy, you know, unicorns pooping gold bars and marshmallows, whereas I don't view it that way. I view marsh marshmallows. I view morality.

I mean, I view marshmallows very favorably, but I view morality as. Yeah, so it's this. It's this thing. We're all living in this world where at any moment, someone can make a moral accusation. You know, Chris broke this rule.

He did that thing. Um, even. Even thought crimes, right? So if. During the religious ages, right?

So if you thought there were two sacraments of seven sacraments, right, you could be subjected to unholy torture for who knows how long. So that's what I mean. Like these accusations that. That one has broken a moral rule. These really.

I think of these accusations as attacks and morality as a weapon. This is the way that we can recruit other people. And again, history is replete with this. Right? In this country, you might or might not know there has been some racial tension over our history.

And there were places in the american south where you could say that person from a group that I don't like looked at me or my partner in a funny way, and the next thing you know, that person is dead, because that's an attack. And what did they do? They broke this rule about where they can look. So this is the way I view morality, as this weapon that we can all use and have to be conscious of at any given moment, right? I mean, does that make sense?

Chris Williamson
It does. I understand why you would choose to use morality. To not be the target of some accusation, to not be in the eye of Sauron. It feels like there must be more benefits afforded as well, though some. The ability for your sort of nobility and virtue to kind of stand on the shoulders of somebody else.

I would never. So there must be more than simply avoiding being the target. What are the actual benefits that are being afforded to the people who are sort of the moral judgment makers? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know.

Rob Kurzban
Again, I sort of am compelled by Salem. And so one of the things about someone who keeps their powder dry, you know, manages to persuade people not to accuse them. And so what does that. What does keep your powder dry mean? Oh, yeah.

I think it's because back in the day of flintlocks, if your powder got any water in it, then when you tried to ignite it, you wouldn't get the spark. So what. What. What does that mean as an analogy? Yeah, so, yeah, good question.

The analogy is something like manages to keep free of trooping over something that would cause someone to make an accusation. So just add. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

I didn't mean to make that so. No, no, I did. I'm enjoying learning all different words. Yeah. So, I mean, the thing about any time that big moral conflicts emerge, the person who's not, as you put it, in the eye of Sarah, which I also like, other people benefit.

Like, during the Salem witch trials, some of that stuff was about land rights. And so once someone's burned at the stake or with whatever in a jail cell for a long time, the remaining stuff gets reassembled, and so there's more stuff to go around. So there are real benefits to being the moralistic person who manages to stay out, you know, again, as long as. As long as value doesn't land on you. There's all these benefits to be had by sacrificing the people in your social world.

You know, it's incredibly tempting. I had a conversation with Andrew Doyle, who wrote a book called the New Puritans, using the Salem witch trials as a historical comparison to look at what's happening with a lot of cancellation and social justice at the moment. I found out about spectral evidence. Have you learned about this? No.

No. Tell me. I'm pretty sure it was called spectral evidence. Spectral evidence? Yep.

Chris Williamson
Spectral evidence was testimony in which witnesses claimed that the accused appeared to them or did harm in a dream or a vision. Contemporary witch law held that witches could project themselves spiritually, either directly or with the aid of Satan, in order to harm their victims from afar. So spectral evidence is kind of like original sin in a way, and it's also the lineage that you can draw to modern social justice is probably pretty straight but there was like they'd been using during the witch trials. They'd been using spectral evidence for decades, fucking ages. Like it was admissible in court.

Spectral evidence was something that was admissible in court. And there was this story where one day, whatever the equivalent of the Supreme Court or the ruling court or whatever of whatever version of America existed at the time, they sent this thing up. And they were like, we're just going to check, you know, that we've been using this spectral evidence thing like quite a bit for quite a while now. That's okay, right? And this letter came back.

It was like, what the fuck are you talking about? No, it's not admissible. Like, please, for the love of God. Like, no, that's not. And that I think Andrew taught me was one of the undoings of the witch trials was that this very sort of tenuous grasp on what did and did not justify or account for evidence bad doing.

The bar was raised because this accusation was so loose and costless that anybody could have. I didn't like the way it's robbed. He just sent the thing at me and Satan appeared or whatever. Anyone can do that at any time. Which means that obviously the friction for you to be able to point the finger at your moral tribal enemies is basically zero.

Rob Kurzban
Right? So interesting. Yeah, that's a great story. I think this sort of speaks to, this is why I get so puzzled when people, you know, when people get pictures, resist the idea that morality is scary. You know, I think about cases like the witch trials and what you just said where it's like this license to just, you know, do whatever you want with no evidence to people.

And I think there's an important piece here which is that during various phases of human history, you know, the people in power to go back to the american south, you know, I was very affected by, you know, stories of that time. And the people in power could just use these accusations to do horrible things to their fellow man. And I think we talk a lot about in this country about the founders and the enlightenment. So on tracing those ideas all the way back to the Magna Carta. And I think one way to think about the last many hundred years is sort of putting the brakes on that kind of stuff.

So you just mentioned, go up to the Supreme Court. So this idea that, you know, due process, for example, is just a way of saying, look, if there's accusations, we're going to put a brakes on it because we don't want people to be able to bring spectral evidence in and just say no. No, no, I dreamed it. So you got to put them on, you got to light the fire and then, you know, take his stuff and then whatever. And so, you know, in many ways, I think the bit, one of the ways in which civilization advanced was exactly putting the brace on what you're talking about.

And I think what, you know, I didn't read the new Puritans, but it sounds to me what he's pointing to is we don't want to sacrifice this, those gains. Right. You sort of don't want to get back into a world in which the people in power can point their finger and say, we're going to burn that guy today or that woman. Yeah. So we've probably presented a pretty unflattering view of morality.

Chris Williamson
Surely morality in its best form is still quite nice, though. You know, you mentioned earlier on harm or a pushback against harming people. That seems to be. I would put that down as a pretty universal good. Isn't morality nice?

And what is morality at its best? And also, are there any fundamental kind of universal in that? They appear a lot laws of morality. What are the underpinnings of it and can't it be done? Well, I totally agree.

Rob Kurzban
I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, morality can be a force that leads to great. I mean, I think harm and property rights are the two big ones. I mean, you know, we now have a whole bunch of ways that we can stop people from harming each other because we've encoded that morality into the legal system and we've given the state the use of force to, you know, enforce those rules. That's great.

