Why will your brain gladly flip a switch to save five lives at the cost of one life, but it will refuse to push one person off a bridge to accomplish the same thing. Why do Buddhist monks and psychopaths and patients like Phineas gage behave differently than you might? And what happens when ancient moral instincts collide with modern problems like pandemics and AI alignment and political tribalism. Could
a simple online game reduce polarization? And could you contribute to charities more effectively if you understood how your moral brain works. This week on Inner Cosmos, my colleague Joshua Green helps us open the hood on human morality and asks whether we can build technologies that steer us towards cooperation in a world our brains weren't built for. Welcome
to Intercosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we see the world, and, for that matter, how we see each other.
When you peer.
Into the human brain, you find a machine built on conflict on the one hand, it's exquisitely tuned to the immediacy of social life, reading faces, sensing fairness, feeling indignation when someone breaks the rules, feeling compassion when someone needs help. These emotional circuits evolved to help the oldest problem of group living, to bind us together, to keep our small bands cohesive, to punish the cheaters, to reward the cooperators.
These systems are fast and automatic and deeply intuitive, and at the same time housed in the very same skullp we have slower, more deliberative systems. This is the circuitry that lets us step back, cool off, calculate, imagine alternative futures. It allows us to override that first impulse and to ask what actually leads to the best outcome, what matters
the most in this situation. Our brains can operate in both of these modes, and most of the time we toggle between the two without even noticing.
And as we'll see.
Today, our moral lives exist in a strange dance between instinct and reflection. The strange part is that evolution never anticipated that we would one day wield these moral instincts on a planetary scale. Our emotional machinery was designed for life in small groups of hunter gatherers, not a world of eight billion people with global pandemics and climate changed and polarized democracies. But we bring the same ancient intuitions to all of it. We still divide the world into
us and them. We still experience harm differently depending on whether it's direct or indirect. We still recoil from active wrongdoing far more than passive neglect. Sometimes these instincts guide
us well, other times they mislead us. If you want to understand the tensions at the heart of modern ethical life, from trolley problems, which we'll talk about in a second, to end of life decisions, from pandemic policy to political tribalism, we have to understand how this dual process, this moral brain, actually works. We have to understand why we help, why we punish, and why certain dilemmas feel difficult even when the math is simple. So this is why I called
my colleague Joshua Green today. Josh is at Harvard where he's a psychologist and a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and his lab studies how we make moral judgments, how our fast gut reactions and our slow reasoning systems work together and sometimes work against each other.
He's the author of.
A book called Moral Tribes, where he argues that our everyday moral sense works beautifully within groups, but can fail spectacularly between groups. And I want to mention that Josh has been working lately on going beyond describing the machinery. He's begun building tools what he calls moral technologies to help societies navigate around our blind spot. So well, here about tools which help people donate in more impactful ways, or online games that measurably reduce political animosity.
In other words, how.
Can we actually engineer cooperation rather than just hope for it. So today we're going to zoom into the moral mind, where emotions meet reason, where tribes collide, and where ancient circuitry tries to steer a modern world.
So let's dive in.
So, Josh, when you look at the sense of morality that our brains generate, what is that for? What problem was evolution trying to solve there?
So morality is kind of a mystery from an evolutionary point of view, because if you think about evolution in the most straightforward terms, you would think that the greediest, brawniest individuals would be the ones who get the most resources and are able to produce the most offspring. And
why would anyone ever be nice to anybody else? And this is something that really bothered Darwin right from from the beginning, and people even said to him, Look, how could you possibly explain any kind of human goodness if nature is red in tooth and claws, as Tennyson famously said about Darwin's theory. And he thought about this and his answer was one that turned out to be very precient.
So he recognized that while individuals may benefit from being ruthless and nasty, teams of individuals, groups of individuals can benefit from being more cooperative within the group. Right, if you're a member of a group where you know, if you fall in the river tough luck, then that group may not survive very well, even if the individual who carried on hunting instead of rescuing you does a little
bit better. And so the idea that we depend on each other, that teamwork is a powerful weapon for you know, fighting against the elements but also out competing other groups. That idea emerged early on, early on, along with the idea that individuals who are genetically related uh can can benefit their their genes indirectly by by by helping others.
So that's the sort of idea.
At a strategic biological level, why would anyone ever look out for anybody else? And then on a psychological level, the question is how does this work? And it mostly works at the level of what we might call social emotions. That is, you, you know, if if someone's in trouble, you have a sense of vicarious distress and you're motivated
to help them. Or if someone's not being a good cooperative member of the group, you might be angry at them and might want to punish them or let other people know what a jerk that guy is is being. So it kind of operates on on on two levels, uh the level of surviving through cooperation, and I think of morality as a suite of psychological mechanisms that enable
us to be more effective cooperators. And then this is implemented largely emotionally, but we can also use our reasoning capacities to figure out how to make our way in the moral and social world. And it's that duality that gives rise to some of the most interesting dilemmas that we've studied.
And you've used the analogy of a camera when it comes to that duality, can you unpack that for us?
So, at least the old sort of digital SLR camera that I have, you know, have these little automatic settings like portrait mode and landscape mode, and if you want to take a picture of a mountain from a mile away, then you know, you put it in landscape mode and it does everything and configures it in that kind of, you know, familiar situation that the manufacturers of the camera anticipated.
But let's say you know you're an artist and you've got your idea about exactly the sort of off kilter shot that you want with the light just so and trying to get a certain weird effect. Then you want to put the camera in manual mode and adjust the f stop and everything yourself to take advantage of your understanding the situation and your understanding of your goals and
get exactly the shot that you want. And you can think of intuition and including emotional intuitions as like those automatic settings, where this is a sort of ready made response for this kind of situation, and it can be something that we have acquired biologically speaking, that we automatically dislike certain smells or some people argue that we or other species have an automatic fear of snakes that might
be poisonous and things like that. But a lot of it is stuff that we have learned, essentially, habits that we have acquired. But whether it comes from our individual experience or things we've learned culturally, or if it's part of our genetic endowment, it's all in the form of ready made, quick responses to situations that are either familiar in our biological history, our cultural history, or our personal history.
And then on the other side, we've got our reasoning abilities, where we can look at the situation and say, Okay, normally I don't like to jump out of buildings, but if the building's on fire, maybe that's something I've got to do in this case.
So, with this dual process nature, you've got fast gut reactions, you've got slower, more controlled reasoning. So how does this play out in the domain of morality.
You can see this tension between kind of the automatic response and the more detached reason response in moral dilemmas that are sometimes.
Called trolley problems.
