Ep16 "Why is everyone who disagrees with you misinformed?"

they see that you know the truth? Welcome to inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works and how

we experience life. It hasn't escaped anybody's notice that we are in a time in which polarization and disagreement is higher than most of us have seen in our lives so far, and so in the past decade I've become very interested in the brain science behind that behind polarization, and more generally, how we come to believe our own political opinions and why we're so certain that everyone else is wrong, and how if we could just talk to them, if they could just listen to us, they would see

the light and they would know that we are right and they were mistaken. Now, I want to set the stage. Polarization is not a new thing. Although we are in a polarized era right now, this is far from unique.

Just think about the Civil War in America, where you had brothers and neighbors taking up arms against one another, or in the nineteen sixties and seventies, people here held vastly different opinions about the war in Vietnam and how to treat the returning soldiers or take stuff that's even bigger, like Nazism in Germany, which was the most advanced country

in Europe. The thing to recognize is that in the nineteen thirty four elections in Germany, every single seat in the Reichstag, the German Parliament, was either Communist Party far left or National Socialist Party far right. Or look more generally at the whole twentieth century, the Communist Revolution in China or in the USSR, or the Hutu massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda, or the Camera Rouge in Cambodia, and on and on. There's nothing new about polarization and

people taking up arms. And what I want to talk about today is why so the question on lots of people's mind, it seems to be, is this because of social media. I don't think that has much of anything to do with it. Keep in mind that all the examples I just named preceded Twitter and Facebook, and those were much worse than what we have going on currently. The fact is it doesn't take much to get people all worked up over different opinions and taking up arms,

and you don't need social media for that. And my goal today is to explain why it is so easy for people to get so worked up and believe their truth. So this is what we're going to explore. Why does everyone have different opinions? And why does everyone with a different opinion to yours seem misinformed or obstreperous or like a troll. So I'll start with a cartoon and a story. The cartoon was one that I saw recently on Twitter.

It shows a bunch of people walking on a road and up ahead there's a fork in the road and off to one side there's a small number of smart, thoughtful people that are following a windy path marked complex but right, and on the other side of the fork there is a very packed group of people and they're all walking and it's labeled simple but wrong, and this takes them to a cliff that they eventually tumble off of.

Now I'm going to come back to this cartoon later, and when I come back, we're going to understand this in a slightly different way.

here by that name. So the administrator says, yeah, this is the professor that wrote this letter, and the secretary says, I've worked here thirty years and there is nobody here by this name. So turn out to be a fake letter of recommendation. So the administrator calls the second letter of recommendation, same story. So she calls the third recommender and gets connected, and it turns out that it was Tanya's mother's office. And so what quickly became unraveled is

that Tanya had faked everything her transcript or GRES. And this was by the way back in the nineties. So she did this by digitally scanning her gres and then changing them with early versions of photoshop, and then reprinting them. Anyway, one of my colleagues equipped that she should get a PhD just for the cleverness of her deception. But the thing that struck me was how blind we all were

to the deception. We were completely fooled by it. So anyway, the graduate school said to her, WHOA, there's something really strange here, and you have to come up with an explanation for this, And Tanya just ran away. But one of my classmates caught her on the way out at the door, and she had an excuse for everything, and she said, I got screwed by this person, and this person cheated me, and I thought they were writing a real letter, and I thought the school was accredited, but

they lied to me, so she had an excuse for everything. Now, obviously the details of this story stuck with me through the years because I had almost gone on a date with this girl. Anyway, that was the end of the Tanya story, or so I thought. A couple of years later, someone pointed me to an article from the Yale University newspaper, and that's how we learned that Tanya had left our school and gone to ya next and faked her way

into graduate school there, and Yale had caught her. This was just like the first time, but Yale was mad because they had been paying her a stipend, and so they put her in jail. And I pictured the girl that I almost went on a date with sitting on a cement bench in jail, and the next newspaper article I found showed that in jail, Tanya had bitten two guards, and at some point she was released from jail, and then we heard nothing about her after that until two

years later. Because Tanya went home to where she lived in Chicago, and she and her mother decided to do a big drug deal with two men who turned out to be undercover agents, and they got caught and she was going to be sentenced for a long time, and so she and her cousin came up with an idea. So they went out and they found a woman who was a drug addict, who who was approximately her size and looked a bit like her. And they said, hey, we're going to give you free drugs if you come

to the dentist. And she said she was doing an insurance scam, and she said, come to the dentist and say that your name is my name. And she had the woman wearing gloves to the dentist office so there wouldn't be any fingerprints, and she accompanied her and she signed the paperwork for her. And then after they had the imprints, they brought this woman home and they smashed her on the head with a brick and they injected her with a bunch of insulin to make her pass out.

