Transcript for “Deprogramming the Partisan Brain” with Dr. Jay Van Bavel
Join our host Don MacPherson and Dr. Jay Van Bavel as they discuss group identities and why people side with political parties. They talk about social identities and partisanship in today’s politics.
Author and researcher Dr. Jay Van Bavel explores the psychology and neuroscience behind why our brains think the way we do and how we can overcome the toxic polarization in this upcoming election.
This season of the podcast is in collaboration with Starts with Us. Starts with Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Dr. Jay Van Bavel: That’s part of a lot of identities is they have rivalries, and these rivalries fire us up. They help clarify who we are and what we stand for. Sometimes they can bring out the best in us. Other times they can bring out the worst, depending on the situation.
Don MacPherson: That is Dr. Jay Van Bavel. He is co-author of the book, The Power of Us, and a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University. He joined 12 Geniuses to discuss the deprogramming of the partisan brain.
My name is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 geniuses. Heading into any election season can be divisive. That’s why 12 Geniuses has partnered with Starts With Us on this series to help you navigate the overall 2024 election. Drawing from their life experiences and current work, each expert guest provides critical insight to help listeners practice better habits when confronted with the election season rhetoric and discourse. The goal of this season is not to sway your vote, but rather to help you make informed decisions when you step into the voting booth.
In this episode, Dr. Van Bavel and I discuss how our group identities, especially our political identities, have shaped our individual beliefs, why we are so politically divided, and how we can overcome that division. We even get into the risks that dissenters take when they go against their group and how history might judge the dissenters and whistleblowers of today. Thank you to Starts With Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts With Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Jay, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Jay: Thanks for having me.
Don: I’m excited to have this conversation. Let’s just start out with your background. Can you describe your career background?
Jay: Yeah, so presently, I’m a professor of psychology neuroscience and connected the business school at New York University. Before that, I grew up in Canada. I did my PhD at the University of Toronto and grew up in a small town in rural Alberta, away from everything. My town was about 2000 people. So I’ve come a very long way. And between graduating from my undergrad degree and going to graduate school, I worked for a year in government and also for a year at an organization that educated kids about racism. So, I’ve done a number of things, and now my main job is just being a scientist.
Don: Fantastic. And you co-wrote the book, The Power of Us, with Dr. Dominic Packer. It explores the usefulness and challenges of group identity. How are our group identities different from our individual identities?
Jay: Yeah, the way I think of it is like this — people have a sense of their individual identity. I think a lot of us walk around the world thinking we’re the hero in a story. We have all the chapters of our life, like the ones I just told you, and you’re overcoming challenges and trying to be successful. But the point we try to make in our book is that our identities go much beyond that. In fact, most of us have more inclusive identities that connect to… For me, I’m interviewing now as an author. When I get off this call, I’m back to being a scientist, analyzing some data. When the day’s over, I’m a father, I go home and like get my kids and have to make dinner, and then all of a sudden all the other stuff doesn’t matter.
And then tonight, as I was just telling you, at 8:30 PM, the Edmonton Oilers hockey game comes on and they’re in the playoffs. And that’s all I’ll be thinking about. And so each of those are different identities I have. And through the day, the situations that we’re in activate different identities. And so you go from yourself as individual to all of these identities you have that are more inclusive than you, and that determine the roles and responsibilities you have, the ways that you think of the world. In our book, we make the case that our identities are very much like glasses. I have my glasses on now. It changes a little bit how I see the world. If I go out tonight, I’ll put on some sunglasses if it’s still bright out. And that also changes a tint about how I interpret the world. And that’s what our identities do. And a lot of them, for most people, if you ask them about I am a blank, half of the things they answer are usually about group-level identities that they have.
Don: We’re going to talk a lot about group identity in this conversation because this is part of a series we’re doing on the 2024 U.S. election. And I wanted to ask you, how do our group identities shape our individual identities?
Jay: Yeah. So, when you identify as a group, it changes how you think about the world, but also changes your behavior towards others. And so one of the classic studies on this that we mentioned in our book is a study on generosity. So we brought people into a lab and gave them some money, and they had to decide how much they were going to share with other students at the university. And most people, they measured, beforehand, if you’re a selfish or generous person, and generous people gave more money, like Mother Theresa, she’s always giving. So, some people are just dispositionally selfless. Other people are more dispositionally selfish, and they take more.
