Molly Crockett || Moral Outrage in the Digital Age

Doctor Crockett is an Assistant professor of psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Center for Neuroethics. Prior to joining Yale, Doctor Crockett was a faculty member the University of Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology

and a fellow of Jesus College. She owns a BSc In neuroscience from UCLA and a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge WHOO, and completed a Welcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zurich and University College London. Molly, I'm so excited to finally have you on the Psychology Podcast. It's so great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Oh, yes, you know, we were just reminiscing about how we've known

each other for quite some time. You know, we were classmates together, and I have this mental image of the first time I met you. I think it was at King's College reception at Cambridge probably, yeah, in like two thousand and I want to say, like five six sixx yeah, two thousand and six, and we both like, I'm trying to remember the conversation, but I remember we're both like lost. Yeah, I mean, Cambridge is a pretty weird place to show up. I grew up in southern California, where none of the

buildings are older than about fifty years old. To show up at King's College is pretty amazing. I think we yes discovered pretty quickly we were both psychologists, and that was the point of It's been such a delight for me to watch your career sore. Yeah, it's just so cool. Anyway, Oh, thank you, that's very good. I wanted to talk a little bit about how your research has changed over the

years and how you got into the research you're doing. Now, because if I recall correctly, at Cambridge you were doing really groundbreaking work on the brain and implications for like for medicine. I believe in like neurochemistry, interventions and things of that nature. Yeah, so my research has changed quite a lot over the years. I guess when I showed up a Cambridge in two thousand and six, I went there to work with Trevor Robbins and Luke Clark on

how serotonin influences cognition and behavior. And at the very beginning of that work I was primarily interested in self control and impulsivity. And it was sort of through a series of happy accidents that I ended up working on morality, and initially was working on serotonin and morality, how serotonin affects our moral judgments, our decisions about how to respond

to on fairness, for example. But eventually my interests broadened out beyond the neurochemical aspects of morality, and now in my lab we're doing a wide range of approaches to questions that broadly concern social behavior and moral judgment, and we use methods from brain imaging and still a bit of pharmacology to behavioral experiments and now most recently looking at very large data sets of behavior on social media.

That's with the postdoc in my lab, Billy Brady. So it's really exciting for me to be able to always be learning new approaches to understanding something so complex as human morality, because I really do think you need to kind of throw the kitchen sink at it. It's one of those age old questions that really benefit. It's from approaches that are not just multi disciplinary, but also using lots of different methods, and I feel incredibly lucky to

be able to do my job. It's really fun. Yeah, I love that you bring all these different perspectives to studying a really and really important topic that's like the topic some could argue is like the topic of our age.

It's just amazing to see how things have changed. I mean, my first met since that two thousand and six, Like I don't feel like none of this stuff was in my head at the time, like as on my radar, as even an important research topic like you know here, I was in my little silo at Cambridge, like studying intelligence. But times have changed and my research interests have also changed dramatically since then as well. I mean, it's just so interesting because like here we are like twenty nineteen.

That's true, I was. I was not on Twitter in two thousand and six. But when did Twitter start? It started around then? I think I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think I didn't get on Twitter until twenty eleven. Yeah, I think the same for me, or maybe twenty twelve for me. I don't think it's made me happier as a person. Would you agree with that experience? You know? It's these kinds of things are hard to self assess.

I mean, on the one hand, I clearly gain some value from it because I spend a lot of time on social media. But there are different kinds of values there. What philosophers like to distinguish between first order desires and second order desires, So they're your first order, immediate desires, like I want to log into Twitter and check my latest number of likes and followers, and then there's your second order desire about whether you want to have that

initial desire. And I think I find myself increasingly in moments where my first order desires with respect to technology use are not in line with my second order desires. Well, that conflict arises in lots of different situations you know, and so that's important topic investigation in itself, Like when they like kind of like system one in system two are aligned, and when they are really really divergent from each other or conflict. Well, should we just jump into

your research on moral outrage? Sure, you do it. You wrote this terrific paper on moral outrage in the digital Age. One finding from that really stuck out at me. You said, I found it so interesting that you found that am moral acts encountered online tend to cite stronger moral outrage than a moral acts encountered in person or via traditional forms of media. And I feel like there's so many implications of that for morality, you know, for a lot

