No, guy just wants to talk to a wall of AI chatbots, So he'll have a chatbot. You'll have a chatbot, and your chatbots will just be having a million conversations with other chatbots. And so all the dating now and conversation and massiness of dating is all going to be mediated through two ais, just like talking to one another.
Today we have NYU professor j Van Bevell on the show. Doctor Van Bevell is an expert on intergroup relations and social identity. I find his research so important and timely. In this episode, we discussed what the world looks like through the lens of identity, how we can escape our echo chambers and overcome our bias, the role of social media and creating a funhouse mirror, and how we can ultimately find solidarity and peace with our fellow humans, even
those we perceive in our outgroup. There's a lot of really valuable information in this episode that is relevant to so much of what we're seeing in the world today. So that's further ado I bring you doctor j. Van Bevell.
Jay van Bevell, how's it going?
So it is so exciting. I am so excited to have you on the Psychology podcast.
I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. Yeah, I followed your work for quite some time. I have to say, mostly on Twitter.
I spend too much time there.
As you know, my wife complains all the time, but I don't know that your wife complains all the time about it. But I can say that it is very elucidating for me to follow it. You know, it keeps me like up to date on the way to science, which I love. So that's pretty cool. So thank you for doing that service. Great.
Thanks.
Yeah. You are director of the Social Identity and Morality Lab at NYU. Wow has that been the name of your labs from inception?
No, my research has evolved. When I first started NYU, I focused on like how we see the world. It was a social perception and evaluation lab. But over time we've really focused on identities, how people identify in groups and how they changes how they think about people, how it changes their moral judgments. And so about five years ago we decided to change it.
Okay, well, it's really seems relevant to everything in the world right now.
Yeah, I mean we I see many issues that we're dealing with.
This.
While you're talking about like racism, the pandemic, climate change, you know, working in organizations, your day to day job, all of those things are relevant to identity.
Do you think that people who are like anti identity, they themselves really do have an identity, They just want to admit it. Yeah, their identity is anti identity.
Yeah, I mean everybody has an identity. So we do this. At the start of our book, the very first chapter we have, I encouraged you to do this too. We'll do it right now. It's just a little challenge because a lot of people think, well, I'm just an individual. America is hyper individualistic, so that's how people think about themselves. But let's do this task, and I'll encourage everybody listening, pull out a pen and answer this question ten times.
And I'm just going to get you to shout out yours. I am blank, okay, Scott Gog do his ten times.
Harry, I am Harry.
No one no one answered leading I thought, okay, that's geg.
I am kind, silly, cheeky, smart, creative, funny, too, sexy.
It's ten okay. Well it's close. Okay. So so there's lots of different ways to answer this, okay. So one way you can answer is with.
Traits, which is that obviously I went down.
There, and you went down like the very personality profile I.
Didn't do like whites. Yeah.
Yeah, So everybody, I hope everybody like can look at their list now and you can divide those up into a couple of different ways. The first way is how many of them are traits like I am cheeky or I am like introverted or extroverted.
Yeah.
The other way that you can chunk those up is relational like I'm a husband, general relationship, or good social roles. And the other way is in terms of group identities. So when I do it, I was say like, I'm a professor, I'm an author, I'm a Canadian, I'm also a New Yorker. Those are some of my identities. And so you can count out of those ten how many of them are like these trait like things of you as an individual, and how many are about our relationships?
And when we did this, we did this on our newsletter we like put and people can go on to complete this on our newsletter, this little quiz, something like sixty to seventy percent of what people, the average person puts are about the relationships and groups that they belong to. And so even though people think of themselves as an individual, most of us are thinking about ourselves in terms of
our identities with groups and when. And the whole point of this is that once you think about yourself that way, it comes with a different way of seeing the world. So I'll just give you a quick example. So right now, I'm here maybe as an author to promote a book or tell you about it. And when I became an author, I became a community that includes you, and all these other authors like reached out to me. I got included in like group chats, got advice support that I had
never gotten before. But when I go home, I'm like a father. I have to like suddenly stop thinking about the podcast and everything about like how do I get
dinner for my kids? Yeah, And then also a husband, and then maybe like after my kids go to bed, I'm like a hockey fan, so I'll try on like the playoffs, and so all of these are different types of And then when I go back to work tomorrow morning, I'm a professor, you know, and I'm thinking about myself in terms of my research or my teaching all of these. And then yesterday was Mother's Day, so to call my mom,
so I'm a son. There's certain responsibilities that come when you're a son, and so all of these are different identities that I have come with, different roles, norms, expectations, ways of thinking about the world.
But they are implications of which lens you choose, right, Like if you view things through the lens of identity, like social like group identity. That that's their implications of that, right which don't follow if you don't. I don't, as you note, as you could see, I don't tend to immediately think of myself, you know, in terms of my relationship groups. Yeah, that's really not the way I think. I don't know what it is about me that makes that. Really.
Are there individual difference traits that predict whether or not you're going to be obsessed with your social groups or not?
Yeah? I mean one of the classic ones about how much you conformed to the groups you're in, is called self monitoring. Do you remember this one? And some people are like a social chameleon, and they're constantly thinking about how do I fit into the group I'm in and adapting to blend in.