Right, So in the classic pair of cases, you've got a trolley that is headed towards five people, and the only way that you can save them is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto another track. But unfortunately there's another person there. And the question is can you hit the switch to avoid having the five get killed? And there most people say yes, that's okay.
But from a cognitive science point of view, the most interesting thing is the contrast between that case where you're hitting a switch and turning the trolley away from five but onto one, and the classic footbridge case. So this is where the trolley is again headed towards five people. This time you are on a footbridge over the tracks, and the only way you can say to those five
people is to do something that's pretty uncomfortable. There's a guy next to you wearing a big backpack, and you can throw the guy with the big backpack onto the tracks and then he'll be a trolley stopper and stop the trolley from killing the five people. But that person will be killed, and you can't jump yourself because you're
not wearing the big backpack, so this wouldn't work. And we're going to suspend disbelief and assume that you have good aim and all of that stuff, and even with all of those somewhat unrealistic assumptions in place, most people say that it's wrong to push the guy off the footbridge, or they at least feel a lot more uncomfortable about it.
And so the nice thing about these cases is in some sense they're very similar death by trolley, five lives versus one, and yet we give very different responses to them. And this was the thing that kind of got me into cognitive neuroscience, you know, many years ago, twenty years ago or whatever it was when you and I first met and started looking at this with brain imaging.
So give us the punchline of why people are happy to flip the switch in the first case and they are not in the second case, and what your brain imaging studies revealed there.
Yeah, so that the short answer seems to be that we have a kind of negative emotional response to the thought of pushing the guy off the footbridge that we don't have in response to hitting the switch in that case.
And why and.
Then right, And so we can answer that question on sort of two levels. What's going on in the dilemma that makes us feel differently, and then what's going on in our brains that is the basis for having that differential response. So in terms of what's going on on in the dilemma, there are three things that really seem to be driving the effect, although there are other things you could vary as well. But the difference is between
the switch case and the footbridge case. And these were nicely identified, and since we're fined by people like my colleague Fiery Cushman.
So one is that.
Well, actually, one thing that's just in the background is that harm is much more salient when it's active rather than passive, and that's true in both of these cases. The two things that really differentiate these cases are one the harm is more direct when you're pushing the guy off the footbridge, so we call this personal force. This is, you know, if you're pushing with your hands or pushing even with a stick, that feels worse than if you're
hitting a switch. Even if you're hitting a switch, that would drop the guy through the trap door.
Or something like that.
So it's just like the footbridge case, we see a big difference there. That difference interacts with something else which is a bit more subtle. It has a longer philosophic history, and this is the difference between harming somebody purposefully.
Or as a side effect.
So the idea is that in the switch case, what you're doing is you're turning the trolley away from the five people, and as a side effect, you end up running over the one person.
But that one person is not part of your plan.
If they were to magically disappear, that would be great, Whereas in the footbridge case, you are using that person as a trolley stopper, right. And it's that combination of harming somebody in this purposeful way, using them as a means, and doing it in this direct personal way. And then in the background, is this the fact that it's active. Those things combine to really give us our sense of
like what is a violent action. If you remove any of those three things, it doesn't have that sense of sort of immediate violence, like touching somebody in the face. So that's sort of the trigger in terms of like the features of the dilemma, the differences that make the difference in terms of the situation.
Then you say, okay, so.
That combination of harming somebody in a way that's active, purposeful.
And direct, that gives us the sense of violence.
But what's going on in our heads and here I think the best evidence actually comes from cases where people have studied patients with brain damage, similar to the famous case of Phineas Gauge. So if you've taken intro psychology or have heard about it otherwise, you probably know about this case. So this was a railroad form and living in Vermont in the nineteenth century, working on the railroad
all the livelong day. And there was a terrible explosion and an iron spike, a tamping iron was blasted out of essentially a cannon, and it went into Phineas Gage's eye socket, through the front of his brain, and out the top of his head. And amazingly he survived once the wound was treated. But when he survived, he didn't survive intact. He his reasoning abilities, what you might loosely
call his sort of cognitive abilities, remain intact. He could speak, he could do math problems, he could do basic reasoning.
But his personality, his character, his values, and his decision making abilities, those things seem to be compromised, and he ended up going from being this upstanding, you know, a respected railroad officer who people looked or looked looked up to, to a kind of lawless Wanderer, and this was one of the first sort of clear indications that there are distinct systems in the brain for that that that that that handle things like social emotional decision making, things that
you kind of have to do by feel, by judgment, rather than following some kind of formula or using some previously acquired skill like your skill for for for for language. After I did those initial brain imaging studies, a group at the University of Iowa, a group in in Italy also did a version of this where they tested patients with damage like Phineas Gage. And these are patients that you know Demasio kind of described as they know the words,
but they don't feel the music. They say things like I'm looking at this picture you're showing me of a gory car accident, and I know, before my brain tumor or whatever it was, this used to bother me, but now it just leaves me flat. So they don't have that feeling. They're kind of emotionally cold. And what you find with these people is that they're much more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge, right. And it's not just these two cases.
There are a lot of different dilemmas. You know, they don't necessarily involve literal trolleys and things like that, And this effect was huge.
You don't need statistics to analyze this.
You can just see it's like overwhelmingly, they're much more likely to make those judgments. We've also found or others have found that psychopaths are more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge. And again, the idea is that they can reason, but they don't have that emotional moral sense, that sense of horror or reluctance at directly harming somebody in this violent way.
But then something really interesting.
This is work that's unpublished, al though I'm pretty confident about it. I had a fantastic undergrad named Shin Sheng who's now long since graduated, who went to Tibet and tested Buddhist monks on the footbridge case. And she tested about fifty of them, and she found that eighty percent of the Buddhist monks approved of pushing the guy off the footbridge.
Now you might say why.
You know, when we ask people, what do you think Buddhist monks would say about this? And they said, definitely, they are not going to be like, you know, the Phineas gauged patients and the psychopaths and that, so what's that's really weird?
Right? And the idea is that you can reach with this.
Dual process approach where it's partly about how you feel and partly about how you think you could reach the same conclusion in different ways. So the Phineas gauge people with the emotion related brain damage and the psychopaths who don't have that emotional moral sense, they just don't have the feeling that says no.
Don't do that horrible violence. Right.
The Buddhist monks said, yeah, I feel that, and I sense that, but I have this more detached and expansive view, and I can see in a case like this, if it is really done with the noble intention of saving
more lives, then that can be acceptable. And many of them, I think five different monks cited this sutra, this Buddhist teaching about a ship captain who found himself in this situation where he could kill somebody to prevent a much greater harm, and he did that, and he did it thinking that it was going to be bad karma for him, but in fact he was reborn as a bodhisattva because he had this noble intention.
