June 22, 2020 • 35 mins
Feeling you belong to a group can be great - but it also has a darker side, leading us down an unhappy path of hatred and violence towards people with different identities and backgrounds.
Dr Laurie Santos talks to Mina Cikara - whose homeland descended into a bloody civil war - and Jamil Zaki about how we can fight hatred with empathy, kindness and difficult conversations.
(Deep canvassing clips courtesy of The Leadership Lab https://leadership-lab.org/ at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.)
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I'm not a groupie person really at all. I
don't really care about sports. I don't really care about teams.
I did not care about baseball at all. I really
it was only there because I was so smitten with him.
(00:36):
Me and a Chikara is telling me about an early
date she had with her husband, Carrie. Carrie is an
avid Boston Red Sox fan, so they decided to check
out a game against the Sox's arch rivals, the Yankees,
and they did so an enemy territory Yankee stadium. He
is a little bit risk seeking, and so he decided
to wear his Red Sox hat to this game. Even
(00:56):
just getting off at the subway station was already a
bunch of jokes and ribbing and look at this guy.
And what was really interesting to me, though, was that
it seemed very good hearted at first, right, it was
just sort of people acting the script. But as the
game wore on, the score got closer and closer, and
the entire stadium grew tense, the banter stopped being playful,
(01:18):
and Carrie wasn't reacting well. So at some point I decided,
I'm going to take the hat from him, because I
don't want him to get into a fist fight here,
so I didn't have anywhere to put this hat, so
I put it on my own head, thinking I'm not
a fan of either team. I really couldn't care less
about this. No one's gonna talk to me, no one's
gonna say anything. And I couldn't have been more wrong
(01:40):
about that assumption. So the second I put on the hat,
people started calling me names. They started telling me about
my mother, They started saying, oh manner of horrible things
about me. But there was a second assumption Mina was
wrong about. She thought if she got taunted, it wouldn't
bother her. But within minutes of putting on that Red
Sox cap, Mina found herself screaming at Yankee fans in
(02:00):
the seats all around her. My husband actually had to
put himself between me and this other guy. And this
experience gave me this incredible insight, which was that by
virtue of marking myself as a member of Red Sox Nation,
I started to get treated that way. And once I
started to receive that treatment, I started to react on
behalf of Red Zox Nation. Mina had unwittingly fallen prey
(02:22):
to some of the most dangerous forces in all of
human nature our inter group biases. So it's that shift
that happens when you approach an idea or an interaction
not through the lens of me and you, but rather
through the lens of us and them. As humans, we
naturally divide the world into end groups and out groups,
and not just on sports fields, we also do so
(02:42):
across political, ethnic, racial, national, and ideological lines as well.
The bonding we get from being part of a group
can sometimes feel good. It can make us feel connected,
like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, but our
partisan urges can also cause us to feel pretty miserable.
They can steal opportunities to make meaningful connections with people
(03:02):
who are different from us. They can make us feel
angry at the other side and cause us to engage
in nasty, sometimes even violent behaviors, and our tendency towards
us versus them thinking has even led to much worse
outcomes than a dip in our personal happiness. These urges
hinder important progress in politics. They can fuel lethal racist violence,
(03:23):
deadly ethnic conflicts, and some of the worst atrocities human
history has ever seen. By some counts, over two hundred
million civilians, not soldiers. Civilians perished in the last century
as a result of large scale group violence. So, in
a time when our society is feeling more divided than ever,
what can we do to avoid all the anger and bitterness?
(03:44):
What can we do to fight the intergroup biases that
lead to so much unhappiness? These are the very, very
hard issues that will try to tackle scientifically in this
season's final two episodes of The Happiness lab Our. Minds
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
(04:06):
minds are lying to us, leading us away from old
make us happy? The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with
Doctor Laurie Santos. We left Mina's story with her screaming uncontrollably,
(04:30):
having to be restrained by her boyfriend from squaring off
with people she'd never met, her passions inflamed by a
game she had zero interest in just hours before. It
may sound crazy that one little red sox hat could
cause all that trouble, but yet happened and was actually
the impetus for my dissertation. Mina is now a professor
(04:51):
of psychology at Harvard University. She's become a world expert
on the neural underpinnings of our intergroup biases. As we
got to talking, I learned that Mina's unfortunate foray into
Red Sox fandom wasn't the first time she'd seen the
dark side of our US versus them, thinking my dad
is Serbian, my mom is Bossi, and my entire family
is from former Yugoslavia. Mina and her parents moved to
(05:13):
the United States in the nineteen eighties, but her extended
families stayed in former Yugoslavia as her homeland descended into
bloody civil war. You know, I would hear these harrowing
stories of people who had been neighbors for decades, who
had raised their children together, they had been friends, they
had been in each other's weddings, and basically, when things
(05:36):
took a turn politically, they turned on each other and
murdered one another or tried to murder one another. And
this was really, I mean, horrifying, but also really fascinating
to me, in part because what it revealed to me
was how quickly these dynamics can change. The speed with
which our group instincts can lead to all out violence
is especially shocking because generally speaking, humans really don't like
(05:59):
doing bad things to one another. Laurie, did you punch
somebody today? I have not punched somebody today. It's been
a good day. Have you punched anyone in the last month? No?
In fact, okay, how about the last year? Actually no,
I'm a kind of non puncher most of the time. Yeah, right.
And what's really interesting about this is that there seemed
(06:20):
to be very strong moral prohibitions against harm that guide
most people's behavior most of the time. Decades and decades
of psychological research show that we really don't like doing
mean stuff. One study by the neuroscientist Molly Crockett found
that participants were more reluctant to administer an electric shock
to a stranger than they were to shock themselves. Harvard
(06:43):
psychologist Fiery Cushman found that people even get queasy when
they pretend to harm other people. He had his subjects
point a toy gun in someone's face or smash the
skull of a realistic looking plastic baby. Cushman found that
even though people knew these mean actions were fake, they
still showed a strong physiological reaction to doing them. They
had an increased heart rate and other bodily signs of arousal,
(07:06):
and participants showed these physiological reactions more when performing the
fake actions themselves versus watching a similar action being performed
by somebody else. We just hate doing mean stuff, and
yet every day we see videos of people doing violent
things to strangers who've done them no harm. So that's
this puzzle, and what it suggests is that there had
(07:27):
to be certain preconditions or certain factors in place in
order for people to overcome this aversion to harm. Mina
has spent the last decade studying what leads people down
this awful road towards actively wanting to hurt members of
other groups. She's found that the first step is what
psychologists have christened the intergroup empathy gap. Normally, we feel
(07:48):
sad when others are sad, and a bit of empathic
pain when others get hurt, but not always. It wouldn't
make sense for us to empathize with all people all
the time, right If we really felt the weight of
every person in the world, we'd never get out of bed.