But I like, I like being the one who says the crazy thing that separates me from.
So you're okay. So we have a whole chapter on different motivations that guide people to identify with certain groups. A big part of being identifying with the group is you need to belong and that's something very basic. Humans are. Our evolutionary skill set that made us. You know that we can dominate the earth and send people to the moon and stuff is we cooperate well and communicate well,
and that's about belonging. And if we had gotten kicked out of our groups on that African Serengeti, we would have died. And so we're like hypertun into exclusion and things like that. The other to mention, though, that's often a seen as at odds with it, and I think you probably score behind this is need for distinctiveness. Some people like to be distinct from others and stand out or be a contrary.
Are you basically calling me a narcissist.
No, No, it's not necessarily narcissistic. It can be a way to gain social status, but that's not necessarily a narcissistic thing. You know, like artists do this all the time, Athletes, you know, great scientists sometimes try to stand out. So there's lots of incentives for standing out. And so the groups that often might be more appealing to most people, and maybe you in particular, if you do have identities,
are ones that scratch both those itches. So stand up comedians, stand up comedians, Yeah, they're on stage, but they're also like love being part of this comedian community and so and that's called optimal distinctiveness. And so if the groups that scratch both those itches are often super appealing to people because they make you feel sense of belonging and distinctiveness. And I'll give you an example, since you were in
a leather jacket. If you're ali in the subway in New York and you see a bunch of people coming back to like a punk concert, and they're all like dressed the same and their leathers in black, And if you ask them if they're conformists, I'll tell you no. But of course you look at them and they all
look the same. Or like when I was growing up, it was like goths, and so these heads, skinheads, and so a lot of these are groups that are distinctive from the rest of society, right, and so they scratch that itch for being distinctive and special, but also make you feel sense of belonging. I'll say another example of this that we're familiar with is like prestigious universities. What is the one of the top things they advertise on their websites and the rankings is how hard it is
to get in? And what's that's the signal of distinctiveness. I'm Kavian and they don't advertise that. That's like a very American way of signaling status. Interesting is like how exclusive it is to get into.
The university that you belong. Well, that is interesting. I mean, I feel like things are changing where everything has to be inclusive.
Whether or not they're selecting based on affirmative action or whatever. You know, Like Harvard still has a five percent acceptance rate ninety five percent rejection rate. Wow, And so it's just that they're selecting on different dimensions, whether or not they're using the arts.
I feel like Asians are getting discriminated against these days.
Well they it's if you're Asian, you have to have a higher SAT score or whatever to get in. But
that's not new. So in the you know, Harvard I think was one of the first universities to start using standardized tests to give people who are from lower income classes and work part of like this new England prep school world an opportunity to get in, right, But then they found out it was they were admitting too many Jews, oh yeah, and so then they start want that yeah, and they didn't want that yeah, and so they wanted to Then they added like interviews and things like that
so they could weed out people who didn't like fit their vision of like a Harvard Man. So those types of things have been used forever to discriminate against different groups. That's partly why they were implemented.
I mean, your work has so many implications for like all the most controversial things going on in our society today, and you do a really great job of not getting mirrored in the muck of it all. So again another kudos to you, Like you managed to write about this stuff in a way that is uncontroversial, but there are really a lot of implications. You know, Like let's talk
about DII programs, right, why not? What do you think about like this obsessive focus on intersectional identity as being the main focus for DI I try, because there's lots of other different kinds of diversity one could talk about. You could talk about you know, idea diversity, you could talk about even neurodiversity, you know, which is not which is not skin deep, it's deeper.
Right, yes, I mean, so I'll say a few things about this. I actually like my very first research when I was a graduate school was about like reducing implicit biases, and my research was actually advisorunning him.
Oh yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah. So he came from like Maserine Banagi's lab, and so we were doing that stuff pretty early on. And my dissertation research was like cited and the Supreme Court on a ruling on affirmative action. So I've been interested in speaking and writing about that for a long time. And so it's kind of interesting in that, like the it's a very trendy space, kind of like fashion. You know, when I was growing up, like women had shoulder pads and guys had mullets, and those things went out of fashion.
I think the mullets were like slowly coming back in but in the cause, so yeah, But in the d I space, it's very like the terms and stuff and what what ideas are trendy has kind of come and gone and right now, like intersectionality is big and it's not just like a buzzword, like it's leaked into So I run a social psychology program at NYU, and our
students are using that term more in their presentations. And a lot of the same concepts were around twenty thirty years ago and it was called multiple categorization and cross categorization, and so a lot of those concepts have been around there just being there's like a new spin on them.
That's like the trendy way to describe it. But that's why I'm like a bit sometimes skeptical when things go in and out of trend because a lot of the ideas are grounded and things that I've you know, I studied cross categorization in my PhD like twenty years ago. So it's not it doesn't seem that novel or fresh. It's just a trendy way of talking about it.
But there's something, there's some nerve that it's striking. There's some need, fundamental human need for social you know, like what's underneath the fad. You know, you're a world's expert on this topic, so I'm sure you're insight in.