That's all they had access to and that's why they used the insulin. And their plan was to kill this woman and burn the body so that the dental imprints would be found and they would conclude that Tanya was dead and then she wouldn't have to go to jail. As it turns out, this poor woman eventually came to in the basement of Tanya's cousin's house and she managed to scramble out of the window and she ran a

crossed the street to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. She screamed for help, and Tanya realized that the woman had just escaped, and she ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken right after her and started screaming that the woman had stolen her money. And everything was very confusing, but the police showed up and they couldn't figure out what was happening, so they arrested everyone.

And so because this woman had gone to the dentist under Tanya's name, then the world would conclude I'm dead and then I won't go to jail, and I was thinking, Wow, I almost went on a day with this woman. So this was one of the moments in my life when I was struck by how different people can be on the inside and how little insight we have into the cosmos of someone else's brain and mind. And happily this was positioned at the very beginning of my neuroscience career,

and it influenced what I've been studying since. It has always struck me as fascinating the differences between people. Everyone is very different on the inside, sometimes much more than we expect. Now it turns out my father was a forensic psychiatrist and he was involved in most of the big mass murder cases in New Mexico where I grew up. One of them was a guy named William Wayne Gilbert who had killed three people cold blooded murder, and my

father became the psychiatrist in that case. Now, I was a child and we went to some social event with my father, and I remember somebody saying to my father, Gilbert should not get the death penalty because presumably he feels terrible for what he's done. Presumably he feels deep

regret for having killed three people. And as a kid, I remember totally feeling like I agreed with that, but I remembered my father's surprise at the statement, because my father had just spent hours in deposition with Gilbert, and he explained to this man genuinely and professionally that it simply wasn't the case that Gilbert had regret, because when William Wayne Gilbert would think about the idea of going to murder somebody, he said, he had the same level

of excitement that he did as a child on the night before Christmas. That's what it felt like for him when he was thinking of killing someone. And so my father's point to this man and to me when I was eight years old, is you can't actually stick yourself in other people's shoes, as much as you'd like to. You think everybody's just like me, especially when you're a child, but in fact people can be quite different on the inside.

And it turns out that the governor of New Mexico at the time commuted William Wayne Gilbert's sentence since he was sentenced to death, so Gilbert was not going to die now, and to show his gratitude, he managed to smuggle a pistol into the prison and led one of the most stunning prison breaks from a maximum security penitentiary where he let out several other murderers. And so for a few months it was very tense in New Mexico because there was this group of mass murderers on the loose.

They were finally found again, but only after this very scary month or two where they were hiding out and taking hostages. So all this stuff really got me thinking from a young age about the differences between people. So I'll just mention one more anecdote here, my father deposed a guy who was on trial. This guy had gone into Western Union office and asked the clerk to use the phone, and the clerk had said, sorry, but the phone is only for the back office people and not

for customers. So this guy jumped the counter and beat the clerk almost to death. And the interesting part is that he said to my father during the deposition, but anybody would have done the same thing in that situation, right,

And he meant it. He was being genuine because we all have an internal model of the world what constitutes appropriate behavior in the world, and we assume that everyone else's model is the same as ours, and this guy genuinely could not imagine anyone having a different reaction in that circumstance. Now, when we think about the differences between people, were used to thinking about extreme cases like Tanya or William Wayne Gilbert or this guy in the Western Union office.

These people, presumably have psychopathy paths make up about one percent of the population. These are people who simply don't care about your feelings. You're just an obstacle that they're trying to get around to get what they want. But this idea that other people can be different from you on the inside can be generalized. So take something like schizophrenia. You see a man on the street corner and he's yelling. He's in an angry dialogue with somebody who's not there.