And many studies in economics have measured this and studied this over time, there’s lots of measures of it. But then they had another condition in the study where instead of getting, having you think about yourself as an individual, they had you think of yourself as a member of that university.
And so they activated this more inclusive identity you had in that community. For me, this might be like someone at New York University at NYU. And in that condition, the selfless people were still selfless in giving money to the other students. But what was most interesting is the selfish people doubled their selflessness, doubled their giving. So, even self-interested individuals, once you activate their identity, that’s more inclusive as a member of that community, as member of that group, they double the amount they share with other members of that community. And so suddenly, their sense of identity has shifted up a level from me to us. And when they see themselves that way, they want the best for everybody who’s connected to that identity.
They start to see themselves more inclusively. So, that’s the ways that these group identities can shape our individual identities that our goals get expanded to include other people who are part of that identity.
Don: We’re getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here, but I just wonder how that behavior, so generosity toward a group that I belong to, but what about behaviors toward others? Meaning, I know you went to the Ohio State University, and so…
Jay: You got it right.
Don: … probably the Michigan Wolverines are not among your favorite people.
Jay: No.
Don: And so my generosity toward a fellow Buckeye also mean that I might be a little bit more rude to a Wolverine or somebody from the University of Michigan. I just wonder what the opposite side of that coin is.
Jay: Yeah, of course. That’s one of the fiercest rivalries in the entire country in sports. It’s up there with like the Yankees, Red Sox. And in Ohio State, they’re one of the… In our book, we talk about how they’ve made a successful organization and team. But all they really care about there, other than winning championships, is beating Michigan. They talk about it all year round. And I’ve been there for the Michigan game and I actually went, this was when I was at Ohio State during my postdoc, I went to where all the tailgating was happening before the game. They blocked off streets outside the stadium. And I followed some Michigan fans as they walked through where all the bars and stuff were, and they would just get endlessly harassed. And that was part of what it means to be a good Ohio State fan is that you hate Michigan with a passion. And the feeling is mutual.
And so that’s part of a lot of identities is they have rivalries, and these rivalries fire us up. They help clarify who we are and what we stand for. Sometimes they can bring out the best in us. Other times they can bring out the worst depending on the situation. And as I’m sure you know, if any of Michigan fans, they’ve won the last few games, and it is quite a thing in Columbus if you’ve lost a couple years in a row to Michigan. It doesn’t matter how good your coach is, how many other games you win. They start talking about firing the coach under those circumstances, even if they’re otherwise nearly perfect. That’s the situation there when you lose to arrival that is that intense.
Don: You write that we are wired for social identity. What do you mean by that? And what do we do with this information?
Jay: Yeah, so the way I think of it is in a really deep evolutionary lens. So humans evolved in small groups on the African Savannah. And if you just look around, humans are pretty flimsy creatures, right? We don’t have claws or sharp teeth. We can’t fly away from predators or we don’t have camouflage or poison or any of the other things that are critical for survival. What we have that’s critical for survival is fitting in and working together. Humans can communicate more efficiently and effectively than any other species on Earth. The other things we do is we cooperate with in-group members. Even if we don’t know who they are, no other primate does that. And so our evolutionary capacity for success, the thing that’s put us on the moon and around the world are those skills — social skills.
This is one reason I like to point out, if you ask people what is their single greatest fear, surveys find that it’s public speaking. They fear public speaking more than death. And it’s easy to understand why if you’ve ever given a public speech. It’s very stressful because you don’t want to mess up and embarrass yourself and then be excluded because social exclusion is extremely distressing. You and I, and everybody listening is the offspring of generation after generation after generation, after generation after generation of people who fit in, people who manage not to get excluded. Because if they were excluded in past generations, they just died. They couldn’t reproduce, they couldn’t get enough food for themselves, they couldn’t defend themselves from predators. And so we are the offspring of people, our DNA, our programming is to connect with others and work together.