Okay, Yeah, So let me say like where I think a lot of this is coming from, and then I'll tell you why I think we're trying to solve it in the wrong way. So interesting, Okay, So a lot of this so in America. And again, as you know, I'm Canadian, so I kind of feel like an anthropologist seeing this. A lot of it comes in America because of historical discrimination, right, history of slavery, all kinds of institutional discrimination, Jim Crow and a lot of those like
carry Bard into the present day. And so let's say at universities, you made the comment about like our missions policies. What we're trying to do is correct first problems that have been part of the institutions and government for a long long time. But it's a little like putting a band aid on, like someone who's like missing a leg. And so a lot of it and not only that's what the bandit goes, Yeah, like exactly, like the band is not going to work. It affects you know, all
these like discussions like that. You're you know, the lawsuit against Harvard for affirmative action. You know, Harvard admits so few black students. In general, most black students go to community colleges or state colleges. Most people overwhelmingly go to like community colleges and state colleges, and we're like almost
not talking about that at all. And that's where like the real impact is you would get like far more benefit to those communities by like pouring resources into those environments.
And so it's like a little bit like good, yeah, but yeah, we obsessed with about this, Like the New York Times will have forty two articles on this one thing that affects like forty two people and so, and I don't blame them in the sense that a lot of people go on to be like on the Supreme Court or things like that, but it really misses the mark for most people, doesn't help lift most people out
of poverty or working class environments. And so that's kind of like my first problem is like we're thinking about solutions at the wrong level and way too late. If you're talking about admissions to a PhD program, you're going to have so many other things that happened before someone's thirty years old that are going to be the real barriers that actually matter, like head start programs or something. Okay, so now let's go to companies organizations.
Right.
So DEI has been growing for about thirty years, you know, long before the present moment, Like all this funding originally it came because like there was all these lawsuits for discrimination. It was costing companies millions and millions of dollars, and so there's and there's a lack of representation. Most CEOs are like white men. At one point, I think there was more fortune five hundred CEOs named John that all
women combined. Yeah, so you know, women see that, and they're up in arms, and rightfully so, and so we're trying to correct for those types of things. But then again it's like a lot like the solutions we have often don't work. So one thing that I'll just tell you, I'm writing my next book right now on how to
make groups smarter. And so just this last week was digging into DEI issues because there's tons of studies about why these corporate initiatives fail or even backfire in many cases, and a lot of them are focused on like calling out bias or making people feel a sense of threat or anxiety about getting things wrong or saying the wrong thing.
And so it makes people super anxious, and it makes managers and employees very reactive because they feel like they're being forced to do something, and it often points fingers at people for being like bad actors or white supremacists and so or you know, the robindiangela model of like going in and making people cry, and then if white women cry, then she complains that they're like weaponizing their white tears.
There's like a whole all that feels psychological and healthy.
Yeah. Yeah, So if you study which you study last, you know, fifty seventy years of psychology, just know like those like the worst possible ingredients to like make a culture healthy.
And even empowering.
Yeah, it's not empowering, it's super stressful. It makes interracial interactions more awkward because people are so anxious about doing their saying the wrong thing, and so then they become evasive. They avoid those interactions or having like authentic supportive relationships. Another thing that fails in is it's very focused on like segregating people into different groups right now. And the premise is good, I think for support for minorities. But
here's a couple downsides. One is there's a recent book that just came out looking at like what works in this space, and one of the best things that works are mentorship. Mentorship programs where people are of different genders and different races and different backgrounds. Yeah, because you get exposed to some it's based on like contact theory, you build real relationships, you break down stereotypes, you start to
understand where someone's coming from. And so that's like it's the exact opposite in some ways of what's being done.
Yeah. I like that.
Yeah, okay, and I'll tell you another one. We'll see if you're like this. This is one of my favorite studies in the last two or three years in this space. It was done by so Had Morar at University of Madison, Wisconsin. So again, a lot of this focus is right now, the rhetoric last few years about everything's white supremacist, and so you have college students coming into this environment where they're just being told that over and over again, or
pointing out egregious acts of racism, whatever. What they've been trying to do is find out, first of all, what do students actually believe? And they do a survey and they find out something like eighty to ninety percent of students are overwhelmingly in supportive of an inclusive campus environment. So very few people, very few people are against this stuff do we agin with? And so instead of focusing on the small percentage of people who are against it.
They create posters and videos and messaging that look of other students on your campus actually fully support an inclusive environment and value diversity, and they lead with that message instead. So really positive message, but one that reflects that the true norms of the environment. And guess what happens. Two
things are really cool. The first thing is white students become more inclusive because they realize, oh, saying sexist are racist, joke's not cool here, and so they actually don't do the thing that they would otherwise do to fit in that makes sense. And then how do minority students do? They actually love it. They feel more sensi belonging.
Wow, they don't need to be paranoid.
Yeah, they don't need to be constantly paranoid. That the whole environment they're in is like someone's going to get them to some moment and then not only let their grades go up, because guess what, then they're able to focus on school and then the cool thing. And this is like a you know, we're always worried about closing these like racial achievement gaps. It closes their grades go so much it's as if they were from a minority
group or sorry, majority group. The minority kids suddenly their grades match up to the majority kids if they're in a condition where they learned that the norms were inclusive.
