On Opinion: Recent Episodes
Parlia
Where do your opinions come from?
Do we ‘think’ our world views, or ‘feel’ them? And what do our beliefs mean for politics and society?
In each episode of On Opinion, Turi Munthe asks thought leaders to share their perspectives on why we think what we think and what it means for the world today, discussing everything from the war on truth to how to argue with people you hate.
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S2 E29: Our Stone-Age Brains
“We have mental mechanisms that have been there since the Stone Age and no longer function in this environment”
Short-term thinking, lazy reasoning and stereotyping, and too much focus on what’s bad (the ‘negativity bias’)… all are throw-backs to our last major evolutionary stage, when humans lived in a world of scarcity, danger and constant tribal fighting.
In today’s more clement environment where resources are plentiful and the likelihood of being murdered minimal, those mental models no longer apply. In fact, over-reliance on those outmoded forms of thinking risk bringing us back to an age of conflict.
“We can either change by design or change by disaster. I prefer the former.”
Listen to Maren make the case for embodied thinking, and explain how a new approach to conversation can change the way we engage socially and politically:
- The 3 Principles of Dynamic Thinking
- How to redefine groups
- Switching our focus from the individual to the collective
- Constructive Journalism
- Why thinking is embodied
- Why rational decision-making is always emotional
- The danger of habits
Prof. Maren Urner
Maren Urner is a neuroscientist, professor of media psychology, and the best-selling author of Raus aus der Erwigen Dauerkrise. She is also the founder of Perspective Daily, a German-language online magazine for constructive journalism.
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S2 E28: The Spirituality Movement
“A lot of those who’ve left the church tend to be younger people, who nonetheless still consider themselves spiritual. They’ve been turned off by churches, but they haven’t necessarily gone full atheist, materialist…”
Religion is declining around the world. Even in America, the great outlier of the post-Christian West, half the population doesn’t believe in organised religion any more.
But the loss of our traditional beliefs has given rise to a growing number of ‘spiritualist’ alternatives. They range from mainstream ‘Wellness’ culture, through eco-spiritualism, occultism, witch culture on Instagram and astrology on TikTok, through to the darker visions of QAnon and Millenarianism.
What defines Spiritualist thinking? What are its roots? Why is it flowering now? And why does it bleed so easily into Conspiracy?
“In the last two years, spiritual culture has curdled - from positive and optimistic to a much more fearful and paranoid kind of message…”
Listen to Jules and Turi discuss:
- The history of spiritualism, from the 16th century to today
- The cornerstones of spiritualist thinking: from myths and monsters through to harmony and health
- The ‘Meaning Gap’
- ‘Conspirituality’: why conspiracy theories and spirituality so easily bleed into each other.
- Intuition (over Reason) as a path to knowledge
- What Rationalists have lost
- How Spiritualists have reacted to Covid
Jules Evans
Jules Evans is a writer and practical philosopher interested in emotions, well-being, transcendence and flourishing. He is the author of Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations, and The Art of Losing Control: A Guide to Ecstatic Experience.
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S2 E27: Generational Politics
“If you truly understand what’s different between generations, you have a much better idea of what’s coming up in the future.”
It turns out there are very real differences between the generations. Key external events - a world war, a crippling global financial crash, 9⁄11, or even a pandemic - will mark a generation in a way that differentiates them from previous or later ones.
But there are also slower cultural and technological differences that also make their mark: consider the dwindling role of religion across the West over 4 generations, or the impact of smart phones on the way we all think.
”The concept of the Generation is the most important one… because it is how history moves, changes, wheels and flows” - Ortega y Gasset
Bobby Duffy has written the book on generational differences, and here explains what brings us together and splits us apart - from our attitudes to sex, money and moral values to the way we think of driving or home-ownership.
“Because we’re so deeply connected, looking at things generationally is really important to us because we want each generation after us to do better”
Listen to Bobby discuss:
- How to go about defining generations
- How we get our stereotypes right and wrong
- Why Gen Z are in a ‘sex recession’
- Why Gen X are so miserable
- Whether the Baby Boomers really did have it so much easier
- Whether there is space for the ‘individual’ in a demographic analysis of culture and personality
- The 3 Key drivers of attitudinal change
- And why we all live 200 years…
Read the Full Transcript
Bobby Duffy
Bobby Duffy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute. He has worked across most public policy areas in his career of nearly 30 years in policy research and evaluation, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. He is the author of Generations - Does when you’re born shape who you are?
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S2 E26: Political Predisposition
“40% of the variance observed in political attitudes can be attributed to genetics”
Twin studies have suggested that one third of our political orientation can be traced to our genes. But does that mean our politics are predisposed?
John Hibbing is one of the greats of Political Psychology in the US. His work spans decades and has broken ground across multiple disciplines - from polling and representation, to the biology of political differences. John believes that knowledge of of this genetic influence can help us better understand each other.
“Predispositions are not destiny, but defaults - defaults that can be and frequently are overridden.”
Conservatives and Liberals evolved clear and distinct bedrock values deep in our collective past. Our views of the outsider, our perception of threat, our concern for order may be as innate to us as our sense of taste or our personality traits.
“Politics is universal; it’s human nature that varies”
Recognising how our values differ, and the reasons why we have such different perspectives on what makes for a just and good society is fundamental to the democratic project. Because ultimately, we need both Left and Right to survive.
Listen to John discuss:
- How taste and politics are linked
- The core values of conservatism and liberalism
- Why Left and Right are universal across culture and history
- whether there is a ‘Liberal’ Gene
- Why Nature vs Nurture is a meaningless question
- How to talk to the other side
Read the Full Transcript
John Hibbing
John Hibbing is an American political scientist and Foundation Regents University Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is known for his research on the biological and psychological correlates of political ideology. He is the author of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences
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S2 E25: On Emotion
“The world that we live in today is fuelled by heightened emotion…”
Over the course of these two seasons of On Opinion, we’ve looked at opinions through the lens of philosophy, psychology, social science, anthropology and evolution. But one area we’ve missed is that of feeling.
Omar Kholeif and Jonathan Sklar take very different approaches to understand the world we live in, but both see emotion as something that can affect individuals and collective groups.
Jonathan feels that you can transpose psychoanalysis, which is designed for the individual, to a culture and a moment in history. Omar is convinced not only that ‘ages’ have emotions, dominant leitmotifs of feeling that impact everyone around them, but also that today is a particularly emotional age - that our feelings are closer to the surface.
Listen to Turi speak to Jonathan and Omar about:
- How we define ‘ages’
- The difference between the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter protests
- Whether we need to ‘fix’ an age of anxiety
- The rise of hatred across the West
- How psychoanalysis can heal emotional wounds of trauma
- The importance of mourning
“There’s a considerable rise in anxiety and tension and people hating other people, and there’s far less debate going on…”
Works cited include:
- William Reddy’s Emotional Regimes
- Will Davies on Nervous States
Read the Full Transcript
Omar Kholeif
Omar is a writer, curator, and cultural historian, and is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, Government of Sharjah, UAE. Trained as a political scientist, Kholeif’s career began as a journalist and documentary filmmaker before entering into the picture palace of museums. Concerned with the intersections of emerging technologies with post-colonial, and critical race theory, Kholeif’s research has explored histories of performance art; the visual experience of mental illness; the interstices of social justice, as well as the aesthetics of digital culture.
