1
00:00:00,320 --> 00:00:03,360
David, this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

2
00:00:03,520 --> 00:00:06,560
Actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologist.

3
00:00:06,800 --> 00:00:07,920
Do you have anything else to say?

4
00:00:08,160 --> 00:00:09,040
No, nailed it.

5
00:00:09,120 --> 00:00:09,680
We got it.

6
00:00:09,920 --> 00:00:10,560
Boom.

7
00:00:27,200 --> 00:00:33,090
David, uh the law and evolution and psychology, the intersection of those three is

8
00:00:33,090 --> 00:00:34,290
what we talked about today.

9
00:00:34,690 --> 00:00:35,170
That's right.

10
00:00:35,250 --> 00:00:40,690
It's a beautiful example of how um anything involving human beings uh can be illuminated by

11
00:00:40,690 --> 00:00:42,050
evolutionary psychology.

12
00:00:42,210 --> 00:00:46,370
Uh and law is a thing that is affected by human beings and human minds, and you would

13
00:00:46,370 --> 00:00:49,890
expect law to be uh uh illuminated by evolutionary psychology.

14
00:00:49,970 --> 00:00:55,170
And our guest today, Keila Williams, who is a professor at Hamilton College and has both a

15
00:00:55,170 --> 00:01:00,940
PhD and JD, double threat, uh tells us all about law and evolutionary

16
00:01:00,940 --> 00:01:01,340
psychology.

17
00:01:01,660 --> 00:01:05,100
Yeah, I love that we learned about sort of how jurors make decisions.

18
00:01:05,260 --> 00:01:07,740
We talked about the death penalty, attitudes about that.

19
00:01:07,900 --> 00:01:12,860
And then we even talked about Keela's work on ecology, representations, and st and how it

20
00:01:12,860 --> 00:01:16,220
drives a lot of stereotypes about even things like racial groups.

21
00:01:16,300 --> 00:01:19,660
Um, really important topics, really counterintuitive.

22
00:01:19,740 --> 00:01:24,060
And I think Keela is just a great example of really cutting edge empirical work in the

23
00:01:24,060 --> 00:01:26,380
evolutionary social sciences.

24
00:01:26,750 --> 00:01:31,710
Yeah, and and stay tuned for my tips on how to be a good criminal and uh Dave's hilarious

25
00:01:31,710 --> 00:01:34,750
rant about how everyone in the legal system is hungry, tired, and grumpy.

26
00:01:35,390 --> 00:01:37,870
And I'm I will put myself in that category too.

27
00:01:37,950 --> 00:01:42,670
Without further ado, uh grab a sandwich and listen to enjoy the episode.

28
00:01:48,510 --> 00:01:50,990
Uh David, do you do you want to introduce Keila?

29
00:01:51,880 --> 00:01:52,200
Sure.

30
00:01:52,360 --> 00:01:58,360
Uh today we have uh Keila Williams, who is uh a rare guest who has both a PhD and a

31
00:01:58,360 --> 00:01:58,920
JD.

32
00:01:59,080 --> 00:02:04,680
That is, you she uh understands both the human mind and the human legal system.

33
00:02:05,080 --> 00:02:07,000
Uh so I I'm kind of curious.

34
00:02:07,080 --> 00:02:12,760
I mean, given that we we started there, how did you end up developing this combination of

35
00:02:12,760 --> 00:02:13,720
expertises?

36
00:02:14,120 --> 00:02:17,960
Uh and uh what how do you think one informs the other?

37
00:02:19,210 --> 00:02:24,570
When I was an undergraduate, I worked in a research lab that was looking at jury decision

38
00:02:24,730 --> 00:02:25,370
making.

39
00:02:25,690 --> 00:02:31,610
And I, as part of that, was reading literature from attorneys who were

40
00:02:31,610 --> 00:02:36,730
talking about the strategies that they use sometimes to select members of the jury.

41
00:02:36,890 --> 00:02:42,890
And I was reading research from psychologists who were writing on a similar topic, and yet

42
00:02:43,050 --> 00:02:45,850
they were coming to opposite conclusions.

43
00:02:46,520 --> 00:02:48,920
And I thought that was really fascinating.

44
00:02:49,080 --> 00:02:54,920
And I wanted to develop expertise in both areas so that I could figure out what

45
00:02:54,920 --> 00:02:55,960
the truth was.

46
00:02:57,160 --> 00:03:03,000
And so is the is the uh the goal for you to understand the mind of the juror,

47
00:03:03,160 --> 00:03:07,320
or is it more to understand the minds of the prosecutors or the judges?

48
00:03:07,560 --> 00:03:10,600
What whose minds are you most interested in getting inside?

49
00:03:11,270 --> 00:03:14,310
I'm just generally interested in legal decision makers.

50
00:03:14,470 --> 00:03:20,070
So that involves jurors, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, all of the above, and lay

51
00:03:20,070 --> 00:03:23,830
people too, who are asked to think about legal questions.

52
00:03:24,390 --> 00:03:24,630
Yeah.

53
00:03:24,950 --> 00:03:30,390
Do you do you feel, I mean, we can maybe like poke on and unpack some of those details

54
00:03:30,470 --> 00:03:31,670
because there's a lot to unpack.

55
00:03:31,750 --> 00:03:33,110
It's like what you're studying.

56
00:03:33,190 --> 00:03:38,620
But just as a starting point, once now that you've sort of wrapped your head around both

57
00:03:38,620 --> 00:03:44,460
views, should we feel pessimistic or optimistic about the legal

58
00:03:44,460 --> 00:03:44,700
system?

59
00:03:44,860 --> 00:03:49,020
Or do you feel more pessimistic or optimistic, or is it sort of ambivalent?

60
00:03:49,180 --> 00:03:54,700
Um, like is it is it worse than we think or better, or what what's your

61
00:03:54,700 --> 00:04:00,510
conclusion just based on being a scientist um and seeing that the way that

62
00:04:00,510 --> 00:04:04,830
psychologists are talking and the way that legal people are talking, they're arriving at

63
00:04:04,830 --> 00:04:05,630
opposite conclusions.

64
00:04:05,710 --> 00:04:07,070
That sounds scary to me.

65
00:04:07,230 --> 00:04:12,590
Like if somebody did something to me that required the legal process, that that level of

66
00:04:12,590 --> 00:04:15,950
inaccuracy to put it away is scary.

67
00:04:16,110 --> 00:04:17,870
Like you would want consistency.

68
00:04:18,190 --> 00:04:23,920
Um, but sometimes like psychologists are weird and like maybe the legal system has figured

69
00:04:23,920 --> 00:04:27,120
out a good system by just trial and error, even without science.

70
00:04:27,200 --> 00:04:28,320
Like, what's your take on that?

71
00:04:28,480 --> 00:04:29,920
Like, do you feel better or worse?

72
00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:31,520
Or what what yeah, what's up?

73
00:04:32,160 --> 00:04:38,160
I often feel frustrated because the legal system is very, very slow to

74
00:04:38,160 --> 00:04:42,720
incorporate science in general and psychological science in particular.

75
00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:47,010
And uh sometimes they they do eventually.

76
00:04:47,170 --> 00:04:52,770
I think eyewitness and eyewitness memory research is a good example of this, where

77
00:04:52,770 --> 00:04:58,290
Elizabeth Loftus did, you know, decades of work trying to show how unreliable

78
00:04:58,290 --> 00:05:00,050
eyewitness memory can be.

79
00:05:00,370 --> 00:05:06,290
And the courts have accepted that and incorporated it into some

80
00:05:06,290 --> 00:05:08,370
of their processes now.

81
00:05:08,770 --> 00:05:10,130
So that's a success story.

82
00:05:10,210 --> 00:05:15,680
But I think that there are other areas where junk science continues to

83
00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:16,960
permeate the quartz.

84
00:05:17,200 --> 00:05:19,440
And that is a frustrating thing.

85
00:05:20,160 --> 00:05:25,040
Is it more that there's an ignorance of of the psychological science, or is it that they're

86
00:05:25,040 --> 00:05:30,160
selecting the the bad psychological science as opposed to the good psychological science?

87
00:05:30,240 --> 00:05:31,840
Or is it a little bit of both?

88
00:05:32,480 --> 00:05:38,270
It's probably a little bit of both, but it's it's ultimately a resistance to change, I

89
00:05:38,270 --> 00:05:38,590
think.

90
00:05:39,070 --> 00:05:44,830
Um, that there's a reliance in the law on we've always done it this

91
00:05:44,830 --> 00:05:45,150
way.

92
00:05:45,550 --> 00:05:49,390
And so that can be difficult to fight against sometimes.

93
00:05:49,790 --> 00:05:49,950
Right.

94
00:05:50,110 --> 00:05:54,190
So it's a conservative institution, not in the political sense, but in the sort of like

95
00:05:54,190 --> 00:05:58,750
precise literal sense of like conservative, meaning like you kind of resistance to change,

96
00:05:58,830 --> 00:06:01,630
which can be a good thing if you if those

97
00:06:05,940 --> 00:06:10,660
But it that that's sort of it sounds like it's a conservative institution in that respect.

98
00:06:11,060 --> 00:06:11,540
Yes.

99
00:06:11,860 --> 00:06:12,420
Yeah.

100
00:06:13,220 --> 00:06:18,100
You know that makes sense if there are certain stakeholders who who might not win out from

101
00:06:18,100 --> 00:06:22,750
the new changes or or just by virtue of the fact that it's an institution that depends on

102
00:06:22,750 --> 00:06:24,350
people coordinating with one another.

103
00:06:24,590 --> 00:06:29,390
Um, if you introduce new ideas and new procedures into it, it's going to make it harder for

104
00:06:29,390 --> 00:06:33,550
people to coordinate, and there are already a set of coordination points or shelling

105
00:06:33,550 --> 00:06:39,550
points, as we might say, uh that have you know have rooted the whole institution.

106
00:06:39,630 --> 00:06:44,350
That that you know everyone triangulates around these concepts of guilt, innocent mensrea,

107
00:06:44,750 --> 00:06:45,390
etc., etc.

108
00:06:45,790 --> 00:06:50,400
And to introduce new ideas is gonna you know tamper with something that's already working

109
00:06:50,400 --> 00:06:52,080
well in terms of coordination.

110
00:06:53,040 --> 00:06:57,440
So we've already talked about psychology and the law.

111
00:06:57,600 --> 00:07:00,000
We haven't yet introduced the evolution piece.

112
00:07:00,320 --> 00:07:03,600
So how does the evolution piece fit in here?

113
00:07:04,800 --> 00:07:10,640
So the goal of evolutionary psychology in particular is to understand human behavior.

114
00:07:10,800 --> 00:07:13,360
And the goal of law is to regulate it.

115
00:07:13,600 --> 00:07:18,810
And the better you understand behavior, the better you're going to be able to regulate it.

116
00:07:18,970 --> 00:07:23,370
So I see them as really, you know, excellent bedfellows.

117
00:07:25,370 --> 00:07:25,930
Interesting.

118
00:07:26,330 --> 00:07:27,130
Regulate.

119
00:07:27,450 --> 00:07:32,970
So it's not merely that the legal system wants to just boss us

120
00:07:32,970 --> 00:07:35,130
around arbitrarily, right?

121
00:07:35,210 --> 00:07:39,130
It doesn't want to just tell us what to do, you know, as an end in itself.

122
00:07:39,610 --> 00:07:45,540
We might think or hope that it is regulating behavior in the service of some higher ideal

123
00:07:46,020 --> 00:07:49,940
like justice, morality, or some something like that.

124
00:07:50,180 --> 00:07:55,940
Um so uh I would then ask the question of uh,

125
00:07:56,100 --> 00:08:00,740
you know, to what end is this behavior regulation uh in pursuit of?

126
00:08:00,820 --> 00:08:04,420
You know, uh we'd like to think or hope that it's in the service of justice.

127
00:08:04,660 --> 00:08:08,500
Do you buy that idealistic story, or do you think something else is going on?

128
00:08:09,700 --> 00:08:11,220
What is justice?

129
00:08:12,950 --> 00:08:16,710
You have one minute to define five words or less.

130
00:08:17,030 --> 00:08:17,750
Yeah, exactly.

131
00:08:22,790 --> 00:08:28,150
A someone who was just starting law school and was there on the first day,

132
00:08:28,310 --> 00:08:34,070
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and the law professor asked them to raise their hands if they

133
00:08:34,070 --> 00:08:35,430
were there to study justice.

134
00:08:35,670 --> 00:08:40,620
A bunch of them like, here I am and then the professor said well you're in the wrong place

135
00:08:40,780 --> 00:08:46,780
the philosophy department is over there so I I think it's a very

136
00:08:46,780 --> 00:08:51,740
cynical way of thinking about it but I don't know that that the law actually

137
00:08:52,700 --> 00:08:57,660
is designed in a way that promotes justice in particular

138
00:08:59,740 --> 00:09:01,900
what is it designed to do yeah yeah

139
00:09:07,030 --> 00:09:08,390
Five words or less.

140
00:09:12,310 --> 00:09:14,630
In a haiku format, preferably.

141
00:09:15,350 --> 00:09:15,910
That's okay.

142
00:09:16,550 --> 00:09:17,190
Great.

143
00:09:17,670 --> 00:09:23,350
Um I think it's designed

144
00:09:26,720 --> 00:09:32,560
To really hard questions attempt to solve

145
00:09:32,880 --> 00:09:33,840
problems.

146
00:09:36,320 --> 00:09:40,240
But it doesn't do so in a highly efficient way.

147
00:09:40,640 --> 00:09:45,920
And it doesn't do so in a way that produces equal outcomes for

148
00:09:45,920 --> 00:09:46,880
individuals.

149
00:09:48,240 --> 00:09:54,080
So depending on your definition of justice, if that is

150
00:09:54,630 --> 00:10:00,550
what you want to see, then I don't think that the legal system is well designed to produce

151
00:10:00,550 --> 00:10:01,510
those outputs.

152
00:10:01,910 --> 00:10:02,070
Right.

153
00:10:02,230 --> 00:10:05,750
So it's sort of like we're all bumbling around and like there's a view of institutions

154
00:10:05,830 --> 00:10:10,390
which is sort of like we're all bumbling around and everyone is just like doing everyone's

155
00:10:10,390 --> 00:10:15,590
busy and hungry and tired and sleepy and just doing the minimal thing to just kind of keep

156
00:10:15,590 --> 00:10:20,840
themselves going and like, you know, keep their kids alive and, you know, their family

157
00:10:20,840 --> 00:10:22,120
alive and stuff.

158
00:10:22,360 --> 00:10:28,280
And most institutions are sort of run by people just sort of

159
00:10:28,280 --> 00:10:31,080
doing the minimal thing reasonably enough.

160
00:10:31,320 --> 00:10:37,080
And so what you're saying is that the justice system, if that's the word for it, or the or

161
00:10:37,080 --> 00:10:42,840
the legal system, is just is an institution because people had problems, it

162
00:10:42,850 --> 00:10:45,490
became other people's problem at some level.

163
00:10:45,650 --> 00:10:49,810
And so we had to come up with a mechanism to solve a set of problems.

164
00:10:50,210 --> 00:10:56,050
And it's sort of a good enough clue system that sort

165
00:10:56,050 --> 00:11:01,810
of has a way of sort of at least on the surface resolving problems.

166
00:11:02,050 --> 00:11:06,130
But it's nowhere near ideally designed or efficient.

167
00:11:06,370 --> 00:11:12,220
It's just this consequence of lots of hungry, sleepy, grumpy people, sort of all

168
00:11:12,380 --> 00:11:14,060
doing doing something.

169
00:11:14,220 --> 00:11:17,340
Is that sort of a fair uh characterization of it?

170
00:11:17,820 --> 00:11:23,260
Yeah, I really liked the the terms that David was using earlier about it being a

171
00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:24,460
coordination problem.

172
00:11:24,620 --> 00:11:30,460
I think the legal system is is really trying to to coordinate um behavior.

173
00:11:31,470 --> 00:11:36,910
And so, like in a criminal case or like a civil case, and kind of both, it seems like

174
00:11:36,910 --> 00:11:40,510
there's it's it's a lot about cost and cost redress.

175
00:11:40,750 --> 00:11:42,910
Is that a fair characterization?

176
00:11:42,990 --> 00:11:47,230
Or how would you think about like what is the the deep structure of what's the problem it's

177
00:11:47,230 --> 00:11:48,190
solving?

178
00:11:48,750 --> 00:11:50,430
Or maybe there's not a single thing.

179
00:11:50,590 --> 00:11:51,150
I don't know.

180
00:11:51,230 --> 00:11:51,870
Yeah.

181
00:11:57,460 --> 00:11:57,700
I know.

182
00:11:57,940 --> 00:11:59,460
No, I just don't we know so little.

183
00:11:59,620 --> 00:12:02,500
We're just we're just recapitulating like law one oh one.

184
00:12:02,580 --> 00:12:04,740
We're like we're just the legal at least for me.

185
00:12:07,700 --> 00:12:09,860
What is the meaning of the law?

186
00:12:11,860 --> 00:12:15,780
Uh yeah, I mean like well it seemed like the way you're talking about it, Dave, the the

187
00:12:15,780 --> 00:12:20,670
problem being solved is a is a conflict between people that these people are in some sort

188
00:12:20,670 --> 00:12:26,670
of conflict uh and uh they they would prefer not to just endlessly

189
00:12:26,670 --> 00:12:30,910
kill each other and their and each other's family members like Hatfields and McCoy's right

190
00:12:31,150 --> 00:12:34,910
and so you know because that would be a problem for everyone else if that was happening all

191
00:12:34,910 --> 00:12:39,470
the time and so these people's problems just become someone else's problems and then they

192
00:12:39,470 --> 00:12:42,670
have to figure out how to keep them from not killing each other.

193
00:12:43,310 --> 00:12:49,040
And and you know I love your your adjectives, J Dave, of you know, sleepy, grumpy, hungry,

194
00:12:49,120 --> 00:12:49,520
tired.

195
00:12:49,760 --> 00:12:54,480
And and these sleepy, hungry, grumpy, tired people are just like, all right, just doing the

196
00:12:54,480 --> 00:12:56,720
bare minimum to keep these people from killing each other.