of things. I was just wondering, like how you interpret that finding in the sense of, like, do you think people are more likely to like signal things online that they don't actually really genuinely authentically believe, but they kind of get caught up in this peer pressure to signal things. Well, I think that that's a separate question that is maybe loosely related to the first question about the strength of

emotional reactions to material encountered online versus offline. And I think one important limitation of the data that I've looked at to note is that the data comes from an experienced sampling study that was led by Will Hoffman and colleagues and published in twenty fourteen, and they had participants in this study responding multiple times a day to randomly timed text messages that sent them a link to a survey that asked them whether in the past hour they

had witnessed, been the target of, learned about, or committed any moral or immral acts, and then if the answer was yes, they asked various follow up questions, including how angry do you feel about this incident? And how discussed it and so on. So I was able to analyze these moral outrage responses a mixture of anger and discussed really to immoral events people learned about depending on where

they had learned about that. But the analysis doesn't distinguish between different types of content, So we don't know from this data whether the thing that people are outraged about online is the same thing that they are outraged about

that they read about in the news. And I think what's driving those differences, even though I can't be sure because the data doesn't go down to that level of detail, but most likely what's driving the differences in the emotional response is that people are probably more likely to see really really outrage provoking content online compared to other forms of media because that content is getting selected for by newspeed algorithms that prioritize content that's most likely to draw

user engagement. And there's quite a lot of research now, I mean, some research initially looking at virality by Joonah Berger and Katie Milkman, who you might have connected with at PEN, showing that like emotion content is more likely to go viral, and then more recently Billy Brady and colleagues and n YU have shown that specifically moral emotions are especially especially likely to go viral, and of course

outrage ism moral emotion. And so it stands to reason that the reason why in that data set we see stronger outrage responses to immral acts learn about online than offline is probably because that content is getting selected for its virality or potential to go viral. So do these things like operate by somewhere like cultural evolution principles or

like mimemic transmission principles. Yeah, potentially, I mean, I think it's a nice analogy to think of the selection of content on social media by news feed algorithms as operating according to some sort of evolutionary principle where fitness is measured by engagement social reward, you know, like yeah, tribal. I mean, that's one the most deep seated revolutionary instincts,

is the need for belonging, right. Yeah, that's a theoretical piece that has a little bit of data on it, and now in my lab there's a whole team that's being led by Billy Brady, a postdoc in my lab, to test some of the questions that I outline in that piece with actual data. So that's been super exciting. I'm learning all about machine learning algorithithms and how to

trade classifiers, and it's been a wonderful educational journey. But yeah, the initial piece was really a reaction to recognizing that I was spending way more time on social media than I really intended to, and that a lot of my choices to share certain kinds of content were feeling really

non intentional. And of course, my background from the Cambridge days working with Trevor Robbins, who, along with Barry Everett, developed really foundational work on drug addiction and how drug addiction and you know, in some cases can be modeled as a shift from goal directed behavior to habit based behavior.

You know, I was sort of steeped in those ideas as a graduate student in Cambridge and started to think about my own behavior on social media as potentially transitioning from goal directed to habitual And of course, one of the seminole findings that's come out of work on goals

and Habits by Tony Dickinson, also Cambridge. Anyway, Yeah, Tony Dickinson, and I believe Dickinson and Shanks Is in the eighties published this paper on different schedules of reward and they showed that variable interval reinforcement, a sort of random, unpredictable delivery of rewards, is the best well or you know, the most effective way to establish a habit. And that's of course exactly how social rewards are delivered to us

on social media, right. You don't know when your post is going to get liked, you don't know how many likes it's going to get, and so we post something and then we're like refreshing the page like a rat

pressing a lever for cocaine. And you know, these are very very basic principles of reinforcement learning, and engineers Facebook and Twitter know this and have designed their systems to maximize the amount of time we spend on the platforms, and you know, and there's all sorts of value judgments one can make about whether that's morally right or morally wrong. You know. I see my role as a scientist to really describe what's happening and to gather data about the

effect of different kinds of technology design on behavior. You know, there is a lot of potential for moral panic around these issues, and there's quite a lot of opinions about what social media is doing to our mental health, our social relationships, democracy, et cetera. Right, But like you know, for every thousand opinions, there's maybe one data point, right, So, like the amount of actual data relative to the number of opinions out there is in my view, problematically small.