Jonathan Sklar
Jonathan trained in medicine at the Royal Free, University of London in 1973, and then trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Adult Department, Tavistock Centre for four years with adults, children and adolescents. At the same time he trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and has been a psychoanalyst since 1983 and a training analyst since 1996. He is chair of The Independent Psychoanalysis Trust.
On Opinion is a member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Produced by Emma Penney
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S2 E24: The Journal of Controversial Ideas
“You can’t have a good education if you’re not exposed to ideas you don’t agree with”
Twelve years ago, Francesca Minerva published an academic article in the Journal of Medical Ethics giving a moral defence of infanticide. She was overwhelmed by the reaction she received - for an academic article in the early days of Twitter and Facebook, it went ‘viral’. She received death threats from the public, academics refusing to shake her hand, and she found it hard to get tenure. But she says that she was lucky. If the same thing happened today, she’d be a lot worse off than a few disgruntled colleagues.
Francesca is one of the co-founders of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, alongside Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. Their aim is to promote free inquiry on controversial topics, in the face of what they see as increasing censorship across the academy.
“It has become really common for academics to sign petitions to get somebody they disagree with fired or demoted…”
Francesca worries that without the capacity to discuss or challenge widely held views, our search for the truth will fall flat. She worries that the very idea of academic enquiry is changing: that truth is ‘constructed’ rather than ‘discovered’.
“I don’t know if university as we know it is going to survive.”
Works cited include:
- Jon Haidt and The Coddling of the American Mind
- Ronald Dworkin on Truth
Read the Full Transcript
Francesca Minerva
Francesca Minerva is a research fellow at the University of Milan. Between 2011 and 2020 she has worked as a post-doc at the University of Melbourne, at the University of Ghent, and at Warwick University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Her research focuses on applied ethics, including lookism, conscientious objection, abortion, academic freedom, and cryonics.
On Opinion is a member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
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S2 E23: The Evolution of Cooperation
“Every multicellular being is a collective that operates as a whole - the individual is an ‘invention’ of evolution”
Cooperation is at work up everywhere - from our ‘selfish’ genes working together in the genome, through to the democratic societies that regulate our collaboration.
Cooperation is what distinguishes us most strikingly from our evolutionary cousin, the Chimpanzee. It is what allowed us safely to descend from the tree canopy into the savannah. It is what defended us from tyrants, helped us build agrarian societies, and forms the basis of our sense of justice and morality.
But cooperation has a dark side: we collaborate to better compete. How we regulate that dark force is key to our survival.
“Collaboration is the essential ingredient of and largest threat to our success”
Listen to Nichola explain:
- The biological evolution of cooperation in humans
- How we compare with other great collaborators: bees, ants and birds
- The evolution of society: from egalitarian to feudal to democratic
- Why loneliness is physiologically harmful
- When cooperation becomes murderous
- Why evolution gave us the Tragedy of the Commons
- How the invention of Institutions changes the rules of the evolutionary game
Works cited include:
- Christopher Boehm’s Reverse Dominance Hierarchy
- Peter Turchin and his Z-Curve
- Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene
Read the Full Transcript
Nichola Raihani
Nichola Raihani is a professor in Evolution and Behaviour at UCL, where she leads the Social Evolution and Behaviour Lab. She is the author of The Social Instinct: how cooperation shaped the world
On Opinion is a member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
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S2 E22: Psychometrics: measuring ourselves
_“Psychometrics is one of the most important or influential areas of applied psychology”_
Psychometrics, the study of personality and ability, began with the Chinese Imperial Court exams, which measured intelligence and civility, as well as archery and horse-riding. Via the East India Company, testing - of intelligence as well as psychological traits - spread to the British and French civil service, and then onwards to education. Psychometrics gave us exams.
John Rust, one of the world’s foremost authorities, walks us through the history and politics of psychometrics, from eugenics and the fraught question of race and IQ, through to the four core psychographic theories of personality: Freud’s psychoanalysis, Carl Rogers’ Humanistic Theory of person, the Social Learning approach, to the Genetic (Rust’s own focus). In the process, he tackles the very politics of testing, psychometry’s complicated place in the world of psychology, and the validity of Myers-Briggs and OCEAN tests.
_“It's a remarkably important area of science. If we can get it right, we can do lots of good. If you get it wrong, there can be a disaster.”_
Listen to John explain:
-
The origins of psychometrics
-
The problem with Evolutionary Psychology
-
The Naturalistic Fallacy
-
Myers-Briggs and Big 5 Theories of Personality
-
The Flynn Effect
-
The ethics of psychometrics in the age of Big Data and ‘Surveillance Capitalism’
Works cited include:
-
Sir Francis Galton’s Lexical Hypothesis
-
Raymond Cattell and his 16 Personality Types
-
James Flynn’s work on IQ and race
Read the [Full Transcript] (https://www.parlia.com/article/transcript-understanding-psychometry-with-john)
John Rust is the founder of The Psychometrics Centre and an Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He is also a Senior Member of Darwin College.
On Opinion is a member of [The Democracy Group] (https://www.democracygroup.org/), a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Listen to Out Of Order.
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“Dehumanisation both justifies and motivates acts of extraordinary violence - but it is not in any sense an innate disposition”
Here lies the terrifying quandary: if humans are the most social of all primates and mammals, if our sociality and capacity for collaboration is at the very heart of our success as a species, how are we able to engage in such acts of hideous violence towards each other?
“Dehumanisation is a psychological response to political forces”
David Livingstone Smith explains how two key ideas underpin the psychology of Dehumanisation: Psychological Essentialism and Hierarchical Thinking, false heuristics that are nevertheless deeply embedded in all of us.
But he goes further. To understand the depths of cruelty and humiliation, the ritualistic violence, the near-religious ecstasy of moral purpose that often comes with genocide and torture, we need to understand the mind of the Perpetrator.
To the perpetrator, their victim is both human and non-human, vermin and all-powerful. More than any physical danger, the victim represents a metaphysical cognitive threat - and becomes a monster to be exterminated.
“When we say ‘we must put them in their place’, it’s a deep idea: we want to put ‘them’ in their metaphysical place”
Listen to David explain:
- The metaphysical threat of the ‘other’
- The Uncanny - and its threat to our sense of purity and order
- Dehumanisation as psychosis
- Why cruelty and humiliation are such intrinsic elements of dehumanisation
- What we can do to fix it.
“We are disposed to have difficulty harming one another, and yet…”
Works cited include:
- Arthur O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being
- Ernst Jentsch on The Psychology of the Uncanny
- Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley
- Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger
- Noel Carroll and The Philosophy of Horror
Read the Full Transcript
David Livingstone Smith
David Livingstone Smith is professor of philosophy at the University of New England. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of London, Kings College. He is the author of many books, including On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How To Resist It
On Opinion is a member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Listen to The Science of Politics.
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“Dehumanisation is a psychological process, and every psychological process can be used for good or bad.”
Humanisation (attributing motive and consciousness) and dehumanisation are flip sides of common cognitive processes, what Harris calls “Flexible Social Cognition”, which he has measured via fMRI scans.
