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[Enda:] Welcome to Futures Conversations, the Edinburgh Futures Institute podcast that showcases all the wonderful research taking place at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Research at the Futures Institute is challenge-led and interdisciplinary addressing many of the greatest challenges we face in the world today. I'm your host, Enda Delaney, the Director of Research at the Futures Institute. [Electronic beat] [Enda:] In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Liaura Cram.
Laura is Professor of Neuropolitics and Director of Neuropolitics Research Lab at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Laura, could you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, who inspired you, what values were important to your family and social group?- [Laura:] Yeah, sure. So, I actually was born in Edinburgh. And, I did go to school just down the road from here. So I went to Tollcross Primary for a while and then across to Gillespie’s.
And for me, in some ways, it's not at all surprising that I would end up somewhere in education. Education has always played a really, really important role in my background. I had a very, very challenging early childhood. And my mum basically ran away with us as three children. And we came to Edinburgh, lived in a one bedroom flat with my granny and granddad in Leith, and was there having to find a way to look after and bring up her children in this new environment.
She had taken her Highers and could have gone to university, but had- they had now expired, so that that was an issue. But one positive thing that I always took, even from the very earliest part, from the time we did live with my father, who I don't have a relationship with, was there were always books in the house, there were always encyclopedias in the house that were always pointed to. And for my dad, his aspiration to get out of what had been a very difficult childhood for him was education.
And his belief for me as the oldest child was always, “you’ll go to university, you will be one of those things” and those things sort of, I think, stick with you. When we moved to Edinburgh, my mum re-did her Highers, while she was taking like a typing course to just feed us, and then went back and trained as a teacher. So education always, always was part of us. There was always somebody studying at a table late at night.
Over the years, my grandmother, who obviously her life would have gone into disarray, having all these kids come and live in her house [laughs] Then she trained. She was a civil servant by day, but she trained as a yoga teacher. And also always, always was at night school. So she was always up at Edinburgh University actually doing things like Indian philosophy courses. And so, yeah, for me, the notion of education was always, it was about aspiration and escape.
It was about, erm, a way of survival and feeding people. But it's also always been about a way of life, curiosity, learning, expanding your horizons. So, like my granny in the sort of early 80s went off to study in India to- to progress her yoga studies. And that was really unusual for a woman of those generations. So I've always been really surrounded by people who saw education and learning as critical, but also who really went for the sort of curious and unusual.
And I think that that probably is reflected in where I've ended up. And although I did well at school, I was always one of these people who kind of, I did well but I was always looking for something a bit more exciting or, where the next thing was. And at 17, obviously being Scottish, I could do my Highers in my fifth year. So I had done enough Highers to know that I could get to university and, but I just, I didn't want to, to stay on at school. I'd really outgrown it.
But I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to go to university. So I went and worked in the Bank of Scotland in Saint Andrew Square. And I began even doing my banking exams there. But it didn't take me very long to realise that wasn't the job for me. And even during that year- and now when I look back, I think that's quite unusual. Like I was 17, but I went and did modern Greek classes at night school at Edinburgh University.
So my very first learning experience at Edinburgh was in the Appleton Tower doing modern Greek as a- as a night class. Then I went off and worked in Greece, and at that point I decided I would apply to university, completely pivoted and I applied to do Modern Greek and Political Science. I wanted to do Modern Greek. I loved living in Greece. And, at the time, you could only do Modern Greek at Oxford, Cambridge, London Kings, and Birmingham, but the others would only let you do it with classics.
So I went to Birmingham. I studied in Thessalonica for a year and then worked on an EU project up in the mountains, in a village in Crete, where a letter came through the door. In those days you still got letters, that said, we're starting this brand new master's degree. It was from Bath University and it was run with 5 or 6 other European countries. So with Tilburg in the Netherlands, with the University of Crete.
What the cohort did was they came from all different countries in the EU and we traveled together. We did three months in Maynooth, three months in Tilburg and then three months at your home university. So that very much cemented- so that was my European Social Policy Analysis. And that's how I then came to be studying, European Public Policy for my PhD- [Enda:] Because your earlier work was on sort of European politics.
And I can understand now listening to your biography- [Laura:] [Laughs]- [Enda:] But could you tell us a little bit about what drove you into that sort of set of interests?- [Laura:] Yeah. So I was- so it was European Social Policy Analysis was what I was studying. So, my dissertation was on, the development of European Union social policy. In those days, again, things were really different. So like as an undergraduate, I had a full grant.