And so what we're doing in my lab is trying to actually apply psychological theory to test some ideas and see whether we can find empirical evidence for them. It's great. Relating to the addiction point that you made reinforcement learning, there's one I want to pull out. One of your juicy you have a lot of juicy quotes in that paper, this one. I tweeted this to the Did you see I tweeted all this stuff from you today? I got

so excited in your favor. Just as habitual snacker, just as a habitual snacker eats without feeling hungry, a habitual online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outraged. So if we apply those same principles to like the addiction of anything like cocaine, for instance, you know, we know that with the dopamine, the difference beween wanting and liking, you know, systems of delpamine, you can actually not enjoy

doing it at all, but you kind of feel compelling. Right, So there are two really important things I want to emphasize here. The first is that the hypothesis about habits that I lay out in that paper is a hypothesis. We don't actually have data to support this yet, although of course it feels very intuitive that a lot of is already. No, it's fine. No, I think it is a hypothesis that we're testing, and I think hopefully in the next couple of months we'll have some empirical support

that's consistent with this. But I want to make sure that listeners flag this as like an idea that's not been established yet. The second thing that I think is really important to distinguish, especially in the context of social media and all the opinions out there, is that there's an important distinction between habitual behavior and addiction. And addiction of course, you know, you may know more about it

than me. I'm not a scholar of addiction, but I have close colleagues who are, and like, it's really important to emphasize that an addiction has a very specific definition, both in terms of its neurobiology and its behavioral consequences. And I had one really important hallmark of an addiction is that there's persistent, uh, you know, continuation of the

behavior despite negative consequences. And I think probably a lot of people using social media might wish they use it less and might feel like they are automatically or impulsively logging in, but I'm not sure that they would go so far to say is that the consequences for them are negative and therefore it wouldn't meet, you know, the strict definition for an addiction. So you know, there are tons of othds out there like, oh, you're addicted to Facebook,

you're addicted to Twitter. One of my favorite ones is Twitter is what did somebody write? Twitter is the crystal meth of newsrooms? That was an opinion piece in the Wasatchington Post that came out after the Covington Catholic controversy had kind of entered phase two after the initial outrage over the video that went viral showing kids and maga

hats shouting at a Native American man. As more footage came out, it became clear that the situation was more complicated than it initially had been presented, and several journalists sort of walked back their initial opinions and deleted tweets that they had written, and there was a sort of very very temporary moment of reckoning I think amongst many journalists about Twitter and what kinds of behaviors it incentivizes. Right, But, like you know, is Twitter the crystal method of newsrooms?

Like that's probably an overstatement based on what we know about the science of addiction, And I personally would love to see more input from scientists who actually study addiction, because you know, it's not helpful or actual addiction research to have the lines being very blurred in terms of what counts as an addiction and what what doesn't Thank you, Molly, that that was really terrific and important nuance. So thank you for saying all that. You know, similar debates are

raging with in terms of sex addiction. Is is that a lot of people don't think that it could it exists, you know, And so maybe the most like reasonable thing to say right now is like, there are lots of things in this world that give us, quote, a dopamine hit, you know, and just because we have these deep seated like like social rewards, for instance, it's evolved to probably be one of the most rewarding things in that dopamine system. But that doesn't mean that every time we get a

dopamine hit from something, we're addicted to that thing. So maybe that's just the most reasonable thing. Yeah. Yeah, So let's talk about outrage fatigue. Did you coin that because I used that phrase? No, definitely, no other no, others have talked about that. I mean, that's another thing that that I think there's not really good data one way

or the other. And if you look at the larger social psych literature on anger expression and aggression, like there's actually evidence that would support the existence of a phenomenon like outrage fatigue, you know, basic processes like you know,

desensitization and habituation. At the same time, there is some evidence from studies of aggression that there's a sensitization process as well, in the sense that like you know, you know, venting anger makes you more likely to you know, to aggress in the future because you're sort of ruminating about

it and you're you're not letting it go. So I think that the broader question of whether outrage fatigue is happening on mass is again, like from what we know from psychological research, it's a mixed bag, and there's just not data on this. It's an intriguing idea, isn't it. I Mean it's similar to you know called compassion fatigue as well, well, you know, like and that has been site of a little like Adam Grant and read Rebel a really cool article in hartstory about that. So maybe