“I think of dehumanization much more as an everyday psychological phenomenon”
Neurologically, dehumanisation is the ability to regulate one’s own social cognition. We grant more ‘humanity’ to our friends than the bad driver in front of us. And in certain professional contexts, dehumanising is a good thing: to small degrees, doctors do it their patients better to treat them.
But thinking of dehumanisation as a scale provides a new frame through which to look at sexual objectification and the commoditisation of labour, all the way through to the Holocaust and the Slave Trade.
Because while dehumanisation isn’t the cause of atrocities, it is always used to justify them.
“Emotions like anger and fear are much more energising when it comes to committing these human atrocities. What dehumanisation does is it allows you to justify why the behaviour has occurred…”
Listen to Lasana explain:
- Theory of Mind
- Social Neuroscience
- The role of Stereotypes in cognition
- The Evolutionary reasons for “Flexible Social Cognition”
- And how we can fight Dehumanisation - societally, and as individuals.
“We need to re-engineer our social systems”
Works cited include:
- Dignity Takings and Dehumanization: A Social Neuroscience Perspective
- Why Economic, Health, Legal, and Immigration Policy Should Consider Dehumanization
- How social cognition can inform social decision making
Read the Full Transcript
Lasana Harris
Dr Lasana Harris is Senior Lecturer in Social Cognition at UCL. Lasana’s research focuses on social, legal and economic decision making and how thinking about what other people are thinking affects those types of decisions. His work explores dehumanisaton, how people fail to consider other people’s minds, and anthropomorphism, extending minds to things that don’t have them.
On Opinion is a member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Listen to Democracy Matters
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“We often treat privacy as a quick fix for much deeper social problems - like prejudice and bias”
Our lives are constantly documented. Our Facebook likes, our Tweets and even our credit card statements all reveal information about us. But what about our faces?
Michal Kosinski has demonstrated that off-the-shelf, commercially available AI can analyse facial images and determine sexuality and political preferences with up to 91% accuracy.
If our opinions and preferences are written into our very faces, what does that tell us about the immutability of our values and behaviours?
And what does that mean for privacy?
Listen to Michal explain how we must learn to live in a Post-Privacy world.
“We should just not be making judgements about people based on their faces, regardless of whether those judgments are accurate or not.”
Works cited include:
- Facial Recognition and Political Orientation
- Facial Recognition and Sexual Orientation
Michal Kosinski
Michal is an Associate Professor in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He studies humans in a digital environment using cutting-edge computational methods, AI and Big Data.
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“Our inner and outer crises are two sides of the same coin”
There are many lenses through which to explain polarisation - economic, political, demographic, evolutionary… Alex Evans wants us to consider it from a psychological perspective.
Alex has campaigned around inclusion and social justice for two decades, but researchers in Israel changed his mind about social fracture. Polarisation between Israelis and Palestinians is a mental health issue - driven by ongoing trauma, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and threat perception.
If democracy depends on citizens who can manage their mental and emotional states, feel empathy for each other, and share a sense of common identity and purpose, we need to address our inner worlds as much as the outer one.
“The state of the mind and the state of the world intersect”
Larger Us, his campaigning organisation, puts psychology at the very heart of its approach to curing our social divide.
Listen to Alex explain how society - both governments and individuals - can move from fight/flight to self-awareness and empathy, from powerlessness to agency, from disconnection and loneliness to belonging.
Along the way, he also discusses:
- The changing role of Religion in society
- Collective Psychology
- How ‘spirituality’ gave up on social justice
- When polarisation is good
- And how we can move from an Us-vs-Them to a ‘Larger Us’ Society
“We really have to come together to tackle these crises but our capacity to do so is being eroded by our emotional responses.”
Works cited include:
- Johann Hari’s Lost Connections
- Jurgen Habermas on Democratic Polarisation
- Robert Wright’s Non-Zero
- Richard Layard on Happiness
- David Bohm on Dialogue
Alex Evans
Alex founded the Collective Psychology Project in 2018, which then became Larger Us in 2021. He is the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough?, and is a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.
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“The avoidance of conflict is actually the real problem”
We traditionally view an argument as a symptom of a problematic relationship, but relationship psychologists have found that they actually lead to healthier and happier people. Children who grow up arguing with their parents do better in school, and couples who air their disagreements stay together longer.
What holds true for the family, holds true for all groups of people: conflict is central to Democracy. Humans evolved to reason collectively: we need each other to get to the truth.
“For valuable conflict to occur, you need two things: a shared goal, and agreed rules of engagement.”
Listen to Ian and Turi discuss:
- Why arguments are good for us
- Why most ‘conflict’ on social media isn’t ‘Fight’ so much as ‘Flight’
- Why emotion is so important in conflict
- How we can turn our cognitive flaws to society’s advantage
- How human individuals evolved to argue, but society evolved to reason.
- Democracy as an ‘Infinite Game’
- How we can have healthy arguments
“It doesn’t matter if you are right, it matters that WE, as a society, are right. Arguing is what gets us there.”
Works cited include:
- Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s Enigma of Reason
- James Carse and his Finite and Infinite Games
Ian Leslie
Ian Leslie is a writer and author of acclaimed books on human behaviour. He writes about psychology, culture, technology and business for the New Statesman, the Economist, the Guardian and the Financial Times. He is the author of Conflicted.
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“The disadvantaged don’t make the world, they cope with it”
Since Etienne de la Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577), we have asked ourselves why the weak, the poor and the marginalised accept injustice.
Social scientists talk to economic and political oppression. John Jost’s work shows that the oppressed don’t just suffer the injustice, they commit to it. Across society, people “invest in their own unhappiness”.
Black children prefer white dolls; women feel entitled to lower salaries; victims blame themselves; around the world, people vote against their own economic interests…
Jost presents three underlying reasons - epistemic, existential and relational - for why people become psychologically invested in the status quo even if it harms their objective interests, and walks through some of the research that demonstrates it.
“One of the things that any kind of social movement for change needs to accomplish is a kind of undoing of the kind of indoctrination that all of us experience.”
Listen to John Jost explain:
- False Consciousness: “ideology as a cognitive illusion” (Marx)
- Out-Group Favouritism
- Why social activism is so taxing - and so many activists suffer burnout
- The role of the Stereotype: it simplifies and justifies
- The role of Evolution in system justification
- And how to break the cycle
“Part of the job of the Social Psychologist is to look at fixing the ills they identify”
Works cited include:
- Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory
- Robert Sapolsky, on the physiology of low-status
- Howard Zinn
- Gyorgy Lukacs
- Berger and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality
- Karl Marx
- Antonio Gramsci
- Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory
- Catharine MacKinnon: Towards a Feminist Critique of the State
- Chris Boehm on the benefits of inequality
John Jost
John Jost is Professor of Psychology, Politics, & Data Science and Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. His research addresses stereotyping, prejudice, social justice, intergroup relations, political ideology, and system justification theory. He has published over 200 journal articles and book chapters and five books, including A Theory of System Justification.
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"Populism is a permanent shadow of modern representative democracy, and a constant threat"
The last few decades has seen a democratic drift, as populist leaders emerge all over the world - from Bolsonaro and Trump in the Americas, through Orban, Kaczynski and Erdogan in Europe, to Modi and Duterte in Asia.
Their policies have little in common, but in their approach to politics, in their populism, they share profound, and deeply undemocratic, tendencies.
