Cara Santa Maria || Clinical Psychology and Social Justice

Kara is an Emmy and Knight Foundation Award winning journalist, science communicator, television personality, author, and podcaster. She's a correspondent on National Geographics flagship television series Explorer, and she's the creator and host of a weekly science podcast called Talk Nerdy with Kira Santa Maria. Kara also co hosts the popular Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast and host the

new podcast Fix That for You. Additionally, she co authored the Skeptics Guide to the Universe book with her podcast co host, and she is the spokesperson for National Geographics Almanac twenty nineteen. Kara is a founding member of the Nerd Brigade and co founded the annual Science Communication Retreat Pound Si Calm Camp Kara, So I don't know I know how to read that, Kars, Yes Camp, Yeah, I calm Camp. Kara. So great to chat with you today. Oh,

thanks for having me. And that's only one fiftieth of your bio. That's most of it. It's most of it. It's like previously, Cara, and then it goes on for five hundred pages. Well, yeah, that is what I'm up to write this very moment. I guess you could say. Good.

So do you approve of the things I highlighted? Uh? Yeah, no, of course, I mean other than the fact, which you know, this is right, the psychology podcast, So other than the fact that I am now back in school working on my PhD. I'm assuming that's probably what we'll mostly talk about today. Some of my other stuff is I mean, I guess it's relevant, but definitely the psych side of things has been taking over my life lately, as grad school does. Yeah, that seems like a fair representation of

grad school. Yeah, so you're fielding graduate university, is that right? Yeah? Yeah? And tell me about your topic, like what are you immersed in? Because when you know gradsten, you're in your dissertation. That's like all you think about, and that's like all you see, like everything you see in the world. Like I know when I was working my dissertation was like, how does this relate to my dissertation? Yeah, So the good news for me is I'm like not quite there yet.

So I'm only a second year PhD student. Because I mean to rewind a little bit. I did my undergrad like a million years ago in psychology with a minor in philosophy, and then I went straight into graduate school. Actually took one year off and worked for a neuropsychologist in clinical practice kind of as a psych tech doing assessments. And then after that I took that year off, I

started a master's degree in a completely different department. So I ended up earning my master's degree in neuroscience in the biology department where we were doing neurophysiology research, so multi electrode array electrophizz research with like mouse brains, not even brains, primary tissue, so mouse neurons that we were growing little flat nerve cell networks with, and so it was like a one to eighty. And then after I did that degree, I spent ten years as a science communicator,

just working you did the field. Yeah, and so then I decided to go back to school after I had been away for a decade. So now I'm thirty five

years old. I'm in my second year of my PhD. Really starting a PhD in clinical psyche if you don't have a master's in a clinical program, in many ways, is really starting from the very beginning, you know, because my master's is in like a hard science, so none of my credits transferred, none of my because I don't have a master in California, I can't even be a psych tech yet until I earn my pass through masters towards my PhD because my masters is not in a

clinical program. So yeah, I'm in the middle of my second year and I'm mostly inundated in coursework. I'm seeing patients regularly, and I'm starting to think about my dissertation. So that's kind of the stage I'm at. Yeah, so your dissertation will be your topic will be something clinical related. Yeah, I mean my interest area right now and hopefully my next practicum and then fine tuning from there. I mean, fingers crossed, I'll get an internship in a hospice setting.

I'm very interested in death and dying psychotherapy. So ultimately the plan, the goal is to work with people when they're in that final stage of life. And my likely dissertation topic will have to do with the concept of dying well in America from a multidisciplinary perspective, So it'll be probably a qualitative dissertation where I sit with people who are have terminal illnesses and I talk to them.

I just interview them and spend a fair amount of time just talking to them about what dying means to them, how they can have you know, a quote unquote good death, and what their cultural background, how their cultural background informs the process of dying in America. Yeah, I mean, this topic of the good death is something that's definitely on

my mind as well. And in the field of positive psychology, some people are trying to try to look at these various factors and if you can actually not just do the research, but actually be a clinician and work one on one with people in our end of life. I mean that what a wonderful way to live a good life, What a good life that is to help people the good death? Oh absolutely, I mean people ask all the time, like, how could you want to do this. It sounds so depressing.

How could you want to spend all this time? Yeah, I'm with you, like you get it. Hopefully people who are listening get it. It's how often is it that the work that you do gets to be interpersonal and gets to be as helpful to the people that you're working to help as it is to you. You know, how often is it that we get out of our work the same amount of meaning and the same amount of profundity, and really just the same amount of knowledge

and information as we put into it. I mean, it's such a lucky and privileged position to be in, and so I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, right now, I'm working with adolescent youth, specifically girls in residential facility setting, and it's tough work. It's very tough work. It's incredibly fulfilling, but it's very very tough. And I think it's funny when people say to me, like, how could you want

to work around death? It sounds so hard, And I'm like, oh, I wish you could spend a day with me at work right now. And I'm spending time around youth, I know, and these are end of life youth, No, No, these are youth that are in the foster care system with sever your mental illness, but more often than not, they've really just been victimized by life circumstances, abuse, neglect, childhood

sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation of children. But the biggest issue with this is that there's no buy in for therapy. They don't want to be in therapy. Lots of them don't even want to talk, and so don't trust to you too, right, I mean, yeah, I mean you end

up spending so much time building rapport, building trust. You have to be very smart and very savvy about how you do therapy with children, first of all, but with adolescents it's even an extra layer than with children because they're street smart, they're savvy, but oftentimes they have emotional dysregulation issues or developmental delays, where on the surface, you're like, yeah, that's a real savvy seventeen year old girl who has a lot of life experience, But you get down underneath

the layers and you look at all of the abuse and neglect and the lack of developmental health, the lack of healthy attachment, and you realize, although it's a seventeen year old girl who's super street smart and savvy. She's got the kind of the emotional flexibility of a child,

and she's struggling in very deep ways. And you know, we think of adult therapy as you know, you're in an office and someone comes to you and they're like, I have these issues and I want to give you all my money so that you'll help me with my issues, and I'm here of my own volition. When you're working in residential treatment, you're in the place where the kids live. You know, you're in their home. It's a privileged position.