So, given what we know about this moral machinery, are there certain kinds of problems that we are systematically bad at?
Well?
You know, it's always controversial when it comes to efficult questions of you know what, what's the right answer and what's the wrong answer. But I think there are cases where we're we're bad when it comes to causing harm or or or And for example, when it.
Comes to physician assisted suicide.
Right, Let's say you have someone who has a terrible terminal illness. They have you know, at most they're going to live in another couple of months, but they're living right now in agonizing pain. Let's say this is someone whose bodies just riddled with cancer and they're just hanging on and you know, despite all the drugs you can give them, their their their their in miserable pain, and they just want to say goodbye and be done for a long time.
I don't know if this is still true.
The American Medical Association's position on this is no, you know, you can't end life.
Life is sacred, et cetera.
Right, Whereas in other countries like the Netherlands, for example, there are procedures and protocols and guardrails in place. But if you want to end your life, typically in cases where someone is has as a terminal illness and it is a great deal of pain and distress, you can do that, right, And you can think of this as a case where the greater good is on the side of letting this person and their life if that's what they want. They're experiencing nothing but misery, and everyone around
them is just watching them suffer. But there's this sense that, you know, ending this person's life actively is like pushing somebody off of footbridge, and that is just inherently wrong.
Our moral instincts evolved for life in small groups. What happens when you take a brain like this and you drop it into the twenty first century?
Right, So the way I think about it is as a kind of sequel to this famous.
Parable called the traad of the commons.
Right. So, the ecologist Garrett Harden had this famous paper in nineteen sixty eight, and he was writing about over population, which turned out to be not as big a concern as he thought it was. But he had this very nice story that sort of beautifully illustrates the challenge of life in a group. Right, So he imagined a bunch of herders living on a near a pasture, and each of them has their separate herds, and each of them says to themselves, well should I add more animals to
my herd? And they think, well, they're just grazing on this common pasture, so why not bigger herd, more money when I take my animals to market. So they all grow their herds, and they all grow and grow and grow, until at some point there are more animals on the pastor than it can support, No food enough for any of them, as they're scrambling to eat the last few shreds of grass, and they all die. And that's the
tragedy of the commons. And this is the classic problem of me versus us, where if everybody does the thing that's in their individuals interest, then everybody ends up being worse off or collectively worse off. And this is the basic problem that human morality is designed to solve. Right, So we have positive emotions and negative emotions that we apply to ourselves and that we apply to.
Others in order to motivate us to be good hurders.
Right, So if you're if if you're a good hurder, you have my gratitude. If you are a cheat and herder who secretly grows herd, then you know you have my anger and perhaps even my disgust. But if you're if you if you help me out, then you have my sympathy. And if I did something bad, I might feel guilty. So that sort of suite of feelings carrots and sticks that we can apply to ourselves and apply to others that have governs life on the new pasture.
But in the modern world, we've got many tribes, we've got many different groups, and there are different ways that that that a tribe can get along, right, So you could have a more end visualist tribe, let's say, where instead of having a common pasture, you just privatize the pasture and you divide it up into different plots and everybody cooperates by having good fences and respecting other people's property.
Rights and things like that.
Or you can solve the problem by having everybody just have a common pasture and a common herd, right, and then you don't have to worry about who's growing there private herds because there is no private herd. And then there are questions about how to organize life more generally. You know, are we going to have collective health insurance for our humans and our sheep? Or can you defend your sheep with an assault rifle? Or you know, who's allowed to be in charge? Can you be a transgender herder?
Or you know, and so on and so forth, right, And in my little sequel to Harden's parable, I imagine something like this. You have a bunch of different tribes that are living around this forest, and then one hot, dry summer, there's a fire and the forest burns down, and then the rains come and there's this lovely pasture in the middle. And all of the tribes look at this new pasture and they say, nice.
Pasture, and they all move in.
And the question is, what's going to happen when all of those tribes, with their different ways of life, with their different religious practices, with their different gender roles, with their different ideas about violence and peace, with their different ideas about individualism versus collectivism, etc.
What's it going to be?
Is it going to be a bloodbath where it's just a fight of all against all and the winning tribe emerges and imposes their tribal culture on everybody else, or is there going to be some kind of new way of organizing things that.
Deals with a modern culture.
Right, And this is I think exactly what's going on in the United States right now and what's going on in other countries, where one solution is essentially to say blood and soil. This country is for this particular tribe that got here first, that has historically been in charge. Let's say we are Whites, we are Christians, we have European heritage, we have certain ways of doing things and other ways that we don't do things, and.
This is what this country is really about now.
Of course, in reality that that tribe is not really a single tribe it itself is an amalgam of tribes. You know, the Germans and the Irish didn't always consider themselves the same people. But you know, at least there's something closer to a smaller culturally identified US, right. Or you can try to have a more modern, pluralistic country where you say, all right, there are many different tribes with many different cultures, and what we need is something
like what I call a metamorality. That is where a morality is a system that enables a group of otherwise selfish individuals to get along as a tribe. A metamorality is a moral system that enables a group of otherwise tribalistic tribes, where tribalism is essentially selfishness at the group level, right. A meta morality is something that enables a group of distinct tribes, different cultures, different different people of different backgrounds, maybe racist or religions, to.
Get along together in a modern context.
And I think that what we're figuring out right now in the US, in Europe, in India, in Brazil, in Israel, Gaza, is are we going? Is there going to be a big us? Are we going to live in a real sort of modern modern democracy where power is truly shared among groups with different histories and traditionally different moral ideals, Or does democracy only work when you have a sort of core dominant tribe and guests right as long as they're well behaved?
Right?
And I think that is the big political question that we're that we're facing.
Give us an example where our gut reaction sort of morality is exactly the wrong thing in a modern global context, large scale policy decisions, things involving climate or pandemics or risk of Ai.
Yeah, so I would say, you know, cultures can be more individualistic or collectivist, and I think you see this playing out in a lot of the issues that you mentioned.
Is ate the case of pandemics.
There's a real trade off there, right, that that that the pandemic restrictions really restricted people's individual freedom, restricted their individual economic freedom, their ability to make money. And in a country that doesn't have a strong social safety net, telling people that they who don't who can't work from home, that they're not allowed to work, I mean that's like, in some ways, like an economic prison sentence.
Right.
But at the same time, there was a real disease and we didn't really understand that, and people were dying.
And you know, and and and and.