Jan-Werner Muller conceptualises populism - that “moralistic imagination of politics” - as a triptych: Anti-Elite, Anti-Pluralist, and Identitarian. Populists arrogate the right to define who counts as ‘The People’, and to exclude all those who don’t fit the bill from full participation in civil and political life.
“The ‘People’ is singular - authentic, morally pure”
Listen to Jan-Werner Muller explain:
- Why Corruption and Clientelism are structural features of Populism
- Why Populists love social networks
- How Populists fetishise the idea of ‘The People’
- Populism’s genius: that it can destroy Democracy in the name of democracy
- and How NOT to fight Populism
“Populism is only thinkable within Representative Democracy”
Works cited include:
- Ralph Dahrendorf
- Nancy L Rosenblum's work on Holism
Jan-Werner Müller
Jan-Werner Müller is a political philosopher and historian of political ideas working at Princeton University. He is the author of What is Populism.
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“The more we increase the connectivity of people, the more people get stuck in extreme positions and echo chambers on the extreme edges of our belief structures.”
In December 2017, Jens Koed Madsen heard Mark Zuckerberg talking about the power of connectivity. Zuckerberg’s hypothesis was that the more people were connected, the more quickly we would filter out bad ideas - a reworking of John Stuart Mill’s classic theory of the marketplace of ideas.
To test it, Jens built a computer model of a social network - full of rational agents sharing information with each other. What he found is disturbing: the larger the network of agents (or citizens, or Facebook users), the faster it builds echo chambers, and the more radicalised those echo chambers become.
“Nobody ever starts extreme - they’re pushed into it through connectivity”
We have spent years focusing on ‘fake news’, misinformation, gullible readers, on the design ethics of the platforms, on political manipulation and propaganda. But Jens’ research shows that it’s the very architecture of our social networks that polarises us.
Listen to him explain his experiment Large Networks of Rational Agents form Persistent Echo Chambers, as well as a forthcoming paper on the role broadcasters play in the media ecosystem - and attempt to look at how we can fix our infodemic.
“Media is an ecosystem. In the same way that an epidemiologist describes the spread of diseases, we do infodemiology - tracking the spread of misinformation across complex dynamic systems.”
Works cited include:
- Sander van der Linden on inoculating against misinformation
- Tristan Harris on the ethics of attention mongering
- Stephan Lewandowsky’s Debunking Handbook
Jens Koed Madsen
Jens Koed Madsen is a Cognitive Psychologist at LSE. He is interested in misinformation and complex human environments, and how people change their beliefs and act in social networks.
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Michael Shermer is one of the world’s most prominent skeptics - founder of The Skeptic Society and editor of its magazine Skeptic. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Michael has spent his career uncovering the workings and causes of our 'Believing Brain'.
“Our brains are wired to think more like lawyers than scientists - to win arguments, to bolster what we already believe...”
We evolved to discern patterns in the world around us. When our ancestors ate the wrong mushroom, they very quickly learnt to link it to their upset stomach. Discovering patterns is the way humans learn. But humans are sometimes too good at it: we ‘discern’ patterns where none exist, and we infuse them with agency.
Listen to Michael and Turi discuss the two key evolutionary drivers of belief:
- Patternicity - our tendency to find patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.
- Agenticity - our tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.
And learn more about:
- The evolutionary origins of belief
- Where conspiracy theories come from
- Dopamine: the belief drug
- What Twin Studies teach us about the Heritability of belief
- How to keep a healthy mind
- And B.F Skinner’s famous pigeon experiment, which shows all animals exist on the belief spectrum.
“Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.”
Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic. He's also the author of The Believing Brain and most recently, Giving the Devil his Due on the free speech wars raging across the West.
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Roberto Foa's research on Global Dissatisfaction with Democracy and Youth Dissatisfaction with Democracy uncovered the highest rates of dissatisfaction in decades, particularly amongst young people.
“The majority of Americans today are dissatisfied with Democracy”
2019 represents the highest level of democratic discontent on record. Around the world, the share of individuals who are dissatisfied with democracy has risen to 57.5%.
In the biggest macro-survey on perceptions of democracy yet performed, Roberto's research shows some terrifying key trends with dissatisfaction at its worst in the world's largest and oldest democracies.
- If a majority of citizens in the US are dissatisfied, it's 80% in Brazil, and closer to 90% in Mexico.
- In Europe, it's 80% in Greece and 65% in Italy.
- In Africa, growing disillusion with the promise of newly democratic countries has pushed dissatisfaction up to 60% in both Nigeria (the world's 5th largest democracy) and South Africa.
- With the failure of the Arab Spring, democracy in the Middle East remains a dream.
- The only two exceptions are some northern European countries (Switzerland, Netherlands, the Nordics) and parts of Asia where democracy appears to be delivering.
But while dissatisfaction is not quite the same as anti-democratic sentiment, frustrations with its failings are THE fastest route towards populism (that democratic counterfeit).
Listen to Turi and Roberto discuss his findings from around the world, and look at:
- why we have lost our faith in democracy
- whether we’re right to distrust its promises
- why the young in particular feel democracy has disenfranchised them
- and how greater ideological polarization might actually be good for democracy in the long term...
"Dissatisfaction with Democracy is rational - in countries with institutions that deliver, it isn't there"
Roberto Foa
Roberto Stefan Foa is University Lecturer in politics and public policy, Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy, and Director of the YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opinion Research.
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“There’s a subtle but crucial difference between ‘Opponent’ and ‘Enemy’”
If Polarization is on the rise around the world, it takes different forms. The “Ideas Landscape” in the US, UK, France and Germany is very different, with the US - unfortunately - most radicalised across its politics. There, political sorting amongst voters and inside Congress has seen a hardening of attitudes towards each side. In Europe, however, there’s more hope.
“What seems to characterize the British political environment right now, more than polarization, is exhaustion…”
In the UK, there is very broad consensus around environmental concerns, the benefits of diversity and the value of the NHS, with only a small minority of political activists on the hard left and right. That pattern is echoed in France (with the added divisiveness of Islam) and Germany (more divided over how to deal with its past).
What can Europe do to ensure it avoids US-levels of polarisation? Stephen believes they key is building a shared identity, characterized by 8 key features.
- An individual experience of belonging, regardless of background or biology.
- A common perception of the country, one that is neither self-aggrandizing nor self-loathing, but self-aware.
- A basic alignment on trusted institutions for expertise and other information.
- A shared notion of the individual’s responsibility to the country.
- A common sense of our basic, guaranteed rights from society.
- A set of shared values to orient moral decision making.
- Congenial intergroup perceptions
- Common aspirations for the future.
“In the US, we’ve lost the common sense of authority that should be provided by academia, science and the media. The umpires and referees aren’t trusted - which means both sides get nervous and they just want to see their side win.”
Stephen Hawkins
More in Common was founded to strengthen democratic societies by countering social division and polarization. They work at the very base of the pyramid - doing deep research into the causes and forms of polarisation, as well as testing new initiatives to counter it. Stephen is their Global Director of Research, and has led their work on Hidden Tribes, the Perception Gap and Democracy for President
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“The key division in all political systems is the result of two distinct perceptions of the most dangerous threats”
Western politics have traditionally been divided into Conservatives and Liberals - tradition vs egalitarianism. John Hibbing, who more than anyone has put biology back into our understanding of politics, proposes an entirely new approach.