197
00:12:56,880 --> 00:12:57,200
Yeah.

198
00:12:57,360 --> 00:13:00,720
Um and uh that's that's what the legal system is.

199
00:13:00,800 --> 00:13:03,040
Is that is that a fair characterization, Keila?

200
00:13:05,600 --> 00:13:06,960
Yeah, I would say so.

201
00:13:07,230 --> 00:13:07,790
Oh wow.

202
00:13:07,870 --> 00:13:08,030
Okay.

203
00:13:08,430 --> 00:13:11,390
Because that's like uh that's also a set of selection pressures, right?

204
00:13:11,550 --> 00:13:15,870
I mean, like, is that like have I mean key look, Keila, like I know like we had Deb

205
00:13:15,870 --> 00:13:19,870
Lieberman and we talked about the intersection of like law and evolutionary psychology.

206
00:13:19,950 --> 00:13:24,830
Like you've done probably you're one of the people, if not the person who's sort of done

207
00:13:24,830 --> 00:13:26,910
the most in integrating those two.

208
00:13:27,310 --> 00:13:33,140
Um, has that point sort of um, you know, that it sounds like that point

209
00:13:33,220 --> 00:13:34,660
um you're making, right?

210
00:13:34,740 --> 00:13:40,020
Is that is that a fair characterization that sort of um the law in some sense does

211
00:13:40,020 --> 00:13:44,180
recapitulate what are and also selection pressures, like what David just described is also

212
00:13:44,180 --> 00:13:49,780
something that like the our mental software design also had to

213
00:13:49,780 --> 00:13:50,580
deal with.

214
00:13:51,060 --> 00:13:56,500
Yeah, I mean, one of the the basic principles that I come from uh in my

215
00:13:56,610 --> 00:14:02,210
research is that these model these modern legal institutions are stemming from

216
00:14:02,210 --> 00:14:04,530
evolved psychological mechanisms.

217
00:14:05,170 --> 00:14:11,170
So how we're responding to these law related questions is being

218
00:14:11,170 --> 00:14:15,410
governed by the ways that natural and sexual selection have shaped our minds over

219
00:14:15,410 --> 00:14:16,610
evolutionary time.

220
00:14:17,250 --> 00:14:22,530
Yeah and one of the themes that like we've had on this um podcast has been to sort of say

221
00:14:22,530 --> 00:14:27,660
that taking an evolutionary approach moves you out of naive realism, which is just sort of

222
00:14:27,660 --> 00:14:33,020
the idea that it's trivial to sort of process any part of the world.

223
00:14:33,260 --> 00:14:39,180
You know, we know from evolutionary and cognitive science that there's a lot of

224
00:14:39,180 --> 00:14:44,300
mental software that's necessary to get anything, even like vision off the ground.

225
00:14:44,540 --> 00:14:50,030
And the idea that sort of there's a lot of content rich, infant rich,

226
00:14:50,750 --> 00:14:56,750
inference rich machinery, a lot of which is social, a lot of which is strategic,

227
00:14:56,830 --> 00:15:00,190
which is also a theme of like David's worldview and themes.

228
00:15:00,590 --> 00:15:06,510
Um that's a very different way of thinking about people, and that they're full of sort

229
00:15:06,510 --> 00:15:08,270
of motivated reasoning.

230
00:15:08,510 --> 00:15:13,790
Um, and I would imagine that that really butts up against an idea that's sort of

231
00:15:14,140 --> 00:15:20,060
jurors or judges or just legal scholars are

232
00:15:20,060 --> 00:15:25,500
just maybe, I mean, you can tell us like, is that the worldview of them that that I mean, I

233
00:15:25,500 --> 00:15:29,580
mean I may, I guess there's an idea that people are sort of self-interested sometimes.

234
00:15:29,900 --> 00:15:34,140
But I mean, I even know like when I've seen like I've been on juries, like people will say,

235
00:15:34,220 --> 00:15:38,060
like, oh yeah, just disregard what you just heard.

236
00:15:38,380 --> 00:15:43,340
And the idea that's sort of like the little me in my head can sort of go in and like

237
00:15:43,950 --> 00:15:49,950
remove that information on all the consequences that information had in

238
00:15:49,950 --> 00:15:52,990
my mind is sort of very it is very naive.

239
00:15:53,230 --> 00:15:56,030
Um so is that is that fair?

240
00:15:56,190 --> 00:16:02,110
Like that that there's sort of like this this very like almost cynical view of people

241
00:16:02,110 --> 00:16:07,310
from an evolutionary perspective butting up against a very sort of naive view of legal

242
00:16:07,310 --> 00:16:07,710
scholars?

243
00:16:07,790 --> 00:16:12,510
Or again, is that like a cartoon where I'm being self serving to my side?

244
00:16:13,420 --> 00:16:19,420
No, I think that's a I think that's a realistic description of um the

245
00:16:19,420 --> 00:16:24,620
differences between how as evolutionary scientists we would think about the ways that

246
00:16:24,620 --> 00:16:30,140
people think and behave uh and how legal scholars tend to approach it from

247
00:16:30,620 --> 00:16:36,060
uh this I would agree a more naive

248
00:16:36,300 --> 00:16:37,980
perspective of how the mind works.

249
00:16:38,330 --> 00:16:38,570
Yeah.

250
00:16:38,650 --> 00:16:42,250
And I think some of your work, I mean, like are do you have are can you are there certain

251
00:16:42,250 --> 00:16:44,010
examples like people might not know?

252
00:16:44,090 --> 00:16:49,130
Uh like people who haven't read your work, like are there examples um either in your work

253
00:16:49,130 --> 00:16:52,890
or other work that you're aware of that's sort of a good example of that where sort of

254
00:16:52,890 --> 00:16:56,650
people have taken a naive view and then, oh, from an evolutionary perspective, we would

255
00:16:56,650 --> 00:16:57,290
expect this.

256
00:16:57,370 --> 00:17:03,140
And that sort of clarifies um either legal issues or at least sort

257
00:17:03,140 --> 00:17:08,020
of um we might have like a a systematic way of saying like look people are gonna be biased

258
00:17:08,020 --> 00:17:09,940
systematically this way or that way.

259
00:17:10,980 --> 00:17:15,540
Uh it's hard to pick one because I'll we have a lot of time.

260
00:17:15,780 --> 00:17:16,660
So yeah, yeah.

261
00:17:17,140 --> 00:17:19,620
A lot of my research is looking at exactly that.

262
00:17:19,780 --> 00:17:25,710
Um so this is probably a recency effect, but the one that immediately came to the mind is

263
00:17:25,710 --> 00:17:31,470
a paper I published last month that was looking at the influence of criminal

264
00:17:31,470 --> 00:17:33,950
motive on people's decision making.

265
00:17:34,190 --> 00:17:39,470
And so from a very strictly legal sense,

266
00:17:39,870 --> 00:17:45,790
motive, the reason why somebody did what they did, um not supposed

267
00:17:45,790 --> 00:17:48,670
to matter when it comes to adjudicating guilt.

268
00:17:48,980 --> 00:17:54,900
that uh whether or not you stole twenty dollars because you needed to buy

269
00:17:54,900 --> 00:18:00,900
life-saving medicine or you stole twenty dollars to buy illicit drugs, it doesn't

270
00:18:00,900 --> 00:18:01,220
matter.

271
00:18:01,380 --> 00:18:03,700
You're guilty of theft all the same.

272
00:18:04,020 --> 00:18:09,780
And so the law really makes it clear that motive is not supposed to matter.

273
00:18:10,290 --> 00:18:10,530
Interesting.

274
00:18:10,930 --> 00:18:13,090
Would it would it would it affect sentencing?

275
00:18:13,570 --> 00:18:18,450
Or it would it is it I mean maybe it does you know in the real world, but is it supposed to

276
00:18:18,450 --> 00:18:20,290
be a consideration when it comes to sentencing?

277
00:18:20,610 --> 00:18:26,530
Yes at the sentencing phase judges are explicitly allowed to to use motive information

278
00:18:26,610 --> 00:18:31,890
um as both a mitigating or or an and an aggravating factor for determining sentences.

279
00:18:32,050 --> 00:18:34,290
So it's it's a little bit different there.

280
00:18:34,530 --> 00:18:38,450
It's more on the side of when you're deciding guilt.

281
00:18:38,660 --> 00:18:43,620
It's not necessary for a prosecutor to prove motive, for example.

282
00:18:44,100 --> 00:18:44,580
I see.

283
00:18:44,820 --> 00:18:47,620
So just just to make sure I'm keeping up with this.

284
00:18:47,780 --> 00:18:49,220
So intent matters.

285
00:18:49,300 --> 00:18:55,140
So like if you accidentally so like if I went to a store and I accidentally put like

286
00:18:55,300 --> 00:18:56,980
I had my son, for example.

287
00:18:57,060 --> 00:19:00,580
I'm I I I don't think I've ever done this, but I could easily imagine like, you know, I

288
00:19:00,580 --> 00:19:06,500
have my son, I'm keeping an eye on him, there's a $20 item and just by pure accident I walk

289
00:19:06,500 --> 00:19:11,990
out of the store versus I steal the twenty dollars because it's life-saving

290
00:19:11,990 --> 00:19:17,190
medication versus I steal the twenty the twenty dollar item because it's illicit drugs.

291
00:19:17,590 --> 00:19:23,030
The last two categories are intent and the motives different.

292
00:19:23,270 --> 00:19:28,150
And so the intent is what matters for guilt.

293
00:19:28,620 --> 00:19:29,820
Is that is that right?

294
00:19:30,380 --> 00:19:30,620
Yes.

295
00:19:30,780 --> 00:19:35,180
So the intentionality of it, that's the mensrea, the guilty mind component.

296
00:19:35,340 --> 00:19:40,540
And so you do have to prove that the person intended to commit the act.

297
00:19:41,020 --> 00:19:46,780
So if I did it by accident, then it would be probably hopefully they would just sort

298
00:19:46,780 --> 00:19:49,420
of uh say, don't do that again.

299
00:19:49,900 --> 00:19:50,300
Right?

300
00:19:50,860 --> 00:19:54,490
Well, I mean, may maybe they could could still convict you of something.

301
00:19:54,570 --> 00:19:58,810
I mean, 'cause I know that you could I mean, manslaughter is like unintended murder and you

302
00:19:58,810 --> 00:20:03,290
can still, you know, be convicted of manslaughter and have to go to prison for that, even

303
00:20:03,290 --> 00:20:04,490
though it wasn't your intention.

304
00:20:04,570 --> 00:20:08,170
You know, if you just you know, you were reckless driving or something like that and you

305
00:20:08,170 --> 00:20:09,930
accidentally hit someone or or whatever.

306
00:20:10,090 --> 00:20:14,570
Um, you weren't intending to kill that person but you you ended up killing them, um, you

307
00:20:14,570 --> 00:20:17,060
know, that could land you in a lot of legal trouble.

308
00:20:17,140 --> 00:20:20,580
You know, similarly with like medical malpractice, you end up, you know, the doctor ends up

309
00:20:20,900 --> 00:20:24,260
killing the patient by some accident or something like that.

310
00:20:24,420 --> 00:20:30,180
Um so even an accidental uh crime, can you can still be guilty of that,

311
00:20:30,340 --> 00:20:30,660
right?

312
00:20:31,460 --> 00:20:31,700
Yeah.

313
00:20:31,860 --> 00:20:35,700
So there are different uh levels of intentionality.

314
00:20:35,860 --> 00:20:41,850
There's knowingly, purposefully, recklessly, negligently, um, and so uh

315
00:20:42,090 --> 00:20:45,050
different levels of the extent of intent that you have.

316
00:20:45,290 --> 00:20:48,170
So is there a difference between recklessly and negligently?

317
00:20:48,570 --> 00:20:50,890
Yes, there is a difference between them.

318
00:20:52,090 --> 00:20:55,610
Could you enlighten us on what the difference is there? 'Cause they seem indistinguishable

319
00:20:55,610 --> 00:20:56,010
to me.

320
00:20:56,730 --> 00:20:57,130
Yes.

321
00:20:57,370 --> 00:21:03,320
So uh reckless, if you're asking me to recall my my intro criminal

322
00:21:03,640 --> 00:21:03,800
class.

323
00:21:04,120 --> 00:21:05,960
Anybody who's like studying for the bar.

324
00:21:06,040 --> 00:21:06,680
Uh exactly.

325
00:21:06,840 --> 00:21:07,080
Yeah.

326
00:21:08,120 --> 00:21:11,560
This will be helpful for me when I'm planning my life of crime so that I can, you know,

327
00:21:11,800 --> 00:21:16,600
carefully contort behavior to so that it fits the, you know, the the behavior with the

328
00:21:16,600 --> 00:21:17,320
lower sentence.

329
00:21:17,400 --> 00:21:21,000
So tell me yes tell us what the difference is and then what the lower sentence is.

330
00:21:23,250 --> 00:21:28,050
So again, I'm holding this back from the absolute recesses of my mind.

331
00:21:28,130 --> 00:21:30,930
This should probably be fact checked before it gets.

332
00:21:31,330 --> 00:21:32,530
We'll run it by ChatGPT.

333
00:21:32,690 --> 00:21:33,090
Don't worry.

334
00:21:33,330 --> 00:21:33,890
Exactly.

335
00:21:34,450 --> 00:21:37,730
But there's a difference between if you

336
00:21:41,730 --> 00:21:47,700
should have known that what you were doing was wrong versus

337
00:21:48,580 --> 00:21:52,980
you knew and ignored what you were doing was wrong.

338
00:21:53,300 --> 00:21:53,700
Right.

339
00:21:53,860 --> 00:21:58,580
Um I could have.

340
00:21:59,460 --> 00:22:05,300
So like if David is building a bridge and he's like using shoddy bolts and it's

341
00:22:05,300 --> 00:22:10,500
gonna fail and he knows he's doing that versus he's just incompetent because it's his first

342
00:22:10,500 --> 00:22:11,860
day on the job.

343
00:22:12,180 --> 00:22:17,070
One is reckless because he's like he's just like, Yeah, this bridge is gonna fail.

344
00:22:17,150 --> 00:22:17,790
I don't care.

345
00:22:17,950 --> 00:22:18,670
It looks fine.

346
00:22:18,830 --> 00:22:20,750
And then the other one is he's just incompetent.

347
00:22:20,910 --> 00:22:25,150
Sorry, David, but um and uh so that would be negligent.

348
00:22:25,230 --> 00:22:27,470
Is that is that I think so.

349
00:22:27,790 --> 00:22:28,430
I think so.

350
00:22:29,150 --> 00:22:29,470
Okay.

351
00:22:29,630 --> 00:22:30,670
I'm I'm starting.

352
00:22:30,750 --> 00:22:34,750
I mean, this is a really s psychologically subtle distinction.

353
00:22:35,310 --> 00:22:37,070
Um it's very psychological too.

354
00:22:37,150 --> 00:22:39,470
Like it's yeah, extremely yeah, yeah.

355
00:22:39,900 --> 00:22:45,900
But we're but we were we're digressing from the uh our looping back here to the example of

356
00:22:45,900 --> 00:22:48,140
evolutionary uh principle.

357
00:22:48,460 --> 00:22:54,380
So this is about the um the motive of uh the

358
00:22:54,540 --> 00:22:57,180
the effect of motive on the criminal.

359
00:22:57,340 --> 00:23:03,340
Um and so we've established right that um that intent matters for guilt,

360
00:23:03,870 --> 00:23:09,710
but that uh and motive shouldn't according to the law, whereas motive

361
00:23:09,870 --> 00:23:12,910
should matter for the strength of sentencing.

362
00:23:13,150 --> 00:23:17,950
And David has some information about how to start his life of crime or at least shoddy

363
00:23:18,110 --> 00:23:19,630
bridge building.

364
00:23:19,790 --> 00:23:23,310
Um maybe that's a reason for strategic ignorance.

365
00:23:23,470 --> 00:23:27,440
For you know, may maybe I you know Exactly.

366
00:23:27,760 --> 00:23:31,840
I don't want to read, you know, the actual uh instructions on how to build a good bridge

367
00:23:32,080 --> 00:23:36,320
because you know then then I'll I'll be more likely to be convicted of of recklessness as

368
00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:37,520
opposed to mere negligence.

369
00:23:37,840 --> 00:23:38,320
Exactly.

370
00:23:38,480 --> 00:23:38,800
Yes.

371
00:23:39,280 --> 00:23:39,600
Okay.

372
00:23:40,800 --> 00:23:44,080
Um so we're we're I think we are bumbling our way.

373
00:23:44,240 --> 00:23:46,800
Dave and I are bumbling our way into a life of crime here.

374
00:23:46,880 --> 00:23:49,280
So can you keep us up to speed now?

375
00:23:49,520 --> 00:23:54,560
So I think we've got the intent or the motive shouldn't matter for guilt.

376
00:23:55,430 --> 00:23:57,590
So yeah, I think that's where we're at so far.

377
00:23:57,910 --> 00:23:58,070
Yeah.

378
00:23:58,310 --> 00:23:58,550
Okay.

379
00:23:58,710 --> 00:24:02,790
So why why does why doesn't the motive matter for guilt?

380
00:24:04,230 --> 00:24:06,950
That's just what the law has determined.

381
00:24:07,190 --> 00:24:12,710
That uh why you the reason behind why you're doing the illegal

382
00:24:12,710 --> 00:24:17,270
thing doesn't matter in terms of deciding whether or not you have done it with the

383
00:24:17,270 --> 00:24:18,630
requisite intent.

384
00:24:18,790 --> 00:24:23,590
Um and so it's just supposed it's supposedly irrelevant.

385
00:24:23,820 --> 00:24:28,620
That doesn't mean that it's impermissible to talk about motive, and

386
00:24:28,940 --> 00:24:34,940
prosecutors definitely do, which was one of the reasons why my

387
00:24:34,940 --> 00:24:39,660
collaborators and I were interested in this paper is because why is it that this thing that

388
00:24:39,660 --> 00:24:44,620
the law considers so irrelevant is nonetheless really heavily

389
00:24:44,620 --> 00:24:50,390
emphasized in a trial to help to craft

390
00:24:50,390 --> 00:24:55,910
a narrative of what the individual did and to make an adjudication of

391
00:24:55,910 --> 00:24:57,430
guilt more likely.