You know, when it's working, it's, you know, that's really wonderful. Same thing about property rights, which goes, you know, so it's great to say, look, if you take my mango, then you're going to get punished because then I can either eat my mango or I could sell it to someone who wants it more. And then we've now increased the good of the world. Right. Because I have the money and you have the mango, and that's pretty great.

All the stuff about. And I think the other thing is just more generally, I mean, I don't hide it all that well, but I'm a libertarian at heart. Not the big, but the person who says, look, as long as you don't hurt anybody and everything's consensual and everyone's an adult, do whatever you want. And a lot, some moral rules have moved in that direction. Right?

So, like, you know, it's I remember before Obama came out in favor of same sex marriage, you know, libertarians, little ill were ahead of that curve. Like, I don't care what sex you are, if you want to enter into a contract, like, everyone should have access to the contracts. And the sort of, once you, once you put those kinds of ideas into laws, which really, again, are just what that really was, was saying, this is a moral principle we have now, which is that we're going to treat everybody the same. That's great. I think that is morality at its best.

That's saying, look, if the rules are the sorts of rules that work in favor of people's choices and liberty and against harm, unprovoked harm, then morality is doing a great job. And we don't have much more than that. I'm thinking about the trajectory of human moral principles over time and thinking about how it seems to me like there's two buckets of moral principles, one being the protection to, and the other being the prohibited prohibition of, like this is with gay marriage. It is protected. For you to be able to do that.

Chris Williamson
I mean, you could, yeah. And the other side being the prohibition, you cannot have sex under this age. You cannot do this particular thing before this time.

As the arc of human civilization and morals and stuff continues to progress, does that not mean that there's this ever increasing accumulation of a more complex system of morality which makes being a human and dancing through that minefield ever more difficult? Oh, my God. Yeah, totally agree. I mean, as cultures become more complex and technologies change, I mean, yeah, I mean, just think about the things that people run afoul of that they just couldn't have run afoul of before. I mean, I just saw this thing yesterday, the day before getting into trouble because you didn't post the black square.

Rob Kurzban
In some cultures, you're like, like, yeah, that was definitely not something my hunter gatherer ancestors had to worry about. Right. It's just they didn't have to worry about omitting some particular signal or whatever. And yes, totally complicated. And of course, as you get more people and they're living more densely, you know, the kinds of things that affect other people goes up.

You know, I'm playing my stereo and I'm in, you know, whatever. In the pleistocene, I would have been, it doesn't really matter. Right. But, like, now. So you need to have all these different rules that weigh your benefits against my costs and so on.

It's really complicated. And, yeah, it's hard to keep up with it. I mean, and this is an area where my friend Josh, who works on our little substat together, he's constantly trying to persuade me that we should just go back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, in part because it's just not so complicated. You just don't have to worry about Alicia. There's something to that dental care, something that, as a modern thing, I'm very fond of.

Don't want to have to go back. Very pro dental care. Pro dental care, yeah, but he's got a point which resonates with yours, which is just like, we have to deal with all of these people around us, but all of the complexities of the rules interacting with each other. I wonder how much of the ambient stress that humans feel in the modern world is just downstream from a shit ton more rules. And it's kind of more complex.

Chris Williamson
And if we do have an increase, for whatever reason, we don't need to go down the rabbit hole of, like. Like, autism spectrum disorder, social isolation, just social ungainliness. What that probably feels like for an increasing proportion of humans is a more complex, nuanced world that I need to move through more deftly at a time where more people than ever before have a reduced capacity at dancing through that more complex world. Totally. And this I've become a little bit closer.

Rob Kurzban
I wasn't for a while, but I'm reading a bit more closely the adolescent literature on mental health, because that seems to be the area where, at least by some reports, you've got these kids who are just constantly in fear of tripping up against whatever the current thing is, whatever the current issue is. And I wonder if that helps to explain a little bit, because there's other evidence they're not going out and playing and they're not. Whatever. They're. Maybe there's a little bit of a risk aversion.

Just the less put yourself out there. And what that means is they're not having the challenges that, you know. I mean, we did more than you are, but, yeah, we did. We sat and did all kinds of dumb stuff when we were that age. None of it was captured on an iPhone, not a single thing.

And so I wonder if that's playing into exactly what you're saying. Like, you've got to tiptoe around this stuff. You've got to hit it. You've got to just get it just right. And then even then, you're not safe, because tomorrow the rule might be the other way.

Right? And you're. Oh, I got you. Because you go the other way. What are some of your favorite examples of new modern moral rules, the posting of the black square, maybe a small one, but are there any that have come about relatively recently that might surprise people when they realize that these aren't instantiated in human history or whatever?

I mean, I would say anything drawn from the kind of the identitarianism, this idea that you always have to back the, you know, in many, in many little subcultures, particular states, you always have to back whatever it is, whoever it is, the person that falls in the category of being the oppressed person. I mean, I get it. Like, there is, I sort of share the intuition that you should sort of root for the underdog. But the way that that has taken off, I mean, again, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve. I mean, I was shocked at, you know, going back to the protests.

You know, you have this conflict. Don't get me wrong, it's obviously complicated, but one side is intentionally trying to kill civilians and the other side is intentionally trying not to do that. And yet the moral norm in many cultures is to loudly back what I take to be the side that's doing. I suppose the degree of complexity to layer on top of all of this is the inability for people to agree on what is true. Right?

Chris Williamson
This multiplicity of sources of truth. Well, no, that's not. That's not your truth. That's not the truth. That's just your interpretation of this thing.

And this kind of comes back to the increasing complexity of rules and morality that people need to weave through. You know, I always think all the time about Barry Schwartz is the paradox of choice. All the fucking time I think about this. It's like so fundamental. I even remember where I was when I first listened to that.

The road, great north road in Newcastle upon Tyne, driving north toward the a one from the city center. I remember the first time I was listening to that YouTube video and I was like, oh, my God. So for the people that don't know, 40 years ago, you would go to the jeans store and there would be one type of jeans and it would be in different waist sizes, and you would go in and sure, maybe you didn't want these blue Levi's genes or whatever, let's say 60 years ago. I don't know, whenever. And sure, maybe they're not perfect for you, but you had very little decision fatigue and any suboptimal outcome in your gene choice did not feel like a personal deficiency in your decision making criteria.