And those of us who didn’t aren’t around to talk much today and didn’t pass on their genes very effectively. That is part of who we are. That’s why when we become hardcore sports fans or something like that, that’s building on and activating this basic primitive aspect of our species, which is groupishness. If you are running a team at work, and, and I do, I run a research team and have been for the last 15 years. We have a culture of constructive criticism and dissent, but I’m also careful to never try to humiliate anybody publicly. If I have like really hard criticism, I would like to pull them aside so they don’t feel like they were socially excluded in front of everybody or embarrassed in front of everybody. And so it’s really important to have a culture where you can give feedback and have challenging discussions, but also where you’re mindful of the anxiety it causes for people to be excluded from the community that they’re part of and care about.
Don: How do group identities shape our beliefs?
Jay: We have lots of different identities. And so I think the mode that we’d want to be in through most of our life is looking at the facts as dispassionately as possible and coming to a reasoned conclusion. And certainly, as humans, we’re capable of that more than any other species. Again, we have these big prefrontal cortices that make us unique. But a big part of how we come to understand things is through our communities. That we trust some people more than others. We trust some news sources more than others, some podcasters more than others. And a lot of times we don’t have the capacity to analyze all the data. So, if we’re going to talk about something, like I got in an argument with an old high school teacher of mine online about climate change. He was a climate change denialist and posted something, and I got in a back and forth.
And then I tried to read some article that he had posted on it from climate change scientists. And I realized even though I have a PhD, I could not understand it. And I realized how much my beliefs about that issue come from my trust in the scientific process and scientific community and what climate scientists believe. And so all of us ultimately rely on that in the same way that like if my car breaks down, I want to go to a mechanic, and I put my faith in that person to fix it because they know it better than I do. And again, that’s one of our advantages of humans. We can work together and take advantage of other people’s knowledge and expertise, but can also lead us astray. If we’re listening to untrustworthy people, we can come to very bad conclusions.
And sometimes we’re motivated to not pay attention to things that challenge our beliefs because it’s threatening or challenge our group because it makes us look bad or feel bad. And so that is a risk that we run as humans. You have to understand sometimes when people believe misinformation or conspiracy theories, a big part of the reason is because they’ve heard it, they’ve lost trust in other sources of information, and they’ve kind of gone off and down a rabbit hole where they’re listening to increasingly untrustworthy sources of information and they’ve placed their trust in those communities.
Don: We’ve seen this political polarization play out over the last decade, certainly and probably even longer. And I think back to 2001 after 9/11, this country was really unified in a way that I can’t remember as an adult. And then, just somehow, that went away. But I’ve been thinking about this idea of religion and politics and how politics has seemed to become our new religion. And that’s just something that I’ve been thinking about. I was preparing for this conversation, and I did a little bit of research and religious affiliation has really waned in the United States. I think about 2% of Americans were unaffiliated with a religion back in the 1950s, and now it’s about one in five people, so about 20%. And weekly attendance of religious ceremonies has dropped from 42% to 30%.
And it seems like politics has played a larger role in our identity. I just wonder if you agree with this assessment, if you have anything that you wanted to share related to politics, maybe taking over religion as an important group identity?
Jay: Yeah, I mean, the first layer of this is just that our religions often determine our politics. That different religious communities are connected to different political parties, not just here, but in many other countries. So that’s the first layer of it. And then the second layer, as you said, is there’s been changes in religion. We’ve become less religious. And because we’re a groupish species, if you go back to that core premise, people are going to look for other communities to scratch that itch. And so I agree with you, I think one of the things that’s happened is as religion has waned, people have clung to their political identities more and more to provide that sense of meaning, a sense of community, a sense of morality, and right and wrong.
I wrote a paper a couple years ago with some political scientists, and we decided that we might be better calling what’s going on in the U.S. instead of polarization, calling it political sectarianism. And in other countries where you have sectarian conflicts are often connected to religion because they go beyond just ‘I disagree with you on these policy issues,’ to ‘you are an evil person and you must be stopped.’ And so that is a little bit more of the dynamic you see increasingly in American politics. The amount that people love their political party, Democrats or Republicans, has stayed stable over the last 40 years, 50 years.