More people interacting with each other would predictably lead to more death. And so there was a trade off between saying we have a collective problem and we all have to make sacrifices to solve it, or saying, well, there are trade offs here, and we're going to let individuals or or churches or businesses or cities and towns or whatever it is make their own decisions about how to
navigate the trade off between freedom and public health. Similar when it comes to climate change, right, I mean, it's partly, you know, a debate about the background evidence and whether or not it's real.
But I think behind.
That is a set of different orientations where some people are very skeptical of the idea that there is this global problem and we all have to change the way we live and make sacrifices in order to address it, versus people who they're going to set a very high bar for the evidence before they give up their individual freedom to you know, drive the kind of car they want to drive, or pay pay a gasoline tax, or vote for politicians who want to you know, change the
way we get our energy and make electricity prices possibly more higher, at least in the short term.
So, given everything that you've studied about the brain and moral decision making, if you were advising a government or some international body, what would you advise them about decision making?
So I think there are sort of two level here, right, I mean, Partly, you know, I'm person with my own values, and then there's sort of strategy. Whatever your values are. Now, my values tend to be for the big us that I am. I'm not a big fan of ethnic nationalism, and I would like to see us be a more
effective pluralistic democracy, right, that's my goal. But that's you know, if you're a true believer in a tribal way of life, you might just say, well, I oppose that, and I'm going to fight you every step of the.
Way whichever you choose.
But I'm now speaking from the perspective of sort of a big tent, big us kind of of person. I think the biggest lesson is you have to work. You
have to meet people where they are. You have to understand that people who have different feelings than you do, people who have different views about divisive moral issues, they don't have to be evil to come to a different conclusion from you, partly because they may just have different values, and partly because they have made different background assumptions either what they've heard from the people they trust about you know,
particular questions. You know, is climate change reel and things like that, or or or or you know that background values that come from their their their their upbringing, whether
it's you know, secular or religious. And so I think that you know, people on the left, especially often shoot themselves in the foot by being maximalist and by saying Anyone who doesn't meet all of these demands right now is evil and terrible and wants to you know, doesn't care about human rights, doesn't care about the people who's whose whose freedoms let's say, are are are are in question, and are just bad people who need to be defeated, right And I think that that approach it's very good
for winning votes within your subset, within your wing of the Democratic Party, or power in parallel, your right most wing of the Republican Party. But then you have a hard time bringing the larger US together and speaking to you the sixty seventy eighty percent who actually has a fair amount of agreement on policy and doesn't want either what the extreme right or the extreme left is offering.
So my general advice is to be pragmatic and strategic and be flexible enough to form the kind of coalition that can actually move things forward and not insist on total moral victory.
Now, excellent, Okay, So so far we've been talking about it's the complexities in the brain that lead to decision making in the moral domain. But I want to turn out to the fact that you've actually been building things to try to steer moral decision making in a better way. This is games, platforms interventions. Tell us about that.
Yeah, so thanks, this is something I'm really excited about, and I'm really excited that you're joining the Pods Fight Poverty program. I'll say more about that and what our goals are, but let me say a little bit about
the science behind how this got started on my end. So, one of the things that's most that are frustrating about the trolley dilemas, in a particular one like the footbridge dilemma, is that there is no satisfying solution that if you say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge, yes, you know you're saving five lives within the world of this scenario, but it's going to feel like a horrible act of violence, and you'd say, I wouldn't trust somebody
who's who would be willing to do that or at least feel comfortable doing that.
Right.
On the other hand, if you say no, you can't push the guy off the footbridge, well, then there are five times as many people dead as necessary, and that's pretty bad too, right, And I think that as long as our brains work the way we work, you can have an answer. But it's never going to be a completely satisfying answer. In other domains, you actually can find a satisfying answer. And in particular, what I have in
mind is the domain of charitable giving. So this begins with a kind of superpower that we have that most of us don't.
Realize that we have.
For those of us who you know, at the end of the year have an extra few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or even more than that, the amount of good that we can do is enormous, but it requires doing it strategically. When I first sort of learned about this, you know, I thought the difference between a really effective charity and a charity that's not very effective would be something like the difference between someone who's really
tall and someone who's not so tall. So a really tall person might be fifty percent taller than someone's who's pretty short. But in fact, the difference between the most effective charities and ordinary charities is more like the difference between redwood trees and little shrubs. You need one hundred times different or close to a thousand times different. So let me give you an example.
There is a.
Disease called trachoma that is not common in the US, but common in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa. And this is a disease that infects people's eyes and can cause people to go blind, not as common in the US.
In the US, people are blind for other reasons.
And if you want to help a blind person in the US, one thing you could do is support the training of a seeing i dog.
Training a seeing eye dog costs about.
Fifty thousand dollars, well worth it for the effect that it has on someone's life, but fairly expensive as.
Something you can do to improve some of life goes.
A surgery that can prevent tracoma in a country in Africa can cost less than one hundred dollars, which means that you could fund over one hundred, maybe close to one thousand trachoma surgeries, preventing hundreds of people from going blind in the first place, for the cost of helping someone who's already blind in the United States.
Now, I'm not.
Saying that we should just forget about people who are blind in the United States. It's these people are humans. They are part of our community. And you know, I'm not saying to hell with them, but I think it would be a moral mistake to ignore the enormous sort of turbocharge good that we can do by finding the most effective ways to help people, typically overseas, not because they're far away, but because the money goes so much farther and the problems are so much more dire and widespread.
So you know, the funding surgeries for tracoma is one example, distributing insecticidal malaria nets for about five thousand dollars on average, you can save somebody's life. Basically, this is distributing a thousand malaria nets at the cost of five dollars each, incentivizing mothers to have their children vaccinated. That can save about on average, rue life for three thousand dollars. And then there are things that have enormous improvements on people's
quality of life, so deworming treatments. So in other parts of the world, people often children are beset by parasitic worms that colini people's in digestive tracks very painful and makes it hard to go to school and learn. And for less than a dollar, you can provide a deworming treatment that will rid a child of of of of intestinal worms at least for a while until they get their next treatment. For one hundred dollars. That's one hundred children who are in a better position to go to school.
And when those kids go to school, of course, they're more likely to earn money later in life and have long term positive effects. And that's just in the domain of of of global poverty and health. I'll mention one other charity, which is Give Directly. This is a charity that it is not focused on a specific intervention, and those interventions often have sort of in randomized control trials, the most bang for buck, but something that takes a little bit more of an expansive view, this is giving
people money directly. And the way this happened was giving give directly was started by economists who were studying the efficacy of different types of health and poverty interventions. And they said, well, we're good scientists. We need a control condition, like what's standard of care, what's baseline? And they found that there wasn't one. There was no sort of standard thing to do. So they said, okay, well, let's just
take as our baseline. What would happen if you took the money that you could use for this program and just gave it to people directly. And what they found was that just giving money people directly had better outcomes than most of the things that people were trying to do, and so they started this organization called GiveDirectly, which was superpowered by the advent of digital banking. So you know, in places where there are no telephone polls, right, but there are satellites overhead.