You're very lucky. You get to see all sorts of things that you never see in the lives of your patients when your patients are adults, so you get to have a broader clinical picture. But you're really invading in their space and you've got to tread lightly, and you've got to really build trust over long periods of time and get super creative, super creative about bringing therapeutic change into their lives. Because trust me when I say they

do not want therapy. They want to have nothing to do with it, and they can smell it a mile away. When you start to try and get them to talk about their feelings, it's you know, it's it's a very interesting and i'd say emotionally challenging place to work for sure. Yeah.

I can relate to that. Teaching college students how to increase their well being and doing exercises where you have to get in touch with your emotions and stuff, and some students who may have had horrible traumatic experiences, you know,

trying to work with that. And I would say, you know, I've I've done a lot of work in the college level the academic side, right, I've taught a lot of like psychology and biology courses and things like that, and I would say this is probably much more like trying to do mindfulness meditation with sixth graders. Yeah, that's the difference. Yeah, it's very difficult, or maybe fourth graders, you know, or

even with college students. Yeah, I'm saying, I mean, it's true that college student struggle in their own way, but there is still a level of buy in, like those kids are there by choice. Yeah, yeah, which is like a very different position to be in for sure. Yeah. Well, so I want to like step back a second, because, like I mean, you've gone so many years of your life with broad science communication. I mean it's like I remember when you used to used to pop up on

I used to blog for Hoffei and Post. I used to Worte for their science section, And I feel like I was constantly paired with like your new Talk nerdy columns. I feel like I've been integrably intertwined with you for years, so without actually ever talking to you, And so I became a fan, right, And it was very obvious for me, obvious from my perspective that you're just like this ravenously curious human being and like everything in science interests you.

And what's that like to go from that very like general exploratory drive to like a very narrow specific topic. What was that like for you? What is it like to you? For you? I mean, it's still happening, right. I don't think I've fully narrowed down yet. I'm still in the corpsework phase of my PhD program, so it's still pretty broad. But I mean, even as you said, like narrowing down from all of science, which is basically like everything to clinical psychological science is a big change.

And also understanding the difference in the epistemology of psychological science over you know, classical maybe we can think of as more quote unquote, and I hate using this term, but like hard sciences, you know, going from even neuroscience, which is a little bit more flexible, but describing things from astrophysics, for example, describing things from chemistry, from biomedical science, and now studying psychological science. It's different. The way that

we collect data is different. I mean, we utilize heavy scientific principles. But there's an ongoing debate within the psychology field of whether we should be, you know, utilizing the medical model or what's considered the contextual model of psychology research, because you just can't do studies with people and with subjective states the same way you can with lab mice. You just can't, and so you have to get really

creative about how you research things in psychology. And so it's been really interesting changing my perspective of one that is I think a little bit more staunch, a little bit probably more materialistic, more evidence based, imperial, empirical and flexible, into under standing a different type of empiricism with psychology and especially psychotherapy. It's been a change for sure. Yeah, and I mean you are now entering the world of empiricism and you'll be doing studies for your dissertation I

imagine and seeing how messy humans are compared. I mean, rodents are messy too, but like humans are a real mess Oh yeah, I mean with with mouse studies, you can literally buy clones from a distributor. Ye, And you can do experiments and say, well, I know that genetically these forty mice that I was doing these experiments on were genetically identical to each other. Yeah, yeah, you know, and so I know that I'm controlling for so many variables.

They're reared the same way in the same laboratory, they eat this exact same diet every day, and they have all the same genes. Obviously, none of those things are true when you're working with people. We've had rich and and profound lives that are inextricably linked to our development. Like there's just no way to know when it comes to people, whether it's the nature or the nurture, or

the both or the neither. When it comes to how somebody reacts to therapy, for example, there's just no way to know if these people are more capable of having a positive reaction to this type of therapy, then those people simply buy virtue of their diagnosis, or by virtue of their home life, or by virtue of their gender or their orientation, or I mean, gosh, I could like literally throw darts at a dartboard and list five thousand

variables to have to worry about when you're doing psychology research. It's just such a different rol for them exactly, And that's the thing you just can't And so then you have to start getting really creative statistically to try and understand how those variables are intervening, you know, or the media your results. Are they moderating your results? What does

this mean? Absolutely? Well, I noticed that you're getting a concentration in social justice and diversity as well, and I don't think every school has that concentration within a PhD. So that's right there. That's an interesting that you have that concentration. Can you tell me more about like what that concentration you hope to bring into your work? Oh? Yes, at Fielding, if you're in the psychology you know division and you are studying clinical psychology for your PhD, you

can choose a concentration. You don't have to, but there are a few different concentrations that you can choose. Neuropsychology is probably the most intensive. It's the one that My background is in you know, I told you that I did an undergrad in psychomasters in neuroscience, and I actually did start a PhD about ten years ago for like a year in clinical neuropsychology. It was I was like not even twenty one years old, yet I had made

a massive move from Texas to New York. I was very who it was a very tough time in my life and it just wasn't the right time to be in school. So I ended up leaving that And since then, you know, getting older, realizing that neuropsych is maybe not what I want to do for a living. I'm not really wanting to do a lot of assessment. I want to do more therapy. It's also very cutthroat, very competitive field. It's kind of like the sexy field to be in

right now. So you know, yeah, there's like a bunch of twenty two year old, fresh out of well maybe twenty six year old, you know, fresh out of undergrad graduate students working on these degrees, and really they're hungry.