He's delusional, he's not in contact with reality. So in situations like this, you look at the man and you say, Okay, I guess that man's internal model isn't the same as mine. He's not experiencing reality the same way I do. So you might think, okay, I get that about different models on the inside for psychopaths and for people with schizophrenia, But otherwise the intuition is that the rest of us are all about the same. But there are some important

things to note here. First, when it comes to something like psychopathy or schizophrenia, we tend to think about these as being categories, like Okay, that person's psychopathic and I'm not, or that person is schizophrenic and I'm not. But in fact, all of these things are now appreciated as living on a spectrum, so you have different degrees along the spectrum. So take psychopathy for example. There's a well used way

to measure this. It's a questionnaire and you score a certain number of points on this from one to forty, and in the United States, if you're above a thirty, then you are labeled a psychopath. You don't want to be roommates with the guy who scores twenty nine on this test, even though they're not technically a psychopath, they share a lot of the fundamental characteristics, so it's a spectral issue. And by the way, this is the same

with everything in psychiatry. This has been the direction of the Bible of psychiatry called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It used to be all about categories, and now everything is about living on a spectrum, but let's keep drilling down.

When we look at mental illnesses more generally, we find things that influence people's thoughts or feelings or behaviors, including not just things like schizophrenia or psychopathy, but you presumably know people with clinical depression or bipolar disorder, or anxiety disorder, or obsessive compulsive disorder or borderline or narcissistic or avoidant, or an eating disorder, or dissociated identity disorder or panic disorder,

or many other things like that. There are at least one hundred and fifty seven of these in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, So it becomes increasingly difficult to assert that everybody is exactly like you on the inside. Despite superficial appearances, people can be very different in terms of

what is happening on the inside. And if you've read my books or listen to my other podcasts, you know that when we see people with two strokes or brain injuries to different parts of the brain, it's not hard to say, oh, I guess their reality is a little bit different than mine. But it proves harder to think about this in terms of everybody that you know and love, because we assume that the people in our lives have

essentially the same thing going on on the inside. That we do the same opinions, the same way of sense making, the same way of gathering meaning, the same political views on the world as you do, but they don't. Everyone that you know is having a slightly different reality going on than you are. We are very different people on the inside. Now, I want to be clear that I'm

not just saying this as a philosophical claim. We can increasingly measure so many examples of this, and this is something I've worked on in my lab for most of my career. Neuroscience has always cared about the big disorders, the things that are most obvious and societally costly. But when we start looking at the more innocuous details, we uncover these clear and measurable ways that reality can be

different inside different heads. So, for example, imagine that you and I and a bunch of other people are looking over Times Square in New York. We're standing on a corner and enjoying watching the crowd. So you open your eyes and there's the world and all its blues and golds and greens. But if you happen to be colorblind, you're seeing it differently than the person next to you. Maybe you can't distinguish reds from greens those look exactly

the same to you. Or maybe you have a more extreme form of color blindness in which there are no colors at all, just shades of gray. So for you, in the person next to you, the internal experience can be quite different, even though you're looking at the same scene.

This is the type of issue that I've been studying in my lab for many years, so you might have heard about my episode on synesthesia. In synesthesia, people have a blending of the senses. About three percent of the population will, for example, see a letter on a page and that'll trigger a color experience for them on the inside. So maybe s's a purple for you, and L triggers a green experience, and so on. It's different for every synesthete,

and there are many forms of synesthesia. You might hear a sound and that triggers a visual experience, or you taste something and it puts a feeling on your fingertips. Essentially, any sense can end up having crosstalk with any other sense in these different forms of synesthesia. And my colleagues and I have documented dozens and dozens of forms throughout the population. Now, synesthesia is not considered a disease or

a disorder. It is simply an alternative reality. The point is that people can have very different experiences on the inside, but to a synesthee, their experience is precisely as real as anything you might experience. So in neuroscience, this is just one more recent appreciation that from one person to the next, reality can be a little bit different. And let me give you one more example that's even newer, the issue of how we imagine a visual scene inside

our heads. So I'm going to ask you to picture this picture a gray and white cat on a picnic table eating colorful cereal and looking at you suspiciously, So really picture that in your head now. There were two researchers who began looking at this question of mental imageries some years ago, Stephen Costlin and Zen and Felicition, and they ended up disagreeing very strongly. Coslin said, when you're imaging something, you're essentially running your visual cortex to see