And it turns out that more and more evidence indicates
that these failures of empathy are particularly likely when targets
(08:09):
or socially distant, so when they belong to other social
or ethnic groups. Tons of studies show that we literally
don't experience the pain of outgroup members the same way
we do for people in our own group. There's evidence,
for example, that white doctors are less likely to prescribe
pain medication to their black patients, and even when such
pain reducers are prescribed, they're given in lower quantities. Are
(08:31):
indifference to other groups pain I mean that even doctors can,
intovert only cause people who are unlike them to suffer
more than is necessary. But an absence of empathy still
doesn't mean that we're cool with knowingly causing bad things
to happen to other people. To do that, we need
to take the next troubling step on that dangerous inner
group path, one that's summed up by a German word
(08:52):
schadenfreude literally harm joy. Schadenfreude really specifically refers to the
malicious pleasure that people feel when they see another person suffering. Oftentimes,
if you just don't like someone, if you perceive that
someone has acted in an unjust way, if they're deserving,
or if you envied them that these would all be
(09:13):
precursors for feeling pleasure when you saw that person suffer misfortune.
But Mina wanted to know, as schadenfreude could also be
at the root of between group conflicts too. Would it
be enough just to know that someone came from a
different group in order to be able to engender this
kind of aggressive, malicious pleasure. Human history has shown us
that it's surprisingly easy to get people to feel schadenfreude
(09:34):
towards outgroup members. Sports is this great microcosm in which
to study these dynamics, because people not only feel allowed,
but emboldened to say really horrible things about the outgroup.
So what we realize is if we could just tap
into individuals who identified as sports fans, that maybe we
could get some honest responding when we just asked them,
(09:55):
how good does it make you feel to see this
bad thing happened to these other folks? Mina recruited, of course,
Red Sox and Yankees fans. She stuck them inside a
brain scanner and showed them cartoon versions of baseball plays
involving lots of different teams, but on theical trials the
ones Mina was really interested in. They got to watch
good and bad things happen to their arrivals. What we
found was that watching your rival fail engaged several different
(10:19):
brain regions, but the only one that was associated with
just how much pleasure participants said that they felt was
this region called the ventral stri item. The ventral stri
item is part of our brain's rewards her kuit, but
this region doesn't just register, Hey, that event felt really good.
It's also critically involved in learning. That means that when
(10:40):
the ventral stri item is activated, it helps us decide
how we personally should behave in the future. It notes
when there's a surprising positive event in the environment and says, Okay,
let's come back to taking the action that brought that
event about, because that's going to be the thing that's
going to be rewarding in the future. Mina's Red Sox
fans were starting to make a mental connection between that
(11:01):
great schadenfreud of feeling and the possibility that they could
use their own personal behaviors to cause that nice feeling again,
perhaps by actively harming someone else. Those participants who exhibited
that much more ventral straight le activation in response to
watching their rival fail were the same people who told
me two weeks later that they would be that much
more likely to heckle, hit, and insult a rival fan.
(11:25):
So that for me established this suggestive link between the
sort of pleasure of watching out group failure or harm
and potentially the likelihood that it was related to your
own desire to become the agent of harm and other circumstances.
And these awful dynamics don't just play out on sports fields.
(11:46):
The same processes are at least partially at work in
settings where people engage in more large scale violence. Think
ethnic cleansing like Mina's family experienced in Yugoslavia, or hate
crimes against marginalized groups, or the long legacy of lethal
violence that law enforcement personnel have inflicted on black people
in the United States. The processes Mina has observed in
(12:07):
her baseball fans likely contribute to the many acts of
racist violence we see in the news, shockingly often, especially
in cases where there are structural features in place to
help inflame our sense of competition and increase our fear
of the other side. Now understanding the processes that lead
to these violent acts, of course, doesn't excuse them. I
want to be super clear on that point, but Mina's
(12:30):
work is incredibly important here because it shows just how
easily situational and structural factors can lead otherwise non violent
people towards brutal actions. To mean, the most striking thing
about schadenferda is not that it happens, but how quickly
we can shift from empathy or indifference to taking pleasure
and other people's pains, and that there are cases in
which out group harm appears to be driven by the
(12:53):
sheer hedonic benefit. It just feels good, and I find
that totally fascinating. Now, there are lots and lots of
structural changes needed to stop the large scale inner group
violence we see all over the world, but Mina's work
suggests that we might also be able to intervene psychologically
to curb at least some parts of these often lethal
(13:13):
downward cycles. And as is often the case in the
Happiness Lab, part of the solution might involve recognizing the
mistakes our minds are making All the time. I've been
talking a lot about how competition is doing quite a
bit of work in these contexts, right, and I think
that a huge part of conflict escalation is actually a
mistake that we make in inner group contexts, which is
(13:35):
that we don't deal with the person in front of us. Instead,
what we're doing is we're dealing with some idea, some models,
some stereotype of who they are. When we get back
from the break, we'll examine how we can turn off
our intergroup empathy gap and do so in a way
that can not only make us happier but also holds
the promise of helping us to make society a kinder
(13:58):
and less polarized place. The Happiness lab will be right back.
I'm very worried. I think that there are lots of
trends that are pushing us away from what is really
(14:18):
our truer natural state, which is to be interconnected with
each other. That said, I'm not fatalistic, right, I think
that there are things we can do to push back.
This is my friend Jamie Zaki, a professor of psychology
at Stanford University. Jamil has just written an important new
book called The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a
Fractured World. That used to be called Choosing Empathy, which
(14:41):
now is the title of one of the chapters. I
started writing it in twenty fifteen and I don't know.
Around late twenty sixteen early twenty seventeen, I can't quite
put my finger on what it was, but something changed
in our culture. I felt like things were getting crueler
and less connected, and people were getting really exhausted with
(15:06):
trying to connect with each other and really embracing social
division in a way that I hadn't seen in my
adult life. I felt like I was being a Pollyanna,
just writing this kind of positive hey, you know, you
can choose empathy too, when all around me it seemed
like this giant tire fire where people just hated each
other more than ever, And it felt to me like
(15:26):
I needed and wanted to acknowledge that to be empathic,
to choose empathy is a radical choice in today's culture.
It is a fight against other forces that are pushing
us in the opposite direction. Jimmiale wants us to get
pissed off at the current polarized state of society and
(15:48):
to take up arms for a coming battle, but his
war doesn't involve weapons or the usual inner group bloodshed.
Jamil wants us to fight divisiveness and our ever increasing
sense of disconnection. He wants each and every one of
us to commit to being kinder to one another. If
you've paid any attention to the news in the last
few years, you understand that Jimmiale's war for kindness is
(16:09):
becoming more and more of an uphill battle. A growing
body of work shows the empathy in general seems to
be decreasing over time. One study presented people with a
series of statements and asked them how well it described them,
on a scale from one not at all to five
fits you perfectly. The statements were things like I often
have tender, concerned feelings for people who are less fortunate
(16:30):
than me, and when I'm upset at someone, I usually
try to put myself in their shoes for a while.