They don't have to work, they don't have lot, like I shouldn't say, they don't have lives, so they're not entrenched in their lives as much as older people are, and they're like, you know, willing to put in to neuropsychology and to compete in neuropsychology in a way that I'm just like not willing to do now that I'm older. It's just not what I want to do for a living. But we have a lot of really bright students at Fielding who are focusing on neuropsychology. We also have I

think a forensic science concentration our forensic psychology. I think there's a parent infant mental health concentration. I know I'm forgetting some of the concentrations that are offered, maybe violence prevention, but I really gravitated towards social justice and diversity because the concentration really is all about making sure that all everything you do in psychology, whether you're doing your research, whether you're taking classes, whether you're seeing patients, has that

social justice and diversity lens. Right, We don't we don't just work with the dominant majority culture, nor should we we work And the dominant majority culture is no longer

the majority, at least in America. It might have the dominant majority power, you know, when we're talking like white male, Protestant, hetero sexual, like we could list a bunch of features of you know, we could talk though about, you know, the privilege of those types of statuses within American society, but ultimate and the power that really the ultimate power that they wielded in almost every field, and how that's

influenced American history and how that influences these kinds of relationships. But ultimately, when you are in a one on one interpersonal relationship with a patient, that patient comes with a beautiful and rich and diverse background. That patient is very likely not going to be a white, Protestant, male, heterosexual,

you know, uh, middle income. You know, the list goes on and utilizing this narrative that we've long utilized in psychotherapy that like somehow that is the norm is first of all gross, but also does a massive disservice to positive mental health. And so, you know, social justice and diversity, the diversity angle is really about. It's about having kind

of cultural multicultural competency. It's about understanding that everybody comes with their own story, and it's about understanding at least some of the basic norms from other cultures and understanding their interplay with mental health, because even things like depression and anxiety look different in different cultures, and they look different when there's a religious component to it, and they look different when you know, the languages are different, they're

expressed in different ways. So that's the diversity side of it.

But the social justice side, I think does go one step further and it really shows that a lot of psychologists are deeply passionate about advocacy and that you know, the best way to affect change beyond doing having a one on one relationship with a patient, is ensuring that the greater society is trending in an appropriate direction and that you know, we see patients falling through the cracks of systems, especially when we're working with Department of Mental

Health or we're doing things that are uh prescribed, you know, you know, utilizing Medicare or something like that, and we see the holes and we see the problems, and the iteration start solving those problems. And it's important I think that if you're a psychologist, a psychotherapist that really cares about having a healthy and fair and equitable world, that there is a social justice component to your work that you advocate for those things even outside of the one

on one psychotherapy room. Thanks Kara, like thanks for describing all of that. There's a lot of different really interesting threads. I think we can go from there. You said that, like neuroscience is really hot these days, and I would say social justice and diversity are really hot terms these days as well, especially among twenty one twenty year olds,

I mean teaching college students. I mean it's very popular as well, these kind of concerns, So it's really it might be hot terms, but I don't think that they are as represented within university settings. I think that as a field, neuropsychology and neuroscience is sexy, right, That's a field like when somebody has done their basic training, whether it's the first couple of years of their undergrad or whether they had got an undergrad in a broader topic.

I think those are like sexy fields to go into, same as theoretical cosmoy astrophysics. It's a very sexy field. It's what people are writing about in the media, it's what people are drawn to as an educational topic. I think that you're right, social justice and diversity are very important, and there are things that people are talking about like

they're becoming the center of the conversation. I still think that we are lacking in an academic setting, We are lacking institutional opportunities for people to actually focus on those things as a career. Well, you should come to Barnhard colleges because there's a lot of deep interest in social justice and diversity. Thereat maybe it varies by maybe it varies. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously I think my background, in

my perspective comes from comes from public universities. Yeah, like the universities where most people have the most opportunities to attend. And it's not to say that there's no opportunities there, and it's not to say that there aren't amazing professors who are focusing on these things, but like you said early on social justice and diversity, Oh, most people don't have the opportunity to concentrate in that. It's like, I know,

it's not a common concentration. Yeah, I mean, you raise a really good point about just general accessibility to scientific the science process, to being able to show up at the table, and there are lots of different inroads we could take in discussing that. Maybe I could ask you, you know, as a woman in science, have you personally faced what have been some of the major hurdles for you, well, yeah,

I mean all women in science have faced hurdles. I mean that's like kind of like do you breathe every day when you when you wake up? I mean yeah, like, all women in science face hurdles. This is a common it's a common concern, I mean in psychology less. So that's simply because psychology opened its doors to women earlier

on in the process. I mean, it's still the case that when you look at at very early psychological history, it was dominated by men, and even at the highest levels at some universities, the tenured faculty, the board seats, things like that. Even within psychology, you do see a higher degree of men at the highest highest levels. But for the most part, in psychological science it's hugely dominated by women. I mean, the vast majority of degrees are

are conferred upon women. There's a lot of female faculty, and psychology has always been kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to general I think, not just social acceptance, but advocacy right for gender and orientation differences. So I think that you also see a lot of transgender individuals working within psychology. I think also people by nature of their life struggles are drawn to understanding the condition of the mind and understanding how they can help people.

So you also see you know, I think women, people of color, maybe nonconforming individuals who are drawn to working within psychology to try and understand those issues a little bit more deeply. But yeah, back when I was an undergrad, when I was working on my masters in neuroscience, I mean, I'm lucky in many senses that I wasn't in like a physics department or computer science department, where those odds

are just so much worse. But there were definitely institutional barriers difficulties that I had to deal with, sexist professors, sexually inappropriate professors, of course. So I mean I think that this is like a no brainer. Almost every woman that you'll talk to can either remember at least one instance, or she might have to dig deep because she's like, oh yeah, I just kind of normalized that, or I

just kind of forgot about that, you know. Oh I didn't want to let that get to me, so I just kind of put it in its box and dealt with it in that way. It wasn't really that big a deal. But later in life, I think when we reflect, we're like, oh, yeah, that was totally shitty that thing that happened, or I didn't get a fair shake in

that situation. Did I I'm now realizing that we justify, we normalize, We do everything we can do cognitively to not feel like we're being treated unfairly because you can't. You just can't like persist with that kind of uncomfortable dissonance every day. So it's hard. It's hard for a lot of I think it's getting way better. Obviously, more

and more women have amazing women role models. But you know, ask any any woman who's worked science, and especially ask a woman of color, or especially ask a transgender person of color. Yeah, they deal with some shit. Well, thank you for talking about that experience. Something popped up on my screen when I was looking at this whole Neil deGrasse Tyson controversy, people saying that, like he touched you inappropriately or something like what was that about? Yeah, I

don't really have an open statement about that. I mean, I think that what they're referring to is an on stage on stage, right, this is something that happened in public. It's not something that there's any sort of what's the word I'm looking for, Sorry, it's still kind of early on the East Coast. I have a late late night in the clinic last night, but it's it's not something where people are I watched that clip, so I was

just cry guessing what happened. So I mean, you can make your own come to your own conclusions about how you felt about that. I mean, I think that at minimum, we can say that there are people in this world who have a frustration. Oh, that's not the right word to use. At minimum, there are people in this world who I think to need to learn and could stand to use some training on better boundaries. At maximum, you could probably make some other kinds of pointed statements about it.