John divides the world between “Securitarians” and “Unitarians”, and sees the battle between them as the ultimate source of political conflict in the world.
Do you worry more about immigration or authoritarianism?
“The difference in orientation to security in the face of outsiders constitutes the most fundamental divide in political systems around the world, now and always.”
Based on a mass of new survey data, John’s revolutionary new book, The Securitarian Personality, proposes a fundamental rethink of the core political divide in our societies - between Securitarians, whose central preoccupation is to protect insiders from outsider threats, and Unitarians, whose core central goal is to outsiders from insider threats. It is also a seminal new assessment of the political instincts behind Donald Trump’s rise to power.
Securitarians fear outsiders: immigrants, foreigners, norm-violators, non-native speakers, and those of different races, religions, sexualities who might be a threat to the identity and existence of the in-group.
Unitarians fear powerful insiders: those with the authority to impose their will arbitrary on the society below them.
These differences are deeply, biologically embedded in who we are, and they have immensely strong evolutionary causes. Securitarians and Unitarians are natural human types, and have been since our hunter-gatherer days.
“Political differences are not just superficial and malleable but rather attached to stable psychological, physiological, and possibly even genetic variations.”
Listen to John and Turi discuss this fundamental rethinking of our evolutionary politics:
- The biology behind our political preferences
- The characteristics of Securitarians and Unitarians
- How Securitarians differ from Conservatives, Authoritarians, and Fascists
- The ‘Securitarian’ Phenotype
- The evolutionary history of our different political instincts
- Who voted for Donald Trump (and Orban, Bolsonaro and others) and why
- The advantages and hypocrisies of Unitarian thinking
- What Siberian silver foxes can teach us about political types
John Hibbing
John Hibbing is an American political scientist and Foundation Regents University Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is known for his research on the biological and psychological correlates of political ideology. He is the author of The Securitarian Personality.
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“We synchronise together through processes of emotional contagion and social conformity… This helps produce a shared experience of the world.”
Human beings are social creatures. But is this social nature more than just a desire to be connected? Do we actually form one collective consciousness? Are humans more a ‘We’ than an ‘I’?
In her book Hivemind: the New Science of Tribalism in our Divided World, Sarah Rose Cavanagh speaks to biologists, historians and psychologists to explore these questions and better understand our “collective self.”
But what can we learn from the Hivemind? How has it polarised us? How does it impact our sense of ‘Us’ and what does it do to our feelings about ‘Them’? And what has social media done to our social consciousness?
“I think taking our ultra sociality online has led to some group polarisation and this tendency for people with different viewpoints to polarise on opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Listen to Sarah Rose and Turi discuss how our sense of self is derived collectively.
- How we experience the world as a collective
- The science that proves Emotional Contagion
- The threat of conspiracy theories to our consensus reality
- The role stories play in our making sense of the world
- Synchrony, and the warm buzz of ‘sharing’
- How stories improve our theory of mind
- Whether our relationships shape our likes and dislikes
- The danger of dehumanisation of our out-groups
- How loneliness affects health
- And what we humans can learn from bees…
“I think that where we need to go is not to avoid our collective social cells, but to make sure that we have human beings as our in-group, rather than this nation or this ethnic group or this religion…”
Sarah Rose Cavanagh
Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist, professor, and Associate Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. Her research considers the contribution of emotions and emotion regulation to quality of life. She is the author of Hivemind: the New Science of Tribalism in our Divided World.
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“You really do have to do bridge building at the community level. People have to learn to talk to each other across sides”
The Left and the Right today are miles apart. In the past few years, polarisation has become an integral part of our societies. But has it always been this way - is polarisation a natural part of democracy?
Covering the politics of polarisation from Chile through India to Vietnam, via long-standing democracies such as the US and Germany, this week’s guest Thomas Carothers suggests that there are three roots present in every polarised society - religion, race and ideological clashes. But what about societies with no polarisation? According to Thomas, they’re at risk too.
“Too much consensus can lead to a dangerous pressure for alternatives that usually tend to be anti systemic, extreme and dangerous…”
Listen to Turi and Thomas discuss:
- Polarisation as a fixture of democracy
- How consensus leads to polarised societies
- Whether there are problems with a lack of polarisation
- The creation of grievance politics
- How Brexit created a different identity polarisation
- Whether polarisation can be a good thing
- How grievance politics differ from Right to Left
- Whether we can manage polarisation
- If the pandemic has made us less polarised
“I think the pandemic has opened our hearts and our minds a little bit in ways that’ll help us feel at least some sense of common humanity beneath the level of the political noise…”
Thomas Carothers
Thomas Carothers is senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a leading authority on international support for democracy, human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society. He is also the author of Democracies Divided: the global challenges of political polarisation
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“Dyadic morality is ultimately about the link between perceived harm and immorality…”
Why do we believe murder is “wrong”? Why can’t we compare the effects of a hurricane with the acts of a paedophile? Kurt Gray argues that human morality stems from “harm” - that moral acts have an intentional agent and a victim, and it is this perception of harm caused by one person to another that allows us to define moral evils.
So could this explain political differences? Do we just all have different definitions of harm? In which case, is there a way of reconciling polarised groups by re-examining our own perception of harm and suffering?
“I think one way forward is acknowledging that the other side’s perceptions of harm are legitimate…”
Listen to Kurt and Turi discuss how harm is the basis of human morality.
- How intuitionism is actually about harm
- Whether morality requires a perpetrator and a victim
- How dyadic moral theory deals with self-harm
- Why people moralise homosexuality
- The importance of theory of mind in dyadic morality
- God versus Environment
- The moral differences between Liberals and Conservatives
- How people remove moral harm
- Why perceptions of harm creates political polarisation
- Whether recognition of perceptions of harm can bridge the political divide
“The way to see people as more moral is to acknowledge that their perceptions of harm are not made up, but instead authentic and that they really are worried about safeguarding others from suffering…”
Works cited include:
- Lawrence Kohlberg and his work on Moral Development
- Jonathan Haidt and his work on Intuition and Pluralism.
Kurt Gray
Dr. Gray is an Associate Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Organizational Behavior at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC, where he teaches about organizational ethics and team processes.
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“A lot of the human behaviour that seems perplexing, irrational (like politics or religion) is often most effectively explained by Evolutionary Psychology”
We evolved to live in hunter-gatherer communities clustered in small units spread sparsely across the landscape. Existentially threatened by outsiders - who brought war as well as germs - humans evolved adaptive psychological behaviours to help negotiate our ancestral environment.
Evolutionary Psychology seeks to understand human psychological behaviour from that adaptive perspective. If we protect our children, fall in love, create social hierarchies - what were the evolutionary reasons to do so?
“Evolutionary psychology allows us to get sighted to our instincts”
Listen to Hector and Turi discuss what evolutionary psychology can teach us about our Politics.
- Evolutionary Basis for Conservatism and Liberalism
- The Politics of Sex: why men and women have different political tendencies
- Why there’s a correlation between conservatism and upper-body strength in men
- Why there’s a correlation between liberalism and greater facial expressiveness across both genders
- Simon Baron Cohen’s work on autism and the “essential male brain”
- Why Conservatives are from Mars and Liberals are from Venus
- How we can map our politics across the Big 5 Personality Test
- Why high-testosterone men tend to share less
- The evolutionary basis for Xenophobia and Xenophilia
- Why Conservatives love dominance hierarchies and Liberals spend all their effort trying to pull them down.