this like a movie. It's like vision. And Felician said, that's ridiculous. You're not seeing something. It's purely conceptual. It doesn't involve seeing in vision. And they both did experiments back and forth, and Felician said, look, you're insane. It's not stored like a picture, and Costlin said, no, you're insane. It's not stored like a proposition. You're actually seeing it. And it was very difficult for a conclusion to be

reached here. Both argued passionately for their side of the argument, and this went on for twenty years in the literature. So why couldn't they come to an agreement on this. The answer is Coslin had what we now call hyper fantasia, which means he has extremely vivid mental imagery. When he imagines something, it's as vivid as real seeing. Now, this is the opposite of what Felician had, which is called

a fantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. He doesn't see anything in particular, He just has a concept, and all of this lives on a spectrum from hyperfantasia to a fantasia. Everyone in the population is somewhere on this spectrum.

I do. But the fact is that everyone is having a different internal experience and this led me to search for a good metaphor. And when I saw the movie poster for The Martian, I thought, Oh, that's it, because the poster shows a single person, Matt Damon, walking around on his own planet. He's the only one there, and I thought, that's the perfect model. We're each living on our own planet, we're each having our experiences, and we think, yeah, this is reality, and it makes sense that everyone has

the same experience that I do. But in fact, just like in any galaxy, each planet is different. Everyone's got their own atmosphere, their own landscape, their own experiences. But we always feel certain that he or she feels exactly the same way that I do about whatever. Take for example, what comes to mind when I say the word justice. What happens inside everyone's head is slightly different. Or fairness what comes to your mind it might not be the

same thing that comes to someone else's. Or attractiveness or love, home, freedom, success, these concepts are triggering different neural networks and different people. They trigger different meaning, which is tied to your whole personal history and your aspirations. But we assume when we use words that the other person knows exactly what we mean. We operate under the assumption that words mean the same

thing to me that they do to you. But in fact that never happens because we each have different internal lives. And one of the ways that you can always appreciate this is just look around you. The next time you're in the bookstore or the library. There are so many different sections, and nobody walks in and explores all the sections equally. Instead, people go in and they go straight to the section they want the thing that resonates with their internal model of the world, mysteries or romances or

westerns or sci fi or whatever. They gravitate to particular things and not others because of the differences in their brains. So this is the first important lesson that I want to establish. Others see the world differently than you do. But why is this true? Why can't we have one really smart person who writes a blog post and says, hey, I think this is the way we should run the country, and all three hundred and sixty five million people read then say, yeah, that's pretty good. Why are we all

so different? This question has been at the heart of a very long standing debate where people attribute differences to either genetic factors or environmental factors, in other words, the nature versus nurture debates. Why do you argue with your sibling about political issues? Does your sibling have very different genes than you do, even though you have the same parents. Does your sibling have different nurture than you even though you were raised in the same household? So are we

determined by our genetics or our environment? And traditionally there have been very strong advocates on both sides of this. Well, both of these have something to say. So let's start with genetics. Do genetic differences matter? Heck yeah they do. Although we're all members of this species, Homo sapiens, there are millions of differences in our genomes from person to person. For the cognitionanty, these are single nucleotide polymorphisms or substitution variants,

or copy number variants and so on. And your genetics matter for who you are. Take just as an example from my book Incognito, so I compiled statistics that if you are a carrier of certain genes, your probability of committing violent crime goes up eight hundred and eighty two percent. So I took statistics from the US Department of Justice, and I broke these down into two groups, those who carry the genes and those who do not. And it's a massive difference. Can you guess what this collection of

genes is. We summarize it as the Y chromosome. If you have these genes, we call you a male. So genes matter, but it's not all genes. It's also your experiences in the world. We drop into the world with half baked brains and we absorb everything around us, everything that you know that you believe, your language, your culture, your memories. It's all stored in this giant neural network. And how does it get stored by reconfiguration of the network.