There was no other option. Right? So, like, what else could you have done? So you have this degree of sort of, of satisfaction and satisficing when it was from, like, economics standpoint. Then you roll the clock forward to now, and you go into the jeans store and it's bootcut or skinny, it's ripped, it's bleached, it's cropped, it's black, it's high rise, it's low rise.

It's all you know. That means that any, even though the total utility of one decision has increased because you can get precisely the exact pair of jeans that you wanted to get, you are now faced with this huge amount of decision fatigue and any suboptimal decision. If you put a pair of jeans on, you're like, I really don't like the way that my ass looks in these jeans. I wish I'd got the ones that were a bit darker, the gray instead of the black or whatever. That's your fault now.

And it's kind of the same with all of the different options we have for information that, well, it's great. I don't want to live in a world where I don't have answers to questions that I want to ask in chat, GPT, Google, Wikipedia, stuff like that. Fantastic. I can see everything. But I now have gone from having to be an information sourcer to an information discerner.

I now have to use. And for almost all of human history, you had less information than you needed. So I think that within probably the last 50 years, humanity has gone from having less information than it wanted to way more than it needs. And the skillset from foraging for information versus discerning from an overwhelming amount of information, that's a very different skillset. And I don't think that we are particularly well adapted to do that.

Rob Kurzban
Totally. And I think that goes back to the top of our discussion, where you think about where people get in their information and you've got the sort of the, in the US, you've got the MSNBC crowd, and then you've got the Fox News crowd, and then you ask this question, well, why do people seek the. An economist would talk about a confirmation bias, right? Which is weird. Like, it's actually weird that people have.

If I just want to maximize what I know about the world, I sort of don't want to limit the evidence to just whatever supports. I actually want to look for counterexamples. Right? And then this question is, why? Why is that there?

And it's important, right? Because, as you say, you wind up in this tiny little information ecosystem. I actually wonder if it goes back to what you were kind of talking about earlier, which is, do I really want to see the holes in my own argument? Do I really want to kind of lift the curtain back behind? And, you know, if you're.

You know, I think that for whatever reason, people experience that as discomfort. And I do think it has to do with the fact that once you sort of do have that experience. Yeah. You kind of have to say, you know, maybe my motivations are not quite as pure. And then once I know that, maybe you'll find out, because I'll say it out loud.

And I think that's why it's so interesting to spend some time listening to people who have these kinds of key conversion experiences, like the liberal who's been bugged and becomes a conservative or vice versa or whatever. Because those are people who really do have this interesting experience of having very firm beliefs, but both ways. And they could wrestle with. Wait, how did I believe that? And my experience of those conversations is they almost always say the same thing, which is, well, everyone around me.

That's what they thought. He was just like, okay. But then that sort of pushes it back. Well, why were you around those people all the time? Yeah.

Chris Williamson
I mean, you know, the peak version of that are these people that were brought up in cults. Right. And you didn't know any other part of the world? I had. God damn it.

Who was the lady that did the witch trials of JK rower Megan Phelps Roper, who was a part of the Westboro Baptist church. And she came on the show. Fascinating. Just total indoctrination. It was the physics of her sort of social psychological system with all of these beliefs.

And then she comes out of it, and this fever dream state that she was in and kind of gets released into the world. And there's all of these other things. I read this sentence from Nick Bostrom a couple of weeks ago. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. He refers to it as thinking in superpositions.

So, superposition from quantum physics. Physics, where you have sort of two particular positions at the same time, and until you observe them sufficiently closely, you don't collapse the superposition. And it's just a. I'm sure that the physics people have a problem with it because it's not that accurate. But it's basically holding two contradictory views in your mind at the same time.

And not choosing to collapse that superposition too quickly. It's like, all right, I'm just gonna, like, keep trying to hold these things. And the more that I spend time trying to think about that, like, not. I'm not gonna, like, lock my sense of identity to one thing. And obviously I do it all the fucking time with everything, whether it's pickleball versus paddle or like some big geopolitics thing.

But the more that I'm able to do that, the happier I feel. My texture of daily experience seems to be way better because I'm just curious about the outcome as opposed to feeling like some sort of ego death thing is going to happen if whatever flag post I've pinned my colors to is abused in some way or damaged by maybe very valid alternate argument. Notice I remember listening to Eckhart Tolle forever ago when I was first starting to read things and listen to things. And he says that one of the reasons that people cling on to their beliefs so much is that admitting that you're wrong is tantamount to death. But it's death to the ego.

And death to the ego is almost the same as death to yourself. Like, you are that ego. You are your positions. And yeah, it's one of the reasons why publicly admitting that you're wrong, or like publicly saying, I've changed my mind, I used to believe this thing and I don't. The more that you can do that, I think you cultivate in yourself kind of like safety.

You like how people learn to relationally or in terms of their attachment, become safe. I go through a difficult thing and I come out the other side and I'm all right. And the more that you can kind of get out ahead of it yourself, I think, is I'm thinking about trying to do this a lot personally. Just like I was wrong about that and I was wrong about this. And I'm really not too sure about that.

The more that you do that, I think the more open it engenders you to be to new ideas and changing your beliefs in future. Yeah, yeah. It reminds me, there's this great. I know I'm probably gonna get wrong. There's an economist I think was Kenneth Arrow, but might not have been.

Rob Kurzban
And someone asked, said something like, I see that you change your mind a lot. Revised his views, his publications. And I might be apocryphal, but he says, yeah, that's what I do when I realize I'm wrong. What do you do? And it just is this great sort of moment, right?

And I will say this, man, like, I think it's unusual for you to feel good about this ability to sort of keep two things to your head. Because there's, I think there's some good psychological literature that, you know, people who have just one cause and just keep pushing on it. The sort of fanatic types and, and, you know, like Westboro, those people are pretty happy. You know, they have. It's a little bit like the paradox of choice thing, which is they've gotten rid of the patterns.

So you're like, I'm going to be this direction. This is my thing. I'm going to believe on this. I'm going to be a fanatic about it. And I'm not going to look for contrary information.

I do think there's something to what you're saying, which is, you know, I don't want to get too wooly, but you do sort of feel like the world would be a better place with more of the Kenneth arrow types or whatever what you're describing, which is, I don't know. I mean, I think a lot about the difference between what the academy was when I envisioned what it was going to be like and then what I experienced. You know, like, I grew up on Star Trek, so I assumed it was a bunch of vulcans. Like, you know, sitting around the table and being like, I have this evidence. I believe this thing.

And this other person says, well, I have this counter evidence. And the first person says, I have decided to revise my view. Like dispassionate. Yeah. Like, and then, and then it's.