But the amount that they hate the other party has steadily gone up. And in fact, that is now stronger than ingroup love part of politics. And what it means is you will support a politician, even if you don’t like them that much, because you need to stop the other party because you think they’re going to do something sinister. And that’s where you get corrosive politics because you’ll look past things like corruption or bad behavior of your own party. You’ll rationalize it, justify it, vote for it. And so that becomes a dangerous thing for democracy. Another thing it does, it’s dangerous, is it means that you won’t cooperate with the other group even if it would be in everybody’s best interest.
And so ultimately the goal of politicians is supposed to be like being pragmatic and finding some way to work together so that the population benefits, the voters across the country benefit. But if you hate the other party so much or don’t want to be seen working with them, then that means that even if you could find some grounds for agreement that would be popular, that the average citizen would like, you’ll be reluctant to do it. And so that’s another dynamic that makes it hard to have healthy governance and effective policy that would benefit most Americans or most members of any country. And that becomes a really dysfunctional system.
Don: What’s playing out in our brains when we have this reluctance? Because something is happening in there that’s saying, “No, you cannot do that.” Is it saying that our beliefs are wrong and therefore we are wrong? Or what’s going on there?
Jay: Yeah, I mean there’s two parts of it. The first part is just that you genuinely disagree with people. Let’s say we’re debating abortion rights, reproductive rights. There’s going to be genuine disagreement on moral values. That’s probably not possible to find a compromise for a lot of people. And then that’s going to have to be fought out by mobilizing people to get to vote and so forth, and putting pressure on politicians. That is normal part of politics. What’s not normal part of politics is when we are rationalizing bad perspectives, when we’re closing our mind to people who disagree with us when we can learn something that would be useful, when we’re socially ostracizing people who cooperate with other political parties, even if it would be in everybody’s best interest to do so.
And so those are a lot of different psychological processes that are going on. Some of it is rationalization. You’re using your prefrontal cortex to rationalize your perspective. Some of it is emotional parts of your brain that are involved in emotion, just get triggered when you see a member of another party. These types of things can lead us down bad pathways, obviously. And I think this is what has happened again in American politics that makes it so dysfunctional is that you can drop our exact same brains into a political system that’s less polarized and we won’t have nearly as much animosity. But when we’re in a culture where you log onto social media and most of what you see is just flame-throwing at people, or you tune into partisan mainstream media and you just see constant attacks on members of your own political party or community, that’s going to be outraging to people and lead them to disengage and distrust those sources of information.
Don: Is social media the reason we are where we are?
Jay: I don’t think social media is the reason. We were polarized before social media and it already getting worse. I tend to think of social media a little bit like gasoline. There’s a fire already burning, and instead of pouring water on it and dousing it, you’re pouring gasoline on it. My lab has been doing a lot of research on social media and how it relates to these issues for the last 10 years. And the type of language that you can use online that helps you go viral is also the type of language that disengages people who are politically different from you. There was a new paper that just came out last night saying most people are blocking people who are politically different than them, way more than they block people who are the same as them.
And so you’re kind of creating, customizing now, through technology, your own little echo chamber through your behaviors of who you mute and who you block, who you follow, who you unfollow. On Twitter there, one of my favorite studies on this, is people also use it like a bat signal to send out into the world who they’re affiliated with. And so there was a study finding, over time, people are listing their political party affiliations in their bios on Twitter, or now X, more and more over time. Because the more polarized we get, the more intense people feel about it and the more they want to signal which team they belong to. And it’s become like Ohio State and Michigan. You would never go to Ohio State and Michigan game and not wear a jersey. You have to pick a side and signal where your loyalty lies, right? And so that’s essentially what American politics has become. And social media just provides a really a efficient vehicle for doing that.
Don: I think in the book you said something like 75% of people wouldn’t date across party lines or something ridiculous like that. How do we overcome this? How do we overcome these differences?