392
00:25:00,550 --> 00:25:05,670
We had looked at what previous literature had said, other psychologists had said about

393
00:25:05,900 --> 00:25:10,060
motive and found that their conclusions were really unsatisfying.

394
00:25:10,540 --> 00:25:15,980
It was essentially like we care about motive because we want to punish bad people and we

395
00:25:15,980 --> 00:25:21,420
want to punish bad people because we have this inherent um desire

396
00:25:21,740 --> 00:25:24,540
to to punish people who we think are bad.

397
00:25:24,940 --> 00:25:25,100
Yeah.

398
00:25:25,260 --> 00:25:25,420
Yeah.

399
00:25:25,500 --> 00:25:29,350
That's clo classic circular psychology reasoning right there.

400
00:25:29,590 --> 00:25:34,470
So you you take the y and x and you transpose their order and then you got it.

401
00:25:34,550 --> 00:25:37,510
I'm figuring out how to be a um uh old school.

402
00:25:37,990 --> 00:25:40,470
This is this is non-evolutionary psychology 101.

403
00:25:40,630 --> 00:25:44,070
This is how teaching you this is how to do the theory crisis one oh one.

404
00:25:44,230 --> 00:25:44,630
Okay, great.

405
00:25:44,710 --> 00:25:44,950
Got it.

406
00:25:45,030 --> 00:25:45,350
So good.

407
00:25:45,430 --> 00:25:50,310
I got X and Y, and now I'm gonna change the order to Y and X in the first zero.

408
00:25:50,470 --> 00:25:50,870
Okay, got it.

409
00:25:50,950 --> 00:25:51,830
Okay, I'm up to speed.

410
00:25:51,910 --> 00:25:52,070
Great.

411
00:25:52,230 --> 00:25:55,190
We're learning how to be criminals and uh bad psychologists.

412
00:25:55,350 --> 00:25:55,590
Got it.

413
00:25:55,670 --> 00:25:55,830
Okay.

414
00:25:57,800 --> 00:26:03,720
so so yeah so we found that explanation pretty unsatisfying um and so we wanted

415
00:26:03,720 --> 00:26:08,920
to take an adaptationist approach to thinking about why would motive be so

416
00:26:08,920 --> 00:26:09,880
impactful.

417
00:26:10,680 --> 00:26:15,960
And what we suggested one reason is uh might be because

418
00:26:16,600 --> 00:26:20,760
motive matters for assessing association value.

419
00:26:20,920 --> 00:26:25,720
So whether or not this is a person we want to keep in the future as a cooperation partner.

420
00:26:26,910 --> 00:26:31,630
Um, so motive is feeding into this calculation of association value.

421
00:26:31,710 --> 00:26:36,750
And we propose that the reason why it's doing that or the mechanism through which it's

422
00:26:36,750 --> 00:26:42,670
doing that in part is by um affecting our calculation of the welfare trade off

423
00:26:42,830 --> 00:26:43,550
ratios.

424
00:26:44,910 --> 00:26:46,350
That we talked that other people have.

425
00:26:46,750 --> 00:26:48,990
David, did we talk about welfare trade off ratios?

426
00:26:49,230 --> 00:26:50,190
We might have talked about briefly.

427
00:26:50,750 --> 00:26:53,790
We talked about it, we I think we talked about it briefly in the context of anger, but uh,

428
00:26:53,870 --> 00:26:56,240
we haven't really delved into it that that fully.

429
00:26:56,560 --> 00:26:56,640
Yeah.

430
00:26:56,880 --> 00:26:58,320
So maybe that?

431
00:26:58,400 --> 00:26:58,480
Yeah.

432
00:26:58,640 --> 00:26:58,800
Yeah.

433
00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:01,120
So what yeah, what is a welfare trade-off ratio?

434
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:07,920
So essentially, and feel free to jump in and adjust my explanation at any

435
00:27:07,920 --> 00:27:13,840
point, but um you can take somebody's welfare into account a little bit,

436
00:27:14,320 --> 00:27:16,640
not at all, a whole lot.

437
00:27:16,880 --> 00:27:22,630
And you can also figure out switch points between when people start

438
00:27:22,630 --> 00:27:27,190
taking their own welfare more into account than when they take other people's welfare into

439
00:27:27,190 --> 00:27:27,750
account.

440
00:27:27,990 --> 00:27:32,230
And this information is really useful because the extent to which someone takes your

441
00:27:32,230 --> 00:27:37,910
welfare into account is predictive of really important information, like, for example, if

442
00:27:37,910 --> 00:27:40,230
they're going to exploit you or not.

443
00:27:41,440 --> 00:27:43,440
Is there anything else that you want to add to?

444
00:27:44,160 --> 00:27:49,440
I mean, we might we sort of intuitively talk about welfare trade-off ratios as like how

445
00:27:49,440 --> 00:27:51,840
much someone cares about you.

446
00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:56,720
Um, you know, w whether they they really value or care about you.

447
00:27:56,960 --> 00:28:00,400
If you if they or if they don't give a shit about you, then they would have a low welfare

448
00:28:00,480 --> 00:28:01,040
trade off ratio.

449
00:28:01,120 --> 00:28:06,950
It's basically an attempt to turn this intuition about you know caringness into like hard

450
00:28:06,950 --> 00:28:12,790
math where like they're willing to impose a cost of ten dollars on you to gain a measly one

451
00:28:12,950 --> 00:28:16,390
dollar for themselves, that's a really low welfare trade-off ratio.

452
00:28:16,550 --> 00:28:20,390
But if they're willing to impose a cost of ten dollars on you to save themselves ten

453
00:28:20,630 --> 00:28:23,910
dollars, then maybe it's m more understandable, more forgivable.

454
00:28:23,990 --> 00:28:27,590
And if they're imposing a cost of ten dollars on you to save twenty dollars for themselves,

455
00:28:27,740 --> 00:28:31,740
then it's like, okay, you know, maybe I would have done that if I was in their shoes and I

456
00:28:31,740 --> 00:28:32,460
can understand that.

457
00:28:32,540 --> 00:28:37,180
And so it's an attempt to uh take this intuitive notion of how much a person cares about us

458
00:28:37,180 --> 00:28:41,500
or values us and translating it to something hard and numerical that we can study

459
00:28:41,500 --> 00:28:47,260
empirically and then we could think about um in in adaptationist terms, um, where you know

460
00:28:47,740 --> 00:28:52,310
surrounding yourself with people who have high welfare trade-off ratios toward toward

461
00:28:52,310 --> 00:28:54,790
yourself would have been a strong selection pressure.

462
00:28:55,030 --> 00:29:00,870
And the ability to negotiate and recalibrate other people's welfare trade-off ratios would

463
00:29:00,870 --> 00:29:02,950
have also been a strong selection pressure.

464
00:29:03,030 --> 00:29:07,590
And that led to the evolution of emotions like anger, uh for for you know trying to

465
00:29:07,590 --> 00:29:11,910
recalibrate other people's welfare trade-off ratios, guilt for recalibrating your own

466
00:29:11,910 --> 00:29:15,670
welfare trade-off ratio if it was too low, um, etc.

467
00:29:15,910 --> 00:29:16,150
etc.

468
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:17,760
Um okay.

469
00:29:18,000 --> 00:29:23,760
So we have so we care about motive because um it it reflects

470
00:29:23,840 --> 00:29:28,240
or it is indicative of the perpetrator's welfare trade off ratio.

471
00:29:28,400 --> 00:29:33,600
And we care about that because um that tells us something very important about the

472
00:29:33,600 --> 00:29:37,840
underlying character of the of the perpetrator and whether we want to associate with them.

473
00:29:38,320 --> 00:29:38,720
Exactly.

474
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:43,920
And there's there's a really great example that Aaron Sell has used um talking about did

475
00:29:44,160 --> 00:29:50,130
somebody ruin your sweater because they needed to wipe their

476
00:29:50,130 --> 00:29:50,530
mouth?

477
00:29:50,770 --> 00:29:55,970
Or did they ruin the sweater because they needed to staunch their child's bleeding wound?

478
00:29:56,210 --> 00:30:00,930
And so the crime of the ruined sweater is exactly the same.

479
00:30:01,170 --> 00:30:06,770
But the motive behind why they did it tells you something about how much they care about

480
00:30:06,770 --> 00:30:12,130
you and your welfare, and thus what their behavior is likely to be in the future.

481
00:30:12,820 --> 00:30:18,580
And so from a legal perspective, what does the law say about welfare

482
00:30:18,740 --> 00:30:19,700
trade-off ratios?

483
00:30:19,780 --> 00:30:25,700
Or what does the law say about a juror caring about how much the defendant

484
00:30:25,940 --> 00:30:27,460
is going to value them?

485
00:30:28,740 --> 00:30:30,980
That you should not care about that thing.

486
00:30:31,140 --> 00:30:36,830
And in fact, they they set up some rules so that they don't

487
00:30:36,830 --> 00:30:41,950
have people who are invested in particular outcomes serving as jurors.

488
00:30:42,430 --> 00:30:42,990
Um, right.

489
00:30:43,070 --> 00:30:47,550
Like if if your brother is on trial, you're not allowed to be a juror in that case.

490
00:30:47,950 --> 00:30:49,070
Maybe unless you hate your brother.

491
00:30:49,310 --> 00:30:51,150
Well, you can't hate your brother or really like your brother.

492
00:30:51,230 --> 00:30:52,510
You have to be completely indifferent.

493
00:30:53,310 --> 00:30:53,710
Exactly.

494
00:30:54,110 --> 00:30:56,750
So so I should so I I kind of want to clarify.

495
00:30:56,830 --> 00:31:00,660
So we're not talking about the presence or absence of a motive.

496
00:31:00,820 --> 00:31:04,420
We're talking about the presence of one motive versus the presence of a different motive.

497
00:31:04,580 --> 00:31:09,700
Because I might expect that the presence or absence of a motive might be a crucial piece of

498
00:31:09,700 --> 00:31:11,380
evidence in a criminal proceeding.

499
00:31:11,540 --> 00:31:15,940
You know, if if if I'm trying to argue that um the defendant is guilty and he has a

500
00:31:15,940 --> 00:31:20,340
plausible motive for doing the crime that's going to be count as evidence that he is guilty

501
00:31:20,340 --> 00:31:20,820
of the crime.

502
00:31:20,980 --> 00:31:24,980
If he has no motive, no reason to have committed the crime that will count as evidence

503
00:31:24,980 --> 00:31:26,100
against the idea that he's guilty.

504
00:31:26,180 --> 00:31:27,450
So you're not talking about that, right?

505
00:31:27,610 --> 00:31:31,850
Because that presumably would matter in assessing a defendant's guilt.

506
00:31:32,890 --> 00:31:38,810
So I am not talking about that, but I also would say that that does

507
00:31:38,810 --> 00:31:41,290
not need to be a component.

508
00:31:41,690 --> 00:31:46,330
Like prosecutors could say nothing about motive and still

509
00:31:47,280 --> 00:31:49,520
Provide the evidence that the person is guilty.

510
00:31:49,760 --> 00:31:51,760
You don't need to prove someone is guilty.

511
00:31:52,240 --> 00:31:54,640
It's not necessary, but it's certainly impactful.

512
00:31:54,720 --> 00:31:56,560
And that's why prosecutors use it.

513
00:31:56,800 --> 00:32:01,600
I will say though, uh, since what you just said reminded me of this, that the absence of a

514
00:32:01,600 --> 00:32:05,200
motive also has implications for WTRs.

515
00:32:05,360 --> 00:32:10,880
Like if you just killed the fourth person that walked by you on the street,

516
00:32:11,090 --> 00:32:17,090
that implies something about your how much you care about other people's welfare

517
00:32:17,090 --> 00:32:21,010
relative to your own and what kind of threats you're likely to pose in the future.

518
00:32:21,170 --> 00:32:26,050
So sometimes the absence of motive conveys important information too.

519
00:32:26,370 --> 00:32:26,530
I see.

520
00:32:26,770 --> 00:32:29,250
In that case, it would point in two opposite directions.

521
00:32:29,410 --> 00:32:33,250
So if I have less of a motive or less of a plausible motive, it would make it less likely

522
00:32:33,250 --> 00:32:34,530
that I did the thing at all.

523
00:32:34,770 --> 00:32:39,330
But if I did do the thing, it would it would uh make me a much worse person and give me a

524
00:32:39,330 --> 00:32:40,450
much worse sentence.

525
00:32:40,880 --> 00:32:46,000
So th that so the lack of a motive leads to both less likelihood of guilt, but if guilty, a

526
00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:47,760
s more severe sentence.

527
00:32:48,480 --> 00:32:49,440
Potentially, yes.

528
00:32:49,760 --> 00:32:54,400
So, David, more severe because you did the random thing versus if you knew the person?

529
00:32:54,880 --> 00:33:00,000
More more severe because if I killed the person capriciously or arbitrarily, that would

530
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:01,680
have very low benefit to myself.

531
00:33:01,760 --> 00:33:01,840
Yeah.

532
00:33:02,080 --> 00:33:07,760
And thus convey a much lower welfare trade-off ratio than if I killed someone, say, out of

533
00:33:07,760 --> 00:33:09,570
self-defense or or something like that.

534
00:33:10,130 --> 00:33:10,530
No, exactly.

535
00:33:10,610 --> 00:33:14,210
But I think this is, I mean, and yeah, and Keila, you can unpack this for us much better

536
00:33:14,210 --> 00:33:15,330
than me bumbling.

537
00:33:15,410 --> 00:33:19,730
But like uh I what I like about an evolutionary approach is that it it unpacks that and

538
00:33:19,730 --> 00:33:21,330
gives it a causal why.

539
00:33:21,490 --> 00:33:21,810
Right.

540
00:33:21,890 --> 00:33:26,370
So like I think we all have the intuition that if it was if if somebody, as in Keila's

541
00:33:26,370 --> 00:33:29,970
example, was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna count up to fourth person and I'm just gonna kill the

542
00:33:29,970 --> 00:33:35,410
person, versus like, oh man, you know, like somebody killed somebody because like some

543
00:33:35,410 --> 00:33:39,900
interaction they had, they they still killed the person, but the intuition is like the the

544
00:33:40,220 --> 00:33:43,020
counting to four person is way worse, right?

545
00:33:43,660 --> 00:33:49,340
Um, and and I think an evolutionary approach gives you well, one of the

546
00:33:49,340 --> 00:33:55,020
benefits is that it gives you an explanation for why that is, like David said, right?

547
00:33:55,420 --> 00:34:00,140
Um, and it also, I mean, Keila, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but like it also relates back

548
00:34:00,140 --> 00:34:06,110
to what you're talking about, which is if I'm a juror, um, I'm evaluating

549
00:34:06,110 --> 00:34:11,710
from an evolved perspective, like I'm designed to care about myself and like

550
00:34:11,950 --> 00:34:12,750
my interests.

551
00:34:12,910 --> 00:34:18,350
And so if I'm sitting in the jury box and I hear a story about somebody who killed

552
00:34:18,350 --> 00:34:23,310
somebody because that person wronged them, I'm thinking, well, did I wrong that person?

553
00:34:23,550 --> 00:34:23,870
No.

554
00:34:24,480 --> 00:34:30,320
So, you know, and how likely is it I would wrong them versus could I walk past them,

555
00:34:30,560 --> 00:34:30,880
right?

556
00:34:31,120 --> 00:34:32,560
And that's very likely.

557
00:34:32,720 --> 00:34:38,640
And so it's much more likely that the person who counts to four and kills somebody is

558
00:34:38,640 --> 00:34:44,240
gonna hurt me or my family than the person who had a very like specific

559
00:34:44,240 --> 00:34:46,560
interaction that me and my family didn't have.

560
00:34:46,720 --> 00:34:52,170
So from an evolutionary perspective, it makes total sense that I would really, really

561
00:34:52,330 --> 00:34:56,650
dislike the counting to four person much more than the interaction person.

562
00:34:56,730 --> 00:35:01,610
And that that's another, I mean, that would be another example of the evolutionary logic

563
00:35:01,610 --> 00:35:07,210
being very powerful in offering an explanation for why those very different

564
00:35:07,210 --> 00:35:08,810
scenarios feel so different.

565
00:35:09,210 --> 00:35:15,050
Yeah, in our paper, we use uh exactly the example of we are going to

566
00:35:15,050 --> 00:35:20,060
be less upset by the person who kills their boss because their boss didn't give them a

567
00:35:20,060 --> 00:35:24,300
raise rather than the person who kills the fourth random person who walks by them on the

568
00:35:24,300 --> 00:35:24,700
street.

569
00:35:25,020 --> 00:35:25,420
Yeah.

570
00:35:25,660 --> 00:35:26,300
Exactly.

571
00:35:26,460 --> 00:35:27,100
Yeah.

572
00:35:27,420 --> 00:35:28,300
Scary.

573
00:35:29,980 --> 00:35:32,060
So you did number four strikes again.

574
00:35:32,620 --> 00:35:32,780
Yeah.

575
00:35:33,020 --> 00:35:33,740
Don't be four.

576
00:35:33,820 --> 00:35:38,460
Um, how did you or yeah, you should just like like make sure you have a is this going to be

577
00:35:38,460 --> 00:35:39,900
in your screenplay, number four.

578
00:35:40,220 --> 00:35:40,540
Exactly.

579
00:35:40,620 --> 00:35:43,850
And then you just make sure you have like four people in front of you all the time.

580
00:35:44,090 --> 00:35:46,410
And then you just like have a backup.

581
00:35:46,650 --> 00:35:48,890
So you could you could game this as a strategy.

582
00:35:49,050 --> 00:35:51,290
Um, this is a very good screenplay, David.

583
00:35:51,530 --> 00:35:54,490
Um, can you walk us through like how do you actually do that study?

584
00:35:54,650 --> 00:35:59,130
Like, do you get um participants to think they're imagined they're jurors, or like what

585
00:35:59,210 --> 00:36:04,170
what are the what are the like what on the ground, like what kind of studies do you do um

586
00:36:04,490 --> 00:36:06,170
to actually assess this?