And when I did my master's degree, I had, an ESRC grant for masters you could apply for, for one year. And then I was applying, for PhD funding. And I decided that I would continue the study in the area of European Union Social Policy. And I was really privileged to have Rudolf Klein as my supervisor. And he was a- he was a really great person for me at that time because not only was he really good at saying to me “Laura, I don't think you're an ideologue.
I think you need to question some of these things that you’re doing.” He also really, offered me opportunities. I went very early on in my- I think my first three months of the PhD, I went off and gave a paper in Italy, with some really, senior people like Jean Blondel, and Giandomenico Majone. And that really changed my career because it meant I had connections and people who then could vouch for me.
But I didn't show any great loyalty, because just about six months after starting my PhD, a job came up at Warwick University with Jeremy Richardson, and he was starting the European Public Policy Institute. And for me, it was just one of those things where you look at it and go, that's got my name all over it. This is what I'm interested in. And yeah, so I took that job as a as a research assistant at Warwick, so I never really was a PhD student.
I always worked full time, while I was completing my PhD. And I think about a year into that post, I got a lectureship at Warwick, and then about a year later I moved to Strathclyde, all as European Politics- [Enda:] The field of Neuropolitics that you've been a pioneer in, I’m fascinated by, but can you explain it for our listeners?
How would you sum up the field?- [Laura:] Over the years working on European Public Policy, I became really interested in the way that the creation of a policy in an international organisation might shape the way that the public saw that organisation. And so that that developed into a question about how we come to identify with different levels of government, whether we're prepared to shift our identities, what are the factors that, erm, help to- to explain that.
And at the time, when I was at Strathclyde, I had a lovely colleague: Stratos Patrikios, who was working in Political Psychology and experiments, and it was quite unusual, really hard to get published experiments then [laughs] but we started then saying, well, you know what if we had a look at how these symbols affect people and there'd been terrific research, erm, in psychology, political psychology, looking at the effect of things like flags.
And so we worked on that in- in the European Union. And then when I came to Edinburgh, I cheekily asked the principal, who was then Tim O’Shea, if they would give me time, because I really had this hunch that the ways we were trying to get at it weren't sufficient to fully understand the mechanisms that were underlying these processes. And I felt that there were insights from cognitive neuroscience that would help us to explain that.
But I knew that I wouldn't have much credibility if I came in with no training. And so he, erm, agreed, that I could have half of my time when I first moved to Edinburgh University to study Cognitive Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging, I kind of split the degrees between Brain Imaging Research Centres Master's degree and Psychology Master's degree here. And always knowing that would never give me enough to do the work myself.
But that would give me enough to know what I didn't know when I was talking to fabulous postdoctoral researchers and other researchers in this interdisciplinary field. You know, like all of these things, fields developed from lots of different angles at the same time. So at the same sort of, period, there were people like Darren Schreiber working in that area. There are fabulous colleagues in New York working, from a psychological perspective, looking at these questions.
And now there are- there are a growing number of centres our colleagues in- in London Center for Politics of Feelings. So there's a- you know, there's a whole body of people coming at this from, from different angles.
But I would say what everybody shares, whether we come as a- as neuroscientists, as political scientists or as psychologists, is, erm, an understanding that- that what's going on under the hood might help us to get better insights into some of the mechanisms and patterns that- that we've recognised in each of our fields.
So insights from political scientists might help the psychologists, some of the questions that they're looking at or the neuroscientists to, to, to target some of their investigations and insights from the, the cognitive neurosciences and political psychology could help us as political scientists to say, look, we've seen these patterns emerging. Why do they keep happening?
You know, what helps us maybe to- to identify some of the underlying mechanisms for some of the theories and practices that- that we observe.- [Enda:] Historically, it's about more sort of behavioural approaches. Looking, to use your phrase, under the hood. It seems to me, you know, a strikingly original way of doing- Did you meet resistance when you- erm, or was everyone, was embracing this sort of new way of thinking about how people acted?- [Laura:] Yeah, it's interesting, is interesting.
I think, it can go either way. I think either it can be quite appealing because it's quite blingy and something new.
And there's also another side where almost immediately where we're always, faced with the questions about ethics, erm, and it can, erm, that that's entirely correct and, and, and appropriate and, and it really does require very, very careful, ethical consideration, but also, it can sometimes come with a little bit of a fear factor because it can be a bit associated with, being used against people’s will.