Jay: We just ran this study, I’ll describe the whole study because I think it’s the best I’ve ever seen on this topic. Jan Voelke and Robb Willer ran this study out of Stanford University and they challenged researchers around the world to come up with the best interventions they could to reduce this partisan animosity and increase support for democracy and so forth. And 252 teams submitted a proposed intervention, again, from around the world. And this was not just scientists, but practitioners and people at think tanks and so forth. And then they had a panel of experts, political scientists pick what they thought were the 25 best interventions, and then they tested them on 32,000 Americans. And my lab saw this and we said, “Let’s create one based on my book.” So we created intervention based on the principles in our book, at which you’ve touched on already, we’ve been talking about.
And creating a shared identity is something in common and then underscoring that there are shared values as well and norms of commitment to democracy. And we created a short, like five-minute intervention in our lab, and then we sent it to them as one of the top 25. And I remember being horrified that it was not going to work or do very badly and then there goes the whole point of spending two years writing a book. We got the results back, I was super excited, it was the third best out of all 25, out of 252 interventions. And my postdoc who is on it likes to say it was statistically tied for first. But I don’t want to over claim. So anyways, I’ll tell you the top three because they were better than all the rest.
And not only did they work at reducing partisan animosity, they had really solid effect sizes. In other words, they had a substantial reduction, and they lasted for multiple weeks later. These are as good as we got, I think for interventions. It was a huge sample of 32,000 Americans from every age, every political affiliation, every racial demographic, gender balanced, all these things. The three best interventions. Ours was about creating a common identity and highlighting shared values in a shared sense of purpose for Americans, and that was the third best. The second best was revealing to people that the media was misportraying them. And so, if you get a sense that people understand that your group is being misrepresented or misportrayed in the media, that kind of takes your guard down because people really have the sense that they’re creating a caricature of them, and that other people see them through that lens and they don’t like that.
Conservatives don’t want to be seen through that stereotype, and other do Democrats. And then the one that was best was actually just a Heineken commercial. I don’t know if you ever saw this. The theory behind it is really… it’s classic and social psychology is called contact theory. And the video, it was a short commercial by Heineken, and just showed two random people coming into a room and they just got instructions. And they slowly were building something, they didn’t know what it was. And over sometime, they built a bar. And then they sat them down at the bar when it was done, and all of a sudden they put a video up that each individual, the two individuals who built the bar, about what their political perspectives were before they had come in to build the bar.
And they were different. Almost everyone was like a conservative and a liberal. And they showed the videos, and they just stood there in silence watching these videos of their political perspectives and how different they were. And then they put a beer on the bar, two beers, and they said, “Would you be willing to stick around and talk about your political differences over a beer?” And, of course, I don’t know how much they edited this, but everybody’s like, sure. And they had, like, they show them starting a real genuine conversation. And that was really powerful because it shows real genuine interpersonal relationships and positive contact can make people open-minded to bridging their divides or at least understanding other people in greater depths and greater empathy.
Don: What I like is your suggestion, which is a common ID or a common identity, establishing a common identity? And I wanted to ask you like, how do we broaden our common identity to, let’s say, instead of Democrat or Republican, I’m an American, or I’m a human, and being able to identify at a broader level to that?
Jay: Yeah, so I think part of it is underscoring that you do share a common identity, and that comes with a set of values and norms and a history, and also opportunities to make it better. Like no identity is fixed. I think that is the biggest thing. And then also underscoring the accomplishments of that group. Maybe one of the best ways that Americans built a common identity was during like the space race. It was obviously during the Cold War with Russia and there were like national security elements, but it was also about like scientific innovation. It was also about exploring the unknown. And the space race was a moment of incredible national pride. It was a moment that shaped humanity. Seeing a man on the moon was a mind-blowing… a lot of people say that was the most shocking, exciting thing that they experienced in their life.
They have memories of like watching it on TV still. And then the other thing about it was it had huge benefits because it spun off all these industries and science-based communities because the innovation was so radical. So, I think creating a common purpose around something really profound and exciting that people can all get behind and work towards is a source of shared pride. Another example is the Olympics. Olympics are great because you can test your international dominance against other countries and other rivals, but it’s always done in a peaceful way.