587
00:36:07,610 --> 00:36:12,720
So the paper that we published was purely theoretical.

588
00:36:13,120 --> 00:36:14,480
It was not an empirical.

589
00:36:15,120 --> 00:36:15,440
That's great.

590
00:36:15,520 --> 00:36:16,240
You're talking to T.

591
00:36:17,280 --> 00:36:17,520
Yes.

592
00:36:17,680 --> 00:36:19,280
It was just us pontificating.

593
00:36:19,520 --> 00:36:20,160
Yeah, that's great.

594
00:36:21,040 --> 00:36:23,440
So but we did say not just, yeah.

595
00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:29,520
We did say that you'd need empirical research to to flesh out the ideas that we were

596
00:36:29,520 --> 00:36:30,240
proposing.

597
00:36:30,400 --> 00:36:35,950
Um but I think that there are a couple implications that that lend

598
00:36:35,950 --> 00:36:38,590
themselves really nicely to empirical tests.

599
00:36:39,070 --> 00:36:45,070
So one of them is this idea that we can find perpetrators with different motives being

600
00:36:45,070 --> 00:36:50,430
similarly responsible for an offense, but reach very different conclusions about their

601
00:36:50,750 --> 00:36:51,950
WTRs.

602
00:36:52,190 --> 00:36:55,950
And that should then predict how much we want to punish them.

603
00:36:56,440 --> 00:37:02,360
Um, that the ratio of cost to benefits to the parties matters to people who

604
00:37:02,360 --> 00:37:05,080
are observing um these actions.

605
00:37:05,400 --> 00:37:11,240
So if there's an action that produces a great benefit to a perpetrator, like the more

606
00:37:11,240 --> 00:37:16,680
acceptable the motive is perceived to be, um, then that's going to

607
00:37:17,690 --> 00:37:23,210
better than if you have a motive that is not providing great

608
00:37:23,210 --> 00:37:25,370
benefit to the actor.

609
00:37:26,250 --> 00:37:29,450
So that I think could be easily tested.

610
00:37:30,330 --> 00:37:36,090
Also, if the future behavior of this offender is anticipated to in some way be

611
00:37:36,090 --> 00:37:41,500
benefit-enhancing, then that even a bad motive will result in less

612
00:37:41,500 --> 00:37:46,860
punishment compared to an offender who's going to be seen as imposing future costs.

613
00:37:47,020 --> 00:37:52,940
And then related to that, if their future association value is high, then their motive

614
00:37:52,940 --> 00:37:56,940
is going to be less influential in general on your desire to punish them.

615
00:37:57,100 --> 00:38:01,020
And so I think all of those are quite testable questions.

616
00:38:01,370 --> 00:38:03,050
Yeah, those last two seem really important.

617
00:38:03,130 --> 00:38:04,490
Can you give examples of those?

618
00:38:04,570 --> 00:38:08,490
Because those are like really subtle, kind of complicated ideas.

619
00:38:10,090 --> 00:38:16,090
Um, so if you have some

620
00:38:17,050 --> 00:38:23,050
situation in which you think that the person is going to benefit you in the future, um, so

621
00:38:23,210 --> 00:38:26,380
for example Like a famous person.

622
00:38:26,460 --> 00:38:32,300
Like let's imagine I'm a juror and the person like is or like a doctor, you know, a

623
00:38:32,300 --> 00:38:37,660
top a top surgeon, I see who specializes in difficult to treat cancer cases, right?

624
00:38:37,820 --> 00:38:38,300
Or something.

625
00:38:38,540 --> 00:38:38,780
Okay.

626
00:38:39,180 --> 00:38:43,100
Um versus uh a homeless person off the street.

627
00:38:43,420 --> 00:38:43,660
Right.

628
00:38:43,980 --> 00:38:49,950
That their motive, even if the doctor has a

629
00:38:49,950 --> 00:38:55,070
worse motive than the homeless person, you might still see people less willing to punish

630
00:38:55,070 --> 00:38:56,430
the doctor harshly.

631
00:38:56,910 --> 00:38:56,990
Right.

632
00:38:57,230 --> 00:39:00,350
And this might and this is something where like character might come in.

633
00:39:00,510 --> 00:39:03,870
So if there are a lot of people who testify that the doctor's a wonderful father, you know,

634
00:39:03,950 --> 00:39:08,510
a wonderful doctor who's helped a lot of people, he has really great character, that might

635
00:39:08,510 --> 00:39:13,240
affect the juror's opinion, affect sentencing, even if even if you know his motive was

636
00:39:13,240 --> 00:39:18,040
really bad in in this case, we might still view his association value as as high if in

637
00:39:18,040 --> 00:39:19,560
general he's a really good guy.

638
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:24,840
Um it's like the interpersonal legal version of like the bank's too big to fail, right?

639
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:27,800
It's sort of like too valuable to convict.

640
00:39:30,170 --> 00:39:36,170
So do you so uh you mentioned that um motive is um irrelevant for assessing

641
00:39:36,490 --> 00:39:41,370
guilt, um, but it is relevant for assessing the severity of the sentencing.

642
00:39:41,770 --> 00:39:46,890
Given your knowledge of how the human mind works with regard to evaluating motives, do you

643
00:39:46,890 --> 00:39:48,890
think that is the right way to set up the legal system?

644
00:39:48,970 --> 00:39:54,410
Is it good to to separate out whether when the motive matters uh uh in terms of which part

645
00:39:54,410 --> 00:39:58,680
of the procedure, or do you or do you view this as the a wrong-headed way of approaching uh

646
00:39:58,680 --> 00:40:04,360
the justice system I think that it's a little bit

647
00:40:04,360 --> 00:40:09,480
naive to think that motive is irrelevant for

648
00:40:09,480 --> 00:40:10,920
adjudicating guilt.

649
00:40:11,160 --> 00:40:16,920
Um I think it is good that

650
00:40:17,240 --> 00:40:23,000
judges are legally permitted to use motive because they would do it anyway.

651
00:40:24,870 --> 00:40:27,590
So I could so my intuition is that it's a good thing.

652
00:40:27,670 --> 00:40:30,150
And let me see if I can run this argument by you.

653
00:40:30,310 --> 00:40:35,750
Um because there when you're thinking about whether the person did it versus how much how

654
00:40:35,750 --> 00:40:39,030
badly they should be punished if they did do it, these are two very different questions.

655
00:40:40,150 --> 00:40:44,150
The first question is just about trying to figure out what's true, just trying to figure

656
00:40:44,150 --> 00:40:47,580
out the facts of of whether they actually did the thing.

657
00:40:47,820 --> 00:40:52,140
And um and then the second question is, okay, given that they did the thing, how bad of a

658
00:40:52,140 --> 00:40:54,940
person are they and how how bad of a punishment do they deserve?

659
00:40:55,100 --> 00:40:59,260
Um, and it seems like you wouldn't want facts from the second part to contaminate parts

660
00:40:59,260 --> 00:41:00,060
from the first part.

661
00:41:00,220 --> 00:41:03,260
Like in the first part, you just really want to have a clear-headed view of whether they

662
00:41:03,260 --> 00:41:05,420
actually did the thing and what the what the evidence is.

663
00:41:05,660 --> 00:41:10,700
And if you're uh biased in answering that question by your hatred of the person, that's

664
00:41:10,700 --> 00:41:14,690
going to give you a less reliable answer to the question of whether they actually did do

665
00:41:14,690 --> 00:41:15,810
the thing, right?

666
00:41:16,130 --> 00:41:20,290
And so it seems like it might actually be smart to separate those two questions and say,

667
00:41:20,450 --> 00:41:24,530
first we just want to figure out what the facts are, you know, what actually happened, you

668
00:41:24,530 --> 00:41:28,610
know, what the person did, you know, whether they whether they did it intentionally or

669
00:41:28,610 --> 00:41:29,890
accident by accident.

670
00:41:30,050 --> 00:41:31,490
Let's figure out what happened.

671
00:41:31,730 --> 00:41:35,490
And then once we figured out what happened, then we can start to get into the you know the

672
00:41:35,490 --> 00:41:37,730
person's character and how badly they deserve to be punished.

673
00:41:37,890 --> 00:41:40,210
Does that argument make sense to you or do you disagree?

674
00:41:40,700 --> 00:41:45,420
It makes sense, but I I think it's unrealistic to believe that it's not going to matter in

675
00:41:45,420 --> 00:41:46,220
that first half.

676
00:41:46,380 --> 00:41:51,580
It reminds me a little bit of uh this is sort of tangential, but uh another

677
00:41:52,220 --> 00:41:56,380
thing in the justice system that has always boggled my mind.

678
00:41:56,540 --> 00:42:02,540
Um, that jurors are not allowed to be told what will happen to individuals who

679
00:42:02,540 --> 00:42:05,420
are found not guilty by reason of insanity.

680
00:42:06,620 --> 00:42:12,450
And they tend to assume that the person will just walk free when actually what

681
00:42:12,450 --> 00:42:15,650
happens is they often are institutionalized.

682
00:42:17,890 --> 00:42:18,290
Not guilty.

683
00:42:18,450 --> 00:42:24,050
So you mean you mean so wouldn't it be guilty, but so interesting.

684
00:42:24,210 --> 00:42:27,890
So they're they're found guilty of the crime, but but they're but they're judged to have

685
00:42:27,890 --> 00:42:30,210
committed it because of a mental illness?

686
00:42:30,770 --> 00:42:30,930
Yes.

687
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:31,240
Yes.

688
00:42:31,480 --> 00:42:33,480
So they're technically not guilty.

689
00:42:33,960 --> 00:42:34,680
Tech oh interesting.

690
00:42:35,160 --> 00:42:38,200
David, I think maybe maybe let me poke on David's assumption here.

691
00:42:38,360 --> 00:42:40,200
And Keila, you can tell me if I'm wrong.

692
00:42:40,520 --> 00:42:46,200
David, I think you are giving the legal system maybe too much credit, or it's more of a

693
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:48,040
it's more of a like a flow chart.

694
00:42:48,120 --> 00:42:53,320
So guilt is not a uh guilt is an operational definition.

695
00:42:53,400 --> 00:42:56,360
It just has like sort of if you're guilty, this happens.

696
00:42:56,600 --> 00:42:56,920
Right.

697
00:42:57,160 --> 00:43:03,110
So like it's not as if, like, I mean, for example, um, if you're guilty, there

698
00:43:03,110 --> 00:43:07,190
might be a minimum sentence that's already imposed by definition.

699
00:43:07,990 --> 00:43:13,510
So this might be a place where, you know, it's not like I have the f discretion as a judge

700
00:43:13,510 --> 00:43:18,550
to just do whatever based on an objective view of they did it or not.

701
00:43:18,790 --> 00:43:20,870
I might my hands might be tied.

702
00:43:21,190 --> 00:43:25,800
So I might actually say not guilty, because I want to avoid the minimal sentence.

703
00:43:25,880 --> 00:43:26,760
Is that true, Keila?

704
00:43:27,080 --> 00:43:29,000
Or am I completely making that up?

705
00:43:29,960 --> 00:43:31,880
I guess I'm not I'm not following.

706
00:43:32,760 --> 00:43:37,560
So I think David is correctly, if we were going to start from scratch and do the pins off

707
00:43:37,720 --> 00:43:43,480
Williams, Petrazuki legal school of thought, um, is basically saying, like, look, there's

708
00:43:43,480 --> 00:43:44,360
just facts on the ground.

709
00:43:44,440 --> 00:43:46,510
Like, did somebody do it or not.

710
00:43:46,670 --> 00:43:50,990
And we should just not imbue that we should not contaminate that with value judgments.

711
00:43:51,150 --> 00:43:53,390
So we should just establish whether or not it happened.

712
00:43:53,470 --> 00:43:56,990
And then after that, figure out what makes sense and is rational to do.

713
00:43:57,070 --> 00:43:58,510
And I completely agree with that.

714
00:43:58,750 --> 00:44:04,670
But what I'm saying is the definition of guilty or not guilty

715
00:44:04,910 --> 00:44:10,270
comes with it automatically, certain built-in consequences

716
00:44:10,920 --> 00:44:16,600
Such that it's not really possible to do what David's saying in some

717
00:44:16,600 --> 00:44:20,040
cases of just sort of like let the facts be the facts.

718
00:44:20,360 --> 00:44:25,480
And then we have full flexibility in choosing how we value what

719
00:44:25,480 --> 00:44:26,600
happened.

720
00:44:26,840 --> 00:44:27,160
Right.

721
00:44:27,400 --> 00:44:32,360
So in other words, just to make it concrete, like, let's say somebody, it's a horrible

722
00:44:32,360 --> 00:44:32,600
example.

723
00:44:32,760 --> 00:44:38,520
Let's say like somebody's family is like killed by somebody, and the person who's

724
00:44:38,520 --> 00:44:41,710
left like seeks revenge on that person, right?

725
00:44:42,190 --> 00:44:46,510
And let's say that happens in a state where there's just like a minimum sentence for

726
00:44:46,510 --> 00:44:49,470
somebody who commits murder.

727
00:44:50,030 --> 00:44:55,790
The jury or the prosecutor, the judge might just decide look, this was such a heinous

728
00:44:56,110 --> 00:45:01,710
crime that the that the person was revenging, that we don't want them to be punished at

729
00:45:01,710 --> 00:45:01,870
all.

730
00:45:02,030 --> 00:45:06,960
So we're just going to declare them not guilty, even though technically, you know, it would

731
00:45:06,960 --> 00:45:10,720
be better if we could just say, well, they are guilty, but there's such exonerating

732
00:45:10,720 --> 00:45:13,760
circumstances, we're just not going to punish them at all.

733
00:45:13,840 --> 00:45:16,880
But maybe that's just not an option in that state, for example.

734
00:45:17,120 --> 00:45:18,240
That's that's what I'm saying.

735
00:45:18,800 --> 00:45:19,200
I see.

736
00:45:19,360 --> 00:45:20,720
There's a a term for that.

737
00:45:20,880 --> 00:45:24,400
It's called jury nullification when it's juries who are doing it.

738
00:45:24,560 --> 00:45:24,800
Okay.

739
00:45:25,040 --> 00:45:30,870
That um that if they say, yes, we've come to the conclusion that the person did it, but

740
00:45:30,870 --> 00:45:33,590
for reasons X, Y, and Z, we don't want to say guilty.

741
00:45:33,670 --> 00:45:34,870
We're going to say not guilty.

742
00:45:35,190 --> 00:45:35,510
I see.

743
00:45:35,910 --> 00:45:41,510
So that would be an example of the value that the tied, the hands being tied, sort of

744
00:45:41,670 --> 00:45:46,790
consequences of the assessment actually goes back and changes the assessment, which I think

745
00:45:46,790 --> 00:45:47,750
is a smart.

746
00:45:48,150 --> 00:45:51,910
I mean, given the institutional constraints, that's not an unreasonable thing.

747
00:45:52,070 --> 00:45:53,910
I mean, imagine it's abuse too, right?

748
00:45:54,150 --> 00:45:59,920
But like in your example, like we don't want the surgeon to go to jail,

749
00:46:00,080 --> 00:46:03,280
so we're gonna change the conviction or something.

750
00:46:03,680 --> 00:46:04,320
Right.

751
00:46:05,120 --> 00:46:05,680
That's interesting.

752
00:46:05,840 --> 00:46:09,840
Yeah, it seems to me intuitively like that's a bad dis badly designed system.

753
00:46:09,920 --> 00:46:12,240
Like that you'd want to separate those two questions.

754
00:46:12,400 --> 00:46:16,800
Like we'd first want to establish that the guy did avenge his family's death and did kill

755
00:46:16,800 --> 00:46:17,120
the person.

756
00:46:17,200 --> 00:46:20,880
And then once we know that, if we if we decide that, you know, it was such a heinous act

757
00:46:20,880 --> 00:46:24,230
that he was avenging, he doesn't deserve to be punished, then that's fine.

758
00:46:24,630 --> 00:46:29,510
So we'd say in that case, he's guilty, but his punishment is zero because he, you know, he

759
00:46:29,670 --> 00:46:30,950
he was justified.

760
00:46:31,110 --> 00:46:36,630
Um that to me makes much more sense than like blending the two questions together in the

761
00:46:36,630 --> 00:46:38,950
way that the legal system currently works.

762
00:46:39,270 --> 00:46:43,830
Uh do you agree with that, Keeler or do you think it's uh it's good to blend them?

763
00:46:44,470 --> 00:46:47,750
Well, I think the legal system is it's trying to keep them separate.

764
00:46:48,150 --> 00:46:48,390
Got it.

765
00:46:48,790 --> 00:46:54,160
Um that it's human psychology that's blending them in these ways.

766
00:46:54,400 --> 00:46:54,640
Yeah.

767
00:46:55,200 --> 00:46:56,720
So it's like a dynamic, right?

768
00:46:56,800 --> 00:47:02,320
So sort of like, so like if I'm a politician, I'm like, uh anybody who kills somebody,

769
00:47:02,560 --> 00:47:06,880
we should have a minimum sentence because we don't want to let murderers go free.

770
00:47:07,040 --> 00:47:08,480
And everyone's like, that's great.

771
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:12,720
And so I impose that structure without thinking through the consequences.

772
00:47:12,880 --> 00:47:17,630
And then the person who's avenging, you know, their whole family's death has this issue.

773
00:47:17,790 --> 00:47:19,230
So that would be an example, right?

774
00:47:19,310 --> 00:47:25,310
Of like we create an institution that sort of fights against the realities that the

775
00:47:25,310 --> 00:47:28,110
politician wasn't thinking about, for example.

776
00:47:30,270 --> 00:47:31,150
That's interesting.

777
00:47:34,590 --> 00:47:40,280
Um so given that we don't

778
00:47:40,280 --> 00:47:45,320
take the motive into account um when we're evaluating guilt.

779
00:47:45,720 --> 00:47:51,640
Um there's this interesting question of, you know, when a jury is hearing

780
00:47:51,640 --> 00:47:57,000
this case, um, we know from our psychologist's perspective that the jury is going to be

781
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:02,710
evaluating the prospective benefits that the perpetrator might um heap onto the juror and

782
00:48:02,790 --> 00:48:06,390
and the prospective costs that the perpetrator might inflict onto the juror.