And what they found was that in nineteen seventy nine,
the average Americans scored like a four out of five,
which sounds not terrible, maybe a B. But by two
thousand and nine, the average American dropped down to a
three point five out of five. So, to put that
in perspective, the average American in two thousand and nine
(16:53):
less empathic by this measure than seventy five percent of
Americans just thirty years before. This rising level of disconnection
means that more and more of us are missing out
on a potential boost to our well being. It's surprising
to a lot of people that empathy is good for
us the empathizer, right. We typically think of it almost
(17:13):
like a transfer, like I give up my money or
time or emotional peace in order to help you have
more of it. It's sort of the quintessential act of
self sacrifice. It turns out, though, that the data point
almost exactly in the opposite direction, that caring for others
is one of the most important ways we can care
(17:34):
for ourselves. People who experience a lot of empathy also
tend to be happier, less stressed, and experience less depression.
They find it easier to make new friends and to
maintain important relationships like their marriages. Seventh Graders who are
able to understand what others feel are also better able
to survive seventh grade, which is not easy. If my
(17:55):
recollection serves, the false intuition that empathic work reduces our
happiness is hard to shake. Jamil saw this himself when
he taught a class of stamper called Becoming Kinder. So
every weekend I would give students these kindness challenges, these
little practical assignments meant to help push them to empathize more,
and one of the very first ones that we did
(18:17):
was spend on someone else. So in a moment when
you don't feel like you have enough time or energy
for yourself, do the thing that doesn't come naturally to
you and help someone else instead. And the students were
really worried about this because it was midterm season. It
feels like it's always midterm season. It's always been term season,
It's somehow always midterm season. But they were freaked out.
(18:40):
They were overwhelmed, and they thought, God, I don't have
the time to do stuff for other people. And reliably,
they came back from that challenge feeling like I was
shocked because after I helped someone else, I didn't feel depleted.
I felt energized. I kind of felt like, if I
can do for someone else, then I must be doing
okay myself. When we don't take actions that could make
(19:02):
the people around us feel better, when we don't check
in with friends or notice of a co worker is
in pain, or stop to aid a stranger, it means
we're each contributing to that tire fire culture Jamil talked
about earlier, but Jamie's work shows that doesn't have to
be the case. Another trick that our minds play on
us and that our culture plays on us, is convincing
(19:23):
us that we can't change. I think there's this big
stereotype that some people are empathic, some people are not,
and whatever level of empathy you have, it's like your
adult height or your eye color, you'll have it for life.
But I think that the evidence actually again point in
the opposite direction. There are things we can do to
(19:44):
push back. I mean, the fact that empathy has declined
so much in the last thirty years means that it's malleable.
Things that go down can come up. And I think
that one of the first things that I want people
to understand is that empathy is under our control more
than we realize. There are specific strategies each of us
(20:05):
can use today to increase our empathy, and not just
in a parochial w where we extend kindness only to
the people who are like us. The science says we
can turn up compassion to fight the dangerous intergroup empathy
gaps that plague our culture, and that we may even
be able to use some of these strategies to start
reducing the biggest and most painful divides in society. We'll
(20:25):
examine all these exciting possibilities when the Happiness lab returns
in a moment. It turns out that, in fact, empathy
is like a skill, and there are lots of things
(20:46):
that we can do to cultivate empathy in ourselves and others.
When Jamil taught his Becoming Kinder class, he gave his
students a super hard assignment, an empathy challenge he christened
disagreeing Better, Oh and welcome back everybody. You can check
out a version on his website. Find someone with whom
you have an ideological difference of opinion. But then, instead
of yelling at each other, or judging each other or
(21:07):
even debating, I want you to try to cultivate curiosity
about each other. Ask this person how they came to
have their opinion in the first place, and share with
them the story of how you came to have your
opinion in the first place. Students embarked on hard conversations
with racist Facebook posting uncles and frank discussions about sexuality
(21:29):
with their less than progressive parents. They predicted that these
exchanges would end in frustration or even tears, but in
nearly all cases those stories sharing conversations went better than expecting.
When you start with narratives, instead of either calling people
out or saying how wrong they are, you get to
(21:49):
a new type of discussion right away, one in which
it actually doesn't matter as much if you would agree
on every point. But something just as important, or maybe
even more important, happens, which is that they grow to
appreciate that people they disagree with are not necessarily bad people.
(22:11):
There's just people with different stories than their own. No
one owes anyone empathy, especially if they're expressing bigoted viewpoints.
But Jamil says his students were still surprisingly grateful for
having been given the challenge, because it taught them that
making connections across seemingly unbridgable divides is actually possible. But
you might be saying this is just an anecdote from
(22:33):
one college class of students talking to their family members.
Is there scientific evidence that sharing stories and empathic work
like this really does the job? Can connecting over shared
experiences actually reduce the inner group disconnection we see all
over the world. Did you vote to allow gay and
(22:54):
lesbian couples to continue to marry or did you vote
to a banned gay and lesbian couples from being able
to marry. Typical political canvassing involves knocking on someone's door
and launching into a one way conversation filled with facts, figures,
and strong arguments. This style of canvassing doesn't really work,
especially when the usual political partisanship tightens its gript. My
(23:17):
name's Josh Kala. I'm an assistant professor of political science
and data science at Yale University. People just tune it out.
They won't engage, they won't pay attention, or they'll argue
against it. Most people are just such consistently democrat, are
such consistently Republican, there's often not much room to to
change someone's mind there. But Josh and his colleagues have
begun studying the effectiveness of a new kind of canvassing,
(23:40):
one that can break down our inner group blinders, and
one that also employs a lot of the same empathic
practices that Jamie and his students used in that disagreeing
better assignment. Deep canvassing is a longer form of canvassing
that really involves sharing personal narratives about an issue. It
often involves a canvasser sharing a moment in their life
(24:02):
that is somehow relevant to the issue that's being studied.
I'm a gay guy. I doubt that totally shocks you,
and I was in a relationship for eighteen years. Often
those stories then prompt the voter to share their own
story when my wife died or whatever, it broke my heart. Well, no,
it didn't break my art. Put a hole in it
(24:23):
and it won't be a lot. Yeah, it sounds like
marriage is incredibly important to you. I was married forty
seven years, so she'd press you. But what we find
is that by talking through these stories, the type of
discrimination that we're trying to reduce becomes much more concrete,
and it also reduces a lot of fears that the
voter has towards that out group. It helps them understand
(24:46):
what does this word transgender actually mean? Or what does
this word undocumented immigrant actually mean? By walking through the
life of an undocumented immigrant or a transgender person through
hearing their story, hearing the canvasser's stories tends to shut
off the indifference we typically feel for people outside our tribe.
Deep canvassing also forces the listener to see people from
(25:06):
unfamiliar groups and with unfamiliar views as people and that
empathic boost allows deep canvassers to do something that billions
of dollars of political ads can't. They actually change people's
minds about controversial political issues. You know this issue is
going to come up for a vote again in the future,
(25:26):
vote in favor of allowing gay and muspian couples to
marry good. Josh's careful field research has found that deep
canvassing gets about five to seven new supporters for every
hundred people they talk to. Now that might not sound
like much, but for ballot measures that are typically one
are lost by less than five percentage points, deep canvassing
can make or break the adoption of a progressive new law.