But it's hard for me to say. Neil's a friend. He's always been a friend, He's always been an advocate and a supporter. He has a lot of other issues going on with regards to those kinds of accuation statements. I have no idea what happened when he was in college, and I am not in a position to talk about any of those things. But he's got a lot that he's that people need to figure out with regards to him. Just like, honestly, this is happening left and right. I

mean it happened with Lawrence Krauss. We saw a massive Lawrences. Yeah, there's a lot you could read out. Yeah, with the physicist Lawrence Kraus. I mean, left and right, we're seeing icons and idols and people that it makes you throw your hands up there enrollgalized and go not you too, really that guy too? I mean it's it's so disenheartening when you find out, oh that professor acted inappropriately. Oh

that professor you know across the boundary. Oh yeah, that one person who I always really looked up to, not so much a saintists we thought, I mean, go back to Bill Cosby, go back to any of these examples, and it's it's yeah, it's it's the me too era, and people are getting hip to it. Some people don't want to believe it, of course, not the sacred cows.

These these narratives that we had for a long time that certain people were perfect, and not only are they not perfect, but potentially you know, engaging in pretty horrible criminal activity. Yeah. That sounds like two separate things, right, because like, no one's perfect. But then there's this extra thing of like there's some people that are definitely abusing their power, and that's a very serious, you know, thing

that we need to be aware of well. And I think what we're learning too is that historically it's not that there are quote so bad apples, which I think has always been the dominant narrative. It's that the culture itself is allowing for an institutional problem and it just has to change. And that's a function of the same people maintaining the same social currency, the same power, and the same privilege for basically all of human history. And that looks like changes are being made. Yeah, of course

they are, but it's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen asily as we'd like. There's a horrible backlash that's coming from it, where the victims are actually suffering, they're being double victimized by being you know, raked over the coals in the court of public opinion.

And it's a really sad situation. These you know, women who are speaking up in the Me too movement, not just women, I mean, I hate to say that women, men, boys, transgender individuals, basically just vulnerable individuals who are finally saying in is enough. I'm speaking up. Other people are speaking up to their strength in numbers. They're getting showed up and eaten alive in the court of public opinion. And it's just it's so sad to watch. It's so frustrating,

and then you wonder why people don't come forward. Yeah, so what do you think about the argument some people are like, we really should have like, you know, there's this whole camp of people that are like due process, due process, that's really what is important. We shouldn't like, we shouldn't like quote, believe all women, you know, we should actually have due process. And because how are those

things two different things? That's what I don't understand, Like, of course we should believe women and we should have due process. I guess if you believe all women without the due process process, then you're not believing in due process. I guess that would be the argument. That's a terrible argument. Due process is a legal distinction. You can believe somebody and still not send somebody to prison until they have

due process. I don't understand. And that's the thing that I see all the time is these internet like like these these trolls on the Internet being like and I'll see this a lot where it's like, you know, I can't believe this person said this horrible thing, like you know, or so and so is protesting against somebody saying something in public and blah blah blah, or like one time I tweeted something like I am so sick of hearing

the term social justice warrior. I'm so sick of hearing the term you know, X, Y, and Z used as a pejorative, and I got literally like thousands of angry trolls, I mean, just the troll army came out of the woodwork and they're like, they're like, you're trying to shut down free speech. And it's like, do you understand what the First Amendment is? Like you're free to say whatever you want, and I'm free to tell you I don't

like it. I don't understand when people mix up legal distinctions with casual conversation, like exactly the I think false equivalents that you were, you know, passing along there, that you were saying that people are saying, yes we can believe all women and yes we can also have due process, and both of those things can exist at the same time and they're not diametrically opposed, just like you have you know, not you personally I'm using the Royal You,

some white nationalist asshole has the you know, freedom to spout hate, and you know, they also have to suffer the consequences when people say, we're not going to stand for that, and we're going to not have you speak at our you know, private event, or we're going to speak our minds and write op eds skewering you, or we're going to talk about your hate organization and cite the Southern Poverty Law Center and and bring to people's attention what clandestine activities you're trying to do to to

infringe upon the rights of ethnic minorities in this country. So, I mean, I think that it's like people need to understand that the legal distinctions are the legal distinctions and the social distinctions are the social distinctions, and they can happen at the same time. Well, I think, you know, you made a really good point about I mean, believing someone. I mean, that's still free speech. Like, if we believe in free speech, we should give free speech to those

who believe whatever they want to believe. Well, and also we need to be you know, we need to understand the evidence based process. Right. I'm a huge advocate of evidence based thinking. I am a scientist, I you know, this is I work on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. We wrote a whole freaking book about it. We do a podcast about it. Yeah, it's my thing. And I do believe that a complaint against another individual is a form of evidence. It's it's you know, legally binding, it's standing.