783
00:48:06,470 --> 00:48:11,510
And that is going to weigh their decision making to a quite substantial degree.

784
00:48:12,150 --> 00:48:16,150
And so do you do you also think this this type of reasoning has implications for juror

785
00:48:16,150 --> 00:48:20,390
selection and and impartiality of you know which jurors are likely to have an impartial

786
00:48:20,390 --> 00:48:22,870
perspective on on the crime?

787
00:48:24,390 --> 00:48:26,390
What do you think about that question?

788
00:48:26,840 --> 00:48:29,400
Yeah, that's a I think that's a fantastic question.

789
00:48:29,560 --> 00:48:35,560
That it it certainly seems to be the case that and I think

790
00:48:35,560 --> 00:48:41,160
the law does recognize this and and does its best to try to remove

791
00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:46,280
the partiality, the partial jurors from being able to sit on cases.

792
00:48:46,520 --> 00:48:52,040
But it would be interesting to think about I think more

793
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:58,990
deeply what are the kinds of cues that uh offenders

794
00:48:58,990 --> 00:49:04,590
are going to give off that jurors might might lead jurors to be less

795
00:49:04,590 --> 00:49:05,470
impartial?

796
00:49:05,870 --> 00:49:06,110
Right.

797
00:49:06,350 --> 00:49:10,670
Like like if you're, I mean, just thinking it concretely, like if you're a family member of

798
00:49:10,670 --> 00:49:16,590
a homeless person, you know, like that's a really that's that's that's a really terrible

799
00:49:16,590 --> 00:49:21,740
thing if like the fact that somebody on the juror thinks that, you know, my uncle is gross

800
00:49:21,740 --> 00:49:26,140
and wouldn't want to be around them, which has zero bearing on whether or not they did

801
00:49:26,140 --> 00:49:30,380
something, has zero bearing on like what is objectively right to do legally.

802
00:49:30,700 --> 00:49:35,580
But the simple fact that, like, you know, my poor uncle is gross to this person who's

803
00:49:35,580 --> 00:49:39,180
sitting in the jury box is gonna have an effect on their psychology.

804
00:49:39,340 --> 00:49:41,260
That seems important to know.

805
00:49:41,420 --> 00:49:44,300
And like it's and like this is happening now, right?

806
00:49:44,380 --> 00:49:49,610
Like this, the idea, at least the the idea in theory, and presumably it plays out.

807
00:49:49,770 --> 00:49:55,610
And I think there's probably lots of cases where this idea of association value

808
00:49:55,690 --> 00:49:59,530
um affecting these decisions, that seems really important.

809
00:49:59,690 --> 00:50:00,890
Is this known at all?

810
00:50:01,130 --> 00:50:04,090
Like in the legal community?

811
00:50:05,050 --> 00:50:10,800
Oh, I I think that they're They tend to

812
00:50:10,800 --> 00:50:13,200
rely really heavily on intuition.

813
00:50:13,760 --> 00:50:19,280
Uh, attorneys, uh especially in the context of jury selection, that

814
00:50:20,560 --> 00:50:26,400
individual attorneys will have really arbitrary

815
00:50:26,560 --> 00:50:29,170
things that they think matter.

816
00:50:29,330 --> 00:50:35,330
Like to give a concrete example, um, I knew of one attorney who always

817
00:50:35,330 --> 00:50:41,090
looked at the socks that prospective jurors were wearing because he felt like he

818
00:50:41,090 --> 00:50:45,730
could determine personality characteristics from what their socks were like.

819
00:50:45,890 --> 00:50:46,130
Right.

820
00:50:46,450 --> 00:50:52,290
And there was another attorney who would always ask if you were at the airport.

821
00:50:52,450 --> 00:50:57,090
So he would ask prospective jurors if you were at the airport and you had to buy a magazine

822
00:50:57,090 --> 00:50:59,940
at the bookstand, what magazine would you pick?

823
00:51:00,100 --> 00:51:05,460
And then would use that to try to infer something useful about

824
00:51:05,940 --> 00:51:07,540
which jures they should select.

825
00:51:07,700 --> 00:51:13,380
And so it's it's not a very scientifically informed

826
00:51:13,700 --> 00:51:18,020
process, I would say, um for the most part.

827
00:51:18,890 --> 00:51:23,930
If you were design if you if we were designing the Keila Williams uh uh approved legal

828
00:51:23,930 --> 00:51:29,450
system, would you have uh every prospective juror fill out a prospective welfare

829
00:51:29,610 --> 00:51:34,650
trade-off ratio questionnaire with regard to the perpetrator toward themselves and then

830
00:51:34,810 --> 00:51:40,090
look at the uh the average uh welfare trade-off prospective welfare trade-off ratio and

831
00:51:40,090 --> 00:51:45,690
exclude jurors with uh whose whose uh scores were, you know, say more than a standard

832
00:51:45,690 --> 00:51:48,640
deviation away from from the mean or something like that?

833
00:51:49,920 --> 00:51:52,320
That would certainly be an interesting approach.

834
00:51:53,680 --> 00:51:58,320
I mean, because that that is a very legal, a very law, a very lawyer-y response.

835
00:51:58,480 --> 00:51:59,440
Very legal healing response.

836
00:52:03,040 --> 00:52:03,280
Exactly.

837
00:52:03,520 --> 00:52:06,800
But but that seems to be what lawyers are intuitively trying to do.

838
00:52:06,960 --> 00:52:11,570
Like, you know, if if say a black person was murdered, uh, and uh, you know, they're gonna

839
00:52:11,570 --> 00:52:15,730
look at the the race of each pr prospective jury member to see if they're gonna be an

840
00:52:15,730 --> 00:52:18,770
impartial um, you know, uh juror for for the crime.

841
00:52:18,930 --> 00:52:22,770
If it was racially motivated, that's gonna, you know, d depending on people's racial views,

842
00:52:22,850 --> 00:52:24,530
that's gonna potentially influence their decision.

843
00:52:24,610 --> 00:52:28,610
So presumably that happens a lot in in legal proceedings if they're if it was related to

844
00:52:28,610 --> 00:52:33,200
religion or sexual orientation or all the basically any detail of the crime is going to be

845
00:52:33,200 --> 00:52:37,520
relevant for excluding jurors who might have a stake in the outcome or who might be, you

846
00:52:37,520 --> 00:52:39,360
know, biased in in one way or the other.

847
00:52:39,440 --> 00:52:42,960
And and lawyers have an intuitive sense of, you know, what's going to affect a person's

848
00:52:42,960 --> 00:52:43,920
level of impartiality.

849
00:52:44,000 --> 00:52:48,000
So presumably they're already doing something like this intuitively, but this would just

850
00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:51,200
be, you know, putting it, you know, in more concrete terms.

851
00:52:52,160 --> 00:52:57,610
I'm curious, have either of you been called for jury duty or served as a juror?

852
00:52:57,930 --> 00:53:03,930
I have been, um, but I um I've gotten out of it, or maybe I was kicked out either

853
00:53:03,930 --> 00:53:04,250
way.

854
00:53:04,410 --> 00:53:10,090
Um, so uh there there's been only one or two times where I wanted to because I had the

855
00:53:10,090 --> 00:53:14,090
time, and even then I wasn't allowed to typically, you know, it's just like I'm a I'm an

856
00:53:14,090 --> 00:53:17,450
experimental psychologist and sort of that excludes me.

857
00:53:17,610 --> 00:53:22,970
Um, but uh there's been times both whether or not I want to, uh I've

858
00:53:23,130 --> 00:53:27,060
never been um allowed to be on a jury.

859
00:53:27,780 --> 00:53:30,580
Yeah, I've been uh no I've never served on a jury.

860
00:53:30,660 --> 00:53:34,180
I came close once, but I didn't want to, and I found a way to get out of it.

861
00:53:34,740 --> 00:53:40,020
Um so like I uh so the uh like I there was the trial was gonna be like when a friend was

862
00:53:40,020 --> 00:53:43,460
coming to visit me and I would have had to like miss him coming to visit.

863
00:53:43,540 --> 00:53:46,420
Uh and um and so I like I wanted to get out of it.

864
00:53:46,580 --> 00:53:52,290
Um and so what I did was I you know I I didn't lie, I gave honest

865
00:53:52,290 --> 00:53:53,250
information about my background.

866
00:53:53,570 --> 00:53:54,370
We can edit this out.

867
00:53:54,450 --> 00:53:58,290
Uh so you know, I you know mentioned I was a PhD psychologist and you know I I you know

868
00:53:58,370 --> 00:54:01,570
said I I was skeptical of eyewitness testimony because I've read all the literature from

869
00:54:01,570 --> 00:54:05,010
Elizabeth Loftus that eyewitness testimony is unreliable and then the case involved

870
00:54:05,090 --> 00:54:09,170
eyewitness testimony and I you know I said that maybe a little bit more forcefully than I

871
00:54:09,170 --> 00:54:13,330
otherwise would have just you know to hopefully scare the the lawyer away and it it it

872
00:54:13,330 --> 00:54:17,720
worked and the the other the prosecutor uh did not want me as a juror for that reason.

873
00:54:17,800 --> 00:54:20,840
Um and so that was a successful strategy for getting out of it.

874
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:24,520
Um so yeah, that that's a pointer for anyone else who's listening who wants to try to get

875
00:54:24,520 --> 00:54:25,560
out of jury duty.

876
00:54:25,800 --> 00:54:30,440
Um so we got recommendations for, you know, committing crimes, for getting out of jury

877
00:54:30,520 --> 00:54:34,520
duty, for writing bad screenplays about uh the number four killer.

878
00:54:34,760 --> 00:54:39,000
We got a lot of why why else would you why else would you uh either learn about the law or

879
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:40,200
listen to a podcast?

880
00:54:40,810 --> 00:54:41,210
I know.

881
00:54:41,370 --> 00:54:44,170
This is just a treasure trove of insights for our listeners.

882
00:54:44,490 --> 00:54:46,490
Um anyway, affordances, right?

883
00:54:46,650 --> 00:54:47,530
Affordances, right?

884
00:54:47,610 --> 00:54:52,490
That's one of the because Keila, you came out of the ASU um school of evolutionary.

885
00:54:52,730 --> 00:54:55,770
Can you talk like just as a we do tangents all the time.

886
00:54:56,010 --> 00:54:58,170
Um you're from the ASU school, is that right?

887
00:54:58,490 --> 00:54:59,450
Arizona State?

888
00:54:59,690 --> 00:55:00,010
Yes.

889
00:55:00,250 --> 00:55:00,490
Yeah.

890
00:55:00,570 --> 00:55:06,560
And your advisors were Steve Newberg in the psych department and Michael Sachs in the

891
00:55:06,560 --> 00:55:06,960
law school.

892
00:55:07,200 --> 00:55:08,000
Oh fantastic.

893
00:55:08,080 --> 00:55:08,240
Cool.

894
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:13,840
And what what is the um their thing is sort of affordances, is that right?

895
00:55:14,480 --> 00:55:14,720
Yeah.

896
00:55:14,800 --> 00:55:20,560
So affordance management theory, the idea that the goal of the social mind is to identify

897
00:55:20,560 --> 00:55:26,240
threats and opportunities in our environment and to respond to them in opportunity

898
00:55:26,240 --> 00:55:28,080
enhancing and threat mitigating ways.

899
00:55:30,030 --> 00:55:30,910
What a crazy idea.

900
00:55:31,070 --> 00:55:31,710
I cannot believe.

901
00:55:32,430 --> 00:55:38,430
How could it just make no sense at all to me that we would have evolved to avoid threats

902
00:55:38,750 --> 00:55:40,750
and uh pursue benefits?

903
00:55:40,910 --> 00:55:42,590
I mean, what a crazy way of thinking.

904
00:55:42,990 --> 00:55:47,630
It must sound stulted to people who are unaware of the history of the behavioral sciences

905
00:55:47,630 --> 00:55:48,990
or the legal sciences, right?

906
00:55:49,070 --> 00:55:52,190
To sort of s say that because it's sort of like, well duh.

907
00:55:52,590 --> 00:55:57,710
But then exactly Keel as you're saying, like it sounds like what you are doing is exactly

908
00:55:58,100 --> 00:56:02,980
in a lovely example of applying that really important idea to a really important area where

909
00:56:02,980 --> 00:56:08,500
it hasn't been done before, which is just to say, look, jurors are assessing affordances

910
00:56:09,140 --> 00:56:14,500
in a way that's completely independent from what the letter of the law is.

911
00:56:15,140 --> 00:56:20,900
And one of my primary research areas has been about understanding people's attitudes

912
00:56:20,900 --> 00:56:22,260
towards the death penalty.

913
00:56:22,420 --> 00:56:27,780
And that is a really interesting area to think about applying

914
00:56:27,950 --> 00:56:29,150
affordances too.

915
00:56:29,790 --> 00:56:31,390
So tell us more about that.

916
00:56:32,350 --> 00:56:38,190
So I uh worked on a project with Ashley Votruba and

917
00:56:38,670 --> 00:56:44,670
uh our advisors, and it was looking at how resource scarcity

918
00:56:44,670 --> 00:56:49,230
influences people's attitudes towards the death penalty and their willingness to impose

919
00:56:49,230 --> 00:56:52,190
death on uh offenders.

920
00:56:52,910 --> 00:56:58,680
And uh It was really an interesting project because so much of the death

921
00:56:58,680 --> 00:57:03,880
penalty attitudes, literature, and psychology has focused on really proximate explanations.

922
00:57:04,440 --> 00:57:10,200
So, for example, political ideology that conservatives are more likely to endorse the death

923
00:57:10,200 --> 00:57:12,040
penalty than liberals are.

924
00:57:17,770 --> 00:57:22,730
I'm not bagging on that work by any means.

925
00:57:22,970 --> 00:57:28,250
But there weren't really any approaches looking at more ulti explanations.

926
00:57:28,730 --> 00:57:34,410
And so we started from the premise of when

927
00:57:34,730 --> 00:57:40,570
you are faced with a serious offender in your group, you have to make an important decision

928
00:57:40,570 --> 00:57:45,080
about whether or not you're going to try to rehabilitate them or if you are going to

929
00:57:45,080 --> 00:57:50,520
eliminate them, whether that's like banishment from the group or actually killing them,

930
00:57:50,840 --> 00:57:51,480
whichever.

931
00:57:51,800 --> 00:57:56,040
You either need to decide if you're going to get rid of them or you're going to try to

932
00:57:56,600 --> 00:57:58,760
incorporate them back into the group.

933
00:57:59,720 --> 00:58:05,720
And what we suggested was that the amount of available resources in the environment is

934
00:58:05,720 --> 00:58:07,720
going to affect that calculus.

935
00:58:07,960 --> 00:58:13,770
That if you have plentiful resources, then you're going to be more willing to take a

936
00:58:13,770 --> 00:58:15,850
chance on rehabilitating the person.

937
00:58:15,930 --> 00:58:21,450
And if your resources are scarce, you're going to be less willing to risk

938
00:58:21,450 --> 00:58:22,730
repeated offending.

939
00:58:22,810 --> 00:58:26,250
And so you're going to be more likely to get rid of the person.

940
00:58:26,650 --> 00:58:31,930
And we found some evidence to support that, both archivally

941
00:58:32,330 --> 00:58:37,800
across the globe, in the United States, and then uh experimentally as well in the lab.

942
00:58:38,280 --> 00:58:40,280
So that was a really, a really fun project.

943
00:58:40,680 --> 00:58:45,880
Well, how do you assess or manipulate resources or what what is meant by resources?

944
00:58:46,360 --> 00:58:51,640
So what we did for our lab studies was we gave people a

945
00:58:51,640 --> 00:58:56,840
slideshow about the economy, and it either suggested that the economy was doing great and

946
00:58:56,840 --> 00:59:02,440
was in an upswing and there are all these available jobs and everything is fantastic, or it

947
00:59:02,440 --> 00:59:08,230
said that the economy is in the shitter and is just getting worse and there are no jobs

948
00:59:08,470 --> 00:59:09,350
and so forth.

949
00:59:09,510 --> 00:59:15,350
And at the time that we ran that study, uh it was shortly after

950
00:59:15,350 --> 00:59:16,550
the Great Recession.

951
00:59:16,710 --> 00:59:22,550
So it was actually pretty believable that the economy could be either good

952
00:59:22,550 --> 00:59:24,310
or bad at that time.

953
00:59:24,710 --> 00:59:30,220
Um and then after they read the economy

954
00:59:30,540 --> 00:59:36,540
information, then they answered questions about um their attitudes toward

955
00:59:36,620 --> 00:59:37,340
the death penalty.

956
00:59:37,420 --> 00:59:40,140
So did they think that the death penalty is necessary?

957
00:59:40,940 --> 00:59:43,900
Do they think that it should occur faster?

958
00:59:44,220 --> 00:59:45,420
Those sorts of things.

959
00:59:46,220 --> 00:59:48,460
So just can I let me flesh this out?

960
00:59:48,540 --> 00:59:52,590
And you can tell me if it's right or wrong, but at different scales.

961
00:59:52,990 --> 00:59:58,750
So um of sort of um a time sampling, there's sort of software in

962
00:59:58,750 --> 01:00:02,270
my mind for detecting resource availability.

963
01:00:02,430 --> 01:00:06,750
So like, you know, uh do are things, you know, it's intuitive, right?

964
01:00:06,830 --> 01:00:08,510
Like are things nice, kept well kept up.

965
01:00:08,670 --> 01:00:10,910
There's enough stuff for me, for my family, whatever.

966
01:00:11,150 --> 01:00:13,710
And then uh, or like it's just desperate.

967
01:00:13,870 --> 01:00:15,470
There's a lot, I see lots of desperation.

968
01:00:15,550 --> 01:00:21,200
There's just not enough stuff and then if you encounter somebody like a

969
01:00:21,200 --> 01:00:26,320
criminal, there's just this issue of like, and it's gonna take resources to rehabilitate

970
01:00:26,640 --> 01:00:26,960
them.

971
01:00:27,360 --> 01:00:31,760
This idea that sort of like, well, it's gonna it's gonna be cheaper and quicker to just

972
01:00:31,760 --> 01:00:32,240
kill 'em.