there's some more principles there, certainly. Yeah, And it's interesting to think about, like if that phenomenon does exist, if it's a real thing, then then should we be thinking about like you know, rationing our outrage, like reserving it for issues that we personally find most important. But then how do you even define that given that our moral judgments are so contact sensitive and sensitive to factors that

are even unrelated to the topic at hand. So, and it just seems very fraught to think about how how we might try to regulate our own outrage in a

in a principled way. I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't try to do that, but I'm like deeply respectful of like how thority and complicated a project that would be right, Like, you know, if we you know, let's say for the sake of argument, let's say that outrage fatigue exists, and like we discover that, you know, for the average human, like you know, expressing outrage, you know, you can you can express outrage and feel it, you know, for real, like I don't know, twice a day, just

to pick a totally fictional random number. Right. Well, then, like when the first time we encounter something outrageous occurs, what do we do with that? Like what if there's something worse that's coming? Do you not want to waste

our outrage on the first thing you see? Yeah? But I mean, it's it feels preposterous to try and think about emotions in that way, right, like's evolved to serve very specific functions and like to try and impose some sort of you know, goal directed, intentional means and they're you know, of experiencing them. Is is a huge project. Although I guess as and saying those words, this is in some sense a project of mindfulness, right like in

you know, in mindfulness practice. And I know that you've you've had people on the show who are way more expert than me on this, and you've written about it yourself. But like, one aspect of mindfulness practice is finding a way to not act on every emotion that we experience and to allow them to rise and fall and without judgment, observe that happening without getting caught up in them, right to cultivate a sense of equanimity with what's happening outside

of us and inside of us. So, yeah, it's probabe, someone should do a study a mindfulness intervention for outrage fatigue, Like, someone should do that study. It would be really interesting. Yeah, I at one hundred and forty seven things I wanted to respond to about that. Hold on, if I pick one in the moment, this is a tough thing about doing this podcast in the moment, some of what you're

saying seems a now to the ego depletion research. You know, maybe there's like a not an ego depletion, you know, the self control of bound weist research all that, but maybe there's like a capassion which just goes into the calls and benefits of outrage, fatigue of outrage, and not fatigue, but just a showing outrage. Absolutely, absolutely, and I think

that's something that's that's really important to highlight. You know, outrage gets a lot of negative press, especially these days, and my own article that you read has been interpreted by some people as making an argument that outrage is bad. I don't know if that was your impression, but I want to make it very clear that I am not making any value judgments about whether outrage is a good thing or a bad thing. It's an emotion, it's complicated,

it can have good consequences. It motivates collective action. Victoria's Spring, Darryl Cameron and Mina Chakara wrote a really nice paper in Ticks highlighting some of the upsides of outrage. That's

what the papers called the upside of outrage. But there are of course also downsides, many of which you know are are being talked about now in terms of potentially exacerbating social conflicts and political polarization and whatnot, oversimplifying issues and you know, turning complex characters into all good or

all bad like these are consequences of outrage too. And having studied extensively the psychological processes and neurobiological processes of decisions to punish other people for perceived violations of social norms like fairness, so you know, work on ultimatum game for example, that was my That was what my dissertation was on at Cambridge, and how how people decide whether to accept being treated unfairly or to engage in costly punishment, so paying some money to themselves to destroy the pie

of someone who's been really selfish. Right, And one thing that I found in my post doctoral research is that if you put people in situations where they can punish on fairness on behalf of either themselves or on behalf

of another person, people reliably do this. And if you ask them afterwards why why did you punish, and you get them to rate their agreement with various statements like I punished because I really cared about fairness and I wanted to teach them a lesson, or I punished because it just felt really satisfying and I wanted to get revenge.