It's nothing like that. It's like I have this mountain of data that undermines this thing you just said. And like, I still believe my thing and I'm gonna get. I'm gonna write a book about it. Yeah, that's wrong.

Chris Williamson
Or that's unethical. Or you're using motivated reasoning. Or you're a xenophobe, bigot, racist, homophobe, whatever it might be. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to distract. Just to say, like, I don't. The people you would expect to be like you, which is to say, oh, I've got. The couple things are academics, where you're just like, okay, I've got these couple ideas. Let's just figure it out.

Rob Kurzban
That's not. Has been my experience. Yeah, I mean, that's the gold standard. I'm usually probably pretty black and white. Basic bitch, bro signs most of the time.

Chris Williamson
But Corey Clark's been on the show and she brought up this study that she did recently. I think she actually sent the email to every psychology professor in the United States. It was some ungodly note, like 5000 academics and it was, how much do you self censor? What are the topics that you think it should never be spoken about? Split it up from male and female.

How much do they prefer to have kind of like a doing good or supporting versus truth seeking type thing? And, yeah, man, there's a lot of, forget even the students, which is what Jonathan Haidt and a lot of other people will be looking at. How much are you self censoring when you're on campus? Coddling of the american mind, shit like that. The professors of feeling this, maybe in some ways, especially if you're not, even if you are tenured, because there's the hard cancellation of you no longer have a job, but there's the soft cancellation of none of your teaching assistants or postgrad students or the people in your lab want to work with you, or you don't get as many offers to be on papers, or you don't.

You're just not invited out for drinks after. You know, there's all of these sort of soft versions of social enforcement that say you kind of don't really seem to be on our side with X or Y or z. Ricky Schlott tells this really interesting story when she first arrived at NYU about talking about shit tests. Apparently in groups of undergrads in the dorms or whatever, they would ask questions like, so what do you think about Jordan Peterson? And it would just.

Someone would sort of just throw it out like that, and the eyes would immediately sort of look around the room to see if anyone didn't castigate him as being a transphobe or whatever. Okay, so we've got morality. We've got it to bases. What is interesting about studying hypocrisy and kind of adding that into this worldview. Yeah.

Rob Kurzban
So, I mean, to some extent, it hinges on that remark you just made. So, like, one of my passions was really understanding the basic design of the human mind. And so, you know, for me, I was very interested in this idea about modularity, that there's different parts of your mind that are doing really specific jobs that are kind of isolated from each other. So, you know, you got a visual system that sees and whatever vocal system that talks. And, you know, when you build that all the way up, you get this possibility that you have one part of your mind that has a particular principle, right?

Like, don't steal music or whatever. And then another part of your mind is like, I kind of want to have music without paying for it. And so you kind of do that thing. And one question is, you know, how can people be so inconsistent? And I think these kinds of inconsistencies tell us something about this really basic way in which humans are designed, which is we're in parts like the Walt Whitman, you know, I contain multitudes kind of thing.

So for me, hypocrisy is. Is kind of like a window into the very deep architecture where the brain isn't just one big mushy thing. It's actually a lot of different parts. And you get a one bit that, you know, has a particular principle or a moral commitment, and then you can have another system that acts completely contrary to that moral principle. So for me, I don't know, I think hypocrisy, it's sort of like one of the ways that you get a view of this fundamental part of human nature, which, you know, that's hard.

It's hard for people to introspect and see themselves. And that's why psychology, I think, is such a hard topic. Right. The brain trying to understand the brain. But for me, it's these inconsistencies that I think really reveal that there's got to be something in there that's sort of not.

It's not homogeneous. It's all these different bits and pieces. Because it's in conflict with itself. Exactly. So I think optical illusions are like this, right?

So, like, you see something and. And part of your brain knows those two circles are definitely the same size, but you're looking at, like, those two things look completely different, or whatever the optical illusion is. And so what that's telling you is that you've got one, you know, you've got two different parts of your brain with completely different beliefs or representations or whatever you want to say. That, to me, is interesting. And all I'm saying is, like, scales all the way up from low level vision all the way up to morality.

And that's cool, because that means that we can use this idea about brain parts to study, you know, all of it, everything in the middle. Just give me your definition of hypocrisy so that we're all playing from the same him sheet here. Yeah. People use it differently. So I feel like it should just mean cases where someone endorses a particular moral principle and then acts in a way that contradicts that principle.

And people have different views about hypocrisy, but that's sort of what I think. So if you say, yeah, if you say, thou shalt not murder and then you kill your neighbor or something, that makes you a hippocratic, obviously that's an extreme case, but there's all sorts of, you know, examples like that. I don't know. When I was. When I was writing the book on this, I did search for a while, and it's hard to resist these cases where you have and hear my colors shine through a little bit.

But, you know, these pious, you know, anti abortion people who then pay their mistress to get an abortion, you're like, so that would be, for me, like the quintessential kind of thing. It's the senator who's vehemently against gay marriage that's secretly going on Grindr on his second phone that his wife doesn't know about on an evening. Exactly. Yeah. So if you're saying out loud, here is my moral belief, and then in your spare time, you are doing the thing that you say is bad, bad, bad.

For me, that sort of is. That's hypocrisy. Again, people can have different views on this, right? Some people. Sometimes people use the word to mean something like, well, I apply this rule differently for this group as opposed to that group, and that's fine.

I mean, I don't love to get too deep into the definition, but that's, for me, I think the best way to think about it. What is your problem with moral hypocrites, then? Well, this goes back to our discussion about what morality is. So if you think of morality as kind of a weapon, what that means is that you're using these moral principles to advance your interests by saying, don't do this. And if you do that, I'm going to attack you or whatever.

I'm going to get everyone whatever. And in terms of your behavior, you're also doing this thing, right? So you're sort of trying to get double credit as a hypocrite. You have the moral principle to beat other people in the head in, and you're going to be able to do the action that no one else is allowed to do or gets punished for. So that's bad.

So this goes back to your question about why is morality good? Well, it's supposed to stop people from being selfish and taking other people's stuff and doing harm. Hypocrisy is really the ultimate expression of selfishness. I'm going to be selfish in having this principle that I'm going to use to attack you and I'm going to do the thing anyway. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
So rules for thee, but not for me. Do as I say, not as I do. You know, the cliches sort of speak for themselves. Talk to me about this sort of bullying equation. Bullying equals attack plus impunity.