That they have norms for the Olympics, like around Olympic spirit. And you’ll see regularly, during Olympics, some runner in the marathon like falls and injures themselves. Another runner picks them up and helps them. And it’s really inspiring. I think like that’s a cool story because we went through the previous century of multiple world wars that killed tens and tens of millions of people based on their national identities. And so international wars and deaths from wars have plummeted in the last 50 years. And we’ve built better institutions that have created a healthy mechanism for people to have a healthy sense of national pride and compete. And Olympics maybe is like one of my favorite examples of that.
And so that kind of gives me hope that we can always be getting better. We’re not perfect. There are people being killed based on their national identities around the world right now. I don’t want to diminish that. But I would just say if you take a minute, go to our world and data and look up the amount of people who died from intergroup conflict in the last several hundred years, or read Steven Pinker’s book about how many people died in intergroup conflict.
Don: It’s one of my favorites. Top five book in terms of how it’s influenced the way I view the world.
Jay: Yeah. It used to be the death from intergroup conflict for prehistoric societies was like one in 10 people or something insane. And now it’s like one in 10,000 or one in a thousand or something. And so we’ve gotten way better, we’ve found ways around it. We’ve used our big brains to find ways for international cooperation. We have institutions that try to make that better — World Bank, United Nations — all these things that are not perfect, they are deeply flawed, but nevertheless better than anything that we had before them for solving this problem.
Don: So, two comments. One is I love the space race, right? Because if you think about where the U.S. was at that time, we were just coming over McCarthyism, and it must have been just a breath of fresh air to unify the country after that. And then two, I’ve been asking people recently, what would you rather see, an American win the hundred meter sprint or someone from another country win and set a world record? And it’s interesting because they think about it, and they’re like, well, you know, most people will say the world record. And that’s my response. But up until a few years ago, I wanted to see the American win because that’s my identity. But now I see myself more as a human, and I want to see human greatness. And so that’s just the question I’ve been asking.
Jay: Yeah. I mean, I love that question. It really gets to something deep. I’m with you. I’ve never thought of it that, but someone like Usain Bolt captured the imagination of the world in a way that, I mean, I don’t know how many times I watched his various races on repeat and read articles and interviews about him. He just transcended prior human capacity in a way that was incredibly exciting. And I think there’s something about greatness and pushing the capacity of humanity or that first time we had someone run a four-minute mile, or the first time someone summited Mount Everest. Those are things that are deeply iconic moments in human history that capture all our imagination and transcend national identities, national boundaries. One of my favorite studies, I talk about it at last chapter of our book, was from astronauts.
They interviewed astronauts who had gone to outer space. So, we talked about the space race as being a transcendent moment for Americans, but now we’ve had astronauts from all other countries go to outer space. And there was a study where they interviewed over a hundred of these astronauts and asked them their experience. And they talk about a small number of things that they all seem to have in common. One is a sense of awe, just seeing the world from that perspective, they’re all awestruck. And they all talk about being profoundly changed. The one thing they say that really profoundly changes them in terms of a social species is that they start to see humanity as a whole. Once they see it from that perspective, you don’t see country boundaries when you’re looking from the perspective of the moon back on Earth.
It’s just a big blue, beautiful blue and green globe. And all of them come back not thinking of themselves in terms of their national identity. They see themselves as humans that has that capacity to think beyond our group or our city or our sports team or our country, and see ourselves in a way more expansive, inclusive way, and activate that identity in people. They now call that the overview effect. That seeing it from that perspectives profoundly changes our identities. I think that’s something that I think that potential resides in all of us, and we need leaders who can tap into that, who can trigger that in people a sense of purpose and connection with everybody because I think it’s something really beautiful. In space, it’s something our ancestors never would’ve saw, right?
As I said, we’ve only very recently created that technology. But when you use it, it changes us in a way our ancestors could have never foreseen.
Don: How can people who disagree politically work more effectively together? And I mean work in the workplace because politics has divided us at work as well.
Jay: Organizations should have an identity. And I think organizations and universities have not had an identity. They don’t know who they are or what they stand for. They have a bunch of mission statement things that are vague that don’t actually dictate how they treat people or what they weigh in on or what they say. And so they’re in an identity crisis. So I would say articulate what your identity is, think of how it relates to everything you do, and then lean into that. And if that is making public statements on certain issues, then do it because it’s part of who you are, and don’t be scared of it. And if it’s not, then don’t. Because I think what happens is then once you do it for one group, then you’re going to have to do it for another. And if you don’t, you’re a hypocrite or you do it wrong, then alienate somebody.