(25:49):
But what's most impressive about Josh's deep canvassing findings is
that these persuasion effects last a long long time. Well,
keep doing those follow up surveys two, three, four or
five months later, and typically we run out of money
to run more surveys before the effects dissidate. But aside
from the policy tis, Josh has also seen how powerful
(26:11):
deep canvassing can be and empathically connecting people from different identities.
One of his favorite examples comes from an encounter in Florida,
during a campaign for trans rights. He was a transgender canvasser,
and he shows up to a house that has a
big American flag and a pickup truck, and he's really
bracing himself for what he expects to be a really
(26:33):
difficult conversation. The canvas shared his story anyway, He described
the kinds of prejudice and misunderstanding he faces on a
near daily basis. He even shared a story about being
made fun of and called an animal on the New
York subway. After sharing this story of personal discrimination, he
asked the person he's canvas, saying, this white, macho pickup
(26:55):
truck drive in American flag, guy, have you ever faced
anything like that? The guy he's canvassing really pauses for
a minute and says, the experiences that you face, a
discrimination that you face, and people's lack of empathy and understanding,
it's it's not that different than the experiences that I face.
I served in Afghanistan. I did two tours there. I
came back and I had PTSD. People would look at
(27:17):
me like I was crazy and they wouldn't understand what
was going on. And what I love about that story
is it just questioned so many of the assumptions that
we all make, and shows that again, if we're patient,
if we question those assumptions, if we're vulnerable and try
and listen and share our share our experiences, we can
be successful at changing minds. Jamil is a huge fan
(27:38):
of Josh's deep canvassing work because it provides a wonderful
example of the central claim in his War for Kindness book,
the empathy is a skill we can build over time,
a tool we can use to do some amazing things
if and when we have the bandwidth to use it.
I think our culture right now includes a lot of
threat at home, online, outside. We're constantly feel as though
(28:03):
there are people who threaten our identity, who threaten our
way of life, who threatened our beliefs, and I'm not
going to say that that's untrue. And although it's easy
and natural to engage in I guess what you'd call
call out culture right so just sort of attacking people
who have toxic or problematic attitudes. I think the hard
(28:29):
but often very productive thing to do is to be
the person who takes that first step, who puts their
guard down and decides to be vulnerable. And Jamille himself
recognizes just how hard that first step can be. It
can be really exhausting to try to empathize with people
who are different from us, especially if they have opinions
(28:51):
that we might fear or ab or now. I try
really hard to be an understanding person, and I truly
believe in the importance of Jamie's battle for kindness. But
almost every day I see some view online that makes
me see red. When people seem to be so hateful,
it's really really hard for me to see them is
deserving of my compassion or my emotional energy. I was
(29:15):
surprised that the guy who literally wrote the book on
empathy got exactly what I was saying. Trust me, I
feel that way all the time. I still remember where
the New York Times had this whole, very sympathetic portrayal
of a family in Illinois that happened to be Nazis,
and I remember a detail where they were trying to
humanize this family by talking about how they cooked their pasta,
(29:35):
and I just remember thinking, I don't want to hear
about your Nazi pasta. You know, I don't want to
humanize you. It's exhausting to connect, and it's especially exhausting
to connect with people who say things that are awful
and that don't really deserve a platform. So I think
it's perfectly okay for people to think about what they
(29:58):
have the energy for, what they have the space for,
and no one should feel like they're obligated to connect
with or empathize with somebody who's saying off things. Now,
no one has to do this, it's not anybody's job.
But when we do, it's remarkable how powerful that can be,
(30:20):
because sometimes what you realize is that people on the
other side are also waiting for a chance to be human.
Despite the uphill battle, Jamil is optimistic that his war
for kindness is gaining new recruits. I've received hundreds of
emails that are something along the lines of I am
(30:40):
so fed up with this culture of division. I want
more empathy in the world. But I'm the only one,
and I'm almost like, can I put you all in
a group chat or something? Is there like so many
of you and I think we often feel alone, like
we are the only ones swimming upstream against a culture
of hatred and division and isolation. But I think it's
(31:05):
really shocking how powerful it can be to take the
first step to be that change instead of waiting for it,
because when we take a step towards listening to others,
towards being vulnerable with them, oftentimes we find that they're
ready to do the same thing. And I think that
each one of us does that, that can change our lives,
(31:26):
and it can change the lives of people around us,
maybe even save lives. The thing that really inspires me
is what could happen if a lot of us did that,
if most of us did that, because then we wouldn't
be changing lives when at a time we'd have the
chance to actually change our entire culture. I try to
be an optimistic person, but right now, in twenty twenty,
(31:49):
the idea that our entire culture will change for the
better seems a pretty distant hope. So much about how
our institutions work seems to be wrong, and the flaws
in these systems lead to prejudice, cruelty, and injustice, and
lots of people don't seem to realize that the burden
of all these awful things continues to hurt some marginalized
groups more than others. Seeing all this makes me really
(32:11):
sad and angry at the groups I feel are responsible.
I hate the injustice. I hate the divisions, and I
hate the heat. Even on my best days, it's hard
not to lose hope that I personally can make any
difference in these historic problems. But I don't want to
just retreat to my end group, and I don't want
to empathize with only people who are exactly like me,
(32:32):
nor gload at the pain and misfortune of those who
hold different views or who've lived different lives. So I'm
now committing to trying to follow Jamille's advice. I'm going
to remember that the science shows my intuitions are wrong,
that if I try to take the first step and
put my guard down, at least in those cases where
I have the emotional bandwidth to do so, it might
be more effective than I think. Rather than only seeing
(32:55):
someone as a member of an identity I disagree with,
I'll try to connect a bit better. I'll ask people
to share their stories, and if they'll listen, I'll share
my own. But like Jamille, I also want to make
sure that all this empathic labor is a bit more
evenly distributed, that the hard work of deep connection doesn't
just fall to historically marginalized groups who've long been on
(33:17):
the receiving side of all the injustice, These are the
folks who are least likely to have the needed emotional
bandwidth to make connections. I also want to make sure
that we're distributing the work of correcting these injustices a
little more fairly, and that the blind spots of our
mind don't prevent well intentioned people like me from inadvertently
making all those structural inequalities worse. And so when The
(33:40):
Happiness Lab returns next time, we'll tackle all these issues directly.
In our next episode, How to Be a Better Ally,
We'll hear what the science says about how you can
fight the structures that lead to some of society's worst injustices,
and how the lives of our mind sometimes cause good
people to unknowingly make things worse. We'll also see that
using evidence based strategies for becoming a better ally can
(34:03):
not only boost your own personal well being, but more importantly,
can make us more effective and contribute positively to the
causes we care about most. And so I hope you'll
return next week to hear the final season two episode
of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The
(34:28):
Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped
with production. Joseph Fridman checked our facts and our editing
was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon. Special thanks to Mel LaBelle,
Carl mcgliori, Heather Fain, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kani,
(34:51):
Jacob Weisberg and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin. I'm not a groupie person really at all. I
don't really care about sports. I don't really care about teams.