This is known as brain plasticity. Brains absorb the world around them, and that's how the world shapes you. We're influenced by our culture, our friends, our neighbors, our generation, and so on. So you're shaped by both your genes and your environment, and these are intertwined in very complex ways, such that it's really rare that we can point to one or the other and conclude that it's responsible for something that we see. It's all about what we nowadays

call gene environment interactions. So you've got the genes that you drop into the world with, and then you've got all these experiences, and these intertwined in this complex way. Your experiences actually shape your nervous system and can feed all the way down to the level of which genes are getting expressed and which you are getting suppressed. And by the way, you don't choose your genes, and you don't choose your childhood experiences. None of that is about choice,

but it makes you who you are now. These differences can be quite subtle. You can disagree with your sibling politically even know you're genetically similar and we're raised in a similar environment, but small differences can take you off in very different directions. So you're shaped by both your genes and your environment, and hence the nature versus nurture question is dead. And brains end up as different from one another as faces. Just walk along the street and

look at how different people's faces are. The variety of faces that you see around you, Well, there's that much variety in brains too. And just as a side note, I can recognize all my students just from their brain scans, because brains actually physically come out looking different from one another. Okay, so we've established that people are very different on the inside and given a sense of how that comes about. But you may think, okay, other people are different from me.

But what is clear is that I see the truth. And if I could just sit down with them and have them listen to me, or I could just shout in cap letters on Twitter, everyone would see the correctness of my position.

so that it understands what is happening out there. So everything in your life, everything about the way the world works, is represented in your brain, usually unconsciously. How you deal with people, where your house is, how to operate the appliances in your kitchen, what language you speak and your spouse speaks, how to drive your car. Everything in your

life is represented in this internal model. And I'm not going to talk too much about the internal model today except to say that one of the fascinating things is that usually it's totally unconscious. And I gave an example of this in a recent episode about putting your hands up on an imaginary steering wheel in front of you and pretending that you're driving thirty miles an hour down the road, and I asked you to make a lane

change from the center lane into the right lane. And what essentially everyone does with their hands is they turn the steering wheel to the right and back to center. But that would actually steer you off the road and you would crash. When you actually get in the cart and watch what your hands are doing, you'll see that the way you make a lane change is by turning to the right, back to center, just as far to the left, and then back to center again. That's how

you make a lane change. Your brain has made a model of the physics of cars and steering wheels and roads and so on, but you don't even know how you do this, and you didn't even know that your brain had that model. This is the gap between what your brain knows under the hood and what your conscious mind has access to. And the point I want to make is that you have this same sort of model

about the whole world around you and its political truths. Now, the details of your trajectory in the world up to this moment convince you that you know the truths, even though someone else's internal model might tell them that they know the truth and it might be different. Now, the really important point here, the thing that no one talks about, is that we don't usually take into account how poor

our internal models are. Here's just an example, starting in early twenty twenty, when the pandemic hit, why did all the bank lobbies close? After all, there were lots of other shops that were open. The floorist was open, the hair salons were open, and all of these were much smaller spaces than the spacious lobbies of the bank. And it's not that the banks couldn't put up plexiglass in front of the teller's windows. In fact, that was usually

already in place. And it's not that the banks wanted to be closed, because they still staffed the drive up windows throughout the day.

so they closed their lobbies. The point is simply that we always think our understanding of the world is complete, but we're always facing situations where we say, oh, I guess I didn't know that. Now it's complete, by the way, the limits of your internal model. This is the engine of comedy. So a comedian, I'll say something like this, I went to the doctor the other day and the doctor said, put your clothes there in the corner next

to mine. It's funny and surprising only because your brain makes a full world of assumptions about the doctor, and then you realize that your model didn't have all the information. And there are so many examples of the limitations of your model. Imagine I were to draw a handful of diagonal lines on a page and ask you what you see. You'd say diagonal lines. But if I say to you how many are there here, you'd realize that you don't know the answer, and you have to deploy your attention

to seek the answer. So this happens to us all the time, where we think we have a complete understanding of what's in front of us, but a little bit of questioning unmasks that we don't actually have all the details of the picture. And I'm using this all as a metaphor to emphasize the importance of genuine dialogue with other people, because sometimes you can't see what questions you haven't asked, or the things that you're not even aware

you're not aware of. And by genuine dify dialogue, I don't mean how do I convince the other person that I'm right and they're wrong. I mean listening and considering and questioning, and trying where appropriate to change your own mind or to stand in a slightly different viewpoint than you were before. Now, I want to come back to this issue that it's so easy to poke holes in our internal models. And the question I've always wondered is why do we think our models are complete when they

lack so many answers? So consider this. Do you know what a bicycle looks like? Of course you do. Now, if you're in a place where you can get out a piece of paper, I'd like you to get it out and sketch a bicycle. Go ahead, And if you can't get the paper, then go ahead and sketch it in the air with your finger. Just the basic outlines of the frame, the wheels, the seat, the handlebars.