And you can ask many statements like this, and you can then group the statements into more sort of socially minded and deterrents focused motive so I want to teach this person a lesson so they're not going to do it again in the future, and retributive motives like I just wanted to screw that person, right, And what we find is that people are unwilling to endorse having punished out of revenge, Like we don't see high agreement with those items, but people are very willing to say that

they punished because they care about fairness, they wanted to teach a lesson, these like you know, good outcomes of the nation. Sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think this is capturing social desirability. But the way we design the experiment, we can actually infer from their behavioral responses how much

they cared about these different motives. Because half the time when they're punishing, the person who gets punished never finds out, so there's no way they can teach a lesson through that secret punishment because the person never finds out they've been punished, So that kind of punishment can only be

explained by pure retribution motives. Right, So we have on this experiment measurement of the actual motives that we can infer from behavior, and then people sell reports of their motives, and what we find is they don't really match up

that well. So oh humans, humans deterrent punishment. So punishment that is actually communicative, that actually does teach a lesson to the recipient, that's correlated reasonably well with people's self reports of I punish because I wanted to teach a lesson, But the retributive punishment is totally uncorrelated with self reports

of retributive motives. So what does suggests to me is that in the case of these punishment decisions, people to some extent are either unaware of or unwilling to report the sort of less socially desirable motives that drive a lot of punishment behavior. And I wonder, I have no evidence for, but I wonder how much of this is now at play on social media, where it's very very

easy to punish perceive violations of social norms. You can very easily, you know, write a tweet to shame someone, call them out for a behavior that you think is bad. You can retweet or like other people's statements of that, And like, I'm not sure how much people are aware of what their motives are when they're engaging in this behavior.

And you know, these are just really interesting questions from a psychological perspective, but I think they also have really important implications potentially for our democracy and our social discourse more broadly. You know, So I feel like I'm constantly kind of switching between taking on and off different hats.

There's the like Malia's scientist hat, which is like, when I'm wearing the scientist hat, I care about using data to portray the world in the most accurate way that I can and trying as best I can to keep my own political beliefs and value judgments out of it. But then there's also like my citizen hat, where I like started working on these issues because I felt really concerned about the direction that the country's going and I wanted to use my training in a way to like

maybe do whatever I can to help the situation. But it's like complicated, you know, juggling those different identities, and I definitely have had missteps where like I have let my own values, like you know, creep into you know, a talk or an interview where I, you know, I'm talking about the science, but then maybe the way that I presented is tinge with some of my value that I'm doing the best that I can, Like, it's it's it's hard, though, and it feels increasingly complicated to do

science on issues that are that are the topic of a lot of heated social discourse. And I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir to you having worked on intelligence, right, Like, it's hard to try and maintain an objective view of the scientific problem when there's this deafening chorus of people telling you how you should or should not think about the problem. And if you think about it in this way, then not only are you wrong, but you're also a

bad person. And like, and the stakes just feel so high, right, more so than ever before, you know, compared to two thousand and six, Like, so were you yeah, you know so? And it's it keeps things interesting. I will say that it sure does and stressful if we can be honest. No, I appreciate you being vulnerable enough to admit that I

admitted something similarly on Twitter recently. These hats that we put on, and when we're in one mode of that hat, we can kind of be blind to the implications for like if we were in the other hat, you know, and then we're in another hat and we think about all these implications and things and then yeah, so it does. You know, it's a lot easier to like just pick

an identity, to pick one hat. I guess is the because I am trying to maybe, like this conversation with you right now, it's helping me as well kind of formulate more directly what exactly the conflict is. And maybe it's just like it's a lot of there are people that seem to like be very comfortable just picking one hat and staying with it and being part of that tribe is a great feeling of like certainty and like,

you know, we can and I find it. Yeah, I want to just like have this nuance to every single

thing that comes in front of me. Yeah, I mean you mentioned humility earlier, and I think I'm finding that as a value increasingly helpful, especially as I'm starting in my research to touch more on issues to deal with race and gender, and I feel very intimidated by working on these issues because I know that I have so much to learn, and you know, I you know, there are many ways to be humble in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and particularly when asking questions around you know,

injustice and inequality. You know, like I just try to learn as much as I can, and you know, I'm going to get stuff wrong sometimes, and you know, the discomfort of being wrong is a you know, is dwarfed by the discomfort of so many people who are in far less privileged positions than me. So I'm very happy to be uncomfortable if that can help me learn more and can help the broader systems of injustice and oppression that we are, you know, increasingly talking about as a society,

both offline and online. I love that so much what you just said. I can't like it enough on social media. You know, as someone who's teaching a course at Columbia Barnard College about the science of living well, we can no longer just talk about the psychological aspects divorced from the context of people who don't even have the opportunities in the first place to exercise those psychological strengths, character strengths and things. So this is just constantly on my