How does that fold in here. Yeah. So this goes back to, you know, that the point I was making about the American south. So, like, there's lots of context and then. And the Salem Bush trials as well.

Rob Kurzban
So there's lots of cases where people could level moral accusations and not really have to worry about themselves getting attacked for leveling them. So again, a white person in the American south, someone who is in the right political position during the sail and witch trials today, I don't want to get too deep into this, but there are certain kinds of people who are protected, so I guess I might as well dive into it. So there's certain kinds of racism accusations that you could make, and whether they're true or false, you're not really going to suffer any penalty for leveling that accusation. But it's a deadly accusation, sometimes literally, I suppose, in certain kinds of contexts for the reason you just said. Soft cancellations.

Hard cancellations. And so if you're in the position, whether, again, you're a white person in the south or you're, whatever, a Puritan or you're a protected class, then you can attack someone with a moral accusation, true or not, and basically not have to worry about the cost. Right. Like, in some contexts you do. Right?

So there's lots of context in which making an accusation to lead to a cost, maybe because the, you know, back, you know, back before states, because that person's relatives might take revenge on you for whatever, or you could just get in trouble for making a false accusation. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. So when we create a world in which people are really not responsible for certain kinds of accusations, even if they're false, or even actions where there's no consequences, you sort of open it up and look again, people just weigh their costs and benefits. Can I get a benefit from making some sort of accusation? And whether that's in terms of the kind of, like, approval from my group or maybe somehow I'm going to get their stuff, or if you're in my company, maybe I go up a notch if I take you down five.

And again, the important part of bullying there is. Yeah, I mean, to go back to just actual bullying. Right. So the quintessential Nelson from the Simpsons, if he's on the playground, he's a big guy. He's the biggest kid, so he can push Bart or Lisa or Nelson or anybody.

Milhouse, too much Simpsons. And he's sort of invulnerable because he's the biggest kid. And so that's the way I think about bullying is so in the context of moral attacks. There's lots of people who put themselves in the position of being invulnerable. I like the example of the American south because it was so clear.

And as I said, I was very affected by some of those, some of those stories. And, you know, if you know that the criminal system is not gonna, and your friends are not going to harm you in any way for, you know, accusing someone of x, y or z, then you're kind of in a position where if you want to take someone out, you kind of can't. And I think that, I think that's a reasonable way to talk about bullying. Those two things seem really similar to me. Like if I'm Nelson, I'm big, or if I'm white, I can't.

I'm basically invulnerable, both of those things. I'm protected so I can attack with protection. That's the key. That's the key parallel. And I think people haven't talked about this a lot.

There's, you know, there's, I can't remember who coined this term, cry bullies, which is the same sort of thing, which is, you know, I, I claim to be hurt in this particular way. And when I'm making that claim, what I'm really saying is that that person or those sort of persons hurt me. And by the way, I'm in this category that, you know, you're basically invulnerable because you just, you know, you're, you know, I want to say, I don't want to go too far on this, but there's certain classes that, you know, you just can't say, you know, you can't really attack. You have to believe them or you have to protect them or whatever. And that creates very weird incentives.

Right. I mean, it's not, I think this is one thing that Doyle really put his finger on. It sounds like in that book, which is, it's interesting, right? It's kind of the same, I think it's kind of the same phenomenon. It's not a coincidence that you have a community with people who are more or less able to make these attacks with no evidence and you get the same result, which is a very moralistic culture.

And that, I think, is what we've sort of signed up for, which is as you increase the extent to which people are invulnerable, you're going to increase the attacks that they make. I mean, history shows us. I also like the example for, I don't know why it is. But in les mis, where the nobleman or whatever gets into it with, is it fantine or cosette? Fantine.

And, you know, he sort of, he definitely was, you know, acrobat, but he's a noble and so he's completely protected. So he could bully her with impunity. Then this is the history, you know, this is, I think, is the darker part of one dark arc of humanity, which is there are certain kinds of identities that you can have during human history which have held you more or less harmless. I mean, at the, in the, in the extreme, the king, right? The king's like, off with his head.

And that's that. It's not like, but he didn't really do that. I'm like, so. And again, that's why I think human progress, due process and courts and whatever, they're great when they work. But of course, outside of the context of governments and just the different subcultures, it doesn't always work that way.

Chris Williamson
I love your insight about how if you get punched or kicked or nugget, you'll eventually heal. But in today's world, with an Internet that lasts forever, you might never recover from an attack on your reputation. Indeed, moral attacks can be fatal. And it's that, like, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And it's like words can kind of stick with you for the rest of time if you're OJ Simpson.

Every single thing comes with an asterisk after your name, right? Like the. Actually, no, that's not right because I guess that would have come about because of something that he physically, allegedly physically did. But certainly whoever it is that carries some previous moral attack, justified or not, it is way stickier. There's sort of analogies that people use where someone could have killed a guy in a car in a hit and run incident and got into jail, gotten out, and now be kind of getting on with their life.

In the meantime, person B, who had a moral attack on their character is still dealing with this huge fallout and maybe can't get a bank account or maybe is socially ostracized or whatever. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think about what was the original, the woman who made the joke about going to South Africa, Sacco, I think, was the last name. Right? So, like, that was the world's introduction to exactly what you're talking about, which is, you know, you just put one thing out there digitally.

Rob Kurzban
So, yeah, she's not an OG, Simpson. She didn't kill anybody. You know, say what you want about the joke. Maybe it wasn't funny. Maybe it was a little bit, you know, racist, whatever you want to say.

But, like, as you're saying, I mean, you know, you read the stories about, you know, she goes to hiding and, you know, can't get into all this kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, it's not, it's not what it was. You know, the world is not what it was. So. So, you know, people's.

The technology has changed the costs that people can impose on you. So that kind of an attack. Yeah, I mean, we all know the results of those kinds of attacks. Absolutely. They're brutal and I think they can be fatal.

Like people are driven to suicide. I mean, these are. I don't love talking about it because there's evidence to talk about. It increases. But humans are social creatures.

You know, when people ostracize others from their social world, you're taking away the most precious thing. To associate the reality tv show that I did in a previous life. Three, sorry, two contestants, one of whom was a friend, took their own lives after they'd been on it. And one that was the presenter. The main presenter did.

Chris Williamson
Now, does reality tv attract people who have a psychological predisposition to maybe this kind of a propensity? Maybe. Does it catalyze it? Almost certainly. Does it create it from ground zero, even?