I think that’s the current model in many organizations. Or they do things like they make empty statements. So, I’ve a paper on this with a student, Karina Del Rosario, and we’ve noticed, she calls out the fashion houses, decided during black life matter, to have the black square on their Instagram. But if you track the models that they show, all of a sudden they went from showing white, white, white models to all of a sudden black models for like three months. And then they just went back to white models. And so basically it was just like a virtue signaling thing at the time. And then it got investigated and blown up in some media articles, and they just got revealed to be hypocrites.
They don’t actually deeply care about the issue. They’re just trying to ride whatever trend is happening at the moment. Or some companies do this with climate issues. It’s called greenwashing. They say they care about it, but then when no one’s looking, they do things that are damaging for the environment. That’s the worst possible thing you could do is just be hypocrite. Because at that point, no one likes you.
Don: I believe where we go from here is that trust and relationships become extraordinarily important. And I see that trend happening and I’m grateful for it. I think there’s this cynicism like, okay, yeah, you’re saying all of the right things, but are you doing the right things? And so trust and relationships matter. And AI is playing a big part in this because we don’t know what to trust, but we do know who to trust based on our experience. So, that’s just something that I’m seeing and I think it just becomes our superpower.
Jay: I think most Americans don’t know what it’s like to live in a society where there’s no trust and a society where the institutions don’t work. Because what happens is you get massive discrimination because people only trust people who look like them or members of their family. In a system or a society where institutions work and you have generalized trust, it means it frees you up to do all kinds of things. You could do economic transactions, you can buy something online, you can hire somebody, and you expect that they’ll show up and do their job. You don’t have to micromanage them. I will say this. One thing I love about my lab is we have a very high degree of trust and a high performance. And that means when they’re not in the lab, I trust them 100 percent. I don’t have to waste any time micromanaging them or any time spying on them.
And if I’m micromanaging them, something’s failed. Like my relationship with them has broken down. That’s only maybe happened one time in 15 years, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to micromanage them, I don’t want to spy on them. I want to have trust. And it frees me up to do a million other things, and I don’t have to think about it with my brain, and I can do other creative things. They love it because no one likes being micromanaged or spied on. It’s actually a fast way to erode trust if there was any to begin with. It’s a virtuous cycle that I’m in. but I see society going in the opposite direction, it’s going in this vicious cycle of like, don’t trust one another. Everybody’s now spying one another. No one trusts institutions.
And that means the institutions get more corroded because no one invests in building them. But man, you talk to a political scientist, the first thing they’ll talk about is important in the society is institutions that people trust.
Don: Let’s finish the conversation on the topic of dissent. People who are whistleblowers or dissenters, they’re taking huge risks, but history may evaluate them differently. And in the book, you point out Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jay: Yeah.
Don: I didn’t know this, but I think his positive public rating was about a third of the American population. And then a few years ago, it was 95% of Americans saw him in a positive light. And so, maybe you could talk about the dissenters of today and the hurdles that they have to overcome, and then how history may view them in the future.
Jay: Yeah. Thanks for bringing up that example. It points to one thing — dissent is hard. And when Martin Luther King was dissenting, I mean, he got assassinated. He paid with his life. He paid by going to prison repeatedly. And people, civil rights protesters were beat up. Dogs were sought on them. It was one of the darkest moments of history, and in some sense also one of the brightest, right? Because they were right. They saw an injustice, they put their lives on the line, and people eventually came around to it. Now, 95% of people have positive attitude towards Martin Luther King. History’s a little bit like that. Sometimes it’s easy to look back in retrospect and see where things were wrong. In the moment, it’s harder for people to know when they’re wrong. And that’s why you need to create a healthy environment for dissent because you don’t know where you’re going wrong.