I did not care about baseball at all. I really
it was only there because I was so smitten with him.
(00:36):
Me and a Chikara is telling me about an early
date she had with her husband, Carrie. Carrie is an
avid Boston Red Sox fan, so they decided to check
out a game against the Sox's arch rivals, the Yankees,
and they did so an enemy territory Yankee stadium. He
is a little bit risk seeking, and so he decided
to wear his Red Sox hat to this game. Even
(00:56):
just getting off at the subway station was already a
bunch of jokes and ribbing and look at this guy.
And what was really interesting to me, though, was that
it seemed very good hearted at first, right, it was
just sort of people acting the script. But as the
game wore on, the score got closer and closer, and
the entire stadium grew tense, the banter stopped being playful,
(01:18):
and Carrie wasn't reacting well. So at some point I decided,
I'm going to take the hat from him, because I
don't want him to get into a fist fight here,
so I didn't have anywhere to put this hat, so
I put it on my own head, thinking I'm not
a fan of either team. I really couldn't care less
about this. No one's gonna talk to me, no one's
gonna say anything. And I couldn't have been more wrong
(01:40):
about that assumption. So the second I put on the hat,
people started calling me names. They started telling me about
my mother, They started saying, oh manner of horrible things
about me. But there was a second assumption Mina was
wrong about. She thought if she got taunted, it wouldn't
bother her. But within minutes of putting on that Red
Sox cap, Mina found herself screaming at Yankee fans in
(02:00):
the seats all around her. My husband actually had to
put himself between me and this other guy. And this
experience gave me this incredible insight, which was that by
virtue of marking myself as a member of Red Sox Nation,
I started to get treated that way. And once I
started to receive that treatment, I started to react on
behalf of Red Zox Nation. Mina had unwittingly fallen prey
(02:22):
to some of the most dangerous forces in all of
human nature our inter group biases. So it's that shift
that happens when you approach an idea or an interaction
not through the lens of me and you, but rather
through the lens of us and them. As humans, we
naturally divide the world into end groups and out groups,
and not just on sports fields, we also do so
(02:42):
across political, ethnic, racial, national, and ideological lines as well.
The bonding we get from being part of a group
can sometimes feel good. It can make us feel connected,
like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, but our
partisan urges can also cause us to feel pretty miserable.
They can steal opportunities to make meaningful connections with people
(03:02):
who are different from us. They can make us feel
angry at the other side and cause us to engage
in nasty, sometimes even violent behaviors, and our tendency towards
us versus them thinking has even led to much worse
outcomes than a dip in our personal happiness. These urges
hinder important progress in politics. They can fuel lethal racist violence,
(03:23):
deadly ethnic conflicts, and some of the worst atrocities human
history has ever seen. By some counts, over two hundred
million civilians, not soldiers. Civilians perished in the last century
as a result of large scale group violence. So, in
a time when our society is feeling more divided than ever,
what can we do to avoid all the anger and bitterness?
(03:44):
What can we do to fight the intergroup biases that
lead to so much unhappiness? These are the very, very
hard issues that will try to tackle scientifically in this
season's final two episodes of The Happiness lab Our. Minds
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
(04:06):
minds are lying to us, leading us away from old
make us happy? The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with
Doctor Laurie Santos. We left Mina's story with her screaming uncontrollably,
(04:30):
having to be restrained by her boyfriend from squaring off
with people she'd never met, her passions inflamed by a
game she had zero interest in just hours before. It
may sound crazy that one little red sox hat could
cause all that trouble, but yet happened and was actually
the impetus for my dissertation. Mina is now a professor
(04:51):
of psychology at Harvard University. She's become a world expert
on the neural underpinnings of our intergroup biases. As we
got to talking, I learned that Mina's unfortunate foray into
Red Sox fandom wasn't the first time she'd seen the
dark side of our US versus them, thinking my dad
is Serbian, my mom is Bossi, and my entire family
is from former Yugoslavia. Mina and her parents moved to
(05:13):
the United States in the nineteen eighties, but her extended
families stayed in former Yugoslavia as her homeland descended into
bloody civil war. You know, I would hear these harrowing
stories of people who had been neighbors for decades, who
had raised their children together, they had been friends, they
had been in each other's weddings, and basically, when things
(05:36):
took a turn politically, they turned on each other and
murdered one another or tried to murder one another. And
this was really, I mean, horrifying, but also really fascinating
to me, in part because what it revealed to me
was how quickly these dynamics can change. The speed with
which our group instincts can lead to all out violence
is especially shocking because generally speaking, humans really don't like
(05:59):
doing bad things to one another. Laurie, did you punch
somebody today? I have not punched somebody today. It's been
a good day. Have you punched anyone in the last month? No?
In fact, okay, how about the last year? Actually no,
I'm a kind of non puncher most of the time. Yeah, right.
And what's really interesting about this is that there seemed
(06:20):
to be very strong moral prohibitions against harm that guide
most people's behavior most of the time. Decades and decades
of psychological research show that we really don't like doing
mean stuff. One study by the neuroscientist Molly Crockett found
that participants were more reluctant to administer an electric shock
to a stranger than they were to shock themselves. Harvard
(06:43):
psychologist Fiery Cushman found that people even get queasy when
they pretend to harm other people. He had his subjects
point a toy gun in someone's face or smash the
skull of a realistic looking plastic baby. Cushman found that
even though people knew these mean actions were fake, they
still showed a strong physiological reaction to doing them. They
had an increased heart rate and other bodily signs of arousal,
(07:06):
and participants showed these physiological reactions more when performing the
fake actions themselves versus watching a similar action being performed
by somebody else. We just hate doing mean stuff, and
yet every day we see videos of people doing violent
things to strangers who've done them no harm. So that's
this puzzle, and what it suggests is that there had
(07:27):
to be certain preconditions or certain factors in place in
order for people to overcome this aversion to harm. Mina
has spent the last decade studying what leads people down
this awful road towards actively wanting to hurt members of
other groups. She's found that the first step is what
psychologists have christened the intergroup empathy gap. Normally, we feel
(07:48):
sad when others are sad, and a bit of empathic
pain when others get hurt, but not always. It wouldn't
make sense for us to empathize with all people all
the time, right If we really felt the weight of
every person in the world, we'd never get out of bed.