So it's like the opposite of stereoty.
Yeah, it's the exact opposite, and it's like a positive message. It's true, and all you're doing is revealing what actually people privately believe. But you're not focusing so much on the downsides and the small number of people who have these kind of negative opinions and said you're kind of like just saying, look, people around you really value these things.
Yeah, I guess I do like that, but it seems like it's harder to do that in other environments such as social media, since we can't control the algorithm. Now, there's a new paper that you're a co author on that is one of my top ten favorite generical papers of all time.
Now, oh awesome.
It's called Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory, How social Media distorts perceptions of norms. Basically one of my top titles of the article is pretty good too, But it is true, like our social media, it's the most extreme voices, like we all knew this to be true, but it's nice to see you actually have data on this. So talk a little about what you found.
Yeah, So I'll just give you a statistic. When people are talking about like let's say politics on Twitter or other social media platforms, ten percent of people produce ninety seven percent of the content, and so that gets hot and the loudest. And guess who those are. If you look at those people, they're the most extreme. So it's really only people at the extremes that are spouting off NonStop.
And so when you open your social media app and you log in, all you're seeing is people from extremes and then guess what, they're all yelling at each other and so true, and so it gives you a false perception what most people believe. It makes it a really hostile environment to weigh in, and it also really disincentivize people who have like nuanced or complexed or empathic views nuanced, Yeah, and so if they weigh in in some way, there's
immediately tacked probably by both sides. Actually, research shows that moderates find it more hostile than anybody else, right, because we bought the extremes are happy to yell at each other all day like normis don't enjoy that, and they're like, I'm just going to shut up. And so you create such a hostile environment that you the whole middle, like ninety percent of the distribution just it doesn't speak up.
Are you evenmember? With L Todd Rose's work on collective illusions? No, he wrote a whole book on that because he collected data showing that most people are not aware that the other members really do agree with what they think. Everyone thinking, everyone's thinking that the most extreme view is the norm in a group. That's the collective illusion. But actually, when you get down to it, everyone actually really most people really do agree with each other if they just would
talk out loud about it. You know.
That's the same logic behind that DEI intervention. Yeah. Or they also use this on colleges with binge drinking. It's a very famous research where I remember those days. Yeah, everybody on dorms things that like binge drinking is what you have to do to fit in because they constantly see people doing it, right, and so they feel pressure to do it even if they don't like it, and they'll do it to fit in, and guess what they get sick, they're hungover, their grades plummet, and they're not happy.
And if you just do a survey and you realize something like eighty ninety percent of students don't like binge drinking. They like going to a party and having a drink or two, but they don't want this pressure to get drunk. And once you reveal that to everybody, ben drinking goes way down.
Interesting. Yeah, well that's good. That'd be a good intervention.
Yeah, the intervention is just like telling people what most people privately believe but are scared to say.
But I mean, that won't get you into the fraternity if it's part of the hazing. Yeah, process, that's cold comfort for ud pledges. YEA, Well, what is moral tuning? I want to link some of this to morality because it does seem like when you're viewing everything through the lens of identity, you start to sometimes think you're morally superior. Right, Yeah, you're like, oh, well, our group, you know, our angels, and over them over there the devils.
Yeah. So, once you're part of a group, you adopt their value system and you start to judge the people who aren't part of the group more harshly. And we have a new paper on this. People are moral hypocrites. They judge and this is especially true in politics. When their group does something, they let it, they don't punish them, but when the other group does the exact same thing, they're more likely to punish them and say it's wrong.
And so that's a real toxic environment to be in as well, because you're just not treating people fairly, you're judging them fairly.
Is very toxic. Relates to tests, so less Yeah, book on toxic people at work trying to do a callback. Okay, so is that what you mean by moral tuning?
Yeah, well, moral tuning is just that a lot of this is also not happening at the level of reasoning. So people are It's not that they're reasoning in ways that lead to this, it's just that once they're part of a group, even when they're not thinking about it, they're being different in terms of their judgment the.
Inter group intro group level of analogy.
Yeah, and it's like an automatic thing, something quickly that comes to mind, like an intuition or a reflex.
Now we're seeing that all over the place right now, aren't we. With collective victimhood, you know, which is the whole research literature and of itself. Have you been staying up to date on the social psychology. I'm a bed aware of it. Yeah, I find it fastening. I've been diving really deep into Uh. There's a there's a theory called moral type casting, which I'm sure you're familiar with,
where we tend to like moral type. We like to moral type cast people is either the victim or the perpetrator. And when you do that, you automatic you know everyone. It creates a sense of competitive victim hood where everyone's competing for that victim label. Because once you get the victim label, you get everyone. You can do whatever you want morally.
You know, it gives you license.
License to be. Now that's my new band name. I think that's that's that's that's to be a good bould. We start a band, A band I can I can sing singh. So, I mean you're seeing it everywhere right now, and so I mean your work is just so unbelievably relevant. You must look at the news and just like shake your damn head every day, right.