This is this is statements. This is how police do their work. This is you know, when we talk about the difference between laboratory evidence and forensic evidence, obviously they're different protocol in their different standards. But when a woman makes an accusation against a man, that's a form of evidence. And I do think it's important to look at it that way. And I think that when we actually look at the data as a whole, we start to realize that those data show that the vast majority of these

kinds of statements are true. And people love to cherry pick, and they love to cite that one time that that woman made a false statement against somebody because she was revengeful because they had a bad breakup and she just really wanted to ruin his life. Of course that's going to happen. Of course, that's and we sho that to be true as well. We should, but we should also look at the frequency of these events, and let's not normalize these things, and let's not say that that's the

fifty to fifty of it all. It's just like when we see these false equivalencies in the news about climate science, right, and we see, okay, well, here's the climate scientist talking about all of these things that humans have done to cause a warming of the climate, and here's a denier sitting down right next to them giving the opposite view. When that's not the fifty percent opinion, it's the one percent opinion. And I think it's the same thing when

it comes to these false accusations. It's so in the drastic minority. But what ends up happening is people go, why would we believe all women A bunch of them are lying, And it's like, no, a very small minority of them are lying, and it's not the norm, and

we need to remember that. So it's very important. So it seems like you're saying, like taking account based rates is extremely important your reasoning about these sorts of things and reasoning about everything, Well, oh, I one hundred percent everything I'm saying we should apply that same principle of

the importance of you know, Bayesian thinking. I think a lot of people have made a really good point that that we should be more Bayesian thinkers than not, you know, yeah, and I think that, Yeah, it's important because you know, it shows I think a lot of people in the kind of new skeptic community use it as a cover for misogynistic thinking, and it's it's a big bummer to

see that coming out. There's a lot of kind of new libertarian thinkers in then, in the new skeptic movement who are like who think that liberalism or think that conservatism is somehow not evidence based. Like they look at it like, oh, we should just stick to the science, and the science means you should be a libertarian, which does not compute at all, because you know, moral distinctions aren't evidence based, and those kinds of stratifications have so

much more to do with them looking at evidence. You know, a lot of them have to do with with ethics and morality and these very inner you know, personal distinctions, philosophy things like that. But yeah, when it comes to this kind of Asian thinking, as you mentioned, of course, we just we cannot think in black and white you know, no pun intended, and we cannot think in these like staunched sort of oppositional, paradoxical, diametric terms. It's just first

of all, not evidence based at all. It's not appropriate to the data that we're working with, and it's really not I mean, it's a way that human beings, as we've learned so much from from psychology studies, an it's a natural, fundamental, I think comfortable way to think is to look at things kind of on a spectrum or no,

not on a spectrum. Is to look at things as if it's like either or It's hard work, right, It requires some neuropsychological work and also requires having the data, the correct data that will be your priors, because a lot of people are biased and start with incorrect priors, don't they. Oh yeah, I mean they yeah, I mean because these confirmation bias, right like you, as well as just narratives, having certain bleeding in certain narratives that don't

perform to the data. And then what happens is you have that narrative, you know, you've experienced anecdote, and so you say here, I'll pick one from my own life. Preas drivers are the literal worst right. I live in la I so apologize if you drive a Prius. I have a lot of friends to drive press pre I

pre uh PRES's I don't know so. But what ends up happening is you're like, oh, Prius drivers are the worst because you get cut off by a Prius driver because there's one in your neighborhood who like drives fourteen miles an hour and you're stuck behind them every time you're trying to get to your house after a long day of work. And then you just start noticing that every time you're getting pissed at a driver, it happens

to be a Prius. And really that's confirmation bias. It's because you have a heightened interest in the preses, you notice them more often, You consider the hits and not the misses. You know, all of those things that the movie Pie so beautifully illustrated. But that's confirmation bias, and it's natural. It's what we all do. It actually takes a lot of work to realize we're falling victim to

these to this confirmation bias. It's it's sort of i'd say one of the dominant cognitive biases that we fall victim to and we have to be really careful not to, but it's not easy. You'll fall into it very readily. You're saying so many really interesting things, and I know that I can have a really really unique, great conversation with you because you're you live both these worlds that I am also interested in social just as well as truth, and so I know we can have these open conversations.

So I absolutely agree we need to be careful. What I struggle with is, like, how do we, like, you know,

take these priors into account. And at the same time, I want to reduce my own bias to discriminate, Like I don't want to treat maybe believe all men, but I also don't want to like not believe all So I believe all women, but I don't want to not believe all men either, Like I want to like treat individuals as individuals and not like generalize an individual too maybe a stereotype or even like the prior of a group. So I struggle with like wanting to have that level

of nuance. I was worrying if you if you think there's a good way of striking that balance, I think you have to strike a balance. I think that you have to I mean, otherwise life is going to feel incredibly chaotic to you. You know, you can't walk around like you're on LSD every day that everything is brand new and that you're not informed by previous to try it for a week, yeah, a week, No, you don't

trust me. You can try it for like eight hours, so that you don't want to try it for But there is this experience right where like you want to have fresh eyes with everybody in every situation is a brand new situation, and I'm going to go into it unbiased, and I'm going to go into it with no previous judgments. And you know, as a as a clinician, that's what I have to do with my patients, of course, but

that's an effortfull opportunity I have. I get to spend an hour once a week, maybe multiple times a week with the same individual, and I go into that with a non judgmental stance, and I go into that trying to be as unbiased as possible and say, this person is is their own person. I might think I know

what's going on in you know, latin X culture. This person's Latin EX experience is different than another person's Latin X experience, or as much as I think I know what goes on in the mind of a young gay man who hasn't yet come out to his parents, this young gay man's coming out experience is different than any

other young gay man's coming out of experience. And yes, of course that's the ideal, and that's the goal, and that's what you have to do in therapy to be a I think of a valuable clinician and to do right by your patients. But in life that is nearly impossible with every single person you meet, with every single experience you have, our decisions are informed by previous judgments. They have to be. It's the only way we can survive. And so I think then you have to strike a balance.

And as much as I appreciate this, you know, and I kind of just hate these I think these social movements, you know, trust all women, not all men. Black lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and of course I'm talking about the more progressive movement coupled with Black Lives Matter. I mean, it's pretty about we're talking about police officers. Oh gotcha, Okay,

I actually need to hear I haven't heard of that one. Yeah, well, it's pretty loaded and that's the thing, like you often will see a progressive social movement and then you'll see a conservative counter. You're saying, like a counter, yeah, and you're against that. No, no, no, I understand the nature

of these things. I understand how they work. But I'm saying, as much as I think that there is importance in in fighting for a cause, you also start to see all the tribalism that comes out in these pithy hashtags. And I think that these pithy hashtags just they simply can't encapsulate everything that we're talking about. So when you say not all men, which is a great example, and you want to say, okay, not all men. Sure, of course, not all men. I mean the hashtag says it all.