You know, people in.
A remote poor village in Rwanda, someone there can have a cell phone which enables them to do digital banking, which opens up a world of economic opportunity. So give Directly gives people money directly, and they can spend it on immediate necessities, on food, on medicine, and then once those basic needs are taken care of, they know what to do. They can you know, and infrastructure, fix the roof in your house, or they can do things that can enable a more long term income.
Right.
So if you want to start a business and you need a little motorcycle to get around so that you can sell your goods, you need to be able to make that capital investment. And so you know what I like about this, and I think a lot of people like about give directly is you know, it's not giving someone to fish, and it's not teaching somebody to fish. These people already know how to fish, so to speak.
This is giving somebody the money to buy, you know, the fish for today, but also a fishing rod that they can use, and they already know how to use, and they just need to get over that economic hop. So this is an incredible charity and this is one that will that we're actively supporting with this program that we're doing with podcasts. And I'll say a bit about that.
But back to the psychology, right, as I said with the Footbridge case, you know, you just have this dilemma where there's no satisfying solution when it comes to charitable giving. There's the default thing that most people do, which is to support charities that are personally meaningful to them.
So you love animals, you support the local animal shelter.
Your aunt died of breast cancer, so you support a charity that does breast cancer research, right, and that is a very good and noble and that's like, you know, the best of humanity coming out there, right.
Don't want to say that that is a bad thing.
However, typically what people feel most connected to is not as impactful as the kinds of things that I described, like malaria, nets and deworming treatments and trachoma surgeries, and
and and and giving directly to people in poverty. So the conventional sort of thing to do once you're someone who's realized we need to be doing a lot more super impact stuff is to say to people, hey, instead of giving to the local animal shelter or supporting the breast cancer research, you really should do this other thing
that's more impactful. And the problem is that a lot of people say, yeah, I get it, but this is my aunt, or yeah, I get it, but what I really love is animals, right, and and and and you know they don't they don't buy it, right. And so my then post doc and I Lucius Caviola, who's now a professor at Cambridge in the UK, thought is is there a third way here? You know, the moral equivalent of a third way? And it doesn't exist in the
trolley problem. And we had a simple idea, which is instead of telling people, instead of doing the thing you most want to do, do this other thing that's more impactful.
What if we just said to people, hey, why don't you do both?
Right?
So we started running these experiments, and in.
The control condition, we gave people the conventional choice, it'd said, Okay, tell us what your favorite charity is, and you give us the link, and then you.
Say, and here's this super effective.
Deworming charity that where for one hundred dollars you can deworm one hundred kids, for ten dollars you can deworm ten kids. We're giving you ten dollars, which you want to choose, And still, like eighty percent of people chose the charity that they identified originally as their personal favorite. Some people chose to switch to the one that the Spurts focused on impact recommended, but most people didn't.
That's the control condition.
In the experimental treatment condition, we give those two options, but we give another option, which is to split the difference, or instead of doing all the water or all to the other, you can do a fifty to fifty split between the charity you love and the charity that the
experts are saying is super effective. And what we found was that a little bit over half of the people chose to support to do the split right, which meant that more money was actually going to the super effective charity by giving people the option to split than if
you force them to make a stark choice. Then we did some research to try to figure out, you know, what's the underlying psychology here, And what we found was a kind of Trolleysque dual process story, which is to say, people have sort of two different urges they're trying to satisfy. They want to give from the heart. They want to give to the charity that they feel personally connected to, but they also like the idea of of doing something
super impactful. It's just not their top priority if they're forced to choose. So what we found is that when it comes to giving from the heart, it's not about
how much you give. If you give fifty dollars instead of one hundred dollars to the local animal shelter, that feels more or less the same if you And then that means if you could give fifty there, then you could have this other fifty left over to do something that's super duper effective, and that scratches a different itch, right, and the overall feeling of satisfaction of doing something as we say, you know, smart and from the heart at the same time, people really like that that that that
that combo. So then we all, okay, so that's cool. We've got that result, we understand why people do that. But then we thought, okay, we could publish a paper saying hey, everybody, you should split your donations like this, and then it would just die in this journal and no one would read it, or if just a few researchers. So we thought, okay, we need some way to get
this out there. Well, what if we had to, you know, we incentivize people, say well, we'll add money on top if you do these split donations, and as you'd expect, people like it even better if we're willing to add money. In fact, we found it was like a seventy percent boost if we said that we would add add money on top. So that's great. But then, of course the
question is where does that money come from? And then what we said was, well, what if we asked people who were agreed to split between a personal favorite charity and this charity that they just learned about, like the deworming charity, said, what if instead of giving the the deworming charity, you put that fifty percent in a fund that will add money on top for the next people, so kind of pay it forward program to keep this going.
And we found that not everybody but enough people were willing to do that such that the money they would put into that fund more than enough to cover the matching donations for the people who said, now I'll just take the matching funds. So we thought, my gosh, this could be like a self sustaining virtuous circle where you have some people who put money into the matching fund and some people who are incentivized by the money in the matching fund, and.
Thing just works.
So Lucius and his Techi friends, most most notably the amazing web designer Fabio kun Uh, created Giving Multiplier, which is our our our our web platform which does this. And if if if you go to giving Multiplier, like what you'd see is you know this description of how it works.
This is giving Multiplier dot dot dot org.
You'll see a place where you can find your your favorite charity. So any charity registered as a five oh one C three in the US you enter that. In the second thing is a list of the super effective charities that we support. So I've named a bunch of them UH already so give directly and UH and and the Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium, and then other ones related to climate change and animal welfare, but ones that that that that have a super outsize impact.
You pick one of those, and then we have this cool slider thing where you decide how you want to allocate your money between the two charity and the more you allocate to the super effective charities from our list, the more money we add on top. But you could still give a majority to your personal favorite charity and we'll still add something on top to both.
Let me get one thing straight, which is the money that I put in. I put one hundred dollars into the matching fund that's going to charities. I just don't know which ones.
That's That's right, it's charities that will be chosen by other people, future people.
Excellent, Okay, got it. So tell us about POD's Fight Poverty.
So we now having over thirty podcasts who are signed on and our goal is to raise a million dollars and to We're aiming for three villages in the Bikar region of Northern Rwanda where.