Yeah, yeah, or it inspires us to do studies. You know, I see something crazy in the news, next thing you know, I'm like studying misinformation or conspiracy theories or cults or something.
I love that you. Yeah, that's true.
It's the cool thing about like studying social psychology. It's like, if you're curious to me, like why the hell are they doing that crazy thing? And then you can dig in and figure out why why does social media feel so messed up?
M Yeah, it's a good question. And I mean the algorithm, you know, really is to blame. Yeah.
Like I'll give you an example, Like I my office is on Broadway. You know, you're a New Yorker. It's chaos. The city's especially like some streets downtown Broadway, and I would like be on Twitter at work in my office and it'd be so catech and they go outside to like grab lunch, and it's like everybody seems way more friendly. And these are New Yorkers I'm talking about, and I'm like, Okay, well, something weird is going on that's drawing this out of people,
and it is the algorithm. There's evidence now that the algorithm amplifies hostile, negative content. And also it's these extreme people they're driving the conversation and building huge followings.
Well it wouldn't This wouldn't happen if people didn't gravitate towards extreme people as well. So there's something about human nature entertainment. It's entertainment. Yeah, that the power of entertainment surpasses any scholarly nuanced perspective. Yeah, something about humans that we need entertainment. What the hell?
Well, I think it's a little bit like this, Like if you're driving down the highway and like you see car accident, everybody slows down and take a look, right, called rubbernecking. But what happens with the technology is that if they see rubbernecking, they cause more accidents. That's essentially what these companies do. If more people are stopping to look at this, we're going to show them of this.
But no one wants to live in a world Just because I rubberneck with the car accident doesn't mean I want to live in a world where every time I drive them a highway it's just a row of accidents. And so that's kind of also the way that like these technologies are designed to keep us hooked, because it's that they know those things are entertaining.
It's a perfect analogy. Have you ever used that analogy before?
Yeah, I think I used it on my paper.
Because it makes so much immediate sense. You were part of a of a legit mega study. Now there's not many papers in our field what they label themselves mega study. You know, it's almost a little vein, you know.
But this, it's like, imagine like another measure on your narciss is a measure.
This is like the legendary study, you know, and you put that in your title. But but you guys did mega study identifying effective interventions to strength and Americans Democratic attitudes? What are some of your favorite interventions that came out of Okay.
So I'll tell you that this there's a fun story for this. So this was a competition to see how we could reduce polarization, just the part of polar when people just hate each other and want to engage in violence against one another. So as a group at Stanford and they just said everybody can submit their intervention, and people from around the world, scientists as well as like
policy and practitioner people submitted an intervention. There's two hundred and fifty two submissions, and then they got a bunch of political scientists and experts and they picked the best twenty five so my lab our intervention was one of the top twenty five, and then we had to like flesh it out, and then they went into the field and gave these interventions to thirty two thousand Americans, like very representative of every race and age and gender and amazing study.
It's a really cool study. And they had money monetary prizes which you don't see much in science for the best ones that worked, okay, and they were looking to see does it reduce polarization, does it increase support for democracy which is under threat? Does it reduce partisan violence? And our intervention, I'm proud to say it was like
based on my book. We tried to like I met with my lab and we tried to figure out, like what based on our book and what we talked about, the principle of identity, what intervention would we create the kind of like falls these principles, and SWE submitted and I was actually quite anxious because it was like, if this fails, it's to throw this book in the trash.
And it wasn't an foundation of your books. And I'll admit it was not the best one, but it was the third best, which I think is pretty too, pretty good if you start with two fifty two, and it was about creating common identities. It was instead of like highlighting conflict, it was highlighting what we share in common and core values in the history of American democracy. And and so the only the best one. I don't know
if you've seen this. It was a Heineken beer commercial where they brought together people to build a bar and then they built it and they got gout to know each other and they built this thing, and then they put two Heineken bottles, very professional commercial, and they then they showed them videos that they had of the people talking about their politics before they got to the set, and they had had people from very different sizes of
the political spectrum there. Yeah, one woman was a trans woman, if I'm remembering correctly, and they said, do you want to talk about your difference?
Is cool?
And over beer? And everybody's like, yeah, actually, I got to know you was human beings, so I can like talk about this now with you. And that was the most effective. And I think it was just showing, like an example of contact contact iPods that if people do something together and they get to know each other's humans, then they can actually have real conversations.
Jay van Bebble. That's the opposite of all the protests we're seeing on our college campuses right now.
Yeah, we're not.
We're not fostering dial intergroup dialogue, are we.
I actually had. I was just gave a talk at Columbia like two days before that. You're bragging now, No, No, it was two days before. Yeah. Yeah, but they're also where the big the whole encampment and protest movement started.
And the director there, the Center of Conflict and Cooperation, who hosted me, he's a peace psychologist, and he told me something really profound, which is he said, we've trained our undergraduate students really good and collective action and protest, which I think is really important, but we have not trained them in peace. We have not trained people. Are institutions from part of the education system is not training people into conflict resolution, how to have a sustainable piece
for relationship and bridge differences. And so he and this was like a couple of days before this whole thing spilled over. It was thinking, this is like an educational deficit that we have as a nation.
Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Can you put me in touch with him? By the way, Yeah, Peter Coleman, please put me in touch with Okay, I just I'm a professor Columbia and I just recently.
Oh yeah, you should definitely talk to me. Is it that teacher's college?
Oh beautiful. Yeah. And I recently gave a talk for twenty five about twenty five professors at Columbia. I gave a closed meeting talk about how we can foster more intergroup reconciliation.
Oh yeah, you should definitely team up with them.
Yeah, I'm very interested in this topic right now. But it just seems like we're going about it the opposite way from like good scientific practices. Like it's just like it's like, what are we doing? Yeah, it's like the social media. It's like we're fostering people yelling at each other about the worst thing they perceive about each other, as opposed to starting with any common humanity.
Yeah. I mean this is like so collective action. It works best if it's sufficiently disruptive that it gets attention. And so these protests have been successful at that level, but they haven't really been successful persuading anybody. Very few
schools have adopted any of their resolutions. Some have, but I would also argue that the universities have done a bad job by a lot of them immediately reacting and bringing the police in to protest are Yeah, and this is against something we literally wrote about the research on this in our book, which was that if you bring the police into a peaceful protest, any type of protest, we weren't talking about gods or protests, but research on
many types of topics finds that it just creates more conflict, It creates us versus them situation, and actually hardens the protesters and they often will resort to more aggressive, disruptive and violent, even if they were peaceful before. And so this whole thing at Columbia where they first bought the police in, there was no other encampments around the whole country.
Within a week, there was like about one hundred. Yeah, and that was what it started Columbia, Columbia, right, Yeah, And so that that was a mistake that spilled over across the whole country, as that would have been our prediction from her book. And it just seemed to, you know, almost like be exactly what happened.
It threw fire on a flame.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to like de escalate. The administration has a responsibility to go in and try to like find some pathway as well. So it's like the conflict resolution failures were often on both sides. And I'll say this, this is from reporting in the New York Times the President of Columbia. I don't know if you know her, but she had to talk about why she brought in the police to the Senate or something, and they had said unanimously they didn't want the police there.
And they also asked her, did you go down and talked to the protesters?
And she said, no, I went down and talked to the protea.
But that's my whole entire point. And your point is, it's not just that these students aren't engaging a dialogue. Their mentors and role models aren't doing it either, and so you really have a failure from every party around like finding ways to find collective solutions.
In my opinion, there's so much we could be doing two differently differently, Yeah, to find collective solutions. And I'm all about finding the common humanity first before. And I know we're such a tribal species. I get it, Yeah, I get it, But why does that always have to be the predominant, you know, there's so many sides to humans, right, And I'm always trying to think, like, you know, in
an evolutionary psychology kind of way, what module can we trigger? Yeah, and why can't we trigger more of the collective cooperation? Like we do have a cooperation module, don't we. Yeah, Well, you wouldn't know it to these days.
I mean, this goes to one of my favorite studies. I mean you probably remember this, the robbers Cave experiment. They brought these two groups of kids, had them compete and then they were just like screaming at each other. And then they had them fix a problem together. They researchers sabotage the water supply. All the kids had to work together to fix the water supply. They had a car that was at the bottom of the hill. All the kids had to work together to push up the hill.
And then by the end of those two things, the kids suddenly all liked each other. They had made friends in the other camp. And at the end, all the kids got together and asked if they could all take the same bus ride home. And so we should look more towards finding superordinate goals. What is something that we can work together on that will achieve some goal and we've kind of lost that. Politically, we've lost it. University campuses, a lot of organizations have lost it or never had it.
Like I sometimes get asked to go in and consult in organizations where they had a merger, or like sales doesn't talk to HR and they don't understand why and they're sabotaging each other. There's all kinds of incentive structures we create, and we don't mentor people to solve problems and come to resolutions in ways that are collectively helpful. And so then you get like complex and then sometimes intractable complex, sometimes violent complex, and it's just we all
lose when that happens. Man, how can we sort of be a downer?
No? You know, it's like, but how can more people get that memo? You know? I mean there are a lot of there there there are a lot of non good faith actors in the activist in space, like can
we be honest? Like, there are a lot of activists, not all of them, obviously not all of them, and obviously they are healthy protests that are that are productive, but there also are a lot of narcissistic activists that you know, this kind of then there's a whole research literature and collective narcissism, you know, and I just feel like these days, like collective narcissists narcissism is is fueling intergroup competition. You know, Victom, the victimhod Olympics.
Yeah, so I'll tyke because I have some research on COT. You brought it up because you study narcissism. I have a couple of projects on collective narcissism. So first I'll tell you imagine a Van throw in our scal Okay, So, so imagine a Van diagram two overlapping circles, and on one of the circles is national identity or any type of group identity, how much you identify the group, and the other part is collective narcissism. And those are correlated. So there's a part where they overlap.
That's bad.