Not all men are rapists, of course, not most men are not rapists. He said that I think most men are rapist. That's actually not true. That's actually I've talked to some feminists who actually think that most men are rapists. Most men, yeah, yeah, And I've pushed them on that and they've said most what is their percentage that they

give you? And then I asked them percentage and they'll say, like, well, I saw statistics saying like one out of four, and I was like, well, even if that is true, and that's not most No, I know, and I've made that argument and I've gotten there, like convert from like the facts thing to the anecdote. They're like, well, I believe all individual anecdotes are just as valid. Then I'm like, then why do you even bring up the statistics then if you're gonna gonna ignore it. So I get these

kinds of conversations. Yeah, but as you said, you I mean, you just said that some people will will say the word most most men, and then as I mentioned, they don't actually believe most men because they don't, because then they're saying, I hope not, I hope not. I think most men are are pretty I think most I think

most humans are pretty fundamentally good. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other conversation that we can have about beneficence and about you know, evil and good, and you know, there's a whole time I'm about to poiseh a whole paper on that topic in a couple they're heavy philosophical terms, but when it comes to I think a great example that you mentioned was not all men, right, that the hashtag of course, not all men is very You can unpack it a lot, so you can see this as

an alternative to believe women. You can see it as an alternative to me too. You can see it as I think, a very fearful response to women's voices finally being heard. You can see it as a as a power play. You can see it as a struggle to maintain privilege. But you can also see it as somebody. Honestly, I do think there's a great uh uh interaction with Anita Hill and Stephen Colbert that I highly recommend everybody watch.

And he was talking about like, you know, I'm hearing from a lot of men that they're fearful to even be in a room with a woman, or you know, they don't really know what to do or how to act because they don't want to be uh, they don't want to get in trouble and they're not sure what the bow are anymore and blah blah blah, and like should men be fearful to be around women now? And she's like, not if they're not raping that, you know, there's nothing to be fearful, and no, you don't have

to be afraid. And so I think that the important thing to remember here again is this Beaijian reasoning. Oh yeah, and I agree with you on that for sure. Yeah, And the important thing to remember is that, yes, there are going to be some people who say not all men, of course, not all men, but enough men, and that's the problem. And so yes, if a woman is walking down the street and a man approaches her and it's

dark and she's alone, she has enough evidence in her life. Unfortunately, the world we live in is that she has enough evidence that she needs to be alert and that she might be a little bit fearful. And that's a sad truth that it's safer to assume the worst of this man when I'm in a compromising situation than to assume the best because I need to worry about my own safety. I can totally see that viewpoint and totally rip me

to shreads that this is a false analogy. Some police officers make that argument, you know, when they have like a young blackmail. You know, they'll say, like, well, it's safer to err on the side of stopping this if they're going to reach into their cote or something like, how is that not discrimination of the individual? Is my question?

And I could be wrong, So I just wanted to open this up for conversation because I'm not a police officer and I don't have the opportunity to violate somebody's rights. That's the difference. That's a major difference. If I am a and I'm saying me personally, I actually offen air on the side of being too trusting, and I'm constantly being me too too. For sure. I'm constantly being having conversations with my friends and family and significant other about

like be careful. Like I found a wallet on the street the other day. It was a young girl's wallet. It was like shaped like a stuffed animal. So at first I just thought it was like somebody had dropped a stuffed animal on the street. And I picked it up and saw that it had a zipper and was like, oh crap, and I kind of felt that there were things in it. So I opened it and I was like, shit,

you know, some young girl dropped her wallet. There was cash, a bunch of credit cards, and a driver's license and I looked at as a provisional driver's license. The girl was barely nineteen, I think, And at first I was with a friend and she was like you can take it to the DMV. And I was like, I'm not doing that, Like, think about the fact this part girl's never gonna get her stuff back if I take it

to the DMV. She's like, you could drop it in the mail and I looked and it was an address that was, you know, within five minutes of where I was, and I was like, no, I'm just gonna drive it to her house, like of course, you know, this poor girl is going to probably in a super panic mode. And so I called my boyfriend and I'm like, you know, i'll be home in a few minutes. I just got to drop this wallet off blah blah blah, and and he's like, oh my gosh, be careful and I'm like

it's a nineteen year old girl. Yeah, but you don't know, like just be careful, Like it's always that mentality. Just be careful. You never know what you're working in, right, And I'm really bad about being like what you're being paranoid? And of course it was totally fine. I went there. The girl was still out, but her mom was like, oh my god, God, God bless you, like she was like, of course, but of course I knocked on the door. And the mom looked at me very reticently, who are you?

Why are you here? And I was like mouthing to her through the door, I think your daughter dropped her wallet. And at first she was like, you know, what are you doing on my property? Like you could tell she was scared of me, Like who is this person? I don't know, because that's the culture we live in now. And finally I was like, you know, just do so and so live here? And she was like, why do you want to know? And I was like, she dropped

this on the street. I found it, and her whole countenance changed and she was like, bless you, Oh my god, you did such a good thing. And It's like, no, I did a normal thing. I did the thing anybody I think you did the right thing. I mean the right thing. But I'm also like, yeah, that's the right thing, and everybody should have done that that It's not like

an above and beyond thing. But ultimately I used this illustration as the fact that, like, people are paranoid and people are scared, and they have sometimes good reason to be, sometimes not so good reason to be. But a potential victim on the street has a certain level of vigilance. That's very different for a police officer. A police officer is armed, and I'm not saying that a police officer shouldn't also be vigilant because their job is incredibly dangerous.