how do the handlebars plug into the front wheel. It's shocking because you know what a bicycle looks like, or at least you think you do. But it's actually a big challenge when you're really pushed on your understanding. And this is known as the illusion of explanatory depth. Just because you're convinced that your model has the full picture, it doesn't mean that it actually does. So here's another example.

Imagine that I ask you if you know how the electoral college works in this country, and you might say, yeah, I know how that works. But now I say, great, please explain it to me, and you might find that you get stuck. You think you know, but as soon as I scratched the surface of something, you find that it's not quite as clear as you suspected. And there are a million examples of this sort of thing, And if you start paying attention, you'll see more and more

of the limitations of your knowledge. So it's useful to question ourselves, with all of our political opinions, about where our knowledge is lacking, because not knowing information doesn't mean that you don't have a high sense of certainty about it, especially if you really don't know much about a topic at all. My graduate advisor once told me to go to the library to learn about lattice gases, and I had never heard of that at all. So I walked over to the library and I discovered there was half

a shelf with books all about lattice gases. And I was shocked, because how could smart people have devoted their scientific careers to writing about something that I had never even heard of just twenty minutes before. And this is the kind of lesson that emerges as you mature in the world. But interestingly, it takes a great deal of work to get there. If you've studied less about a subject, you tend to overinflate your knowledge. This is what's known

as the Dunning Krueger effect. So these are a couple of psychologists and they ran studies where they found that if they ask people a bunch of questions about humor, or grammar or logic, you then take the people who score at the bottom quartile, and they grossly overestimate their

performance on the test. Although their test scores put them, let's say, in the twelfth percentile, they estimate themselves to be in the sixty second percentile when you ask them, how much do you know about this compared to other people? In other words, the less that you know about a topic, the more confidence you have in your own abilities. What happens is that as you learn more about a topic, your confidence goes down, and it's only much later, when

you become an expert, that it starts to go back up. So, now, given everything I've told you so far, I want to return to the cartoon that I described at the beginning of this podcast, about the fork in the road where one sign points to complex but right and the other points to simple but wrong, and almost everybody is going in the simple but wrong path, except for the few people winding their way up the steep, complex but right path.

Now the cartoon struck me as funny, but perhaps not for the obvious reasons, because when I saw this cartoon on Twitter, I noticed that it had racked up many thousands of likes. So I started to research who exactly were the enthusiasts, and I had a suspicion that I knew the answer, and that turned out to be correct. Each person of whatever political persuasion, sees himself in the

complex correct thinkers winding the steep path. Whether you are on the right or the left, whether with the Independence or Green Party or libertarians, whether you're a fan of Antifa or QAnon, whether you're a denizen of Wokistan or Magastan, you fundamentally know that you are a person who engages in refined and proper thinking. You appreciate data that is intricate and meaningful, while people on the other side, for reasons that you can only guess, they believe incorrect things.

What I want to emphasize is that each person who clicked the thumbs up button knew that he was not like the sheep on the opposite side of the fork. Instead, he possessed an intricate and accurate view of the world. Okay, So which side of the political debate did the cartoonist support, Well, who knows who cares. It was presumably one of his most successful cartoons because it was the skeleton key that

fit the lock of each reader's internal model. So the first step to rising above our internal models is to start watching for these bug traps that lure us in. I just saw an example yesterday, a bumper sticker that read make America America Again. And everyone on the road who saw this bumper sticker presumably thought that sounded great. Why because both sides of the political spectrum are equally

happy to engage in retrospective romanticization. Liberals and conservatives can equally well reach back in memory to a time that seemed less complicated, a totally illusory era where the nation agreed with the logic of your political viewpoint, before the of the crazies with whom you now have to deal. So the only thing that the bumper sticker really points back to is the impoverishment of our memories. The cartoon