But if you actually pull them apart and you look at the effects of collective narcissism separate from group identity, and except effects of group identity, once you pull out collective narcissism, they have opposite effects collective narcissis. This was Alexandra Choska, and I collaborate with her. That okay. Yeah, So she's found this over and over and over again. Collective narcissists believe in conspiracy theories. People who are strongly
identified do not. Collective narcissists hate immigrants. People who are nationally identified do not. People are national identified want to work with other groups any healthy identification. People who have this kind of narcissist get collective identification, refuse to work with other groups and discriminate.
It's because you're parceling out the variants associated with antagonism, the personality.
And there they see themselves as victims. And also leaders who are collective narcissists, and you can probably think of a few don't actually care about the members of their group. They care about their group's image. They're obsessed with their group's image, and so they're super defensive about protecular that image.
Recognize greatness yeah and people, yeah, exactly.
And people who care about the group intrinsically and more genuinely care about all the group members, and so you get very different behaviors and beliefs, and it's like they're confed. They're correlated a lot of times, so people can found them. And I think that any type of group that any is bad. But really, what we got to do is train people what is the unhealthy group, but any pull that out of groups and isolate not respond to it. And then we got to like cultivate healthy identities.
I couldn't agree more with that. I couldn't agree more with that. In my new book I'm working on, I talk about healthy in group love versus unhealthy and group love our pride. You know, you can have healthy pride empowering, you can have pride that is totally ensconsed in victimhood. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So we need to get the memo out there more. I don't know if we're going to do much to
convince the narcissists that they're wrong. You know, It's not like they'll hear about the research and be like, oh, you're right. You know I've been going about it wrong because BB at all or whatever says what I don't know, I've invented a name, you know, So I don't know, but we got there's I feel like we're both professors, you know, on campuses where the lot's going. What can
we do? You know we should be doing I feel like a psychologists should be doing more all across the psychologists are really in a good, good state to know they're equipped with the knowledge of what could be done. And I don't feel like there's consulted. We're not consolted as much.
Yeah, I mean some like you have this great podcast, as you said, I know, but it's to share the research. I share a lot on social media. Yeah, I mean, I mean these are the things, right, books, we can talk. But it's like, I think we need to bake this into education. Like that was what I was really convinced. It's like, we need a first year class on every campus in this country teaching this stuff.
Agreed, we need it.
Maybe it in high schools, you know, we need to like do this or like, so my steps on Maddie, he learns already. He's ten years old, and his class are teaching them the difference between opinion in fact, right, because a lot of people when they read the newspaper, they can't tell what is the actual like investigative journalism
and what's just someone's opinion. So they're teaching kids at that age to have like that awareness to be able to understand when they're seeing news what whether it's just someone's opinion or not. And so like that's a skill set that that's new that they're realizing they have to train people because grown adults don't know it. Well, we could train these things too well.
Okay, well Lynn, let's segue into the chapter of your book, the Future of Identity. Okay, what do you see have your has your thinking changed it all since you wrote that chapter?
Yeah, I mean, well there's another. I mean, are we were thinking of the future right any around democracy, climate change?
But where would where would you right now?
I mean I'm a little more cynical, big and partly again it's just that the technology now we have AI, and so there's all these other like technologies coming up, and we don't know how they're going to disrupt us.
We don't know until the sexpots come, the sex spots.
I was seeing on it's coming, Okay, I was seeing on social media this morning that the new open AI releases, like it's going to be like the movie Her where we have these like romantic relationships with AI.
I mean, I see these kinds of articles. It's like, it's so interesting to think in our lifetime, what is going to replace real human connection.
We were just talking about dating a New York This was an interview yesterday or two days ago that went viral on social media. It was the CEO of Bumble. So Bumble do you Bumble is a dating app? Yes?
And did they didn't they reverse it where women were complaining that they had to be the initiator.
Yes, so the whole point of the app was mine. I've never used it, but my understanding is the whole point of app is that it's safer for women because they can they initiate all the content.
But they want to be Oh yeah, so they were.
They were complaining that a lot of them are too many were complaining they don't like that because they actually want don't want to do.
All the work. They're deeply ingrained in evolutionary psychology.
I think, yeah, that was backfired and then and then, but also women, and I don't blame them, like on those apps, you're you're so many people are contacting you have to go through millions of conversations.
Tell me about it. All is people contacting me.
I think women get contacted way more on the apps. I mean that's the data and so and professional women are any women are busy and they don't want to have to wade through forty long conversations with forty different guys find out what one is worth like going for coffee with Yeah, and so this is the new innovation. This is a solution is tell me if you think this will work. Okay, they're going to create an AI.
They're integrated AI and to bumble, so that if you're a woman on the app, all these guys contact you, it can just weed. It will have conversations with all of them and tell you who matches up with you.
Oh well, you have to have a lot of trust in AI to do that. First. First of all, you have a lot of perfect one could slip through and.
It's assuming as a I knows what you're looking for. But then guess what this is. The CEO also said, But of course the guys get AI too, and because it's unfair for them just to be and no guy just wants to talk to a wall of AI chatbots, So he'll have a chatbot. You'll have a chatbot, and your chatbots will just be having a million conversations with other chatbots. And so all the dating now and conversation and messiness of dating, it's all going to be mediated
through two AIS, just like talking to one. It's the opposite of like humanity. You've like weeded out any human element of the interaction of the dating environment.