People have very little. You know, people are very poor.
And have are kind of stuck in an economic rut where they don't have the resources they need to to get out of it. And our goal is to lift seven hundred families out of poverty, giving a little over one thousand dollars to each family, which can be life changing for a family.
There.
Listeners are encouraged to to to go to GiveDirectly dot org slash cosmos for for your listeners and giving Multiplier is adding fifty percent match while our while our supplies last. So we're we're committed to putting up a half a million dollars for this campaign, So anything your listeners give giving Multiplier will be matching at fifty percent. And the
results with with give Directly are amazing. I mean, there have been twenty five randomized control trials, so gold standard experiments with give directly specifically, and they find that that that these donations cut infant mortality rates in half.
And not only.
Does it help the people who get the money, it boosts the local economy by a factor of two point five.
Right, So this is getting back to this.
You know a lot of people worry about anti pop pretty mechanisms, especially in poor countries. You say, yeah, this is just pouring money down the hole where there's some temporary relief, but it doesn't really go anywhere. I don't want to under sell temporary relief if you're starving or if your child is you know, in danger of dying of malaria or whatever.
It is.
Temporary relief matters, right, but you also want to think about the long term. And part of what's great about gift directly is that it gives people the power, the agency, the flexibility to take the money that they that they're getting that they can use beyond you know, immediate survival, to build things that that can help them survive. And we see this in the growth of these local economies as a result of this. So that's what we're trying
to do. And thank thank you David for being part of this.
And are you or someone else doing follow up studies to see what happens with this village over the next five ten years.
Yeah?
Absolutely, So give give directly. You know, they track the effects of every every campaign they run, all of the money that they spend.
Okay, so you know, by the way, Josh, you and I have known each other for our whole careers and neuroscience, and it's so wonderful to see you taking all the stuff you know about decision making and morality and build moral technologies. So the last thing I wanted to ask you about is you had a Nature paper earlier this year about a game that people could play to cross to bridge political divides. Tell us about tango.
Yeah, so let me say a little bit about how I think all of this stuff fits together.
Right.
You know, I was one side of conference recently and I had to have like my little name tag, and at this particular conference, you had to put like a one line thing on, like what's your deal?
Like what are you about?
And I never had to do that before, And I thought back to, you know, what are my heroes Peter Singer, philosopher and his notion of the expanding circle, the idea that over time humans have gone from you know, not just caring about their family and their immediate relationships, but you know, the circle of moral concern has grown from the village to the tribe, to the chiefdom to the
nation and and and beyond nations. And what I sort of put on that little name tag, which I now think of is my tagline, is is expanding the circle of of of of altruism and cooperation and as we're trying to do and with the trolley stuff, you know, in this weird way, it wasn't weird to me, but it's it's sort of maybe not obvious.
That was the goal there as well.
I thought the way to move forward is we need a better moral philosophy. And there's I'm a consequentialist utilitarian, although I don't like the U word. I prefer to call myself a deep pragmatist. But there are these objections to that kind of view, like is it okay to tell one person to say five people you know in the footbridge case?
And isn't that wrong?
And I wanted to understand the psychology so that I could say, look, this philosophy makes sense, but we have these over generalizations of certain moral instincts that block us from there. So it was a kind of philosophical approach
to expanding the circle. As I've gotten older, I thought, you know, instead of like kind of trying to fly up into the clouds, do some philosophy and then come back down to earth, I'm just going to drive along the ground, take you know, what we think we know about human nature and pack that up and and see
what we can do with it. So giving multiplier, I see, is about expanding the circle largely from nation to world that we are supporting charities where we in the affluent West primarily can do an enormous amount of good for other human beings who happen to not be our co nationals, right, and then from also from species, the human world beat beyond that is one of the charities we support is the Humane League, which you know, there are billions of
animals that suffer in factory farms every year, billions, Like you know, it's hard to get your head around this, right if aliens were visiting Earth and saying, like, what's the greatest moral tragedy here? Depending on what you believe about animal consciousness, you might think that it's actually factory farming. That's a whole other story. But giving multiplier supports charities that are looking to end tortuous, miserable factory farming, either
through policy or through developing meat alternatives. And so that's going from nation to world and from world to other species, human world, other species. Tango goes back to our earlier discussion about the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of common sense morality and going from a tribal us to a larger, multi tribal us. So when you know, when I finished my my and published my book Moral Tribes,
which he mentioned. You know, I was happy with the book in a lot of ways, but I also felt like it was kind of an unfulfilled promise in some ways. I mean, you look at a book like that, the titles Moral Tribes callon Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them, you might think that that book was going to give you like practical tools to solve tribalism.
And I think it falls short in that way.
It really gives you sort of a kind of guiding general philosophy and some psychological under self knowledge that could help you get to that philosophy, but it's not really immediately applicable tools. And so after that kind of era, I said, all right, I want to try to try to fulfill that promise. So I thought, okay, well, what does it take to solve tribalism? What does it take to bring groups with distinct identities and with some animosity
towards each other together? And I thought, okay, well, I'm smart. Maybe I'll have some big new theory about how to do this. And I looked at the existing research and what I kind of concluded was that actually, we've got old.
Ideas that are pretty good, like really good. Right.
So on the biological front, everything points to the idea that mutually beneficial cooperation is the key. Mutually beneficial cooperation is the story of life, starting with primordial soup, and basically molecules come together to form cells because cells can can survive and reproduce in ways that loan molecules can't. And cells form more complicated eu caryotic cells, which form colonies, which form organisms, which form societies.
And all the way out up to tribes and nations and occasionally United nations.
Every living system is built and sustained on mutually beneficial cooperation. It's parts coming together for teamwork because they can accomplish things that they can't accomplish on their own.
But there's competition at every level, right.
Organisms are competing to survive, societies are competing with each other for.
Resources, and so the.
Challenge is can we cooperate at the highest level, right, whether that's tribes within a country or countries in the world, right, And that may not come so naturally, right, so we need tools for that. That's the biological perspective. On the social science side, it's much the same story. You go back to ideas from the fifties, like Gordon Allport's famous
contact theory. Basically, what he argued is that the way you bring groups that are intentioned together is well, you need to have them come to some kind of contact, and it has to be under the right kinds of conditions, essentially, conditions that are conducive to cooperation.
And you know, Alport wrote.
This all out of the fifties, but really this is very intuitive. I mean, people have surely recognized for centuries that you put people on the same team, and they're more likely to get along, right, if there's really a shared purpose there.
Right, So if.
We've known this for decades, if not centuries, then why have we not solved our human tribal problem?
Right?