973
01:00:32,480 --> 01:00:37,200
I mean, this is like very blunt, but the psychology is sort of like it's gonna be cheaper

974
01:00:37,200 --> 01:00:41,200
and quicker to just kill them as opposed to like invest all this time and energy and money

975
01:00:41,280 --> 01:00:42,720
in is that fair?

976
01:00:43,070 --> 01:00:44,030
Yes, exactly.

977
01:00:44,350 --> 01:00:44,510
Yeah.

978
01:00:44,670 --> 01:00:46,990
Now, is that accurate in any way?

979
01:00:47,230 --> 01:00:53,150
Like, even assuming that people can accurately assess resources, like, is that

980
01:00:53,150 --> 01:00:53,870
even true?

981
01:00:54,030 --> 01:00:58,750
That like um uh like imprisoning people is very expensive.

982
01:00:58,910 --> 01:01:02,430
I think killing people is even more expensive, let alone the morality of it.

983
01:01:02,590 --> 01:01:07,710
Like uh like this seems like a very like mismatchy kind of thing, um, let alone like

984
01:01:07,790 --> 01:01:13,740
letting people decide who should die because of like ambient feelings about scarcity.

985
01:01:14,380 --> 01:01:20,220
So it is true that killing someone in America with the death penalty is more

986
01:01:20,220 --> 01:01:22,540
expensive than keeping them alive for life.

987
01:01:22,940 --> 01:01:27,020
And that is because of all of the mandatory appeals processes that we have.

988
01:01:27,260 --> 01:01:31,820
If it were the case that the person would be found guilty and sentenced to death and then

989
01:01:31,820 --> 01:01:34,590
taken out back and shot, it would not be more expensive.

990
01:01:34,670 --> 01:01:35,710
It would be way cheaper.

991
01:01:36,030 --> 01:01:41,790
Um it's more legally expensive, but not the actual act is is not more expensive.

992
01:01:41,950 --> 01:01:42,270
Got it.

993
01:01:42,510 --> 01:01:42,590
Right.

994
01:01:42,910 --> 01:01:47,550
I can say as somebody who lived in Germany, uh do not recommend the first or the the

995
01:01:47,550 --> 01:01:48,430
cheaper option.

996
01:01:48,590 --> 01:01:52,750
There or like there's a long history of that being a really bad uh scenario.

997
01:01:52,990 --> 01:01:56,190
So be careful what yeah, the uh pr money's not everything.

998
01:01:56,270 --> 01:01:56,910
Yes, exactly.

999
01:01:57,310 --> 01:01:57,550
Interesting.

1000
01:01:57,630 --> 01:02:01,960
Would would would you expect, you know, making people aware of this fact, say the

1001
01:02:01,960 --> 01:02:07,800
expensiveness, um, would that be another variable that could push

1002
01:02:07,800 --> 01:02:08,840
people one way or the other?

1003
01:02:09,000 --> 01:02:13,160
Say, you know, if I'm if I think resources are really scarce, I might as well get rid of

1004
01:02:13,160 --> 01:02:16,120
this person 'cause they're another mouth to feed and, you know, there's not enough stuff to

1005
01:02:16,120 --> 01:02:16,760
go around.

1006
01:02:16,920 --> 01:02:20,520
Uh but if then if you if you tell me that actually executing him is going to be even more

1007
01:02:20,520 --> 01:02:24,520
expensive uh than putting him in prison, then, you know, maybe that'll push me in the other

1008
01:02:24,520 --> 01:02:24,680
way.

1009
01:02:24,840 --> 01:02:25,880
Would you make that prediction?

1010
01:02:26,570 --> 01:02:27,690
We actually tested that.

1011
01:02:27,850 --> 01:02:33,690
We measured we measured how people how expensive people thought um one was relative to the

1012
01:02:33,690 --> 01:02:34,010
other.

1013
01:02:34,170 --> 01:02:39,370
And that did not actually push around their their death penalty decisions.

1014
01:02:40,330 --> 01:02:45,370
So even even if you tell people it's cheaper to keep them alive when they detect scarcity,

1015
01:02:45,450 --> 01:02:46,810
they still say kill 'em.

1016
01:02:47,290 --> 01:02:47,850
Yes.

1017
01:02:49,050 --> 01:02:51,940
So to what what what is your why is that?

1018
01:02:52,100 --> 01:02:53,220
What do you think?

1019
01:02:54,340 --> 01:02:59,780
Is it just sort of like the system is just sort of doesn't believe that

1020
01:03:00,100 --> 01:03:06,020
explicit information or I think it's because

1021
01:03:10,330 --> 01:03:16,010
The mind doesn't actually care that much about

1022
01:03:16,170 --> 01:03:20,490
the reality of the cost of doing it.

1023
01:03:21,050 --> 01:03:26,730
That when resources are scarce, even if you tell me that it's

1024
01:03:26,730 --> 01:03:30,970
less expensive, the mind is still going to want to do that.

1025
01:03:31,120 --> 01:03:32,160
It's just so counterintuitive.

1026
01:03:33,040 --> 01:03:33,200
Yeah.

1027
01:03:33,600 --> 01:03:36,880
I think it's just a it's a counterintuitive idea at the end of the day.

1028
01:03:37,040 --> 01:03:40,880
Like you might tell me, yeah, I might explicitly say, yeah, okay, I I believe that it's

1029
01:03:40,880 --> 01:03:45,280
more expensive, I, you know, but intuitively it doesn't seem like that's right.

1030
01:03:45,440 --> 01:03:48,640
And and that might be what's what's shaping people's attitudes.

1031
01:03:48,720 --> 01:03:52,480
Aaron Powell I wonder is could it be and Keel, I'm sure you've thought of this and maybe I

1032
01:03:52,720 --> 01:03:58,070
I'm just sort of slow to catch up, but like could it also be sort of a folk or like a smart

1033
01:03:58,070 --> 01:04:00,470
folk version of sort of uh deterrence.

1034
01:04:00,630 --> 01:04:05,750
So sort of if we're in a very difficult, scarce world,

1035
01:04:06,470 --> 01:04:12,310
then if somebody is like doing something bad, it's a higher

1036
01:04:12,310 --> 01:04:13,270
cost, right?

1037
01:04:13,430 --> 01:04:18,140
So sort of like I really want to like slap down bad behavior.

1038
01:04:18,300 --> 01:04:21,020
Like it's this is this is no joke, kids.

1039
01:04:21,180 --> 01:04:23,420
Like you can't do bad stuff, right?

1040
01:04:23,580 --> 01:04:25,020
Like that's the mode you're in.

1041
01:04:25,340 --> 01:04:30,540
And so it's this it's this flipping into like punitive mode

1042
01:04:31,100 --> 01:04:36,380
when costs are high for for just doing the wrong thing, right?

1043
01:04:36,540 --> 01:04:39,260
Um and that would be a different thing.

1044
01:04:39,500 --> 01:04:45,210
And that would even be, if that was the the the causal structure for why that would be,

1045
01:04:45,370 --> 01:04:50,250
it would, it would even be rational, quote unquote, to even ignore the cost of that one

1046
01:04:50,570 --> 01:04:56,570
murder in the sense of if if people believe the death penalty is more uh deterrent, even if

1047
01:04:56,570 --> 01:05:01,610
the people aren't consciously thinking this, then it's sort of it's still rational because

1048
01:05:01,610 --> 01:05:05,930
you're you're you're deterring more other people from doing the wrong thing in a highly

1049
01:05:05,930 --> 01:05:06,970
scarce environment.

1050
01:05:07,130 --> 01:05:10,280
That might be wrong, but that would be, I don't know, have I'm sure you've thought of that.

1051
01:05:10,360 --> 01:05:11,880
Like what do you think about that?

1052
01:05:12,360 --> 01:05:16,600
Well, one thing that's interesting is that we've found that resource scarcity doesn't make

1053
01:05:16,600 --> 01:05:22,360
people more punitive in general, that it doesn't just heighten their their desire to punish

1054
01:05:22,360 --> 01:05:28,250
and punish harshly, that it's specific to the use of capital punishment.

1055
01:05:28,570 --> 01:05:28,810
Wow.

1056
01:05:28,970 --> 01:05:29,610
That's cool.

1057
01:05:29,690 --> 01:05:30,090
That's amaz.

1058
01:05:30,330 --> 01:05:31,370
That's such beautiful data.

1059
01:05:31,450 --> 01:05:31,690
Yeah.

1060
01:05:31,770 --> 01:05:32,570
And yeah.

1061
01:05:32,810 --> 01:05:37,370
We're I am we're real time going through the uh you're correcting us.

1062
01:05:37,450 --> 01:05:38,170
This is wonderful.

1063
01:05:38,250 --> 01:05:38,490
Yeah.

1064
01:05:38,810 --> 01:05:38,970
Yeah.

1065
01:05:39,050 --> 01:05:43,130
No, it was an interesting hypothesis, but yeah, that that that data uh speaks against that

1066
01:05:43,130 --> 01:05:43,690
hypothesis.

1067
01:05:44,010 --> 01:05:44,250
Yeah.

1068
01:05:44,890 --> 01:05:45,450
Interesting.

1069
01:05:45,610 --> 01:05:49,210
There's also this thing, I mean, like there's this trope and I think believe it's true.

1070
01:05:49,290 --> 01:05:52,650
Like, you know, like for the example, like, you know, I w I watched a YouTube video of like

1071
01:05:52,810 --> 01:05:58,300
a northern European prison, which you know depicted the prisoner getting up in the morning

1072
01:05:58,300 --> 01:06:02,780
and like, you know, leaving his apartment and going to work, you know, and coming home in

1073
01:06:02,780 --> 01:06:03,100
the day.

1074
01:06:03,260 --> 01:06:07,180
You know, and that's a very different kind of, and this is like for a pretty serious crime,

1075
01:06:07,420 --> 01:06:07,900
you know.

1076
01:06:08,060 --> 01:06:13,820
Um, and and so that that's an example of sort of like there's a

1077
01:06:13,820 --> 01:06:19,810
social, um a very big social safety net people feel taken care of in

1078
01:06:19,810 --> 01:06:22,530
like northern European social democracies.

1079
01:06:22,690 --> 01:06:27,970
And that seems to correlate with sort of non-punitive sort of

1080
01:06:27,970 --> 01:06:33,090
retraining or you know minimizing recidivism sort of policies

1081
01:06:33,650 --> 01:06:39,570
versus the trope of sort of, you know, in the somewhere like certain places in the US where

1082
01:06:39,570 --> 01:06:43,650
it's sort of like, you know, oh, you shoplifted three times, we're gonna have to kill you.

1083
01:06:43,730 --> 01:06:49,620
I'm sorry, you know, like um is that uh is that a character, caricature,

1084
01:06:49,700 --> 01:06:52,100
or is that sort of borne out in the data?

1085
01:06:52,180 --> 01:06:57,940
Like am I um am I reading into that with anecdotes or is that sort of what you're

1086
01:06:57,940 --> 01:06:58,580
saying?

1087
01:07:01,060 --> 01:07:06,900
That like somewhere, so for example, like you could actually would the would the would it

1088
01:07:06,980 --> 01:07:11,940
would it be that, you know, if you had somewhere, for example, you took somewhere with

1089
01:07:11,940 --> 01:07:17,470
really bad social safety notes, Healthcare is expensive, it's not

1090
01:07:17,470 --> 01:07:20,670
available, people's kids are hungry, food is expensive.

1091
01:07:20,830 --> 01:07:26,430
And you just shifted to a northern European model where food is cheap, healthcare is free

1092
01:07:26,510 --> 01:07:30,750
and universal, childcare is free and universal, people feel taken care of, that would

1093
01:07:30,750 --> 01:07:34,590
immediately change sort of how people feel about prisoners.

1094
01:07:34,750 --> 01:07:36,750
Is that sort of what this is saying?

1095
01:07:37,550 --> 01:07:38,510
That's interesting.

1096
01:07:38,990 --> 01:07:43,790
I can speak from the data that we have that when we were looking at the global

1097
01:07:44,700 --> 01:07:50,540
data that we were using the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index

1098
01:07:50,540 --> 01:07:52,940
as our proxy for resource availability.

1099
01:07:53,100 --> 01:07:58,700
And that does incorporate a number of the things that you're talking about, like education,

1100
01:07:59,100 --> 01:08:02,780
in addition to just resources themselves.

1101
01:08:03,740 --> 01:08:09,590
And we found that places that have lower human development were more

1102
01:08:09,590 --> 01:08:14,150
likely to have the death penalty as a form of punishment.

1103
01:08:15,670 --> 01:08:21,270
So I I want to dig so my hypothesis here is that it's not so much about

1104
01:08:21,510 --> 01:08:23,830
resources at an absolute level.

1105
01:08:24,070 --> 01:08:28,360
Because if you think about it in the modern world, our absolute access to resources is

1106
01:08:28,360 --> 01:08:31,880
probably uh significantly higher than it would have been in ancestral environments.

1107
01:08:32,040 --> 01:08:37,320
Um what it's what it's indexing is not so much you know whether there's a lot of stuff or

1108
01:08:37,320 --> 01:08:42,040
not a lot of stuff, but the zero sumness of the stuff available.

1109
01:08:42,600 --> 01:08:48,470
So if we live in a world that's more positive sum where um you know maybe there aren't

1110
01:08:48,470 --> 01:08:54,470
that many resources in an absolute sense, but uh, you know, eliminating you is not going to

1111
01:08:54,470 --> 01:08:56,550
increase the amount of resources available to me.

1112
01:08:56,630 --> 01:08:58,790
Because it's just about positive sum cooperation.

1113
01:08:58,870 --> 01:09:02,550
Um, and you know, maybe having more people will increase the amount of cooperation and

1114
01:09:02,550 --> 01:09:04,150
increase the pie for for everyone.

1115
01:09:04,230 --> 01:09:07,030
And so it doesn't it doesn't really make sense to try to eliminate someone.

1116
01:09:07,110 --> 01:09:11,030
But if we are in a state where there are limited resources and where there is zero sum

1117
01:09:11,110 --> 01:09:12,180
competition over them.

1118
01:09:12,500 --> 01:09:16,020
Then in that case, eliminating you is going to be a pretty appealing prospect because it's

1119
01:09:16,020 --> 01:09:20,900
going to directly increase the amount of resources available to me.

1120
01:09:21,860 --> 01:09:26,580
So of course, I would expect, you know, zero-sumness and absolute resource levels to

1121
01:09:26,580 --> 01:09:29,940
probably be correlated, but they're still distinguishable and they're not the same thing.

1122
01:09:30,020 --> 01:09:34,310
And so I would expect, you know, this human development index, poorer countries are tend to

1123
01:09:34,310 --> 01:09:39,030
be countries with uh crappier institutions, with more uh zero-sum competition and

1124
01:09:39,030 --> 01:09:43,670
corruption, uh, you know, in in politicians, where the society is much more about fighting

1125
01:09:43,670 --> 01:09:48,790
over uh the slices of the pie uh than it is about growing the pie, uh and which which you

1126
01:09:48,790 --> 01:09:50,630
tend to find in in in wealthier countries.

1127
01:09:50,710 --> 01:09:54,550
And so in those in those more zero-sum contexts where there's more there's competition over

1128
01:09:55,030 --> 01:09:59,750
power um and resources are it's less about cooperation and and growing the pie and more

1129
01:09:59,750 --> 01:10:04,080
about just forming coalitions and grabbing what little of the pie is is left.

1130
01:10:04,240 --> 01:10:07,680
That in those uh contexts, there's more of a zero-sum mentality.

1131
01:10:07,760 --> 01:10:13,280
And maybe that is what's driving this result rather than well, absolute levels of wealth.

1132
01:10:14,400 --> 01:10:16,640
No, I I think that's really insightful.

1133
01:10:16,800 --> 01:10:22,560
Um it it reminds me a little of the the fact that we saw differences

1134
01:10:22,670 --> 01:10:27,070
across states based on state per capita income and whether or not they were likely to have

1135
01:10:27,070 --> 01:10:30,510
the death penalty, even controlling for the political ideology of the state.

1136
01:10:30,670 --> 01:10:36,110
So I I totally agree with you that I think it's it's about a relative comparison, not about

1137
01:10:36,110 --> 01:10:38,910
the absolute um number of resources.

1138
01:10:39,150 --> 01:10:42,350
Can I add another layer of complexity to this?

1139
01:10:42,670 --> 01:10:42,830
No.

1140
01:10:45,870 --> 01:10:51,740
So Ashley and I also thought that the value of the

1141
01:10:51,740 --> 01:10:55,180
offender would matter in this calculation.

1142
01:10:55,420 --> 01:11:01,340
So when resources are scarce, so even if resources are scarce, you're not going to

1143
01:11:01,340 --> 01:11:05,500
get rid of the most valuable group member, no matter what they do.

1144
01:11:06,380 --> 01:11:12,150
So we set up some experiments where we tested this, where we manipulated the

1145
01:11:12,150 --> 01:11:18,150
value of the group member by making the offender either a very good

1146
01:11:18,150 --> 01:11:23,910
hunter or an artist or a schlub who was

1147
01:11:23,910 --> 01:11:26,150
lazy and didn't contribute anything to the group.

1148
01:11:26,230 --> 01:11:30,950
And then looked to see how resource availability would affect people's willingness to

1149
01:11:30,950 --> 01:11:36,710
punish, and found that when resources are scarce, people actually became much less willing

1150
01:11:36,800 --> 01:11:40,960
to ban it was banishment in this case, to banish the hunter from the group.

1151
01:11:42,560 --> 01:11:43,360
Interesting.

1152
01:11:43,920 --> 01:11:48,240
I mean, I wonder it seems like the logic you're laying out here with regard to capital

1153
01:11:48,240 --> 01:11:51,920
punishment would also apply equally to immigration.

1154
01:11:52,160 --> 01:11:56,240
So that's another case where you are, you know, as opposed to eliminating a member of the

1155
01:11:56,240 --> 01:11:58,160
group, you are welcoming in a new member of the group.

1156
01:11:58,320 --> 01:12:02,230
And so in that case, the same logic should apply, where if there's a limited amount of

1157
01:12:02,230 --> 01:12:05,750
stuff and we're letting another person into the group, that is going to reduce the amount

1158
01:12:05,750 --> 01:12:09,750
of stuff available for me if we if we live in a zero sum world.