They go into unknown situations where they have blind spots and where there's a massive potential for violence and for danger on a regular basis. But going into assume that a young black man, by virtue of being black and by virtue of being young, is likely going to commit a crime or is likely is simply not based on the evidence. It's just not it's not based on the

evidence too. For a woman taughtomaculy assume that a male is going to rape them by the same logic, maybe not rape but you, but based on their personal evidence. A yes, if you look. I think the most updated numbers are that over half of women have been sexually

assaulted in their lives. So hello, And let's add to that that if you do look at your own personal anecdotal experiences late at night, walking around, walking to your car, oftentimes being followed, being cat called, hearing specific verbalizations that are threatening is incredibly common for most women. Yeah, incredible, and I want to acknowledge that absolutely, and I think that's right. That is experience. Yeah, and you have to

realize that that is her evidence. And again, like, be understanding when I say that a woman walking to First of all, I do have to put my foot down and say, I think it's pretty horrible that any would Beddy would be like, why would a woman want to be vigilant walking to her car? She has no evidence to support the fact that she needs to be vigilant, is like, who are you? First of all? So there's that, but even beyond that, a woman being vigilant walking to

her car is not infringing upon your rights. And it is not claiming that she thinks that you are a rapist. It is her saying that. And it's not claiming that she thinks that every man with an ear shut her eyes as a rapist. It's her saying that there are certain men that look at her a certain way or that say certain things that make her uncomfortable, and so therefore she must be vigilant when she's walking to her car late at night. It's not all men, it's some men,

and those men pose a serious threat. And I think that the sad truth is that it's not just the woman thinking that Very often, as I just described with the example of returning the wallet to the young woman's family, it's the men in our lives that reinforce that. And if you remember when a very famous case of a woman being kidnapped and raped and murdered in Australia recently, and there was a huge outcry from the community that

these women were not feeling safe. The men were saying, well, you shouldn't be alone, you should travel in groups, you should have your cell phone handy shahlah. It was victim blaming. It was well, we're not going to make a statement that men shouldn't rape, and we're not going to make a statement that boys need to be more mindful or that you know, the perpetrators here are doing horrible things and we need to be more vigilant to make sure that the perpetrators do that. Let's put the onus on

the victims. Well, maybe you shouldn't have worn such a short skirt. Maybe you should have had your eyes more open after yoga class. Maybe you should have kept to main streets instead of you know, taking that shortcut home. It's your behavior that led to this, and that is really, really unfortunate. So yes, there are things that we could always be doing that's vigilance to help reduce a risk of danger. But the onus is not on us to

do those things. All those things are going to do is cause a high level of traumatic anxiety in our lives if we have to be hyper vigilant all the time. And so yes, we have to do those things. Within it's an unfortunate and undue burden that we have to carry. But not doing those things does not put us at a higher chance of getting raped. It just removes the lesser protections. And that's a very important distinction to make.

If a rapist is going to rape a young woman and he has his eyes set on her, if she's got her eyes a little more open, if she's got her cell phone in her hand, if she's got her rape whistle, he's still going to rape her. It's going

to happen. And if we actually do look at the evidence, if we actually do look at the things that, let's say, the correlates of rape, the things that make it more likely that a young woman is going to be raped, you know what those things are, Being in an abusive relationship, having abusive parents, having previously been victimized by commercial sexual exploitation of children. So having previously been trafficked means that

you're more likely to be rape in the future. So basically, being a victim increases your chances of being a victim. And all of those things have to do with being a vulnerable situation. Low education, low access to resources, living in an unstable family where you don't have healthy attachments and you were never able to develop them. I mean, they're the vulnerable children that I see on a regular basis. It is not their fault. It is society's fault. It

is their family's fault, it is their neighborhood's fault. It is oftentimes the educational system that failed them's fault. It is the legal system and the foster system that failed them and that made it so that they were more

likely to be revictimized over and over and over. I cannot tell you how many times I have met young, bright eyed, beautiful girls who were victimized by their foster families or who were victimized within it should have been a secure and safe place, and that is the most likely reason that a young girl is going to be a victim of sexual abuse. Not because of anything she did. Well,

thank you for making that point. And yeah, I think that common ground for certain for this is that in order to make systematic changes that will, on a societal level, decrease the chances that any woman will ever get raped, we need to know scientific we know all the factors that go into it. Yeah, and the truth is we also have to not fall victim to the logical fallacy wherein we move the goalpost. And that's something that I think we see a lot of it. Tell me more

about that. We have that evidence. We have tons of forensic evidence, We have tons of big data about demographics about you know, we can look at who's most likely to be victimized in what situations are they most likely to be victimized. We know that it's the most vulnerable among us. We know it already, and yet I think people who don't look at that data often make the loudest arguments. That's a good point. I mean, I think that, like, when it really comes down to it, I think we're

kind of saying the same thing. You just describe some factors that we know make things more likely, like being foster care, things like I think we're both one hundred percent agreed. We should never ever blame someone who is in foster care, you know, make it at all culpable for the incident. So I actually think we're saying something very similar. I'm just talking about, like, how can we have science informed understanding of how we can make kind

of these systematic changes. Sure, but we also have to understand that science can only go so far, right, because as much as we have the evidence, we also have to appeal to legislators, and we have to see these institutional changes that are happening at a level that goes beyond the evidence. Legislators aren't often that interested in the evidence, and even if they are, they're also going to be

really interested in appeals to emotion. And I think that we have to understand the psychology of individuals and we have to utilize that psychology. So we have to, you know, have a multi pronged approach to affecting social change. The social psychologists have been doing it for decades, right. Socialchologists are brilliant marketers because they understand how people think and

they understand how to convince people of things. And so I think we need to utilize some of those lessons learned by the social psychologists in our approaches to legislative lobbying and in our approaches to science communication, for example. I mean, that's something we didn't even really get a chance to talk about, and we've gone over at this point,

I'm going to have to run soon. But you know the idea of when you're talking to the general public about science, meeting them where they are and not always just throwing facts at them, because the knowledge deficit problem is not the problem, as we've proven time and time again. Can't just throw more facts of people and expect them to change their minds. It doesn't work that way. So

I do want to be very respectful your time. So maybe this can be like kind of the last question, like what do you do if, like you do a research study and your dissertation and you objectively find the facts about something and it contradicts like a social justice narrative, Like what do you do with that conflict? What do you do when social justice narratives conflict with trying to do a thought experiment? Like what do you do in

that situation? Well, the same thing you do anytime you do scientific experimentation and your hypothesis you end up confirming the null right. So let's say that there's any narrative. It doesn't need to be a social justice narrative. Let's say that the narrative is that this cancer cell behaves in this particular way under this external environment. And then you do the research and that's not what you find.