And I think the answer is twofold. The optimistic part is to some extent we already have. I mean, as my colleague Stephen Pinker has documented with a lot of resistance to people who don't like.
This conclusion, but it's very well supported, is that.
Humans have over millennia and centuries and decades become overall more peaceful and less milor right.
And although there's been a.
Reversal in recent years unfortunately, but nothing close to sort of at the level of the overall arc of our history. And really every modern city is a testament to the idea that people with different cultures, different races, different ethnicities and religions can view each other more as fellow citizens and cooperation partners than as enemies to be distrusted.
Right, So these.
Can grow organically, right, And we see this in other contexts where there's an immediate need. During World War Two, there was you know, we needed soldiers in the United States, and there was a push to have racially integrated units in the military. But some people thought this would never work. You could never have white people and were then called negroes fighting with each other against the common enemy. And some people said, well, we've got to try, and we
think this could work. And it worked beautifully, right, And the US military was far ahead of the rest of civilian life in the US in terms of racial integration. Likewise, in sports, you know, just when there's a warn tobe one or a game to be won, you want the best players playing together and working together. And that's a
kind of circumscribed context where that can to work. So part of the answer is in the right when circumstances demand it, you can get cooperation across tense lines of division. The challenge is how do you engineer it where the ball doesn't seem to be rolling in the right direction right, and where we have these divisions, in these levels of
distrust and disrespect, how do we engineer that deliberately? So my thinking was, well, we need a way to get people from opposite sides of whatever divide the same team. So you know, this can be Republicans and Democrats in the US, or Jews and Arab slash Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, or Hindus and Muslims in India. You got to get people on the same team. Okay, how do you do that? Well, you need to put people on the same team. It needs to be scalable and it needs to be fun.
My lab's answer to that was a cooperative quiz game which was originally developed with my amazing grad student Van d Philippus, and now those work is being led by the amazing Lucas Woodley.
So this game is now called Tango.
And the way it works is you sign on to the game and you answer a few questions about yourself and in the typical version of this. In the experiments I've done, you might say I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat, or I'm a liberal arm a conservative. You also answer kind of fun, you know, get to know
you questions. You know, what's your favorite superpower that you'd like to have, and things like that, and you you answer those questions that you get paired up with your partner and you have a little get to know you chat and you say, oh see, we both would like to have the power of flying or invisibility or whatever it is. And you can see you know what the person's politics is. And then you get into the game.
And in the most interesting case, you're playing the game with someone who is, let's say in the US politically different from you. You know, they're a Republican or a Democrat, and you're on the opposite side, right, And the game starts out with questions that are designed to have a kind of complementarity, but not anything that's likely to be
divisive or controversial. So, for example, Republicans are more likely to be able to answer questions about the show Duck Dynasty, and that this is not stereotypes like this is validated with data, whereas Democrats are more likely to know about stranger things or the queen's gambit. Right, So you have questions where one side's likely to be able to help the other side and vice versa, and that gets people into the game. Yeah you're a Democrat, but that's okay.
Yeah you're a Republican, but that's okay. We're winning, we're high fiving, we're playing together. Everything's great. Then you get questions that are about more divisive issues but still grounded in facts. So if you ask what percentage of gun debts in the US involve assault style weapons? If you ask, you know, liberals, they're likely to say, I don't know,
thirty percent, fifty percent. If you ask people who are conservative, they're more likely to say no, assault weapons or which they wouldn't even call assault weapons, are like, you know, two percent, it's more mostly handguns. Right, So that's a case where the conservative Republicans are more likely to be correct.
But then if you ask a question about, you know, how who commits more crimes per capita, immigrants or native born Americans, Republicans think are more likely to think that immigrant crime is sky high, when in fact, immigrants commit relatively few crimes.
That's the case where the liberal is more likely to be right.
But at this point in the game, you know where you might think, oh, man talking about immigration or guns, one of them, it would be a disaster. But by then you're into the game, you're playing your teammates, you've worked well together, you've already gotten to know each other
as respectful, decent people. And people just play the game and they try to win those points and some you know, and everyone gets to be surprised and everyone gets to be right, and you have this cooperative experience and at the end, people like say these tiery goodbyes, Man, it was so much fun playing with you. I hope it could meet in real life and things like that, and it's great. What we want to know is what is
the effect of having this cooperative experience. So we've now done a series of randomized control trials with online with Republicans and Democrats, and what we found exceeded our expectations. We find it playing tango with someone who's politically different from you for less than an hour has positive effects that last at least four months. So we ask people how warm or cold do you feel towards the other
party on a scale of zero to one hundred. How would you divide one hundred dollars between a random Republican and a random Democrat? Do your respect Republicans or Democrats?
Do you trust Republicans or Democrats? And what we found is that when people play with someone like this, to take sort of the best known measure, which is that feeling thermometer, people play the game, and immediately after the game, we see like, on average, a nine point increase in warmth towards the other party, where you can think of it as a decrease in cold And you know, we say,
well nine points, what does that mean. That's the equivalent of rolling back about fifteen years of increased polarization in the United States. Now that's the immediate effect. Of course, you know, it's not magic. It doesn't last. But when we when we go back to people four months later, we still see an effect of you know, that's the equivalent of like five years of depolarization. And the cool thing about the game is that you can play it
more than once. It's like Jeopardy, you could play every night, right, And we also find that people really like it. So our our median enjoyment rating was ten out of ten. Now these are research participants who were not expecting to have a lot of fun, so you know, it's not surprising that they really enjoyed it.
But we.
See these long lasting positive effects you with this scalable tool and in a way that people really enjoy. So that's the that's the main points of the paper that we published in Nature Human Behavior this summer.
In the last year or two, we've been doing is working on getting this out in the world.
We are building an online tool where people can play, but where that's not there yet, and I can talk about kind of what we're doing and what we need for that. But our most immediate traction has been in higher education. And you know, historically when it comes to psychology research, like testing college students is what you do
on the cheap, you know, just a convenience sample. But now, as you know, especially at place like Harvard, higher ed is sort of ground zero for a lot of our cultural divisions, right, so we have been working with schools to deploy this, you know, not as research participants, but to students living their lives.
And our biggest events so.
Far have been at orientation for Harvard and Cornell and Penn State, at Harvard this year, we did the entire incoming class of twenty twenty nine, so over a thousand students, and we're using some different questions. It's not so much about your political party as like more like are you politically liberal or conservative? And we're also asking questions about things that are more divisive within a campus like Harvard, so like Israel, Gaza, sorts of things in addition to
things like guns and immigration and stuff like that. And what we found is that playing the game for about twenty minutes had significant positive effects on acknowledgement that the other side can make valid points interesting, getting to know people who are different from you, comfort voicing controversial opinions on campus. My favorite pair of results for Harvard because I think this speaks to a challenge that we are
really working to address. When when liberal students at Harvard at orientation in August played with a conservative student, they were seven points less negative towards conservatives, so that's also a pretty big effect. And then when conservatives played with a liberal student, they felt five points more open towards expressing controversial views on campus, So.