So maybe I'll be a bit more like neutral marketing or capturing people when they don't know they're being seen. Insights like, which isn't the kind of research that we do, as with all things that come up for real, sort of cutting edge, it's remarkably hard to get through traditional peer reviewed journals, because that's hard to find somebody who has the expertise, who can comment on it.
And if you get people from one side, maybe more from the politics they often find, maybe there's too much neuro in the paper. If you get somebody from the cognitive neuroscience side, they'd be like, all would be expecting much more coverage of the- of the- the underlying story and the- the analysis here.
So I've kind of resigned myself now over the years that- that possibly my place is just to kind of take that tough turn and hopefully it's just a bit easier for the next set that come along behind you.- [Enda:] In many respects, an incredibly brave thing to do, retraining, exploring, you know a whole new area, which itself is developing very fast, obviously cognitive neuroscience, that there is an inherent risk in doing that- [Laura:] For sure.-
[Enda:] I'm sure you felt that at the time?- [Laura: For sure. But on the other side, I guess right from the very beginning where we said, you know, for me, education education is all about curiosity and pushing your boundaries and I think the best part of being an academic is the ability to reinvent yourself. For me, it was probably less brief than just a necessity. I don't think I could just keep going in the same route.
And I, I really admire people who can and you can find new angles on things that they are interested in. And can you tell us a little bit about the new your Politics research lab that you direct at the Futures Institute? What does the lab do on a daily basis? I mean, that's shaped very much on the daily basis, depending on what projects we're running on. And you know, how many postdocs we have at any given time.
We have people who are already based at Edinburgh University who've been with us for, about ten years. So Claire Llewellyn, who originally came from Informatics, but now is employed by Social and Political Sciences and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. So that's a quite an interesting, kind of process where actually institutionally, it begins to see the, the pattern of recruitment and we actually get genuinely interdisciplinary posts. And that that I think is, is an interesting outcome.
Robyn Hill, who is still based in informatics but has worked really closely with us. We work very, very closely with Adam Moura from psychology. So we've always worked across, the disciplines, and then we have postdocs.
At the moment we have cost associated suppliers Luke Stevens and Sarah Dale job, all with very different, backgrounds because we need those, different backgrounds looking at things like large language models, biometric testing and, large survey experiments and on a daily basis, you know, if you just come in, we have people either running experiments or analyzing experiments. They're all setting up this morning for a really nice journal club that one of our postdocs is organizing.
Because, again, what if I, if I had to summarize something about the lab is it's really about developing, a shared language. So what we recognize is, is that each of us comes from each of our disciplines, and we don't even use exactly the same terms for what are ostensibly the same things. And it's very easy for people to talk past each other. So what we consider sort of really praying for all of us is to have that communication environment. So we're probably quite unusual.
People are in the lab more than than maybe people often order as a postdoc. But part of that is to have that conversation between people so that if somebody is working maybe on something biometric, somebody else is working on something that's a survey experiment. They can actually see the crossovers and the links and advise each other on techniques and and ideas. We've done a number of, fMRI. So it's functional magnetic resonance image studies.
And we're really privileged here to have at Edinburgh University. Brain imaging, Edinburgh imaging. And they have the facilities out at the hospital, where we can do volunteer, research. And we've worked closely with different people as they are over the years. Obviously, fMRI for us is the the more expensive end of our life. So so we tend to we often talk about it like a tunnel, like a funnel, rather, where we start out wide. People like, like clear, might work on social computational analysis.
So maybe finding what mechanisms we think are at play and then bringing it down a little level, maybe doing a behavioral experiment, our survey experiment lab, to see if those mechanisms are the mechanisms that we think are happening. And then once we really come down to where we think something might be happening in the brain, then we might take it into an fMRI study.
We in terms of neurophysiological studies, though, we also do, use, an emotion suite, which is a biometric set of measures that lets us measure things like, heart rate, skin conductance, to look at eye tracking, and in fact, we have just got, an electroencephalography, set, which we haven't used yet, but we will soon. And that will allow us to do some of the actual brain imaging in lab before we maybe go out and spend more money on an MRI, for example.
In this case, we are looking at how your identity affects your perception of exclusion. So we'll look for something that's a very well normed, protocol. So there's something called the Cyber Bowl where it's almost like a bowl playing game. It's like a bowl playing game. And, you are either included or excluded, by a partner. And in the case of the experiment that we did, your partner, you know, their identity.