1159
01:12:10,230 --> 01:12:15,590
And so have you thought about maybe extending this logic to um to immigration

1160
01:12:15,590 --> 01:12:16,470
attitudes?

1161
01:12:17,030 --> 01:12:19,270
I haven't, but I I love that idea.

1162
01:12:19,510 --> 01:12:21,430
I think that makes total sense.

1163
01:12:22,680 --> 01:12:24,600
And there is research out there.

1164
01:12:24,920 --> 01:12:28,680
I think Carrie Pick is one person who's been working on this, looking at the different

1165
01:12:28,680 --> 01:12:33,400
kinds of threats that different immigrant groups are seen to pose.

1166
01:12:33,720 --> 01:12:39,480
And the um finds that Mexican Americans are seen to pose a more

1167
01:12:39,640 --> 01:12:40,840
economic threat.

1168
01:12:41,160 --> 01:12:47,070
And so I wonder if maybe it also would be affected by what whether or not the

1169
01:12:47,070 --> 01:12:52,510
immigrants are seen as posing an economic threat versus a safety threat versus some other

1170
01:12:52,510 --> 01:12:54,350
type of threat or benefit.

1171
01:12:55,150 --> 01:12:55,550
That's great.

1172
01:12:56,110 --> 01:12:59,230
Yeah, no, I'm aware of there's there's some interesting data, I think a political scientist

1173
01:12:59,310 --> 01:13:04,270
by the name of Haynes Mueller or Hans Mueller, uh basically showing that when you specify

1174
01:13:04,270 --> 01:13:07,390
the characteristics of the immigrants, you know, whether what country they're from, you

1175
01:13:07,390 --> 01:13:10,910
know, whether they're religious or not, whether they're high highly educated or highly

1176
01:13:10,910 --> 01:13:16,760
skilled or not, um, you tend to actually eliminate most partisan differences in in

1177
01:13:16,760 --> 01:13:17,640
immigration attitudes.

1178
01:13:17,880 --> 01:13:21,240
So if it's like a if it's specified that this is a highly skilled, highly educated person

1179
01:13:21,240 --> 01:13:23,880
who's coming in to immigrate, you don't really see partisan differences.

1180
01:13:23,960 --> 01:13:27,640
You know, Democrats, Republicans are happy to let that person in, which I think speaks to

1181
01:13:27,640 --> 01:13:32,280
this hypothesis that it's really about options of of zero sumness and association value.

1182
01:13:32,440 --> 01:13:35,640
You only really get partisan differences when it comes to uh Latin American immigrants and

1183
01:13:35,640 --> 01:13:36,600
Muslim immigrants.

1184
01:13:36,680 --> 01:13:39,150
And why that is the case is an interesting question.

1185
01:13:39,230 --> 01:13:43,310
Uh with uh with the case of m Muslim intr uh immigrants, I would expect, you know,

1186
01:13:43,390 --> 01:13:44,750
religiosity to play a role there.

1187
01:13:44,830 --> 01:13:49,630
And, you know, uh I would expect, you know, people who are more um devout to be more

1188
01:13:49,630 --> 01:13:51,790
threatened by a religious rival, perhaps.

1189
01:13:51,870 --> 01:13:54,910
Uh with with Latin Americans, I'm not sure it it may have something to do with with

1190
01:13:54,910 --> 01:13:58,750
economic threat and the and the perception that maybe they're gonna be competing with uh

1191
01:13:58,830 --> 01:14:02,030
with you know working class white people for low skilled labor.

1192
01:14:02,190 --> 01:14:03,790
That could that could be uh a part of it.

1193
01:14:03,870 --> 01:14:05,380
But it's an interesting, interesting topic.

1194
01:14:05,700 --> 01:14:11,380
I mean also those two regions were are also sort of like we have a a very checkered history

1195
01:14:11,380 --> 01:14:16,580
of s of like, you know, the the global north sort of dominating Muslim countries or global

1196
01:14:16,580 --> 01:14:17,220
south countries.

1197
01:14:17,300 --> 01:14:21,460
And so I mean I think like a very rational reaction is like these are people coming from

1198
01:14:21,460 --> 01:14:24,820
more desperate circumstances, all sequel, right?

1199
01:14:24,980 --> 01:14:27,460
Which is fairly accurate all sequel.

1200
01:14:27,540 --> 01:14:28,020
Yeah.

1201
01:14:28,500 --> 01:14:33,690
Sorry, Keila, you were gonna say something No, I was just saying that's really interesting.

1202
01:14:34,010 --> 01:14:34,170
Yeah.

1203
01:14:34,250 --> 01:14:39,210
I mean, this also speaks to like this also predicts, for example, that like association

1204
01:14:39,210 --> 01:14:44,970
value uh and high resources should go together in like uh rhetoric about

1205
01:14:44,970 --> 01:14:48,010
like outgroups, which I think is borne out too.

1206
01:14:48,090 --> 01:14:51,850
Like this is the this idea, like David, you were talking about like the re the kind of

1207
01:14:51,850 --> 01:14:57,840
resources based on what Keela's saying, that like, you know, um, if I want to sort

1208
01:14:57,840 --> 01:15:03,760
of like say that we should really um be upset if I'm like a speaker, you know,

1209
01:15:03,840 --> 01:15:08,480
like a demagogue or something, I should be like, look, there's these low association value

1210
01:15:08,480 --> 01:15:14,080
people who have who have who are taking resources or have resources

1211
01:15:14,400 --> 01:15:15,520
that belong to you.

1212
01:15:15,680 --> 01:15:19,360
Like that's the sort of like the deep structure of like a demagogue in a way.

1213
01:15:19,440 --> 01:15:25,170
And I think that's pretty borne out, um, you know historically right like you know um again

1214
01:15:25,250 --> 01:15:29,010
I'm thinking you know just because of Germany but like you know the the idea that sort of

1215
01:15:29,010 --> 01:15:34,610
like you know the Slavs have our uh have our uh or have our like you know

1216
01:15:34,850 --> 01:15:39,970
space you know for the Third Reich you know so sort of like these people who are subhuman

1217
01:15:40,130 --> 01:15:44,850
are occupying this wonderful land and area that belongs rightly to us.

1218
01:15:45,010 --> 01:15:47,650
Um and you just fill in the blank of other examples.

1219
01:15:47,810 --> 01:15:53,720
So it's a I I think this idea is sort of a lovely example of sort of like the deep

1220
01:15:53,720 --> 01:15:56,760
structure of like this political rhetoric.

1221
01:15:58,680 --> 01:15:59,080
Yeah.

1222
01:15:59,320 --> 01:16:05,320
Um speaking of resources and um their availability or lack thereof, um I know you've

1223
01:16:05,320 --> 01:16:10,680
done some interesting research on stereotypes and how they relate to perceptions of

1224
01:16:10,680 --> 01:16:12,920
resource scarcity and resource availability.

1225
01:16:13,000 --> 01:16:16,440
So I'm curious if you could uh elaborate on on some of that work because I think it's

1226
01:16:16,440 --> 01:16:17,160
really interesting.

1227
01:16:17,670 --> 01:16:18,070
Thank you.

1228
01:16:18,310 --> 01:16:18,630
Yes.

1229
01:16:18,870 --> 01:16:20,870
So I have done some work.

1230
01:16:21,030 --> 01:16:23,990
This was with Oliver Sung and Steve Newberg.

1231
01:16:24,790 --> 01:16:30,710
And we were interested in this idea of ecology stereotypes, about whether

1232
01:16:30,710 --> 01:16:36,710
or not people hold beliefs based on inferences

1233
01:16:36,710 --> 01:16:42,230
of the kinds of environments that others come from, and specifically how that might be

1234
01:16:42,230 --> 01:16:45,270
related to race stereotypes in the US.

1235
01:16:46,070 --> 01:16:51,900
So I I wonder if I should start from the beginning in terms of the theory behind this

1236
01:16:51,980 --> 01:16:53,020
or just talk about it.

1237
01:16:53,740 --> 01:16:53,900
Yeah.

1238
01:16:53,980 --> 01:16:56,220
I mean, it's incredibly, I'm so glad David brought it up.

1239
01:16:56,300 --> 01:16:57,260
It's such incredible work.

1240
01:16:57,340 --> 01:17:00,060
So yeah, and I'm sure many people don't know about it who are listening.

1241
01:17:00,220 --> 01:17:02,540
So yeah, please just start from wherever you think.

1242
01:17:02,780 --> 01:17:03,180
Yeah.

1243
01:17:03,820 --> 01:17:09,500
So the the starting point is that the kinds of environments that people grow up in

1244
01:17:09,500 --> 01:17:11,820
does actually affect their behavior.

1245
01:17:11,980 --> 01:17:17,410
That when people grow up in environments that are resource poor and unpredictable, that

1246
01:17:17,410 --> 01:17:21,890
they this tends to engage more present-focused strategies.

1247
01:17:22,050 --> 01:17:27,650
So more impulsivity, more opportunism, more sexual promiscuity,

1248
01:17:27,810 --> 01:17:31,570
less investment in education, and less investment in children.

1249
01:17:31,970 --> 01:17:37,570
Whereas people who grow up in more resource-rich and predictable

1250
01:17:37,570 --> 01:17:40,930
environments do sort of see opposites.

1251
01:17:41,170 --> 01:17:47,160
So being less impulsive, more planning for the future, more future oriented, more

1252
01:17:47,160 --> 01:17:49,640
sexually restricted, et cetera, et cetera.

1253
01:17:50,120 --> 01:17:52,680
So that work is already out there.

1254
01:17:53,080 --> 01:17:57,880
Lots of people have have uh quite a bit of robust research on that.

1255
01:17:58,120 --> 01:18:02,520
And so we are coming again from the affordance management perspective of the mind

1256
01:18:03,030 --> 01:18:08,070
interested in seeking out these threats and opportunities, that people should be attuned to

1257
01:18:08,070 --> 01:18:09,350
this ecology information.

1258
01:18:09,510 --> 01:18:13,670
If it provides really useful information about how others are likely to think and behave,

1259
01:18:13,830 --> 01:18:18,310
then it would make sense for us to have stereotypes that are based on ecology.

1260
01:18:18,550 --> 01:18:23,510
And so the first study that we did in our first ecology stereotypes paper was just

1261
01:18:23,510 --> 01:18:29,350
exploring generally if people do possess these ecology stereotypes, as we called

1262
01:18:29,350 --> 01:18:29,590
them.

1263
01:18:29,910 --> 01:18:35,280
So we gave participants vignettes that described a person who was either from an

1264
01:18:35,280 --> 01:18:40,080
environment that was really resource poor and unpredictable, or resource rich and

1265
01:18:40,080 --> 01:18:40,800
predictable.

1266
01:18:40,960 --> 01:18:46,960
And we asked them how likely is this person to be impulsive, be invested in their

1267
01:18:46,960 --> 01:18:50,080
education, be sexually promiscuous, et cetera.

1268
01:18:50,400 --> 01:18:55,440
And we found that people do have these ecology stereotypes, that they stereotyped people

1269
01:18:55,440 --> 01:19:01,200
from more harsh ecologies as being more present focused and people from

1270
01:19:01,790 --> 01:19:06,430
these more hopeful ecologies as being more future focused.

1271
01:19:07,070 --> 01:19:11,950
So that was our first just establishing the base, basic effect.

1272
01:19:12,430 --> 01:19:18,350
Then we did some additional studies that were trying to sort of rule out alternative

1273
01:19:18,350 --> 01:19:19,310
explanations.

1274
01:19:19,630 --> 01:19:25,550
We showed that people have these ecology stereotypes for environments that are seen

1275
01:19:25,550 --> 01:19:30,910
both as being primarily white inhabited and primarily black inhabited.

1276
01:19:31,960 --> 01:19:37,160
We showed that these stereotypes are not derivatives of wealth

1277
01:19:37,160 --> 01:19:42,200
stereotypes, that within high and low wealth, we still see these ecology

1278
01:19:42,200 --> 01:19:43,880
stereotypes occurring.

1279
01:19:44,040 --> 01:19:49,960
And then we also showed that it's not just a positivity bias towards people in hopeful

1280
01:19:49,960 --> 01:19:55,960
ecologies, that the stereotypes are really specific to

1281
01:19:56,280 --> 01:20:02,270
these present versus future focused in psychological suites

1282
01:20:02,350 --> 01:20:03,470
of behavior.

1283
01:20:03,870 --> 01:20:09,630
And so then our final study in that project was looking at if maybe that these

1284
01:20:09,630 --> 01:20:14,350
ecology stereotypes could help to explain race stereotypes in the US.

1285
01:20:14,510 --> 01:20:19,150
And the reason why we thought that that might be the case is because in America, race and

1286
01:20:19,150 --> 01:20:23,790
ecology are confounded in the sense that black Americans are more likely to live in

1287
01:20:23,790 --> 01:20:28,720
resource-poor and unpredictable environments, and white Americans are more likely to live

1288
01:20:28,720 --> 01:20:30,960
in resource rich and predictable environments.

1289
01:20:31,120 --> 01:20:37,120
And so if there is this confound, then it would make sense for the mind to be using

1290
01:20:37,120 --> 01:20:40,000
race as a proxy for ecology.

1291
01:20:40,640 --> 01:20:46,400
So we essentially separated race and ecology information in that last

1292
01:20:46,400 --> 01:20:46,960
study.

1293
01:20:47,200 --> 01:20:53,200
And we first replicated our finding that when you give people just ecology information, you

1294
01:20:53,200 --> 01:20:58,990
see that those from harsh ecologies are stereotyped as more present focused than those from

1295
01:20:58,990 --> 01:21:00,350
Hopeful Ecologies.

1296
01:21:00,510 --> 01:21:02,430
Then we looked at just race information.

1297
01:21:02,510 --> 01:21:07,230
So if we asked people to imagine a black individual or a white individual, people were

1298
01:21:07,230 --> 01:21:12,030
stereotyping the black individual to be more present-focused than the white individual.

1299
01:21:12,270 --> 01:21:16,830
But when you provide people with both race and ecology information, that's when the really

1300
01:21:16,830 --> 01:21:18,830
interesting results happened.

1301
01:21:19,070 --> 01:21:23,230
That people's stereotypes tracked ecology and not race.

1302
01:21:23,480 --> 01:21:27,480
So it essentially wiped out the effect of the race stereotypes.

1303
01:21:27,640 --> 01:21:33,640
So black Americans from hopeful ecologies were stereotyped as being just as future focused

1304
01:21:33,640 --> 01:21:35,960
as white Americans from hopeful ecologies.

1305
01:21:36,120 --> 01:21:41,400
And similarly, black Americans from harsh environments were stereotyped as just as

1306
01:21:41,400 --> 01:21:45,240
present-oriented as white Americans from harsh ecologies.

1307
01:21:45,480 --> 01:21:48,520
So that was the those are really exciting findings for us.

1308
01:21:49,720 --> 01:21:51,470
Yeah, that's that's really amazing.

1309
01:21:51,630 --> 01:21:57,470
I mean, in the sense of, you know, I mean, tell me if I'm if I'm wrong, but I mean

1310
01:21:57,790 --> 01:22:03,630
uh the literature and also I think just sort of common knowledge was sort of that this

1311
01:22:03,630 --> 01:22:04,830
is all about race.

1312
01:22:05,070 --> 01:22:06,350
Is that fair?

1313
01:22:06,830 --> 01:22:07,470
Yes.

1314
01:22:08,750 --> 01:22:10,590
Yeah, and so this would yeah.

1315
01:22:11,060 --> 01:22:15,700
I mean it it's I mean it's again, you know, uh viewing the mind, uh viewing humans as

1316
01:22:15,700 --> 01:22:17,300
idiots, basically.

1317
01:22:17,460 --> 01:22:22,340
Um, you know, we're just you know blindly we just don't like people who look different than

1318
01:22:22,340 --> 01:22:23,620
us, and and that explains this.

1319
01:22:23,700 --> 01:22:27,220
And we have these crude stereotypes that aren't really tracking anything in reality, and

1320
01:22:27,220 --> 01:22:29,940
it's just we're just dumb bigots.

1321
01:22:30,100 --> 01:22:35,070
Um, and you know, while a lot of the the downstream outcomes of these stereotypes uh might

1322
01:22:35,070 --> 01:22:36,190
be might be deplorable.

1323
01:22:36,430 --> 01:22:42,270
The underlying uh logic to the mind that is uh creating these stereotypes is there there's

1324
01:22:42,270 --> 01:22:43,390
something rational about it.

1325
01:22:43,550 --> 01:22:48,190
That it's it's connecting to something uh deep about the connection between uh human

1326
01:22:48,190 --> 01:22:49,870
ecology and and human behavior.

1327
01:22:50,030 --> 01:22:52,190
And people are picking up on this regularity.

1328
01:22:52,270 --> 01:22:55,630
Um and uh it's n it's not just a blind, crude thing.

1329
01:22:55,710 --> 01:22:59,550
It's it's it's it's stemming from something real, uh which I think is is is really

1330
01:22:59,550 --> 01:23:00,030
interesting.

1331
01:23:00,190 --> 01:23:02,670
Uh and it and you know it echoes some of Dave's work.

1332
01:23:02,800 --> 01:23:05,760
You know, it basically, you know, the the paper can race be erased?

1333
01:23:05,840 --> 01:23:08,560
And if you find that, you know, race is confounded with all sorts of things.

1334
01:23:08,640 --> 01:23:10,320
It's confounded with ecology, as you mentioned.

1335
01:23:10,400 --> 01:23:12,400
It's also confounded with uh coalition.

1336
01:23:12,480 --> 01:23:17,360
Um, and when you deconfound those things, you can uh erase uh uh race effects.

1337
01:23:17,440 --> 01:23:23,200
You know, we uh with with Dave's work, you know, if if you um deconfound um skin color

1338
01:23:23,200 --> 01:23:27,200
with, you know, whose side of a of a group conflict you're on, that can uh decrease or some

1339
01:23:27,280 --> 01:23:29,840
in some cases eliminate racial categorization in your case.