- Why Fear is such a big driver for conservatives (who tend to have a larger amygdala than liberals)
- What the difference between Chimps and Bonobos can teach us about the evolution of our politics
- How to explain the manifestation of strong man politicians, like Donald Trump, in evolutionary terms
- The idea of “Evolutionary Mismatch”: that certain types of behaviour today are a useless hold over from our hunter-gatherer ancestry (like a psychological version of the appendix)
- And why the Iroquois had a split leadership system: one for war (led by young men) and one for peace (led by the old and the women).
“Democracy is the answer, but it often needs tuning”
Works cited include:
- John Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Alford and their work on the Biology of Political Differences.
- Sir Simon Baron Cohen and his work on autism.
Hector Garcia
Hector Garcia is Professor in the department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas and a Clinical Psychologist working with veterans. He’s the author of Sex, Power and Partisanship and hosts a YouTube channel discussing those issues.
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“Microaggressions are so hard because they typically don’t meet traditional philosophical conceptions of blameworthiness…”
Microaggressions are the latest front in the culture wars - seemingly harmless comments such as “yes, but where are you really from…” or misused pronouns, over time, can cause profound damage to the receiver. But the idea of cautioning an act so seemingly harmless feels like thought-policing.
In her book The Ethics of Microaggression, Regina Rini defines a MicroAggression as “an act or event that is perceived by a member of an oppressed group as possibly but not certainly instantiating oppression.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot to trigger both Right and Centre, since it tells us the aggression is in the eye of the beholder. Microaggressions can’t be ‘judged’ from the outside, they can only be heard.
To many, that feels intuitively dangerous: old school totalitarianism could see you hauled off for ideas other might suspect you of having; with MicroAggressions, one might be hauled off for ideas someone else could have based on your suspected intent.
Rini explains the philosophical misunderstanding at the heart of the war around microaggression: the huge mismatch between the Harm Felt and the Blame Attributable.
Minute acts of indignity can add up to systemic violence and have profound real-world consequences for their victims, but how do you blame the often unconscious perpetrator for an act so ‘micro’?
Listen to Regina and Turi discuss:
- Why MicroAggressions have become such a cause celebre in the Culture Wars
- MicroAggression and the threat to freedom of speech
- The history of the idea to Chester Pierce in the 1970s.
- The problem of Collective Harm vs Individual Blame
- How the idea of MicroAggression is woven into thinking about systemic inequality.
“We’re suffering from an inability to hold two thoughts in our heads the the same time… First, MicroAggressions add up to real and serious harm in the lives of marginalised people. Second, most MicroAggressions are NOT the sort of the thing we can easily blame people for”
Works Cited include:
- Derald Wing Sue: Race Talk
- Chester Pierce, who coined the term.
- Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind
Regina Rini
Regina Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University in Toronto. Prior to that, she taught at NYU’s centre of bioethics. She writes a regular philosophy column for the TLS.
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“We need to borrow from both the Left and the Right to achieve a renewal of liberalism…”
As a journalist and political commentator, Timothy Garton Ash took a front row seat watching Eastern Europe open up in the 1990s - the heyday of Liberal expansionism around the world.
Today, faced with populist authoritarians and illiberal democrats at home, and the rise of China's new model of modernity abroad, Liberalism is on the back foot - we're experiencing an "anti-Liberal counter-revolution".
Timothy argues liberalism is to blame for its troubles - over-exporting free-market ideas, under-investing in culture, community and politics in a world of massive, destabilising change. He argues for a "conservative-socialist-Liberalism" - a civic patriotism focused on the common good deeply embedded in national communities.
On the back of his recent manifesto for Liberalism's renewal in Prospect Magazine, listen to Timothy and Turi discuss:
- Whether Liberalism can survive in the 21st Century
- Whether Joe Biden's America can still hope to lead the "free world"
- The demise of liberal ideas in the student body
- Equality of Esteem alongside economic security
- Levelling up vs Levelling down
- Civic Virtue
- Patriotism vs Nationalism
“The nation is just too important, and too strong in its emotional appeal, to be left to the nationalists”
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of ten books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last half century. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
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“We have to come to the table, even if it’s just to say we disagree… then you have a chance to move forward”
The number of armed groups created in the last 6 years surpasses the number created since WW2. States themselves have been creating them, globalisation has linked them up, and the population displacement driven by climate change has only exacerbated the problem.
Through his work with Geneva Call, Hichem has worked all over the world - successfully convincing militias in Northern Syrian to not recruit child soldiers, and securing the release of hostages in the DR Congo.
His work is centred around Dialogue - engaging, listening and negotiating. How do you ask a militia leader to commit not to use human shields? How do you ask an armed group to divert some of its resources towards protecting civilians?
The guiding principles used by Geneva Call offer a way to approach dialogue in a polarised world.
Listen to Turi and Hichem discuss the three pillars of constructive dialogue
- Ownership: granting the other side autonomy, and shared ownership of the dialogue.
- Localisation: working with the physical reality of your interlocutor, understanding their community.
- Contextualisation: every community is individual and different - we tend to apply the same rules everywhere irrespective of what is happening on the ground.
Hichem Khadhraoui
Hichem Khadhraoui is Director of Operations at Geneva Call, where he has travelled across the world negotiating with armed groups who violate human rights. Geneva Call works in situations of conflict or violence where armed groups are at risk of violating human rights law and endangering civilians. They have worked everywhere from Colombia (FARC) to the Philippines (with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front).
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"By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding"
It goes without saying that the way we think is embedded in our own time and culture. The same is true even of Philosophers: our 'professional' thinkers.
Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks is an exploration of the world's non-Western philosophical traditions (China, Japan, India, Islam and the oral traditions of Africa and elsewhere) - how they differ, what they can teach us.
Nothing deflates western philosophy's claims to universalism so much as seeing how deeply embedded they are in time and place.
Baggini looks at four epistemological areas across each philosophical tradition:
- How we think we know
- How we understand the workings of the world
- How we understand ourselves in the world
- What we see as the 'Good Life'
From the Confucian ideal of Harmony, the interplay of Falsafa and Kalam in the Islamic world, the Indian principle of Pratyaksa and ideas around Karma in numerous cosmologies, listen to Julian and Turi discuss how very differently we all see the world:
- Truth-seeking vs Way Seeking
- Progress vs Tradition
- Freedom vs Harmony
- Intimacy vs Integrity
And how the way we see the world impacts what we do to it - from the development of empirical science to the rise of capitalism, populism and today's atomised society.
"An insider is like a fish in a fishbowl," said Xu Zhiyuan, "unable to see the exact shape of its surroundings even though those surroundings are perfectly clear to everyone else." Come take a step outside.
Works Cited:
- Derek Parfit, Reason and Persons
- Thomas Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity
Julian Baggini
Dr. Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosopher's Magazine and a patron of Humanists UK.
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“In their desire for groups to BE equal, Liberals have a bias towards PERCEIVING groups to be equal… Inequality must therefore always be explained through discrimination and prejudice, rather than evolved or genetic differences”
Turi talks with Dr. Cory Clark about the origins of bias - why it is so ingrained in our thinking, its evolutionary uses, and whether bias (or ‘motivated reasoning’) is equally shared by people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Conservatives have historically got a terrible rap for being anti-science, creationists, climate change deniers… able to ignore objective facts that attack their world views.