And so we will look at how you respond in your brain when you are included or excluded by a partner of a particular identity group, and then see if there are any differences. And on the, you know, the spoiler. That one is. Yes. That are that it that we tend to actually think of ourselves as more excluded by somebody who's not from our identity group.
And, and in this particular study, we found that their, their, percept of being included and excluded, were more similar between the control group and the other identity than they were with their own identity group. So they thought they were they were more excluded by the other identity group. But, we actually no, they were not. There was no difference in the exclusion because we set the exclusion rate.
So we know that objectively, it's the same, but our, our identities actually give us a different perception of that. What would you see as being the, the, the, you know, the takeaway for the, for the field of, of politics, from, from using cognitive neuroscience to help explain issues of identity and belonging. Yeah. So I think the first thing is always proceed with caution. Remember a lot of these, studies will we will be talking about a very,
very small sample size. We are just beginning to, chip away at some, some ideas, maybe give some alternative lenses. And I think that's really important. So, yeah, in terms of simply taking that away and thinking you can manipulate people, you up to be really, I probably wouldn't be as confident that you could could quite do that. However, I think it does help to, to give us some means in a really nicely triangulated environment, which we should all be doing is good scientists, obviously.
Well, perhaps it is a different understanding of what is the mechanism that has been driving something and a from for me that, that, that is, that is the really, important insight. And if it begins to help us to see, well, when you behave in this particular way as a politician voter, then these are the types of information processes that are taking place. Then it might help us to understand a little bit about why some things backfire or why some kind of intervention.
So for example, there's been a lot on our misinterpreted misinformation interventions and actually found there's been quite a lot of backlashes to those misinformation intervention. And sometimes understanding how that information has actually been processed and how identity and identity triggers can affect that, might help us to get a better understanding of how you could make a more effective and to misinformation intervention.
That's an interesting tongue twister that you've you've shifted this very nicely along to, I guess, the practical consequences or the practical findings, eg, Liberal democracies across the West are facing all sorts of challenges, whether it's the rise of far right or people feeling disenfranchized. Where would you see your politics addressing these existential issues? I guess for for liberal democracies?
Yeah, I think I mean, I think particularly the kind of work on, the identitarian approaches, the, the, the provoking acts. I'm about to give the Shapiro lecture on government and opposition. And so that's very high in my head. I'm going to give some spoilers on that. But but yeah, basically that question almost our positioning always of things in adversarial formats of government in opposition in itself, immediately puts six people up into two group scenarios.
And we know, from many, many studies that very often more effective policymaking takes place in quite a functional, quite a sort of law, politics environment. And what we haven't always known are what other mechanisms that explain why that works. One of the key issues, I think democracy is faces is trust. And I'm wondering, can you read politics to tell us about trust in political systems? Have political parties, political leaders, around the world? Is this an area?
Yeah. I mean, again, I mean, one of the, the, the studies that we did a couple of years ago was looking at trust in information, and the way that we process trusted and, and non trusted information in the brain, whether that makes us feel more positive or more negative about the information that we're achieving. And again, we were looking very much at how identity, fits into those processes. So I think in that very, similar vein, again, you're talking about small sample studies.
You're just beginning to maybe shine a light on some of the mechanisms. But what you're also seeing is across the studies of social and effective neuroscience and of cognitive neuroscience, you're seeing multiple studies across all these wonderful labs. There's talk about a many, many more. And as you get more and more of them, you have more meta analyzes possible.
And then these small studies aren't just small studies on their own, but you're beginning to get, wonderful, banks of information that highlight which parts of the brain seem to be associated with particular activities. And the more we see these as a source of metastases and then the more useful it becomes.
So yeah, I think everything that you're doing is just a little drop towards it, but I often think of it as a bit more, like maybe being a chemist, you know, if you, if you drop one, or two drops of solution into something and it doesn't work, you're not necessarily going to throw the whole experiment out. It might be 93, or it might be if you did one and a half and I think that that's some of what you have to look at. You're looking at around very, very much a moving target.
You know, our understanding of the brain is developing every day, our understanding of the analytical models and, and simply the software to use to analyze the brain is changing and updating all the time as people learn about it. So it may be very well that you did a perfectly, appropriate and well managed study from the five, ten years ago. But then really now the results wouldn't stand up because our understandings of to.
So yeah, also have to accept that and acknowledge that one thing that's changed over the last 30 years or so is social media and the use of social media particularly, and monitoring and expressing political views. How do you see the relationship between what people say online, what people do online, the whole notion of echo chambers, that people are basically ending up talking to people that they largely agree with, rather than people that they might have disagreement.