And it turns out that more and more evidence indicates
that these failures of empathy are particularly likely when targets
(08:09):
or socially distant, so when they belong to other social
or ethnic groups. Tons of studies show that we literally
don't experience the pain of outgroup members the same way
we do for people in our own group. There's evidence,
for example, that white doctors are less likely to prescribe
pain medication to their black patients, and even when such
pain reducers are prescribed, they're given in lower quantities. Are
(08:31):
indifference to other groups pain I mean that even doctors can,
intovert only cause people who are unlike them to suffer
more than is necessary. But an absence of empathy still
doesn't mean that we're cool with knowingly causing bad things
to happen to other people. To do that, we need
to take the next troubling step on that dangerous inner
group path, one that's summed up by a German word
(08:52):
schadenfreude literally harm joy. Schadenfreude really specifically refers to the
malicious pleasure that people feel when they see another person suffering. Oftentimes,
if you just don't like someone, if you perceive that
someone has acted in an unjust way, if they're deserving,
or if you envied them that these would all be
(09:13):
precursors for feeling pleasure when you saw that person suffer misfortune.
But Mina wanted to know, as schadenfreude could also be
at the root of between group conflicts too. Would it
be enough just to know that someone came from a
different group in order to be able to engender this
kind of aggressive, malicious pleasure. Human history has shown us
that it's surprisingly easy to get people to feel schadenfreude
(09:34):
towards outgroup members. Sports is this great microcosm in which
to study these dynamics, because people not only feel allowed,
but emboldened to say really horrible things about the outgroup.
So what we realize is if we could just tap
into individuals who identified as sports fans, that maybe we
could get some honest responding when we just asked them,
(09:55):
how good does it make you feel to see this
bad thing happened to these other folks? Mina recruited, of course,
Red Sox and Yankees fans. She stuck them inside a
brain scanner and showed them cartoon versions of baseball plays
involving lots of different teams, but on theical trials the
ones Mina was really interested in. They got to watch
good and bad things happen to their arrivals. What we
found was that watching your rival fail engaged several different
(10:19):
brain regions, but the only one that was associated with
just how much pleasure participants said that they felt was
this region called the ventral stri item. The ventral stri
item is part of our brain's rewards her kuit, but
this region doesn't just register, Hey, that event felt really good.
It's also critically involved in learning. That means that when
(10:40):
the ventral stri item is activated, it helps us decide
how we personally should behave in the future. It notes
when there's a surprising positive event in the environment and says, Okay,
let's come back to taking the action that brought that
event about, because that's going to be the thing that's
going to be rewarding in the future. Mina's Red Sox
fans were starting to make a mental connection between that
(11:01):
great schadenfreud of feeling and the possibility that they could
use their own personal behaviors to cause that nice feeling again,
perhaps by actively harming someone else. Those participants who exhibited
that much more ventral straight le activation in response to
watching their rival fail were the same people who told
me two weeks later that they would be that much
more likely to heckle, hit, and insult a rival fan.
(11:25):
So that for me established this suggestive link between the
sort of pleasure of watching out group failure or harm
and potentially the likelihood that it was related to your
own desire to become the agent of harm and other circumstances.
And these awful dynamics don't just play out on sports fields.
(11:46):
The same processes are at least partially at work in
settings where people engage in more large scale violence. Think
ethnic cleansing like Mina's family experienced in Yugoslavia, or hate
crimes against marginalized groups, or the long legacy of lethal
violence that law enforcement personnel have inflicted on black people
in the United States. The processes Mina has observed in
(12:07):
her baseball fans likely contribute to the many acts of
racist violence we see in the news, shockingly often, especially
in cases where there are structural features in place to
help inflame our sense of competition and increase our fear
of the other side. Now understanding the processes that lead
to these violent acts, of course, doesn't excuse them. I
want to be super clear on that point, but Mina's
(12:30):
work is incredibly important here because it shows just how
easily situational and structural factors can lead otherwise non violent
people towards brutal actions. To mean, the most striking thing
about schadenferda is not that it happens, but how quickly
we can shift from empathy or indifference to taking pleasure
and other people's pains, and that there are cases in
which out group harm appears to be driven by the
(12:53):
sheer hedonic benefit. It just feels good, and I find
that totally fascinating. Now, there are lots and lots of
structural changes needed to stop the large scale inner group
violence we see all over the world, but Mina's work
suggests that we might also be able to intervene psychologically
to curb at least some parts of these often lethal
(13:13):
downward cycles. And as is often the case in the
Happiness Lab, part of the solution might involve recognizing the
mistakes our minds are making All the time. I've been
talking a lot about how competition is doing quite a
bit of work in these contexts, right, and I think
that a huge part of conflict escalation is actually a
mistake that we make in inner group contexts, which is
(13:35):
that we don't deal with the person in front of us. Instead,
what we're doing is we're dealing with some idea, some models,
some stereotype of who they are. When we get back
from the break, we'll examine how we can turn off
our intergroup empathy gap and do so in a way
that can not only make us happier but also holds
the promise of helping us to make society a kinder
(13:58):
and less polarized place. The Happiness lab will be right back.
I'm very worried. I think that there are lots of
trends that are pushing us away from what is really
(14:18):
our truer natural state, which is to be interconnected with
each other. That said, I'm not fatalistic, right, I think
that there are things we can do to push back.
This is my friend Jamie Zaki, a professor of psychology
at Stanford University. Jamil has just written an important new
book called The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a
Fractured World. That used to be called Choosing Empathy, which
(14:41):
now is the title of one of the chapters. I
started writing it in twenty fifteen and I don't know.
Around late twenty sixteen early twenty seventeen, I can't quite
put my finger on what it was, but something changed
in our culture. I felt like things were getting crueler
and less connected, and people were getting really exhausted with
(15:06):
trying to connect with each other and really embracing social
division in a way that I hadn't seen in my
adult life. I felt like I was being a Pollyanna,
just writing this kind of positive hey, you know, you
can choose empathy too, when all around me it seemed
like this giant tire fire where people just hated each
other more than ever, And it felt to me like
(15:26):
I needed and wanted to acknowledge that to be empathic,
to choose empathy is a radical choice in today's culture.
It is a fight against other forces that are pushing
us in the opposite direction. Jimmiale wants us to get
pissed off at the current polarized state of society and
(15:48):
to take up arms for a coming battle, but his
war doesn't involve weapons or the usual inner group bloodshed.
Jamil wants us to fight divisiveness and our ever increasing
sense of disconnection. He wants each and every one of
us to commit to being kinder to one another. If
you've paid any attention to the news in the last
few years, you understand that Jimmiale's war for kindness is
(16:09):
becoming more and more of an uphill battle. A growing
body of work shows the empathy in general seems to
be decreasing over time. One study presented people with a
series of statements and asked them how well it described them,
on a scale from one not at all to five
fits you perfectly. The statements were things like I often
have tender, concerned feelings for people who are less fortunate
(16:30):
than me, and when I'm upset at someone, I usually
try to put myself in their shoes for a while.