Liberals, on the other hand, are the party of empiricism - they are more educated, are more likely to trust experts, and make up the massive majority of scientists and academics themselves…
And there’s the rub. Because at the heart of the Liberal view is a fundamental structuring bias around equality. Liberals so desire to see equality in the world that they are blind to instances of true genetic or evolved differences. This is what Cory Clark calls the ‘Equalitarianism’
Listen to hear Cory and Turi discuss:
- ‘Equalitarianism’, the liberal bias that underpins all others
- Tribalism and its evolutionary advantages
- ‘Ideological Epistemology’ - how we frame our ideas politically
- Liberal Bias in academia
- Whether, despite warping research, Liberal Bias might be a good thing for the world
- Whether there is an evolutionary purpose to our political differences
Works cited include:
- Bo Winegard and his work on Equalitarianism
- Roy Baumeister and his work on wealth creators vs wealth distributors.
Cory Clark
Cory Clark is a Social Psychologist and a Visiting Scholar in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary research interests social cognition, politics, morality and metascience.
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“When evidence is ambiguous––when it is hard to know how to interpret it—it can lead rational people to predictably polarize.”
Turi talks with philosopher Kevin Dorst to understand why all our cognitive ‘flaws’ - from confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, through our selective exposure to media, even the prejudice we apply to our analysis of evidence that contradicts our beliefs - should actually be thought of rational behaviour.
Ever since the 1970s, when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky began working on the cognitive / psychological bases of our logical errors, the idea that humans are profoundly irrational has grown in popularity.
We think to satisfy emotional needs (the need to feel safe, to belong, to feel better than others) as much as epistemic ones (finding out the truth).
So much is certainly true, but - as Kevin explains - it has profound political implications.
When we come to believe that humans are irrational, it is only and always those on the other side whom we accuse of the flaw; never ourselves. And accusing our political opponents of irrationality - accusing them of intellectual corruption and cognitive breakdown - is a step towards demonising them, and a massive accelerant of the polarisation we see across our political landscapes.
Kevin Dorst tells us that story is wrong. Politics and Culture are not maths. The evidence we have for thinking one way or another is always ambiguous. The ways we think about politics and culture are, Kevin tells us, fundamentally rational approaches to Ambiguous Evidence.
Join us to hear how, and why, and what that should mean for the way we engage with those on the other side of the political spectrum.
Listen to Kevin and Turi discuss:
- Ideological Sorting
- Attitude Polarization
- Affective Polarization
- Ambiguous Evidence
- And the pernicious effects of de-rationalising humans
“Irrationalism turns polarization into demonization.”
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“Democracy runs on disagreement: it is by means of citizens hashing out their differences that democracy can achieve better political outcomes.”
In Part 2 of their podcast, Turi and Bob Talisse follow on from their discussion of Equal Citizenship (and why polarization strains that ideal), to discuss Disagreement and how we build democratic ‘Civility’ to make sure disagreement is working for, not against, democracy.
Disagreement is central to the democratic aspiration. Not only does it enshrine the right of individuals to participate in the democratic process, but it is epistemically useful - it helps us discover and articulate new ideas. But how can we argue properly when all our instincts push to defeat the other side rather than build with them?
Bob Talisse explains that we're programmed to argue (a good thing) but that we must remind ourselves to do so within the bounds of 'civility'. Not 'civility' in the 19th Century sense of the term, but rather 'Civic Friendship' - anchoring our argument in the idea that we're all building the same civic project together, that our disagreement is precisely what makes our collective experience so much better.
Listen in to understand:
- Deep Disagreements: the kind of differences no reasoning or logic will ever succeed in bringing together
- How (and why) we privilege winning arguments over learning from them.
- Performance Debating: why we love to argue, and why we’re so bad at differentiating real debate with playing to the gallery.
- Why politicians play to their bases rather than try to convince the other side.
- How we've merged the notion of fact and opinion.
- Civil Discourse: what it means and how we can work to build ‘Civic Friendships’.
- And whether COVID-19 might just bring us back together as societies…
“The informational environment seems directed at dissolving the distinction between knowing what happened and having a judgment about what happened.”
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
"Democracy is the thesis that a decent and stable political order is possible amongst equal citizens who disagree, but only if that disagreement is made to work in the service of democracy through civility."
In this two-part podcast, Turi and Bob Talisse explain these core ideas of Equal Citizenship, Disagreement and Civility, why they're so fundamental to democracy, and why they're at threat today.
The radical idea of democracy is that a just and stable social order is possible in the absence of political hierarchies: nobody's political participation is worth more than the next person's.
It's not just that government must treat us as equals, but that we ourselves must recognise each other as political equals. If we don't, if we begin to see our political opponents as depraved, as morally or intellectually corrupt, we begin to see them as unfit for democracy. We will seek to exclude them from our common democratic project - we enter a 'Cold Civil War'.
That is the idea of Equal Citizenship, and it is massively under threat from polarization across the world.
Why are we polarized?
- Our societies have become much more diverse (through immigration) just as our local communities have become more homogenous.
- The physical landscape has changed: social and physical mobility has meant liberals and conservatives can congregate around each others geographically.
- Choice has expanded so much with technology that we can self-select for everything: liberals need only read liberal news; conservatives the same.
- Our political identities mean much more to us than they ever have - stepping into the void left by Religion.
- As we personalise our politics, so perforce we dehumanise our political opponents.
Listen to understand:
- why Polarization in democracy is a feature not a bug
- the critical difference between Political Polarization and Belief Polarization
- Lifestyle Politics: politics has suffused our consumer choices
- how to tell someone's politics from the number of maps they have at home
- why everyone is incentivised to play extreme politics today
And why Bob's father, an ardent Republican, had a Union-man as his best friend...
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
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“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
The Mind is embodied - it is a bodily function. What causes it to function in the way that it does. What motivates it?
And here’s the rub. Because the mind has two, often contradictory, reasons for working.
- Epistemic: we think for knowledge, truth, accuracy.
- Emotional / Social: we think to reinforce group bonds, gain status, find safety.
This week, Turi talks to Adrian Bardon about Denialism: when the emotional reasons for thinking win out over the epistemic ones. That process is called “motivated reasoning” because our reasoning is motivated by emotional needs. It can be deeply damaging to our understanding of the world, and our capacity to engage with each other.
Together, they discuss how motivated reasoning works, what animates it, and why it has been so useful to us evolutionarily.
They also talk actual politics, and ask why Conservatives have a such a hard time with Man-Made Climate Change, and why Liberals deny the value of nuclear energy.
Listen to hear:
- why all reasoning is motivated
- how Denialism manifests itself in politics and media
- What the core emotional drivers are of our politics and values?
- why the Coronavirus caused such a challenge to Conservatives
- whether we’re happier thinking tribally than thinking rationally
- and how you can treat motivated reasoning in yourself.
Finally, listen to hear what we can do about Climate Change communication.
We don't have time to wait for the science deniers to evolve. How can we avoid an epistemic crisis unleashing an existential one?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
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“John Stuart Mill would be the kind of person who would argue for following people with whom you strongly disagree because they’re the ones that are gonna make you think.”