And if you have a culture where people can’t say so, you can go down some really terrible paths. And again, it’s not just in America. Think of the words we have for dissenter. Dissenter is a nice way of saying it, but the terms we throw around are devil’s advocate. Man, just think about what that word means. Heretic. Think of how heretics were treated throughout history in pretty much every part of Earth. So, this is the way that the language and the terminology and the way of thinking we have about dissenters. But dissenters are really important for innovation. If you run a creative company, you need dissent because you will stagnate and get really boring very fast. And so any creative field needs it. And I would argue almost any field needs healthy dissent.
But it’s hard to do, right? Because you don’t want to get called a devil’s advocate or a heretic. You don’t want to get socially ostracized. We just talked about how our species hates that. So, what you need to do is create a culture where it’s normative and healthy to dissent, and I’ll help you along the way. This is Dominic, my co-author’s research, he started studying this when we were in grad school. It’s funny, I’ll tell you the story. We shared an office in the basement, and he showed up one day halfway through grad school, and he had a poster of Tiananmen Square. That iconic image of that one student protestor sending up against a column of tanks. And he put it on the wall in our office, and he says, “I’m going to study dissent.” And I don’t know what it was, just something triggered in him, that was the thing he was going to study.
We were both studying social identity and group dynamics at the time. And the first thing he wanted to test is, are dissenters people who don’t value the group or do they value the group? Because up until then, a lot of literature from sociologists and others was dissenters are doing it to derail the group or showboat or whatever. And that’s how often how we think of dissenters, even at work, that they’re trying to shoot down my ideas or they’re just being a jerk or whatever. But what his research found is oftentimes the people who dissent are the people who care most about the group. They’re the most deeply identified with the group. Because guess what? It’s so hard to dissent socially and psychologically, that the only people who are willing to do it are the people who care, and they want to say something before the group destroys itself or goes down a terrible road.
And so they’re willing to speak up because they care about the group. And they’re speaking up before they leave. Because, guess what? If the group doesn’t change, a lot of times they will leave. But they’re often doing it in good faith at first, just like a lot of whistleblowers are doing it in good faith. They see something wrong and they care. And it’s only after they’ve been blocked or shut down or ostracized that they eventually have to do an outsider whistle blowing thing. But a lot of time, they care a lot about the group, like their job, and want it to go well. So, they’re willing to take the risk to speak up. And here’s the thing about them — they are gold. Research shows that dissent predicts the outcome success of groups. So, groups that don’t have dissenters and people who don’t feel comfortable dissenting, perform worse.
There was a great study on Google Jigsaw. They analyzed all their teams to find out what predicts successful teams. Single biggest factor with psychological safety, which is people feel comfortable speaking up and dissenting. That was more important than any personality trait or whether you go for beers after work or whatever. That’s the culture you need. And then the next element of it is, as long as there’s a dissenter and a group, the group reaches better outcomes even if the dissenter is wrong. I always have to say this one twice. Groups make better decisions if as long as there’s a dissenter even if the dissenter is wrong. Why? Because it frees up other people to dissent and creates a healthy conversation around whatever the topic is.
And even if they weren’t right about whatever the criticism is, someone else might have a better criticism or a better idea, and they’re biting their tongue. That first speaker makes it safe for them to speak, and it creates group deliberation and discussion. And so you want desperately to create a community or a culture in any organization that allows and makes dissent healthy and safe.
Don: Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t?
Jay: I’ll encourage people who are listening to this, I have a newsletter, Power of Us at Substack. You can follow. Please read the book. If anything in here sounded interesting, we go into it way more depth in the book. And I’d love to get your thoughts and have you engage in these ideas. I mean, the bottom line here is we have a million books in the bookstore on self-help. None of them talk about group dynamics. None that I know of. And so I think if you want to understand how you work, how groups that you’re in work, influence them in healthier ways, be a better leader, I think you really need an education in group psychology and social identity. So, that’s the main point of why we have the newsletter, why we have the book is there has to be at least one voice out there sharing the science on this stuff.
Don: Jay, I love the conversation. Thank you for your time and thank you for being a genius.
Jay: Thanks for having me.
Don: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, I interview Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist and researcher at the University of California Berkeley, and the director of AAPI Data. He and I discuss the value of American democracy and why so many people have flourished under this system of government. If you are learning from and enjoying the podcast, please share it with others and please consider rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.