This is opening people up.
We also sort of allowed people to take two behavioral steps. So we asked people at the end, he said, Hey, you played with your partner anonymously, do you want to meet your partner?
If so, leave your contact info.
And we found that eighty percent of students gave their contact info. So you've got people shifting attitudes in making campuses more open, more more hospitable to both liberals and conservatives, and people taking steps in the real world. And then the most fun part of all of this is that the winning teams went to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game, and so people went with their partners, whether they were similar or or politically different.
So we are, you know, rolling this out.
And I think of this as kind of the opposite of divisive online content. I mean, you think of what internet trolls and operatives have managed to do by creating by spreading ill will and just trust sort of at scale, using very engaging content like fact checking. Can't fight that. The opposite of that is not, you know, an earnest
fact check, although we need to do that. It's something to compete with it in a positive way, something that people find engaging, that millions of people can do, and that trust spreads respect and trust at scale.
Not that everybody has to agree.
We're not trying to change people's minds about issues, but getting to the point where people can disagree respectively and constructively. So our goal over the next year is to get this out there and have you know, thousands, if we can millions of people have the positive experience that people on college campuses and in our experiments have already had.
Good for you, were you surprised that this works anonymously because the contact hypothesis suggests that you need to get people together in person to have conversation.
Yeah, that's it's a very astute point.
That was one of the things we weren't sure about, right, And you know, one thing we wondered is do we have to do this like on zoom where people give their names and you can see their faces. And one of the cool things about this was that you didn't have to have that conventional name in a face contact to get this to work and to have the positive experience generalize to other people. It's possible that things will work even better if we have those kinds of more direct,
face to face with a name kind of contact. It's also possible that there's something stealth effective about having it be anonymous because it makes people feel more safe, right that that that you can kind of ease into it where you know, they don't know who I am, they don't know my name, they don't.
Know what I look like.
No one's taking a screenshot of me and putting it
online and say who is this person? Right, So there's a kind of safety that comes with the anonymity, and then they can move from the anonymous context too in person like the students did at Harvard in the dining hall, or if we're when we're building this out online, we might people give give people the option after they've already had a friendly anonymous interaction to say, Okay, here's my here's my social media handle for this platform or whatever
that we're both on, and you know, people can get to know each other, you know, online and in something that's more real life than than than an anonymous game. So these are great questions that we want to experiment with when we when we have the chance.
Great one last question, if everyone on earth understood moral psychology as you do, what is one belief or habits that you might hope would change individually and institutionally.
I think that at the psychological level, like at the level of managing one's own mind, people would have a little distance between their first thought, which may or be right.
Or may maybe not, and what they actually act on.
And you know this is there's a great bumper sticker, don't believe everything you think, which I think sort of beautifully captures this logic that people need to sort of recognize that what you feel or your first thought is not necessarily the right thing to do. And then I think we need to have a kind of openness where we recognize that whatever our differences, we have so much in common.
We all, you know, we all want to be happy.
We don't want to suffer. We care about our families, we care about our friends. We want to live in a world that's almost all of us. Want to live in a world that's peaceful rather than the violent. We want to live in that larger US cooperative world at least where we're not harming each other. Right, But the
terms of that cooperation are what's challenging. And what I would hope to see is when people can sort of let go of the grip of their prejudices and first judgments, that people would be willing to take a step and act on their curiosity and be able to say, okay, can I get to know people who are differently, not making any promises that I'm going to agree with them or want to be their best friend or go into
business together, but at least try to understand. And if I think we took those first two steps of liberating ourselves from our intuitions and then liberating ourselves from our isolation, only learning about other people from what bad actors on social media have to say and encountering people more directly, those things would make us see the humanity in each other and we be I think that we would be able to solve our biggest problems.
That was my interview with Josh Green. I still have a bunch to say, but I want to remind you, if you're able, go to GiveDirectly dot org slash cosmos. I have that link in the show notes as well. Give directly dot org slash cosmos. Donate whatever you can. All the money goes directly to people in deep need in Rwanda. No contribution is too small. So let's come back to this idea of Josh's that our moral brains are beautifully designed for a world that no longer exists.
They're exquisitely tuned for small circles, for family, for friends, for the people whose faces we can see and whose pain we can imagine. Our brains give us loyalty and indignation and gratitude and guilt. This is why we'll run into the street to pull a stranger out of traffic, and also why we can feel more outrage about one
vivid case than about a million small tragedies. But the challenges that define our modern life, from pandemics to global poverty, to AI alignment to the future of democracies, these aren't small circle problems. In many cases, they are statistical, They are long term. They're geographically scattered. No one is knocking on our door asking for help. There's no crying baby, there's no burning building across the street. And so our moral camera, as Joshua might put it, is just aiming
at the wrong scale. This is a design mismatch. We're running stone age moral software on a planetary scale system. So that leads us with two tasks. At the individual level. The task is to become more bilingual in our own minds, to recognize our emotional reactions, to recognize what they're good at, but also to notice when they're steering us wrong, to be willing when the stakes are big and abstract, to flip into manual mode, to ask, okay, what actually helps
the most people? What am I missing because it doesn't feel emotionally salient. At the societal level, the task is to build better scaffolding around these imperfect brains. That means institutions and norms and technologies, and even little bits of choice architecture like the kinds of moral technologies that Josh is working on, building things that nudge our caring in directions that our emotions wouldn't find on their own. We need systems to help our local, tribal instincts add up
to something globally wise. That doesn't mean turning ourselves into cold calculators. Our emotions are part of what we're ultimately trying to protect. Love and loyal and solidarity. These are the best parts of being human. So the idea is to use reason and evidence not to erase those feelings, but to aim them. So the question to carry forward from today's episode is how can each of us expand the circle of the people that we care for and feel responsible for without losing the warmth of the.
Small circle we evolved for.
That's a simple question that sits at the intersection of our psychology, our politics, and fundamentally the future of our species. Once again, if you can go to GiveDirectly dot org slash cosmos. This is one way to turn your moral intuitions into action and take everything we're learning about the brain and use it to optimize how we go about trying to heal the world. Go to eagleman dot com
podcasts for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time, may your moral instincts be kind and generous. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.