Turi talks with the philosopher Nigel Warburton about free speech and its foundational text - John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).
Today, all sides of the political spectrum decry attacks on their free expression.
Led by Donal Trump, the Right attacks the social networks for expelling them, and mainstream media for spreading lies about them. The Left attacks the systemic inequality of speech - how the white, rich and male dominate column inches. Even the Centrist signatories of the Harpers Letter feel their ability to debate has been shut down by no-platforming and cancel culture.
Nigel Warburton takes us back to the earliest defence of free speech, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, to discuss what makes it so foundational to our polities and democracies, and why it’s such a tricky notion to define.
Listen to Nigel and Turi discuss:
- the Marketplace of Ideas (and its problems)
- ‘dead dogma’: why ideas need contesting to stay alive
- why ‘civility’ in debate is over-rated
- ‘Epistemic Injustice’ and why some people’s views aren’t taken seriously
- why Mill thought you need a diverse society to build the breeding ground for Genius.
- the Tyranny of the Majority: and why the wrong kind of free speech is so dangerous
“Free speech isn’t an absolute - it’s something which we need to rethink almost all the time in relation to every sort of case that emerges”
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
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“People are drawn to conspiracy theories to satisfy particular unmet psychological needs - epistemic, existential and social.”
Turi talks with Professor Karen Douglas of the University of Kent, to understand where conspiracy theories come from.
Karen has surveyed all the literature on conspiracy theory. She identifies three core drivers behind the instincts of conspiracy believers, in each instance attempting to satisfy a deep psychological need.
- Epistemic: the need to understand the world around us. Conspiracy theories appear to give us the answers we’re looking for.
- Existential: the need to feel safe in our environments and feel a sense of control as autonomous humans. Making sense of the world around us allows us to feel we can dominate it.
- Social: we all want to feel good about ourselves and about the groups that we belong to. If we’re in a group that’s suffering, conspiracy theories allow us to explain that away.
Listen to hear:
- why narcissists make conspiracy believers
- why people with anxious attachment styles tend to conspiracy thinking
- whether conspiracy thinking is evenly split between Left and Right
- how we’re all conspiracy theorists some of the time
- And whether conspiracy theories do, in fact, alleviate the psychological needs of those you seek to believe them
Mpre on this episode
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
"A lot of beliefs that are fundamental to who we are and to how we think about the world are influenced by things that appear to be arbitrary and irrelevant to the truth of the matter.”
Turi talks with Professor Miriam Schoenfield, of the University of Texas at Austin, to understand whether we can have any kind of certainty about the truth of our beliefs.
The children of Jews tend to be Jews, the children of Jains tend to be Jain, those brought up in the liberal agnostic West tend to be liberal agnostics… Much as the children of Liverpool FC supporters tend to support Liverpool. The fundamental philosophical premises of our most cherished beliefs are flawed: we’re conditioned to believe them.
Are we epistemologically stranded?
Listen to hear Miriam and Turi discuss:
- Doubt: “something that simply happens to us, without explanation, fluid and wordless”
- the Gestalt Shift, and how it’s different from just ‘changing your mind’
- Whether Rationalism is itself a belief system
- Whether emotional or spiritual experiences might get us closer to the truth than ‘thought’
- Why agnostics take smaller risks in politics
- And whether we ‘learn’ our feelings, in the same way as we ‘learn’ our beliefs
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://www.parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about the Parlia project here: https://www.parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://www.parlia.com
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Turi speaks with Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen about how emotion drives the political agenda. What are emotional epochs? Are we all responsible for the growth of "angry populism"? Is it justified? How is social media putting emotion at the heart of the global news agenda? How is collective trauma shaping today's protest movements?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
"The more intelligent someone is, the more polarized their opinions on climate change become. More intelligent Republicans are actually more likely to be climate change deniers, while more intelligent Democrats are more likely to endorse the scientific consensus. So, at the extremes of intelligence, you really see a big strong divergence of opinion."
Turi talks with science writer and author of The Intelligence Trap, David Robson. What is intelligence? How does it create inequality? Do IQ tests favour the rich? Is intelligence a form of propaganda? What is the growth mindset? Where do rationality and morality intersect?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
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“The struggle [is]...because of some of the ethics and practices of traditional journalism, there's an inclination or habit to quote both sides. Even though there really aren't both sides."
Turi talks to Spaceship Media founder Eve Pearlman about growing media polarisation, fake news and how we can combat the crisis of truth. What is polarisation? How might we overcome it? How does journalism deepen this problem? Is empathy scalable?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
“You may think that the feeling you're feeling is happening because of you. But in reality that's actually a performance that's being scripted by some very clever search engine in Silicone Valley."
Turi talks to futurist Shumon Basar about how technology is transforming the way we think and feel. What is the extreme present? How has the digital world rewired our experience of time? Are algorithms changing the way we perform emotions? How is that subverting the relationship between humans and our technology?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
“When it comes to morality, we have our moral taste buds, most people are motivated to do good...But there’s still quite a lot of wiggle room...a lot of uncertainty...that creates an opportunity for decision making”
Turi talks with Research Director for Kindlab, at www.kindness.org, Dr Oliver Scott Curry to find out how humans became moral animals. What is morality? How does it impact our choices? What is 'morality is cooperation'? How have we evolved to create moral values? Why are people unkind to each other?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
"You can write a blog, every time you do, you are distributing information - propagandizing. And, in that sense the day's propaganda is very similar to this virus, because what's been fascinating...is that you are very aware that you're not just a victim of it, but that you may [also] have spread it”
Turi talks to writer Peter Pomerantsev about how globalisation has caused a communications revolution. Is all information propaganda? How is the internet destabilising the global axes of power? Is the growth of populism caused by corrupt information flows? Who can we trust?Have lies become the world's most powerful political tool?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
“People are not born extremists. What are the social circumstances that have created the ground for radicalisation?”
Turi talks with psychotherapist and conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rfikind about what extremists think. What makes societies susceptible to radicalisation? Are people born extremists? How is Europe moving into a dangerous space? What does the UK response to coronavirus tell us about our political climate?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
"We are responding in ways, which are...imaginative and potentially dangerous...terrifying...mass information surplus really destabilizes people's understanding of where they sit in the world. When you've got thousands of different competing narratives attacking you at all times it's extremely destabilizing and, therefore, could very easily prompt a rush to the safety of tribes."
Turi speaks to Dr James Mumford to find out how tribalism limits our political agency. How do we choose our political affiliations? What are the inherent contradictions in those choices? Is tribalism inevitable in the age of uncertainty? How does this instinct for community stop us from questioning our own values? What does this mean for our political systems?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Why do we think what we think? Find out more about The Parlia Podcast with host Turi Munthe.
The Parlia Podcast will ask: what is an opinion? Do we ‘think’ our worldviews, or ‘feel’ them? Are they inherited? What do our beliefs mean for politics and society? Our ideas make us who we are, and yet we almost never ask where they come from. In each episode of the Parlia Podcast eminent thought leaders share their perspectives on why we think what we think. Host Turi Munthe explores everything from the war on truth to the psychology of morality, asking: how do we know our own minds?
Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here.
Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi
Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia.com/about
And visit us at: https://parlia.com