mind these days, like every day. It's on my mind these days because I'm seeing things and my students are really teaching me a lot of things that I'm learning about, you know, like they're so intertwined that yeah, maybe this whole idea of you're really helping me in this conversation as well to think about this and more parly, so

thank you, well, thank you. Yeah, maybe like I need to not think about it as like different hats, like I take this hat on and then off, and then I put this on and off, Like maybe like we need to think of these things always always intertwined. I'm just thinking, like, especially in the field I work in the positive psychology and the science of like how to live well, I don't even know if we can ever if I can ever really have these different hats, like I think they need all the hats need to be

on at the same time. Maybe is a better metaphor. Yeah, anyway, thank you so much for that. Students are the best. I mean, yeah, I agree, It's been really wonderful just having their questions and feedback as I've been presenting, you know, I teach a social neuroscience class, and I just did the lectures on punishment and outrage last week, and it's always such an informative exercise to present the work to fresh minds and they're they're living this, you know. And

one thing that I wonder a lot about. And I'm curious your your perspective on this, because I know you've you've looked a lot at development and adjustment and kids as they're you know, learning who they are and how to navigate through the world. You know, I really wonder what technologies like social media might be doing to the

way young people construe the social world. Right, Like, when you think about our moral emotions and instincts that evolved in a very different environment than the one we now find ourselves in, and in particular, moral emotions and moral behaviors are exquisitely tuned to concerns about reputation, right, because

reputation is everything. It's you know, everything, at least it was in our ancestry and small tribes, well hard to gain and easy to lose, right, And like, how does it change the way you conduct yourself if you live in a world where it's on display anything you say or do, any casual comment is preserved forever on the

Internet and could go viral at any time. It's preserved there, you know, not everything, of course, we're not like in full surveillance mode yet, but like anything you say publicly online can be preserved and could go viral and could be there for your future employees or your future dates

to see and evaluate. And I remember being a teenager and like you say stupid stuff when you're a teenager, right, like that, like part of becoming an adult, and part of becoming you know, a person who's more sensitive to others or around them is screwing up and having people you know gently call you out on it and you learn, right, And our technologies like social media fundamentally changing the process

of moral learning and young people. Huge question. I don't even know how to begin answering that question, but I think it's an important question. Well, you know, but the people different political ends are going to be divided on that question. So some people are going to see it as a good thing. Some people are going to say that it's causing teenagers to grow up to be so hyper sensitive to every minor thing that like, you know, could be perceived as a moral that we like have

this authoritarian society. You could see there's like these different views in the political spectrum. I think there's a lot of projection onto high you know. Again, like I feel like a broken record sometimes, but like I mean, that's why it's so important that we actually do research on this so we can get a grip on like, you know, maybe it actually has no effect. Like you know, there was a paper that came out in Nature Human Behavior

a few weeks ago. Amy Urban and some colleagues at Oxford did a multiverse analysis where they basically took these large data sets and then analyze the data in every possible way it could be analyzed. And the research question was, broadly speaking, I'm probably getting the details wrong, but like, is social media use or internet use harmful for well

being particularly in young people? And like some studies say that it's harmful and others say that it's not harmful, And like the data are very murky, partially because like the way that the questions are asked are really high level. They're not getting deep into the psychological processes. Yeah, so like if the dependent variable if what you're I don't know, if well both actually independent and dependent variable, right, so like well being is such a complicated construct, as you

know because you're teaching a class on it. And then also internet use is very complicated, like spending time online, Like you can't use a basic predictor like how many

hours a day do you use the Internet? Like somebody who's spending all of that time going down YouTube rabbit holes about you know, flat earth and you know violent conspiracy theories is going to have a very different impact of that time on well being than someone who's like you know, using Facebook to message with their best friend

we moved away. Well, my colleagues at Penn the World well Being Project, found that the language used on Twitter was a better predictor of county wide heart disease than every single other measure of heart disease combined. Like that's usually looked at by like the WHO or something like that. Wow. So you know, that's just one example of how even like constantly ruminating and using certain like negative aggressive language

on Twitter, let's talk about some goodness among humans. Because you found this paper and tell me if my conclusion of this paper is wrong, but you found that, yes, it is true that we very quickly form moral impressions of people as either good or bad. But there's a certain flexibility that humans have as well that build in