Maybe to some degree. But those are all in one form or another, social judgments by other people, judgments on how you look or scrutiny over the way that you conducted yourself in a relationship or the person that you're dating or not dating or this thing that you tweeted or whatever it might be. That's an awful lot of pressure. And, yeah, you're right when you say that the social impetus can have real world consequences. So the words that are supposed to never hurt you can end up being sticks and stones that take your life.

Rob Kurzban
Yeah, for sure. I think, as an evolutionist psychologist, I think a lot about the mismatch between ancestral environments and modern environments. And one mismatch, which I don't think a lot of people have been talking about, I've been thinking about a little bit, is, look, if you're in an ancestral environment and you've got a little rock versus a big rock, you sort of know what you're dealing with. You sort of know the capacity for harm, and you can use that to make judgments. If I hit that guy with a rock, then maybe his brother's going to come out with me with a bigger rock.

I don't know. Man, people don't realize what they have in their iPhones or their whatever, androids, the weapons. Oh, the caliber of the rounds that they're able to throw. Yeah, it feels like I've got a tiny little phone, but no, you've got a nuclear bomb. And so we have this mind that's not really evolved to sort of be calibrated to the size of the harm that we do, particularly in this world where you can multiply it very fast.

And so you've got, I think that's a kind of mismatch, which, as far as I know, hasn't really been discussed much, which is how do we get people to sort of understand the technology in a kind of a very intuitive way, like what they're, you know, what they're dealing with. I mean, I think the reality shows are an interesting case. Right? Like, you know, at first it seems like a great idea, and then you sort of say, well, what, what do you think public humiliation is going to do? You know?

And so I think, and I should say, like, I think it's easy to condemn people for, you know, using these weapons, but part of it is that they just, they're just bad at thinking about it. And we ought to have at least a, you know, I just think we don't have the intuitions. Again, it's not like a rock. We're very detached from the impact of the things that we do, online, reputational attacks and stuff like that. You know, the feedback loop isn't sufficiently tight, and the impact of what you do is also not felt.

Chris Williamson
And then there's this kind of, like, what's it called? Like the witness effect or whatever it is, the sort of psychology of the crowd. Where was it your tweet that said that she looked fat in that dress that drove her to depression? Well, 2000 other people tweeted her saying that she looked fat in that dress. So how do you contribute?

Kind of hide behind that a little bit. There's less accountability. There was a really, like, this is God, ten, probably ten years ago now. And one of my friends from Newcastle, Adam Dawkins, is a DJ, was just really good at finding shit on Twitter. And he found one of the best pieces of hypocrisy I think I've ever seen, which was a tweet from some account that was saying something similar about one of the people from Love island that took their own life.

One of the girls, she looks awful in that dress, or like she's let herself go or something like that. And then six months later, the day that the news came out that she'd taken her life is like, rip. Sophie, our thoughts are with your family. Like, what? What tragic news, how terrible, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, yeah, come on. Yeah. I think this speaks to the prior point, right? Like, each one of those things has to do with garnering a certain kind of reputation in a particular group, right? So, like, you.

Rob Kurzban
You want the points for being empathic, and you also sort of want the points for being a little edgy dunking on someone. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I try to, you know, be as positive about the future and human nature as I can, but, like, we're pretty nasty creatures, and then we're nasty creatures where all of us are sort of carrying around, you know, like a weapon of mass destruction in our hand. What do you think is going to happen? Not that I have great ideas for solving it.

I mean, I think, you know, people, as you mentioned, you, you know, down height coddling and else, you know, the first thing is get it out of the, you know, maybe you start. Start young and sort of get it out of the hands of the young people and so on. But, you know, this is one of these things where you start taking this mismatch idea seriously, where you're like, oh, this really matters because we're these barely, you know, we barely came down from the trees, and now I've got this thing in my hand that can just wreak havoc on multiple people's lives. You know, we're just barely past throwing feces at each other. You know, what are the things that motivate an attack?

Chris Williamson
Why do people tend to morally attack? I think there's, you know, in the case of Salem, I do think part of that was driven by just pure instrumental. I want to get the rights to the grazing. You know, these are very physical things. I think, you know, my sense is that under.

Rob Kurzban
In many kinds of subcultures and the west right now, there's, you know, there's call out culture, right? There's a reputational benefit to being the person who makes this accusation, sometimes true, sometimes not, and you sort of score points. I mean, I would think that many people actually rise to prominence in virtue of. I mean, I don't want, again, I don't want to get too deep into the politics of it, but, you know, you know, here in the United States, you might know that we had a person nominated for the Supreme Court and someone made an accusation about that person. And, you know, I hesitate.

But, yeah, now they have a seven figure book deal and they're very welcome in all sorts of talk circuits. Now, look, maybe it was true, and under those circumstances, then it's a virtuous act to say, look, this is a thing that happened, we should rethink. But it's foolish to think that these accusations don't carry benefit. So again, you have to tot up the costs and the benefits. And so maybe in that case it's true, but in how many cases is it not where someone gets some huge reputational bump from being the person who makes these accusations?

Chris Williamson
Yeah. What role does reputation play here? Well, I mean, I think that's one case. Right. So it has really tangible effects.

Rob Kurzban
Your reputation can be translated into income, certainly. I think this does go back a little bit towards the protests and so on. So there's a reputation, you know, it can expose. You know, you get these sort of points for endorsing the right principles and so on. And that can be valuable on the mating market.

It can be valuable in the job market, the talk circuit. In the current world, you know, reputation translates really directly. Right. When you, you know, I don't know, I'm guessing you've tweeted from time to time about how many followers you have. Right.

Like that part of your reputation, it matters. Like, it matters how many people are interested in what you have to say goes right to your bottom line. Like in the modern world, because of the digital age that we live in, cultivating a reputation for x, y or z, if it's valued, that goes a long way. The fact that we even have a profession called influencer sort of tells you.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, you've got this really nice sort of taxonomy thing of sincerely held moral principles and bully motives. It's like different kinds of motives. Can you just explain that? Yeah, because what I try to do in this, I do think we should give people the benefit of the doubt when there's accusations. When people make accusations, there's lots of reasons that people might make them.