You say, okay, it's one study. Now I've got to do more and see if I can replicate these findings. I iterate, and let's say you do fifteen studies and you systematically disprove a previously held belief, which is very rare in science because usually a theory held belief is based on multiple studies and it's based on concilience. So it's based on multiple studies from various fields coming together to start to form what's called a theory. Right, It's

no longer just a hypothesis. There's multiple lines of evidence supporting it. So our best examples of theories are things like evolution via natural selection. It's an amazing theory. It holds so much water. Pretty much every field of science supports it, from everything from molecular phylogenetics to morphological comparisons of ancient bones to extant forms Darwin's finches and things like that. We have so much evidence that evolution happens

via natural selection. That's a theory, so it's actually very rare that then somebody goes in the lab and they do an experiment and it's like, oh, it doesn't seem to happen via natural selection. It's like, oh, cool and weird, but probably a one off. So let's first make sure it's not a one off. And then once we see that we actually have some sort of new understanding, the start to build more experiments around it and try and learn it better. I mean, that's just how science works.

It doesn't matter what narrative the science is going up against. We know what we know based on the convergence of a lot of evidence. And if we have one study, we don't know that we have an inkling. We have an idea, but we need to learn more about it.

Only after we have multiple studies from multiple labs, from multiple perspectives, I should even say, and maybe even from multiple fields, are we able to finally say, Okay, we're pretty confident that this is how the world is or this is how the universe is, And then how do you update the ideologies? Though in light of that evidence so that's where paradigm shifts come in. Right. If you've ever read Thomas Kuns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that's

what that's about. And it's slow, right, because people are slower than the evidence. That's true because we are entrenched. And when I say we, everybody, we have these cognitive biases where we think something works a certain way because that's how we've been taught and it's a comfortable way of knowing because it fits with our own personal experience. And then when somebody turns it on its ear, it's very hard to let go and to say, oh, I'm going to start thinking sideways now when for so long

I was thinking right side up. But also, let's be honest, most things don't get turned on their ears. Most things change iteratively. We learn a little, tiny new thing that makes us do a slight update, and it's much easier to do a slight update than it is to completely change your mind. And most things are iterative. Those paradigmatic shifts are they've only really happened, and you can kind of put a line in the sand between what you

consider to be a big paradigm or not. But we're talking moving from a model where you know, the Earth was the center of the universe to a model where we now understand that we are but a speck of

dust and the universe has multiple galaxies. Or we're talking about moving from a model where a higher power produced organisms in the form more lesson they generally are today, versus a model where there are natural pressures that were put on the actual DNA within the organisms, wherein these mutations that naturally occurred allowed for the more fit organisms to continue to survive. Those are massive paradigm shifts. Those

things are pretty rare in science. I know you've also studied skepticism in science, and I think it relates to a lot of what we're talking about today. I just want to thank you so much for I've learned a lot of science from you over the years. So thanks for teaching really all so sweet here. I mean, I'm a big fan of the whole Talk Nerdy series, A big fan. Yeah, And so Scott, I want to know, like, when did you so you are working as a as a psychologist, when did you get your PhD two thousand

and nine? Oh wow, So it's been a while. So it's been a decade now. As a psychology. Yeah, rear Man. Now, yeah, so you're teaching and doing research. Yeah, I'm teaching at Columbia and doing research. That's right. And I created I created a new course called the Science of Living Well. Oh. I love that. I feel like students are just so stressed out these days, and I just have this big like urge to just want to like help students increase their well being and meaning in life. Yeah, it's so true.

There's like so much that I think. You're right. Young people, even older people have to juggle now. That just wasn't you know? It is a slower pace prior to the Internet, and it was you know, information gathering required effort, full movement, but it also required putting space in between days, Like you know, you'd have to use a card catalog or you'd have to like check out a book from lo. You just couldn't get information as fast as we can now.

And now, because we can have access so quickly, there's an expectation that we can react to it so quickly and that we fill every moment of the waking day with information gathering. That's so true. I'm trying to nobody stopping for mindfulness. Yeah, exactly, exactly effortful to do that. So I'm trying to I'm trying to bring back a feel that on the psychology of being that Abraham Masow and humanistic psychologist talked about on the fifties and sixties.

And I feel like we need, we need a psychology of being because everyone is like, yeah, just what you said, Like everyone is just concert preoccupied with future plans. And it's so funny too, because that's where I know, yeah, I'm about to jump off. But that's where I think a lot of our cross overcomes. Because what we didn't talk about is that within the clinical fields, oftentimes you

also choose an orientation. So you might be more of a psychodynamic therapist, you might be more of a cognitive behavioral therapist, you might be a really uh immersive therapist where you're what's the word, like an eclectic therapist, where you blend all these things together. But I tend towards and my school luckily offers a track in existential humanistic that's my thing, Yes, my thing exactly so, and that's the type of psychotherapy that I practice and that I'm

really drawn to studying. So that's where I think a lot of our crossover PhD and if I can help support it in any way, let me know. Okay, that's so kind of thank you so much. You know, I'm probably actually going to take you up by good please do. And hey, thank you for the really open, honest, respectful conversation. I'm such a nerd that I just like to consider every single perspective on the table before I realize what

I think. So I think that's completely fair, and I always appreciate the opportunity to be able to have these passionate conversations that you're right, are really respectful, and even when you either have different views or maybe one person's playing Devil's advocate and you're more doing it for the

sake of debate. I love playing Devil's advocate for fun. Yeah, but either way, it's always great to be able to really flex those muscles and talk about talk about not just what the evidence show us, but based on that evidence, what we do truly believe, because those things, I think do go hand in hand. Yeah, these are really important topics and let's keep up the convo. Have a good day, Kara. Awesome, Thanks you TOOI Hie, thanks for listening to the Psychology podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.