that show illustrate the human capacity for forgiveness. Yeah. So this is research that was led by my PhD student, Jennifer Segal, and we were interested in understanding, at a very mechanistic level, how people develop beliefs about the moral

character of other agents. And so we ran a series of experiments where the basic task is to observe other people making decisions that can benefit themselves but harm someone else, and your job as an observer is to try and predict whether this other person is going to go for the selfish, harmful option or whether they will sacrifice their own interests to benefit the other person. And we compare how people form these beliefs about character for others who

are relatively selfish versus others who are relatively altruistic. And what we find is that for both the good guys and the bad guys, people form pretty accurate beliefs about how good or bad those other people are, but the beliefs about the bad characters are much more uncertain and much more flexibly updated. If you get new information, then

the beliefs about the good well that's good and bad finding. Well, yeah, so if you get if you get information that that somebody's pretty good, then you kind of park that belief and you're like, Okay, cool, I don't have to worry about this person. I have this relatively stable belief that they're good. And learning rates from new information are pretty slow, So once someone has an impression that someone's good, then

they're pretty stable in that. And I think that comports with our own experience, like our friends, like you know, we know they're good people and we're you know, even if they occasionally let us down, like you know, for the most part, we have this stable, good impression of them. When we get information that somebody might be bad, then this seems to transport the belief into this like volatile

and uncertain state where it's much more quickly updated. And that could be in the good direction or the bad direction, and I think is adaptive either way. So, like you get some information that somebody like might be a jerk, and now you're like, Okay, what do I do with this person? Well, first of all, you probably spend a lot more of your attention thinking about this person, like

they're occupying more of your headspace so to speak. And I think we can all think of examples of people in our lives where are like, eh, I don't know about this person. I don't know if they're trustworthy, and we're really really sensitive to any new information we might

get about people like this. If we get information that, you know, what, actually that thing that they did that made you question their motives, like maybe it was an accident or you know, it's not as bad as you thought, and so you're like, Okay, cool, Now that I have this new information that they're actually reasonably trustworthy, then the belief can recover, right, So we're you know, we're not

stuck with bad beliefs we have about people. But at the same time, if it turns out that person is even worse than we thought, then we're also able to adjust our belief in the downward direction as well. And broadly, I think that it's it's adaptive to have a cognitive system that develops character beliefs in this way, because like, what do you do with potentially and trustworthy people how

to make a good decision about that relationship? Well? Probably, but you know, we live in a world where good people can make mistakes, and if we were to write somebody off at the first sign of trouble, we would be overcorrecting and we would miss out on a potentially

long relationship of mutual benefit with that person. And so especially in an environment where most people are trustworthy and cooperative, when that's what the prevailing norms are, and that's what seems to be like innate stance that humans have is

you know, generally cooperative and trusty. And you know, there's a lot of psychological research on this, like having that bias to leave room for movement in your bad beliefs is one that should be adaptive, absolutely, And this study that you connected with your colleagues focused on minor offenses. So Alexander Toddov yeah, asked the question, you know, what

if the transgressions are major? He said, quote what if you were a participant in the quote bad agent was inflicting physical pain on you or somebody you love to maximize their earnings rather than on a stranger. And so it does make me think that there might be just a hypothesis, you know what we I think we do view the r Kellys of the world differently, you know, like Bill Cosby's and you know all that you know, right, Yeah,

we're not going to forgive Bill Cosby that easily. That's something I definitely should have mentioned at the beginning, which is that the kinds of selfish versus altruistic behaviors that we were studying in these experiments were very minor in the sense that these are the kinds of like most of the most of the behaviors that we form impressions of others on day to day are things like somebody didn't return our call, or somebody was late to meet us, right,

like not this person is an axe murderer. But surprisingly, a lot of the literature on impression formation and social psychology asks how people form impressions of others based on information like this person was an ex murder. Well, no, I'm perhaps being hyperbolic. I definitely know, like like sold drugs to high school students. That's like a that's definitely a stimulus that I've seen in a study that I've

read for various acts of theft. A lot of the of the impression information research is based on extreme good and bad acts, not all of it, not the whole literature,

but quite a lot of it. And that's really interesting given that, like, you know, most of us are not encountering those types of behaviors in our daily lives, and so we deliberately wanted to look at impression formation from these more minor transgressions, with the caveat of course that like these learning processes are very likely to be different, if not in kinds, then at least in degree for more extreme transgressions. Thank you. So let's wrap up this