and the bumper sticker. These work because they can mean anything to anyone, and what they reveal is the degree to which we live inside our internal models. And we assume everyone shares the same model we do, and anyone who has a different internal model we tend to demonize. And that's because we believe our models so strongly, because that's all we have, whether that's our religion or our

political side. Of the spectrum, whether we're the Communists or the Nazis in nineteen thirty four, it makes us angry that other people can't see the truth as clearly as we can, and we are suspicious of them. And this leads me to the final chapter of today's episode, which is the notion of empathy. And there's an important aspect of this that's typically over look So I'll illustrate this

with a historical example. In the late seventeen hundreds, there was a British nobleman named Lord Gordon, who was born into privilege, but he found himself caring deeply about the welfare of the sailors. He was an officer, but he campaigned energetically to improve their conditions, and his empathy was broader than that. When they sailed to Jamaica, he was disgusted by the slavery there and he berated the British

governor about it. So here's an example of a guy where everywhere he went he sought to improve the well being of.

So in my lab we performed a brain imaging study in which you are in the scanner and you see six hands on the screen in front of you, and the computer goes aroundoo and randomly picks one of the hands. So one of two things happens. Either the hand gets touched with a Q tip or it gets stabbed with a syringe needle.

if your own hand got stabbed. So when you see someone else's hand get stabed, that activates this same pain matrix.

He worked tirelessly to repeal the civil rights of Catholics, and in seventeen eighty Lord Gordon marched a crowd of fifty thousand people to the Houses of Parliament in London and for a week, the mob destroyed Catholic churches and Catholic homes in what came to be known as the Gordon Riots, which was the most destructive domestic upheaval in the history of London. So why did Lord Gordon, a person so capable of empathy, have such antipathy for Catholics.

The answer paints a fundamental fact about human nature, which is our tendency to form in groups and outgroups, groups that we feel attached to and those that we feel opposed to. Our empathy is selective. So, especially after the Second World War, psychologists began to study this issue of in groups and out groups and how this can so easily lead to violence. And my lab and a lot of others have done a lot of research into this issue of how easily we form in groups and out groups.

And I'll give you just one example of this. So come back to this experiment with the people in the brain scanner watching the hands get stabbed. Now we take these six hands on the screen and we just add one word labels to each hand Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, atheist. And now the computer goes around boo boo, boo boop, and it randomly picks a hand, and you see that hand get touched with a Q tip or stabbed with

a syringe needle. And the question is does your brain care as much if it's an out group versus your in group. We tested people of all different faiths and atheists also, and the result is that you care more about your in group and you care less about outgroups. When you see the hand get stabbed that is labeled with your in group, we can measure a very big response in the pain matrix. And when you see a hand get stabbed that has one of the other labels on it, we see a very small response in the

pain matrix. Your brain just doesn't care as much. This is a large effect and it's depressing that it's true, but it's just the way humans are. We care a lot about our in groups. And these are just single word labels. I mean, all the hands look the same and they just have different colored wristbands on them so you can distinguish them. But it turns out we are really really sensitive to these labels. So the issue of

empathy is subtle and complex. With just a single word label, your brain can feel more or less empathy for someone. One can run the imagery about them and their pain more or less vividly. Now, what's fascinating is how rapidly our levels of empathy can change. So we next took the exact same subject and we presented them with a single sentence. The year is twenty twenty five, and these three groups have teamed up against these three groups. And so now you find your in group teamed up on

one side or the other. The computer has picked these sides randomly, and so you've got this team and the other team. So what do you think happens? You care now about your allies. The two groups have randomly got lumped in there with your in group. So suddenly when you see their hand get stabbed, you have a larger empathy response than you did just a moment ago.

Now take a moment to think about your own level of empathy towards others. Imagine that you see a seventy five year old man get hit in the face and his nose gets cut and he's bleeding. Do you feel an empathic sting with that? Okay, Well, now imagine that he's at a rally for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump, or just anyone you agree or disagree with. Is your empathy any different? And if so, does that challenge your

view of yourself as an empathic person. If you felt unequal responses in those two situations, a Biden rally or a Trump rally, you're not alone. People generally assess their own empathy by thinking about those in their in group. I've always been struck by this in action adventure movies. When we see a person get hurt, if it's the protagonist, we really WinCE. But if it's the antagonist and he's falling off one hundred foot cliff to his death, we