We already do that with like swiping right or left. You'll look at the picture. What information can you gather from a picture?
Really?
Oh man, Well, that that's disconcerting. I want us to end on a happy note. Something is everything going to ship? I was given the future of identity in a positive.
Okay, so future of identity in a positive way.
I'll give you a t press.
Okay. I'll give you a couple of trends that have been really positive and we don't talk about them almost ever. The first is that globally we have cooperated more than ever in history. And if you look at the rate of like humans killed from introgroup conflicts in the last century, it's plummeted. And it's because humans are not you know, we have this tribal instinct you pointed out, and it's
baked into our DNA. But we can. We can. We have big prefrontal cortices that can develop solutions, and so we've built solutions. We've used reasoning, We've built things like the United Nations and other things, World Economic Forum and stuff to find out ways to cooperate, and so intergroup violence has plummeted in the last fifty years. I might not feel like it if you open the newspaper, but if you just look at actual millions of people killed,
indow coll like it's gone way down. Yeah, this is yes, I have it. It's entirely consistent of what he says. We focus on whatever war is going on, but objectively are way safer and other ways. And Stephen Pinker points this out, is like child poverty has plummeted in the last one hundred years, like a lot. We've made a huge progress on so many of these things because we've cooperated and worked together and created institutions and found better solutions.
It's just that we never focus on those we never talk about it. And so like a little bit of what my point is is like, if we just stay susceptible to the economic incentive structure of social media or mainstream media, where they always focus on the negative and those stories sell and they're on the front page of the newspaper, or they're being bumped up by the algorithm, or the extreme people are dominating conversation, we're going to miss the broader trends of the things that have been
so impressive and positive, like human nature, and we should be focusing more on those positive things, like I was saying with the norms of inclusion. If you tell people that most people value this, then more people actually do the good thing.
And so.
Maybe I'll end on this. One of the sections of our last chapter of our book was about climate change. That's one of the big challenges we face as a humanity, Right, don't think so? Well if they don't think so so, we just had a paper that was published on this, like came out like two days ago. Fifty thousand people, sixty countries. We looked at climate change. I'll tell you the data on left versus right, sixty countries, and you
were right. Conservatives believe in climate change less than liberals, and they're lessupportive of climate change policy and liberals. But we also measured real behavior. We had a task where people had to work hard to and we planted trees. And by the way, people were hard enough. In this study. We got a sponsor that we were able to plant over three hundred and thirty thousand trees in the real world based on the behavior of people, So it's a
real We made them work really hard. I had a real behavior, not just like checking, like answering one to seven on a likeer scale. There's no difference between liberals conservatives in real behavior. They worked just as hard no matter where they were on the political spectrum to plant trees. And so I was like, Okay, there actually are grounds
for cooperation on real things. You just I think what we have to do is spend more time not talking about our differences all the time, Yeah, but finding common ground. Guess what, everybody loves trees. Everybody loves like beautiful nature, and that's something that like you can build on. If you get people to do that, then maybe they start to identify as someone who cares about the environment. Then you do the next thing, puppies Yeah who Yeah, find
something that people love it and scaffold on that. So that so that's kind of like, even though we have these barriers, there are things there that are like shared norms and values. We need to find them and harness and do those things and then build off those. And so that was like some promising data in.
That, Yes, meeting with the common humanity. It's just like it's so obvious and yet it's so hard for humans to do that when the ego is involved. Yeah, it's just like, how can we have people quiet their egos?
And let me tell you the worst. We also tested a bunch of interventions to try to get people see what motivated people to support climate change the best. Let me tell you the worst intervention. I guess.
I guess.
Climate change messaging. It's doomer messages. If you say that there's doom and gloom in the world is just going to burn to a crisp. That was the single It backfired, people did less environmental behavior, and it was also one of the worst at getting them to support climate change policy. They just like fuck people. They don't want to support climate change policy either, and they don't want to engage in real behavior because they're just give up, Why should
I do anything? The world's just burning? And so it's also like that. But guess what that was the best intervention for getting people to talk about it on social media. Intervention was like a doom and gloom message about climate change, that we're all doomed and the world is burning and it's going to burn to a crisp if you have.
If people hear that message, they want to share that on social media because guess what, that gets lots of clicks and likes, but they don't want to engage any real behavior and they don't want to support any policy, and so the types of things that were motive that motivate people to share online might be the things that hurt us the most in the real world. We need more positive messages. That was the doom and gloom message. It's kind of exactly what you talk about all the time.
We need more positive messages and less new doom and gloom about these things.
Well, Steve Piker would appreciate that.
Yeah, he's been trying to He's been saying that for a long time, and people piel on him on social media.
There's like a site human progress dot org or something before. They're constantly trying to tell people about how much menty is making progress. We do need to get those messages out more. I see Jordan Peterson posting a lot of that kind of stuffy.
There are some people who are seeing it, but it's like, I wish that was more part of the conversation to.
I do too, Jay van Bevel, it was a delight to talk to you on the show. Thanks so much for having your work is so important.
Thanks God. It's always a pleasure.