And what they found was that in nineteen seventy nine,
the average Americans scored like a four out of five,
which sounds not terrible, maybe a B. But by two
thousand and nine, the average American dropped down to a
three point five out of five. So, to put that
in perspective, the average American in two thousand and nine
(16:53):
less empathic by this measure than seventy five percent of
Americans just thirty years before. This rising level of disconnection
means that more and more of us are missing out
on a potential boost to our well being. It's surprising
to a lot of people that empathy is good for
us the empathizer, right. We typically think of it almost
(17:13):
like a transfer, like I give up my money or
time or emotional peace in order to help you have
more of it. It's sort of the quintessential act of
self sacrifice. It turns out, though, that the data point
almost exactly in the opposite direction, that caring for others
is one of the most important ways we can care
(17:34):
for ourselves. People who experience a lot of empathy also
tend to be happier, less stressed, and experience less depression.
They find it easier to make new friends and to
maintain important relationships like their marriages. Seventh Graders who are
able to understand what others feel are also better able
to survive seventh grade, which is not easy. If my
(17:55):
recollection serves, the false intuition that empathic work reduces our
happiness is hard to shake. Jamil saw this himself when
he taught a class of stamper called Becoming Kinder. So
every weekend I would give students these kindness challenges, these
little practical assignments meant to help push them to empathize more,
and one of the very first ones that we did
(18:17):
was spend on someone else. So in a moment when
you don't feel like you have enough time or energy
for yourself, do the thing that doesn't come naturally to
you and help someone else instead. And the students were
really worried about this because it was midterm season. It
feels like it's always midterm season. It's always been term season,
It's somehow always midterm season. But they were freaked out.
(18:40):
They were overwhelmed, and they thought, God, I don't have
the time to do stuff for other people. And reliably,
they came back from that challenge feeling like I was
shocked because after I helped someone else, I didn't feel depleted.
I felt energized. I kind of felt like, if I
can do for someone else, then I must be doing
okay myself. When we don't take actions that could make
(19:02):
the people around us feel better, when we don't check
in with friends or notice of a co worker is
in pain, or stop to aid a stranger, it means
we're each contributing to that tire fire culture Jamil talked
about earlier, but Jamie's work shows that doesn't have to
be the case. Another trick that our minds play on
us and that our culture plays on us, is convincing
(19:23):
us that we can't change. I think there's this big
stereotype that some people are empathic, some people are not,
and whatever level of empathy you have, it's like your
adult height or your eye color, you'll have it for life.
But I think that the evidence actually again point in
the opposite direction. There are things we can do to
(19:44):
push back. I mean, the fact that empathy has declined
so much in the last thirty years means that it's malleable.
Things that go down can come up. And I think
that one of the first things that I want people
to understand is that empathy is under our control more
than we realize. There are specific strategies each of us
(20:05):
can use today to increase our empathy, and not just
in a parochial w where we extend kindness only to
the people who are like us. The science says we
can turn up compassion to fight the dangerous intergroup empathy
gaps that plague our culture, and that we may even
be able to use some of these strategies to start
reducing the biggest and most painful divides in society. We'll
(20:25):
examine all these exciting possibilities when the Happiness lab returns
in a moment. It turns out that, in fact, empathy
is like a skill, and there are lots of things
(20:46):
that we can do to cultivate empathy in ourselves and others.
When Jamil taught his Becoming Kinder class, he gave his
students a super hard assignment, an empathy challenge he christened
disagreeing Better, Oh and welcome back everybody. You can check
out a version on his website. Find someone with whom
you have an ideological difference of opinion. But then, instead
of yelling at each other, or judging each other or
(21:07):
even debating, I want you to try to cultivate curiosity
about each other. Ask this person how they came to
have their opinion in the first place, and share with
them the story of how you came to have your
opinion in the first place. Students embarked on hard conversations
with racist Facebook posting uncles and frank discussions about sexuality
(21:29):
with their less than progressive parents. They predicted that these
exchanges would end in frustration or even tears, but in
nearly all cases those stories sharing conversations went better than expecting.
When you start with narratives, instead of either calling people
out or saying how wrong they are, you get to
(21:49):
a new type of discussion right away, one in which
it actually doesn't matter as much if you would agree
on every point. But something just as important, or maybe
even more important, happens, which is that they grow to
appreciate that people they disagree with are not necessarily bad people.
(22:11):
There's just people with different stories than their own. No
one owes anyone empathy, especially if they're expressing bigoted viewpoints.
But Jamil says his students were still surprisingly grateful for
having been given the challenge, because it taught them that
making connections across seemingly unbridgable divides is actually possible. But
you might be saying this is just an anecdote from
(22:33):
one college class of students talking to their family members.
Is there scientific evidence that sharing stories and empathic work
like this really does the job? Can connecting over shared
experiences actually reduce the inner group disconnection we see all
over the world. Did you vote to allow gay and
(22:54):
lesbian couples to continue to marry or did you vote
to a banned gay and lesbian couples from being able
to marry. Typical political canvassing involves knocking on someone's door
and launching into a one way conversation filled with facts, figures,
and strong arguments. This style of canvassing doesn't really work,
especially when the usual political partisanship tightens its gript. My
(23:17):
name's Josh Kala. I'm an assistant professor of political science
and data science at Yale University. People just tune it out.
They won't engage, they won't pay attention, or they'll argue
against it. Most people are just such consistently democrat, are
such consistently Republican, there's often not much room to to
change someone's mind there. But Josh and his colleagues have
begun studying the effectiveness of a new kind of canvassing,
(23:40):
one that can break down our inner group blinders, and
one that also employs a lot of the same empathic
practices that Jamie and his students used in that disagreeing
better assignment. Deep canvassing is a longer form of canvassing
that really involves sharing personal narratives about an issue. It
often involves a canvasser sharing a moment in their life
(24:02):
that is somehow relevant to the issue that's being studied.
I'm a gay guy. I doubt that totally shocks you,
and I was in a relationship for eighteen years. Often
those stories then prompt the voter to share their own
story when my wife died or whatever, it broke my heart. Well, no,
it didn't break my art. Put a hole in it
(24:23):
and it won't be a lot. Yeah, it sounds like
marriage is incredibly important to you. I was married forty
seven years, so she'd press you. But what we find
is that by talking through these stories, the type of
discrimination that we're trying to reduce becomes much more concrete,
and it also reduces a lot of fears that the
voter has towards that out group. It helps them understand
(24:46):
what does this word transgender actually mean? Or what does
this word undocumented immigrant actually mean? By walking through the
life of an undocumented immigrant or a transgender person through
hearing their story, hearing the canvasser's stories tends to shut
off the indifference we typically feel for people outside our tribe.
Deep canvassing also forces the listener to see people from
(25:06):
unfamiliar groups and with unfamiliar views as people and that
empathic boost allows deep canvassers to do something that billions
of dollars of political ads can't. They actually change people's
minds about controversial political issues. You know this issue is
going to come up for a vote again in the future,
(25:26):
vote in favor of allowing gay and muspian couples to
marry good. Josh's careful field research has found that deep
canvassing gets about five to seven new supporters for every
hundred people they talk to. Now that might not sound
like much, but for ballot measures that are typically one
are lost by less than five percentage points, deep canvassing
can make or break the adoption of a progressive new law.