How is social media changed the way in which, neuro, sense of the the political world around us, develops? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great studies on that in our lab. And Claire Llewellyn is really a social media expert. Of course, it's a really challenging environment to work in just now, Twitter ex was, an amazing resource for academics and the limitations on on that.
I've changed a lot of, of the ability to do longitudinal studies, which I think are particularly interesting in that, field.
But, one thing I think that remains and, and I really do hope we get, we get back that ability to use that range of, of, social media sources is I think it's very interesting to observe, spontaneous conversation from people rather than sort of top down questions that we might offer in surveys and, and know there is fabulous research done on the way in which things that carry like moral outrage, move, at a different, rate around, the world.
So, I, I think we have to look at it in a number of ways. I think there are some challenges, to the notion of the echo chamber. In the sense that, you know, if you remember, when we all just used to buy our one newspaper, we were very much in our equity. We only read, you know, if you were a Guardian reader, you were definitely not a telegraph reader and never the twain. So in fact, you probably do get exposed to more things.
And again, there's been quite a lot of studies on that Christian faculty here, does a lot of work on, the social media and, ecosystem as well. But, we may be a bit more exposed, a bit more than we think in that ecosystem. Could you tell us a little bit about the work that you've done? The, the sort of neuro politics of the politics of identity, for want of a better phrase?
Yeah. So, that really, so, for example, the story that I told you about the PSI football experiment is, is one of the parts of these stories. And I guess the starting point for that is really, an understanding that whether or not and there are that are disputed positions on this. So whether or not we basically, are born social on the spot, alien man's political animal, or whether we become social people like Catalina for tapas to talk about, how we become social through our early nurturing.
But one way or another, as human beings, we don't survive without others, and certainly not in our, our early lives.
So I think, one of the things that I find most compelling when you come back to the study of identity from a neuro political perspective, is I came to it because I found that there were it was a bit like ships that pass in the night when you talked about European identity, the beside the those who thought it was highly rational and it was in the cost benefit, and I would identify with you or I wouldn't and there were others who thought it was a much more emotional,
sentimental attachment and actually, what I think you get out of the kind of political approach is that it's very rational to be social and that these, these, shape one another. And when you start to understand that that's really that is a real shifting point. So it's not either rational cost benefit analysis or affective emotional social. How we rationalize is affected by our emotional, physiological and the context and environment around us shape our physiological and our emotional responses.
And that affects our ability to make rational decisions and to to perform executive function. So I find actually that understanding of the feedback and the interaction between the two is probably the biggest contribution that. Have you had much interest from political parties, think tanks, what you might call the sort of mechanisms of of the political system in the in the work you do. I could see why why they might be interested in it.
Yeah. I mean, we've talked to various people, not sure so much political parties. All I can see why they might be interested. We have worked a lot with, different institutions. So, for example, part of the, the European Commission's Joint Research Council, did a study on understanding our political nature and how that might help them to inform their policymakers. And, they had, people from a variety of different, different disciplines. I was part of the neuroscience group there.
Stefano Palminteri led that, and my psychiatrist was part of it. Lou Safra runs, and really, again, a really nice example of people putting together these different understandings from different disciplines and bringing to the question of how might an EU policymaker actually make better policy if they understood some of this? And that was a really interesting project to be part of. We're here at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
What sort of future do you envisage, given your expertise and the wonderful work that you've told us about? Yeah, I mean, it's hard, you know, when times when resources are constrained and generally and, and and times are hard, we know that that can make it, difficult for people to, look for a road to look up optimistically.
My hope, my sincere hope is that our, our focus comes on how we can do better, how we can, use the knowledge that we have about the way that brain, mind and body interact with one another to understand better how the policies that we make impact on people, and how that in turn affects how they behave as political citizens. And I think sometimes we lose that connection.
So often you'll hear people walking around just nice, and all this is broken and that is broken and that that brings a lot of despair. But it also often brings with it, a lot of sense of impotence, lack of efficacy and an inability to fix things. And, my hope for future research is that we actually start right there. How do we make people feel more efficacious? More like their contribution in the system can make a difference.
Make it so that, when, a system needs fixing, they feel like they might have a voice in the fixing, and that they are, the policies that affect them. They're not just passive recipients of these policies, but that they actually have a role to play. Well, thank you very much for for taking the time to tell us about your own fascinating work. The work of the newer Politics Research Lab at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Oh, thanks very much for having me.