feel just find about that, possibly happy about that. So what this means is that we have the capacity to feel someone else's pain in different ways, depending on whether they're a member of our tribe or not, and the tribal tendencies of humans. This can incite murder and torture, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Rwandan genocide. This can buy the appeal of nationalist visions, from Hitler's Final Solution

to Mao's Cultural Revolution. So, given how deeply our biases are ingrained, the question is, are we doomed to repeat these kinds of atrocities forever? So I'm going to suggest perhaps apps not. I'm going to give five strategies here to narrow the empathic divide between people. The first thing has to do with just understanding our own biases. We can increase our awareness of our own internal thought patterns so that we recognize our partisanship as we experience it.

For example, in our social echo chambers, we tend to accept the logic of our in group and we reject the logic of outgroups. And we're also predisposed to help those in our in groups rather than those a little farther away who might need help.

avoid the oversimplifications that we typically accept. And by the way, this is often accomplished through art and literature, which has for a long time wage day behind the scenes battle against dehumanization. Theater and books and movies. This lets people step into the shoes of other people, and in the fourteen forties, when the printing press was invented, this allowed

stories to spread widely. So, for example, when Harriet Peacher Stowe published the anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in eighteen fifty two, readers stepped inside a shack that they otherwise wouldn't have ever entered, and once in it was no longer so easy to relegate the characters to an out group. The third strategy is to learn and resis

the tactics of dehumanization. There are a lot of tricks that governments and propagandists employ and I'm going to do a different episode on that, but I'll mention here that one common ploy is what's called moral pollution, in which a group is socially smeared by association with something repulsive like vermin or insects, or anything that develops them in a negative emotional cloud. Once you have a negative emotional reaction to a group, it becomes harder to hear their perspectives.

So when you can recognize that a person is being attacked for his identity rather than his arguments, you can better defend yourself against this trick. The fourth strategy has to do with blinding your biases, so design processes and organizations that remove the chance that prejudices interfere with your judgment. For example, a lot of software companies here in Silicon Valley, they'll ask job candidates to submit code rather than to

show up in person. And many orchestras have blind auditions, which means they audition people behind a curtain, so you can't see the gender or the race of the person who's looking for the job. You're just listening to the music. And in the same way, many universities have a need blind application process so they can separate intelligence from financial considerations. So the idea is, wherever biases can be subconsciously triggered,

it's best if you just remove the opportunity. And the fifth strategy I think is the least intuitive, and that is to entangle group memberships. So what I mean is work to ensure that communities are intertwined. So to see how this would work in practice, consider the five tribes of the Iroqui Native Americans, who fought intensely with each other in the fifteenth century. So they had a new leader come in named Deganaweda, who came to be known

as the Great Peacemaker. And what he did is he hassigned each tribe member to one of nine different clans, the Wolf clan or the Bear clan, or the Turtle clan or Sandpiper.

he was able to defang the intertribal warfare. So what we've seen in today's episode is how different we are on the inside, and yet how strongly we believe our own truths, even though our knowledge of everything is so impoverished. And yet we all walk around with the impression that if we could just sit down with another person on the other side, we could show them the truth. So if you have the same opinions as everyone else in

your life, great, But I hope you don't. I hope you can take the opportunity to dig deep and find out how the other folks in your life see the world and listen to them. It's not the same as agreeing with them or giving in to them, but it is acknowledging that your point of view doesn't have a lock on the absolute truth, and it's allowing that the most important thing you can learn is an ability to

dialogue in conditions of disagreements and discomfort. It's the most important thing that you can do for each other and for your own brain. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an

uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position. So I've given five directions for helping us to learn how to bridge that gap, not by assuming we're right, but by having the intellectual humility to realize that it's a big, pluralistic world out there, and that everyone, including you, has a model of the truth, and that only by adopting the stance of genuine dialogue and understanding your own biases and the possibility that we might be wrong, can we

hope to move things forward. If you're interested in learning more, find further readings on these topics at Eagleman dot com, Slash podcast, and if you have questions, comments thoughts, email us at podcast at eagleman dot com, where we've been getting great responses. Watch full video episodes and leave comments on YouTube at Inner cosmospod. Until then, this is David Eagleman signing off from the Inner Cosmos