(25:49):
But what's most impressive about Josh's deep canvassing findings is
that these persuasion effects last a long long time. Well,
keep doing those follow up surveys two, three, four or
five months later, and typically we run out of money
to run more surveys before the effects dissidate. But aside
from the policy tis, Josh has also seen how powerful
(26:11):
deep canvassing can be and empathically connecting people from different identities.
One of his favorite examples comes from an encounter in Florida,
during a campaign for trans rights. He was a transgender canvasser,
and he shows up to a house that has a
big American flag and a pickup truck, and he's really
bracing himself for what he expects to be a really
(26:33):
difficult conversation. The canvas shared his story anyway, He described
the kinds of prejudice and misunderstanding he faces on a
near daily basis. He even shared a story about being
made fun of and called an animal on the New
York subway. After sharing this story of personal discrimination, he
asked the person he's canvas, saying, this white, macho pickup
(26:55):
truck drive in American flag, guy, have you ever faced
anything like that? The guy he's canvassing really pauses for
a minute and says, the experiences that you face, a
discrimination that you face, and people's lack of empathy and understanding,
it's it's not that different than the experiences that I face.
I served in Afghanistan. I did two tours there. I
came back and I had PTSD. People would look at
(27:17):
me like I was crazy and they wouldn't understand what
was going on. And what I love about that story
is it just questioned so many of the assumptions that
we all make, and shows that again, if we're patient,
if we question those assumptions, if we're vulnerable and try
and listen and share our share our experiences, we can
be successful at changing minds. Jamil is a huge fan
(27:38):
of Josh's deep canvassing work because it provides a wonderful
example of the central claim in his War for Kindness book,
the empathy is a skill we can build over time,
a tool we can use to do some amazing things
if and when we have the bandwidth to use it.
I think our culture right now includes a lot of
threat at home, online, outside. We're constantly feel as though
(28:03):
there are people who threaten our identity, who threaten our
way of life, who threatened our beliefs, and I'm not
going to say that that's untrue. And although it's easy
and natural to engage in I guess what you'd call
call out culture right so just sort of attacking people
who have toxic or problematic attitudes. I think the hard
(28:29):
but often very productive thing to do is to be
the person who takes that first step, who puts their
guard down and decides to be vulnerable. And Jamille himself
recognizes just how hard that first step can be. It
can be really exhausting to try to empathize with people
who are different from us, especially if they have opinions
(28:51):
that we might fear or ab or now. I try
really hard to be an understanding person, and I truly
believe in the importance of Jamie's battle for kindness. But
almost every day I see some view online that makes
me see red. When people seem to be so hateful,
it's really really hard for me to see them is
deserving of my compassion or my emotional energy. I was
(29:15):
surprised that the guy who literally wrote the book on
empathy got exactly what I was saying. Trust me, I
feel that way all the time. I still remember where
the New York Times had this whole, very sympathetic portrayal
of a family in Illinois that happened to be Nazis,
and I remember a detail where they were trying to
humanize this family by talking about how they cooked their pasta,
(29:35):
and I just remember thinking, I don't want to hear
about your Nazi pasta. You know, I don't want to
humanize you. It's exhausting to connect, and it's especially exhausting
to connect with people who say things that are awful
and that don't really deserve a platform. So I think
it's perfectly okay for people to think about what they
(29:58):
have the energy for, what they have the space for,
and no one should feel like they're obligated to connect
with or empathize with somebody who's saying off things. Now,
no one has to do this, it's not anybody's job.
But when we do, it's remarkable how powerful that can be,
(30:20):
because sometimes what you realize is that people on the
other side are also waiting for a chance to be human.
Despite the uphill battle, Jamil is optimistic that his war
for kindness is gaining new recruits. I've received hundreds of
emails that are something along the lines of I am
(30:40):
so fed up with this culture of division. I want
more empathy in the world. But I'm the only one,
and I'm almost like, can I put you all in
a group chat or something? Is there like so many
of you and I think we often feel alone, like
we are the only ones swimming upstream against a culture
of hatred and division and isolation. But I think it's
(31:05):
really shocking how powerful it can be to take the
first step to be that change instead of waiting for it,
because when we take a step towards listening to others,
towards being vulnerable with them, oftentimes we find that they're
ready to do the same thing. And I think that
each one of us does that, that can change our lives,
(31:26):
and it can change the lives of people around us,
maybe even save lives. The thing that really inspires me
is what could happen if a lot of us did that,
if most of us did that, because then we wouldn't
be changing lives when at a time we'd have the
chance to actually change our entire culture. I try to
be an optimistic person, but right now, in twenty twenty,
(31:49):
the idea that our entire culture will change for the
better seems a pretty distant hope. So much about how
our institutions work seems to be wrong, and the flaws
in these systems lead to prejudice, cruelty, and injustice, and
lots of people don't seem to realize that the burden
of all these awful things continues to hurt some marginalized
groups more than others. Seeing all this makes me really
(32:11):
sad and angry at the groups I feel are responsible.
I hate the injustice. I hate the divisions, and I
hate the heat. Even on my best days, it's hard
not to lose hope that I personally can make any
difference in these historic problems. But I don't want to
just retreat to my end group, and I don't want
to empathize with only people who are exactly like me,
(32:32):
nor gload at the pain and misfortune of those who
hold different views or who've lived different lives. So I'm
now committing to trying to follow Jamille's advice. I'm going
to remember that the science shows my intuitions are wrong,
that if I try to take the first step and
put my guard down, at least in those cases where
I have the emotional bandwidth to do so, it might
be more effective than I think. Rather than only seeing
(32:55):
someone as a member of an identity I disagree with,
I'll try to connect a bit better. I'll ask people
to share their stories, and if they'll listen, I'll share
my own. But like Jamille, I also want to make
sure that all this empathic labor is a bit more
evenly distributed, that the hard work of deep connection doesn't
just fall to historically marginalized groups who've long been on
(33:17):
the receiving side of all the injustice, These are the
folks who are least likely to have the needed emotional
bandwidth to make connections. I also want to make sure
that we're distributing the work of correcting these injustices a
little more fairly, and that the blind spots of our
mind don't prevent well intentioned people like me from inadvertently
making all those structural inequalities worse. And so when The
(33:40):
Happiness Lab returns next time, we'll tackle all these issues directly.
In our next episode, How to Be a Better Ally,
We'll hear what the science says about how you can
fight the structures that lead to some of society's worst injustices,
and how the lives of our mind sometimes cause good
people to unknowingly make things worse. We'll also see that
using evidence based strategies for becoming a better ally can
(34:03):
not only boost your own personal well being, but more importantly,
can make us more effective and contribute positively to the
causes we care about most. And so I hope you'll
return next week to hear the final season two episode
of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The
(34:28):
Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped
with production. Joseph Fridman checked our facts and our editing
was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon. Special thanks to Mel LaBelle,
Carl mcgliori, Heather Fain, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kani,
(34:51):
Jacob Weisberg and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
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