Rob Kurzban
So, for example, someone might have done a bad thing. And again, in the case of Ford, I don't want to take a position on that. That's one possibility. What I would say is if you get rid of all the other possible motives for leveling an accusation, sort of what we would call the virtuous ones, like, for example, that the. I think the most obvious one is that the person did something bad and needs to be excluded from society or whatever, then you sort of are left with, there's some other reason that they're making this accusation.

Again, I think that's the Salem witch trials. I don't want to keep coming back to it, but, you know, we know for sure now that the reason that they were making the accusation is not that they literally had the experience of seeing the person having sex with the devil or whatever. There must have been some other motive. And so once you can eliminate all the actual motives, then you can start to say, well, what is this person really up to? What are they really doing?

And don't get me wrong again, I think that your first pass should be to give the person the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, well, they're, you know, maybe in the case of our friend inside, you know, who tweeted the tweet about South Africa, you think it's really important that people know that it's not okay to make jokes along those lines, and I want to stop that from happening in the future to make the world a better place. Okay, that's possible, but there's certain cases where you can sort of eliminate those possibilities. Then you're left with, well, maybe their intentions weren't quite as benevolent. Why is it the case, then, that accusations of hypocrisy are so relatively toothless? Oh, man, I have wrestled with that question.

I. Yeah, that, you know, I. I always like to. Before I have these, you know, interviews, I said, like, to sometimes be able to play the I don't. I have no freaking clue card that's sort of in this area.

I don't really understand it. It seems to me the. It should be, you know, it should really damage one's reputation if you can, you know, show this kind of hypocrisy. But as you say, it seems pretty toothless. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so common, you know, it's sort of like dog bites, man.

You're like, ah, a person was a hypocrite. Okay, you know what else is new? It's not. I wonder if. I wonder if one of the things that people are doing is almost kind of adjusting their sights a little bit to know that we're more transparent and frictionless in toilet tweeting, whatever's come to our brain, and that because of that, we kind of need to give an additional amount of leeway to people that, all right, he said this thing, and then he said this other thing.

Chris Williamson
The problem being, and I think every news story has sort of picked up on this, that the stickiness of the hypocrisy accusation often tends to flow in one direction more than the other, that there's a lot of accusations of hypocrisy that do really stick about for quite a long time. And then if there's someone else, I'm not convinced. If this is quite hypocrisy, this is more just people being thoughtless. But it's a pet peeve of mine. There was a photo of a single squaddy british army guy walking down the streets of London that went super viral during COVID in the UK on WhatsApp.

And it was one of these things. WhatsApp even limits how many people you can forward messages to to stop precisely this. And it even gives a little tag at the top that says forwarded many times. And this was forwarded with a supposed text message or something from someone's son that was in the army, basically saying, martial law is going to come in next week and people are going to be held in their homes at gunpoint. Because this is the new policy that the government's going to bring in.

And that never happened. That never happened. And every person that went bananas on the Internet talking about why it was going to happen, no one ever came out and said that thing that I posted. Turns out that it didn't end up happening. I was wrong.

Same thing like, hey, where's the global health passport thing? And the social credit system that we were adamant. People were so fucking convinced. And the reason I've got a pet peeve about it is that that took up some of my mind. Share like, that took up a non insignificant portion of my life, hearing you fart out some half baked cod psychology opinion that I was subjected to that you.

That wasn't true. And then you just proceeded through life as if nothing had happened. As if you hadn't wasted precious brain cycles on bollocks. Yeah. And then, yes, there's a lot there.

Rob Kurzban
And one piece is. And yet it's gonna happen again. Like, this is the weirdest thing. And I'll do it. I will do it.

Chris Williamson
I will be that guy. I will be the bollocks guy as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the weirdest things about the modern moment is that, you know, we.

Rob Kurzban
We keep having these incidents and there's this big less that we all take from. Let's not tweet, whatever. And then 20 minutes later. So, I mean, the example, you know, there's a bit more that just come out on the COVID For me, the lab leak stuff was just for some reason, that kind of got stuck in my craw, right? Because I think it was because it was nature or it was the Lancet.

Right? So these. These institutions where they just say, yeah, you know, it's what? It's unscientific. And by the way, I take no position on this.

I mean, I don't have any, you know, I'm whatever. But, like, we're told, if you think this, it's a conspiracy theory and don't even entertain it. And the people who were talking about it were, you know, bad, bad, bad. And then here we are now where it's like, whatever, but exactly your point. Like, no one says, oh, man, like, I should have that.

And then. And then, like, this introspective moment where it's like, who do I have to be so that that doesn't happen? Not about COVID but about my life. Like, how do I stop and take a moment and ask myself, okay, who am I? Why did I put my name on the opportunity?

Chris Williamson
We all have the opportunity to shape the world in a tiny, tiny fragment of a way of whatever our influence is. We nudge human civilization and the current sort of milieu in the direction that we want it to go in. You don't not matter in that regard, I think. Yeah, yeah. And I think the piece is just the temptation.

Rob Kurzban
We all sort of understand the costs, which are not borne by the, you know, by the person who pushes. Who forwards the thing on WhatsApp. But what we don't think enough about, I think, is kind of what you're saying, which is. Yeah, this temptation, right? So for people who are, you know, potentially going to get reputational bonus or more followers in virtue of, you know, breaking the story or what have you, and we just haven't really, as a culture, you and me, but, like, how do we tamp that down?

How do we, if anything, it's worse and worse, right? Because, you know, we've got this very kind of, like, l shaped world, right, where all the. All the benefits are for a few people, capture the big accounts, and then everyone else wants to be one of the big accounts. Well, how do you do that? Well, I could start with this thing about this soldier who's, you know, mucking around on some random street in London.

Chris Williamson
Do you remember when those. I think it was like, tanks or military Humvees were going through Miami beach? Yeah. Do you remember those videos? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever happened to that? Yeah, exactly. These things just disappear. I don't know. It kind of goes back to.

And again, I will continue to make this error regularly and say things that later I cringe and want to curl up into a ball and die. Because I said, but just really trying hard to say with the appropriate level of certainty. Isn't this interesting that I've seen this image, but let's look at it with a little bit of skepticism and go, well, you know, it's one bloke on the street and a WhatsApp message. Is this really worthy of that? Or maybe should I?

I don't know. I just think the ultimate problem is frictionless communication with no repercussions. If you can just spurt out anything into the ether and no one's really going to pull you up for it, you're fine. And then we see this very odd sort of puritanism when someone breaches this weird, arbitrary waterline of being sufficiently big that they're worthy of intense scrutiny. And something Kevin Hart tweeted in 2009 gets pulled up and now he's an evil dude.