conversation with a Twitter lightning round. Oh got so, I asked on Twitter. You know people to ask you questions, So I'm going to just and you can be very succinct and quick in your answer. Sure, So, Lara meltem Bilkman said, what are the patterns or biomarkers in the physical brain which are associated with altruism? Oh? Great question, and I was just lecturing about this to my class. So there are a number of brain systems that have

been implicated in altruism. One of them is empathy, and of course this dates back to psychological work by Dan Batson and others highlighting the link between empathy and altruism and pathic responses in the brain, particularly in networks involved in experience sharing, like the anterior insula and antira singulate cortex.

Have been linked with altruistic behavior. The mentalizing network as well, so the ability to take perspectives of others, including the temporal prival junction, has been linked to altruism, and the septal area as well, which is very deep within the brain. That area has been shown to respond to different kinds of empathy and also predict helping behaviors, as reported through daily diaries. This is a really nice study by Sylvia

Morelli and colleagues. There's also evidence that the reward system of the brain responds not just to our own rewards, but also to seeing others get rewards, so to the extent that we vicariously share the reward experiences about this is also predictive of altruism. I could go on, I'll wrap up, but like, there's actually I have like an hour and a half of lecture material on this very question. So Brian Gallagher asked, do you see yourself as more

sympathetic to any particular ethical school, for example, virtue, ethics, utilitarianism, deontology. Oh, what a great question. That's tricky to answer. I think in part because the more I learn and read about different ethical perspectives, the more I feel like I don't know what my own is. I think I definitely lean consequentialists, but I wouldn't say that I'm an extreme hardcore consequentialist.

We actually, my student, former student Jim Everett and collaborator Guy Kahan, a philosopher at Oxford, led the development of a scale to measure utilitarianism. And you can find out how utilitarian you are online. I can. I can give you the show notes. Yeah, yeah, I'm like slightly, I'm above average utilitarianism on that scale, but not at the extreme. So Jeffrey Miller asks, how can effective altruism succeed as a movement if most people are morally disgusted by utilitarian reasoning?

Great question, I get that a lot. I actually I've had several conversations with the Effective Altruism group. I was just at a student dinner a couple of days ago chatting with that about this very question. So research that I've done with Jim Everett again and Dave Pizzarro has suggested that people find utilitarian decision makers less trustworthy than dante logical decision makers. And of course effective altruism as a movement, being quite utilitarian and nature is concerned about

social perceptions given this research. One thing that we found in those studies is that if a utilitarian decision maker expresses that they felt conflicted about their utilitarian decision or you know, they found it very difficult, then this erases the differences in trustworthiness. So what that suggests is that to the extent you can signal concern for others and you know, other social emotions that are sometimes overridden in

utilitarian choices, and that that can restore trustworthiness. Okay, but there still is an uphill battle if you're an effective altruist. Yeah, okay, last last question. I saved that I saved the best for last. Obviously that's my my subjective valuing. But Brian Eyre asks, how do you manage to be a brilliant scientist, a pro managing a big multidisciplinary lab like Clockwork and an ext and be an extremely kind, caring and motivating

supervisor all in one person and still somehow sleep. Oh that's very very kind, overly kind, I mean, I think to answer in one word, I guess it would be great attitude, Like I just feel so grateful to be able to do this work and to be at a place like Yale that I'm surrounded by so many smart and kind and motivated people, and you know, my lab is amazing, and I just feel really, really lucky and grateful to be able to play a role in supervising those students, and they make my work and my approach

to science better. So yeah, it's easy to do that, I think when you take a step back and think about like, like in two thousand and six when we met, like, I could never have predicted that I would be, you know, where I am and doing this work, and you know, I'm very grateful for that. And I do sleep. I sleep. Try to sleep at eight hours, and that's a lot. Your fans will be very happy to hear that. That's

a non negotiable. I wish I had. You know, I've met many people I won't I won't have them, but like I know scientists who can get by on like four hours, and I'm very jealous. I wish I needed a sleep because then I could do more of the stuff that I love doing. But for now, I have to get by on my eight hours. Well, thank you Mollie for such an exciting and nuanced and thoughtful chat today. Thank you so much, Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.

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