Rob Kurzban
Yeah. Yeah. Again, we've created this, this sort of technological ecosystem which has all of these really weird kinds of properties to it. And, yeah, we don't really know. We don't really have good defenses against it.

I mean, as you say. Yeah, the repercussions for, like, you know, retweeting something which turns out to be false, I'll tell you where I, where I also worry, and other people have written quite a lot about this is, you know, when I was a kid, you know, we had three networks and we got the news from ABCD, SNBC, or whatever, and you really got the sense that they were trying to do as much as possible, more or less, to get you the truth. Right. And that's how they were sort of making their buck, was they were a little better at getting the actual news into the living rooms these days, it doesn't really feel that way for the reason you're talking about. Right.

So the people who are tuning in to MSNBC. Yeah, they want to know the truth to some extent, but they also sort of have this other motive, which has to do with reinforcing their worldview. And so this problem that you're sort of pointing to, which is pieces of history that get memory holed and no one talks to again or pieces of history that get amplified which turn out not to be true. Like, I sort of thought the media, the fourth estate, was supposed to be the backstop against all this. And maybe I'm wrong.

It's not my area. I'm a psychologist, not a media studies guy, but it doesn't seem that way anymore. And part of it is the fractionated media landscape. But I think the piece that makes me most concerned is the interaction between there's all this, you know, all of these people moving into lots of different directions, coupled with confirmation bias, the psychological piece, right? So people are just going.

So it's not so bad. It was only three directions to go because. Right, if you got confirmation bias, but there's only three things, okay, you get a little bit of whatever. But now if you've got an animal like us and all we do want to do is just keep eating the same information, and I've got this buffet over here, and this buffet, I'm going to find the perfect buffet. And then those guys are incentivized to keep feeding me whatever it is I want to see that I think is the danger is that is the sort of the media interacting with the human capacity to want to confirm our biases.

That's. That, to me, is scary. And it goes back to your point, which is we don't. And then add an AI, and now no one knows what's true anymore. Many.

I'm not even here. Yeah. No, this is all a simulation. Yeah. We may have presented a pretty unrosy, apocalyptic vision of humans ability to operate well in the world.

Chris Williamson
What do you think about the role of wisdom in overcoming this sort of biological hardware and our predispositions? Yeah, I love that question. So, the third guy who I work with on our substack living fossils, he founded an institute, the Wisdom Therapy institute. He's all about wisdom, and I really think. I think he's onto something.

Rob Kurzban
And what he reminds me of, which I think is really important, is that, yeah, we're terrible, moralistic creatures, and we have confirmation bias. But if you want to talk about the one trick that humans have in our sleeve is that we're capable of learning. That's the cool thing. Again, Rob Boyd at UCLA, his one thing you always just say, the trick about humans is that we're social learners, and that gives me some kind of optimism because, you know, wisdom comes hard, but it does come. And, you know, there's a little bit of, you know, you got to be ready to kind of go through some tough stuff to earn the wisdom.

And sometimes you just have to get older. But I think what that tells me is that, you know, we're not doomed exactly, because, you know, 50 years ago or whatever it is, 200 years ago, people didn't learn calculus or whatever it is, and now we do, and it's just part of, you know, what people. Many people who are lucky enough to have that in their curriculum. So I don't think it's crazy that people like you and Robert Wright and Shaunie are going to be able to change the world in such a way that people acquire these wisdom skills. And part of wisdom, I think, speaks to this question about morality and being moralistic.

Because, you know, I think if you could step back and, you know, ask yourself, yeah, what do I know about this? And, you know, am I. Is this a stick, a stone, or a nuclear bomb or how big a deal is this? And are my choices here that I have in front of me? Which of them are going to make the world a better place?

Which ones are going to make the world? So, you know, a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy, a little bit of wisdom. You know, I don't think it's crazy to think that down the road we're going to be in a world in which people learn those skills as a regular part of growing up. I don't, you know, that's not huge right now, but you can see part of it, right? Like mindfulness.

You know, you look at the influence of Sam Harris. I mean, how many people are, you know, engaged in mindfulness practice because. Because of, you know, Sam's influence? And I think those things are related, right? So, like, if you have a little moment to think about yourself and some time to kind of center, you start asking these questions about what are your effects on other people?

And then there, I think, comes a little bit of wisdom. I mean, one way to think about it is we're these evolved creatures and we've got these ancient mechanisms, and someone cuts us off on the highway and we get angry. But it doesn't take that much wisdom to say, is it going to help me to ride his bumper for the next 3 miles, kind of make my life and his life better or their life better? So that's my hope. My hope is located in the fact that, you know, humans can learn new stuff.

I mean, we've done amazing things technologically. There's work to be done inside ourselves. And I also believe kind of like the point about to take it all the way back to charging interest. Like good ideas really do, by and large, tend to spread, by and large, not all the time. Like, there's some terrible ideas that have done a great, you know, have done a good job of propagating themselves.

I won't name any, but good ideas tend to spread. Like property rights was a good idea, prohibition against murder great idea. You know, they, they prospered and they, you know, whatever technological inventions wheel, that was good. And so I think a lot of wisdom. There's some pretty good ideas in there.

There, you know, about some. Some humility about how much I know about what's going on in your head and some, you know, some humility about my intuitions and about, you know, what I think I know. And some humility about just not, you know, how can I be the best person I can be? And that's constantly changing. So I do think that we have, like, I see a little.

There's hope in there. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Again, we're monkeys who just, again, barely started using tools. It wasn't that long ago there.

But we also do have some people who are guiding us towards thinking about ways where I think we all could be a lot better. Rob, let's bring this one home. You're great. I really appreciate you. Where should people go?

Chris Williamson
They want to keep up to date with your writing. I'm in love with the. Right. The articles you're writing for aporia. But you've got your own stuff as well.

Rob Kurzban
That's right. The living fossils on substack. Everyone's got a sub stack. Come find us there. Josh and Shaunie, we talk about wisdom mostly evolution, some clinical psychology.

I just want to say thanks. It's been super interesting chance to talk to you. Really appreciate it. I appreciate you, too. Thanks, man.

Yeah, cheers.

#796 - Rob Kurzban - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality

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1: Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology of Morality

2: Morality and Reproductive Interests

3: Social Reputation and Moral Judgments

4: The Strategic Use of Morality

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