1340
01:23:30,000 --> 01:23:35,910
If you deconfound race with ecology, that can um uh el eliminate uh differences in in uh

1341
01:23:35,910 --> 01:23:37,030
uh racial stereotypes.

1342
01:23:37,110 --> 01:23:41,590
So I I think it's a really interesting um line of work that that delves you know deeper

1343
01:23:41,590 --> 01:23:46,950
into the nuts and bolts of this important you know part of uh you know modern culture uh

1344
01:23:46,950 --> 01:23:49,990
and and and really uh I don't know giving a lot of insight into it.

1345
01:23:50,630 --> 01:23:55,110
And the the underlying evolutionary logic here um that I'll just toss out maybe for

1346
01:23:55,110 --> 01:23:59,430
listeners who aren't familiar with it is that um humans across evolutionary history would

1347
01:23:59,430 --> 01:24:04,040
not have encountered people of different races, um, very often, if at all.

1348
01:24:04,200 --> 01:24:10,040
And so we wouldn't have expected evolved mechanisms that would encode race as

1349
01:24:10,040 --> 01:24:11,160
a social category.

1350
01:24:11,640 --> 01:24:11,800
Right.

1351
01:24:11,960 --> 01:24:16,200
And it's I I think to me, it's a lovely example of, and I think all everything we've talked

1352
01:24:16,200 --> 01:24:22,120
about, like juror decision making, legal decision making, racial categorization, it's

1353
01:24:22,120 --> 01:24:27,640
the idea that beneath the surface, there's sort of a hidden

1354
01:24:27,640 --> 01:24:33,310
logic that if you understand it, you can better understand what's happening

1355
01:24:33,470 --> 01:24:34,990
and possibly change it, right?

1356
01:24:35,070 --> 01:24:38,590
So like you're talking about legal decisions that are happening right now as we speak.

1357
01:24:38,670 --> 01:24:42,990
Like people are literally deciding if somebody's guilty or not as we speak.

1358
01:24:43,230 --> 01:24:48,190
And it's for reasons that maybe aren't good, like because somebody just seems gross to

1359
01:24:48,190 --> 01:24:48,350
them.

1360
01:24:48,430 --> 01:24:52,340
And that's completely irrelevant and bad that they're doing that.

1361
01:24:52,500 --> 01:24:58,020
Um and so I think what I like about all this work is that it shows that there's sort of a a

1362
01:24:58,020 --> 01:25:03,700
hidden logic that if you unpack it, you can sort of get at the the

1363
01:25:03,700 --> 01:25:06,980
machinery in a way that we can then better evaluate.

1364
01:25:07,060 --> 01:25:09,380
Like does this make sense, yes or no?

1365
01:25:09,540 --> 01:25:11,860
Which is a different issue, but still um yeah.

1366
01:25:12,020 --> 01:25:15,060
So I I like that that that's sort of a through line of all that work.

1367
01:25:15,490 --> 01:25:15,730
Yeah.

1368
01:25:16,130 --> 01:25:18,530
People have used the phrase deep rationality.

1369
01:25:19,250 --> 01:25:20,690
And I think it's a good one.

1370
01:25:21,010 --> 01:25:21,330
Yeah.

1371
01:25:21,570 --> 01:25:23,010
Have you thought it all?

1372
01:25:23,170 --> 01:25:25,410
Um, because I know we're both here.

1373
01:25:25,490 --> 01:25:29,090
Um, and people ask me all the time, like, what do you think about the relationship between

1374
01:25:29,090 --> 01:25:32,850
the coalitional work and the ecology work?

1375
01:25:33,170 --> 01:25:37,410
And, you know, maybe we can also just pin that for another time, or you and I can talk

1376
01:25:37,410 --> 01:25:40,290
about like I I I am not sure what I think about it.

1377
01:25:40,370 --> 01:25:46,180
And I'm curious if you've thought about that that relationship in the sense that we

1378
01:25:46,180 --> 01:25:50,980
both have done this work showing that race is being used as a proxy for some other deep

1379
01:25:50,980 --> 01:25:52,580
rationality thing.

1380
01:25:53,300 --> 01:25:58,020
But what what have you thought about sort of what what's up with the relationship between

1381
01:25:58,020 --> 01:25:59,620
ecology and coalition?

1382
01:26:00,340 --> 01:26:06,110
I have not put a lot of thought towards it, other than um I've

1383
01:26:06,110 --> 01:26:09,630
also seen that there is likely a connection there.

1384
01:26:09,870 --> 01:26:14,430
And that it's interesting that that race is being used as a proxy for both of those things.

1385
01:26:14,670 --> 01:26:14,910
Yeah.

1386
01:26:15,070 --> 01:26:16,510
Um, but I haven't no.

1387
01:26:16,670 --> 01:26:18,350
I would like to talk more at something about it.

1388
01:26:18,590 --> 01:26:20,670
Maybe we can have that another time or something.

1389
01:26:20,750 --> 01:26:21,070
Yeah.

1390
01:26:21,150 --> 01:26:24,030
I it's a good example of sort of like yeah, me too.

1391
01:26:24,110 --> 01:26:26,510
I've thought about that, but I I've meta thought about it.

1392
01:26:26,590 --> 01:26:29,310
I've thought about it abstractly, but not actually gone through it.

1393
01:26:29,390 --> 01:26:31,390
So yeah.

1394
01:26:32,600 --> 01:26:34,920
So I mean I mean the go ahead.

1395
01:26:35,400 --> 01:26:39,880
No, you know, no, I've just I I I I've been trying to understand, you know, political

1396
01:26:39,880 --> 01:26:45,800
alliance structures and and why um you know uh the the so on the so called white

1397
01:26:45,800 --> 01:26:50,520
working class has uh recently gravitated a lot toward the Republican Party, um which is

1398
01:26:50,760 --> 01:26:53,640
sort of a recent phenomenon in in American history.

1399
01:26:53,800 --> 01:26:57,650
Um and uh I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around that and and why we see a lot of this

1400
01:26:57,650 --> 01:27:03,250
anti-immigrant sentiment um and uh racially coded policy preferences coming from the white

1401
01:27:03,250 --> 01:27:04,050
working class.

1402
01:27:04,130 --> 01:27:07,730
Um, you know, depending on how you want to measure it, you you tend to see these effects.

1403
01:27:07,890 --> 01:27:13,810
Uh and um uh just thinking out loud, I mean, th these are people that you know,

1404
01:27:14,050 --> 01:27:17,250
if you think of the white working class and and African Americans, they're coming from kind

1405
01:27:17,250 --> 01:27:18,450
of similar ecologies.

1406
01:27:18,610 --> 01:27:24,400
Uh and I'm wondering if if if there's something about being in a similar ecology um

1407
01:27:24,480 --> 01:27:27,520
you know evokes a kind of um competitiveness.

1408
01:27:27,600 --> 01:27:33,520
Like you know, we we we talked with um Ann uh Pizor about um how it's

1409
01:27:33,520 --> 01:27:39,520
not so much um uh uh the how far apart uh two groups are

1410
01:27:39,520 --> 01:27:40,960
that that will elicit antagonism.

1411
01:27:41,040 --> 01:27:44,160
It's often the groups that are more similar to each other in terms of their status or

1412
01:27:44,160 --> 01:27:46,320
formidability that where you see the most conflict.

1413
01:27:46,510 --> 01:27:49,870
Uh and I'm wondering if something like that could explain this uh this political

1414
01:27:49,870 --> 01:27:53,950
realignment where you see um, you know, uh uh the white working class developing these sort

1415
01:27:53,950 --> 01:27:57,870
of ethnic resentments that that steer them toward um the Republican Party and toward these,

1416
01:27:57,950 --> 01:28:00,590
you know, uh more uh populist policies.

1417
01:28:00,750 --> 01:28:04,990
Um so I'm cu I'm I'm just thinking out loud here and then spit blank but I'm curious if you

1418
01:28:04,990 --> 01:28:05,870
have any thoughts on that.

1419
01:28:06,540 --> 01:28:07,660
That's really interesting.

1420
01:28:07,820 --> 01:28:13,020
Um, it also reminded me uh as another example uh backs up what you're saying.

1421
01:28:13,260 --> 01:28:18,220
You see that with intersexual aggression too, that um women tend to be most competitive

1422
01:28:18,220 --> 01:28:20,780
with women who are similarly attractive, right?

1423
01:28:20,940 --> 01:28:25,500
They're not being competitive with the the superhottis or the ugos.

1424
01:28:25,820 --> 01:28:26,940
It's yeah.

1425
01:28:27,500 --> 01:28:28,940
Technical terms, huh?

1426
01:28:29,820 --> 01:28:30,300
Right.

1427
01:28:30,460 --> 01:28:35,930
Um it reminds me of the the Saturday Night Live sketch that was Black

1428
01:28:35,930 --> 01:28:36,730
Jeopardy.

1429
01:28:36,890 --> 01:28:42,730
Um, I don't know if you saw that, but they they had Tom Hanks on it, um, who was

1430
01:28:43,050 --> 01:28:48,810
uh MAGA supporter um along with two um other

1431
01:28:49,130 --> 01:28:50,250
black contestants.

1432
01:28:50,330 --> 01:28:56,330
And and the whole shtick was that the contestants were all agreeing on things, and how

1433
01:28:56,330 --> 01:28:59,900
surprising was it that that there was such agreement?

1434
01:29:00,140 --> 01:29:06,140
Um and I think it it's because of this shared ecology uh that that it

1435
01:29:06,140 --> 01:29:09,980
really does drive similar cognition and behavior.

1436
01:29:11,180 --> 01:29:11,820
Yeah.

1437
01:29:12,460 --> 01:29:13,420
Interesting.

1438
01:29:14,460 --> 01:29:15,100
Cool.

1439
01:29:15,740 --> 01:29:18,380
Well, I was also just oh go ahead.

1440
01:29:18,700 --> 01:29:19,100
All right.

1441
01:29:19,670 --> 01:29:24,550
I was also just going to say that we very recently published a paper that shows that

1442
01:29:24,550 --> 01:29:27,750
ecology stereotypes are quite universal.

1443
01:29:28,230 --> 01:29:32,870
So you see them existing in many, many countries around the world.

1444
01:29:33,190 --> 01:29:37,110
And it's not always confounded with race.

1445
01:29:38,390 --> 01:29:43,030
So for example, in Japan, it's very homogenous, racially homogeneous.

1446
01:29:43,110 --> 01:29:48,760
And so you wouldn't expect ecology by race effects, but we do see effects of cat

1447
01:29:49,080 --> 01:29:54,840
other categories that have been confounded with ecology, specifically family structure.

1448
01:29:55,080 --> 01:30:00,440
So there you see that single parent households get

1449
01:30:00,440 --> 01:30:05,160
stereotyped like harsh ecologies, people from harsh ecologies.

1450
01:30:06,120 --> 01:30:10,920
Is the idea that um predicting people's

1451
01:30:11,490 --> 01:30:13,490
impulsivity is really important.

1452
01:30:13,570 --> 01:30:16,530
And so you're picking up cues that would predict that.

1453
01:30:16,930 --> 01:30:20,770
And so that's why we're having this.

1454
01:30:20,930 --> 01:30:25,490
So in that context, maybe people you said which country was it?

1455
01:30:25,570 --> 01:30:25,810
I'm sorry.

1456
01:30:26,450 --> 01:30:26,610
Japan.

1457
01:30:26,850 --> 01:30:27,090
Japan.

1458
01:30:27,170 --> 01:30:27,570
It was Japan.

1459
01:30:27,650 --> 01:30:27,810
Okay.

1460
01:30:27,890 --> 01:30:28,610
I thought it was.

1461
01:30:28,770 --> 01:30:34,610
Um, so in Japan, if I if I live in Japan, I might just really experience that boy,

1462
01:30:34,770 --> 01:30:38,770
the family composition of people just really pops out to me.

1463
01:30:39,200 --> 01:30:44,240
Um, the idea would be though that the reason why that is happening is there's this

1464
01:30:44,240 --> 01:30:50,240
underlying, probably non-conscious process that I'm trying to infer

1465
01:30:50,240 --> 01:30:52,800
what somebody's going to be like, quote unquote.

1466
01:30:52,960 --> 01:30:54,480
And I may not even be aware of it.

1467
01:30:54,560 --> 01:30:56,720
Is that sort of a fair thing?

1468
01:30:57,040 --> 01:30:57,600
Absolutely.

1469
01:30:57,920 --> 01:30:58,640
Interesting, yeah.

1470
01:30:58,800 --> 01:31:03,950
So that yeah, because I think most people, I mean, even when I heard this work, I mean, I

1471
01:31:03,950 --> 01:31:07,710
was skeptical of the coalition work, I was skeptical of the ecology work, and in part it's

1472
01:31:07,710 --> 01:31:10,350
because it doesn't jive with my intuition, right?

1473
01:31:10,590 --> 01:31:13,150
As you said, like a lot of law is based on intuition.

1474
01:31:13,230 --> 01:31:18,990
And we know as psychology, like one of our things is that intuition is valuable because it

1475
01:31:19,070 --> 01:31:23,710
it is sort of a readout of our software, but it's not the description of the software.

1476
01:31:23,870 --> 01:31:28,900
And so like I experience, you know, race, I experience like these pop-out effects of

1477
01:31:28,900 --> 01:31:33,220
certain things, but why I do, or even why I'm attending to it, might not be hidden.

1478
01:31:33,300 --> 01:31:37,380
And I think this is a lovely example of like, I don't think anybody listening would think,

1479
01:31:37,460 --> 01:31:41,940
like, oh yeah, no, ecology is something I'm tracking, or like I'm trying to figure out how

1480
01:31:41,940 --> 01:31:42,820
impulsive somebody is.

1481
01:31:42,980 --> 01:31:45,860
I mean, maybe, like, you know, occasionally I'd be like, oh, that person seems really

1482
01:31:45,860 --> 01:31:50,580
impulsive, but like it's not a category that is sort of intuitive.

1483
01:31:51,190 --> 01:31:57,030
Um, but in the same way, you know, like your visual system calculates

1484
01:31:57,110 --> 01:31:59,830
like how far apart the images are on each eye.

1485
01:31:59,910 --> 01:32:01,910
And that's part of how you experience depth.

1486
01:32:01,990 --> 01:32:06,390
Like we experience depth, but we don't experience like how that's actually working.

1487
01:32:06,550 --> 01:32:11,910
I think it's a similar thing where there's all these sort of like social illusions, but the

1488
01:32:11,910 --> 01:32:14,100
underlying logic is different.

1489
01:32:14,180 --> 01:32:19,620
And I just love, like, I think the ecology work is so important as an example of that.

1490
01:32:19,860 --> 01:32:21,140
Um, yeah.

1491
01:32:21,620 --> 01:32:26,180
So yeah, so I don't know if I have a a question, but yeah, I just want to say, I mean, do

1492
01:32:26,180 --> 01:32:30,820
you think about uh how have people responded to the work?

1493
01:32:30,980 --> 01:32:33,940
Um, like, have you gotten much feedback one way or the other?

1494
01:32:34,100 --> 01:32:39,950
I know it runs counter to a lot of existing theory that had been sort of very

1495
01:32:39,950 --> 01:32:45,070
much in this sort of like it's about race or it's about ideology

1496
01:32:45,950 --> 01:32:48,270
that doesn't look at this underlying deep logic.

1497
01:32:48,350 --> 01:32:50,030
Like, what's the response been?

1498
01:32:50,990 --> 01:32:54,270
So generally the response has been really positive.

1499
01:32:54,350 --> 01:33:00,030
Um, but I'll focus on the the two less positive responses that I've

1500
01:33:00,030 --> 01:33:00,510
gotten.

1501
01:33:00,750 --> 01:33:06,220
Um one has been, are you saying that black people are impulsive?

1502
01:33:06,780 --> 01:33:11,180
Are you claiming that there's a kernel of truth to the stereotype?

1503
01:33:12,140 --> 01:33:18,140
And I am surprised by that criticism because actually the work

1504
01:33:18,140 --> 01:33:20,060
is saying quite the opposite.

1505
01:33:20,220 --> 01:33:25,020
It's saying that there's nothing about blackness that makes people impulsive, that you can

1506
01:33:25,020 --> 01:33:29,740
put a white person in the same ecology and expect it to elicit the same behavior.

1507
01:33:30,460 --> 01:33:34,330
So actually it's very anti-essentialist.

1508
01:33:35,850 --> 01:33:41,210
And then the other critique that we've gotten is well, are you just talking about social

1509
01:33:41,210 --> 01:33:41,690
class?

1510
01:33:41,850 --> 01:33:45,290
Is this really just social class stereotypes or wealth stereotypes?

1511
01:33:45,450 --> 01:33:50,810
And we tried to get at that with that study that that manipulated wealth orthogonally to

1512
01:33:50,810 --> 01:33:51,770
ecology.

1513
01:33:52,810 --> 01:33:58,580
But I I find the the social class question to be a really amusing

1514
01:33:58,580 --> 01:34:04,340
one because um social class theorists

1515
01:34:04,340 --> 01:34:09,620
don't come from the same perspective at all and they

1516
01:34:10,980 --> 01:34:16,020
they would I think be quite

1517
01:34:16,020 --> 01:34:21,710
unwilling to say that their theory applies, for

1518
01:34:21,710 --> 01:34:23,550
example, across species?

1519
01:34:24,590 --> 01:34:30,110
Whereas we are claiming that you do see across species these

1520
01:34:30,270 --> 01:34:31,550
ecology effects.

1521
01:34:32,030 --> 01:34:37,310
And so would you call, this is one question that we've had for social class theorists is,

1522
01:34:37,470 --> 01:34:41,470
you know, would you say that an elephant is a higher class animal than a rat?

1523
01:34:42,660 --> 01:34:47,220
Um and I don't think that they would be willing to make those claims.

1524
01:34:47,540 --> 01:34:47,860
Right.

1525
01:34:48,100 --> 01:34:49,860
So yeah.

1526
01:34:50,100 --> 01:34:50,420
Interesting.

1527
01:34:50,660 --> 01:34:51,780
That's a good question.

1528
01:34:53,380 --> 01:34:54,260
Intuitively, yes.

1529
01:34:54,340 --> 01:34:56,900
I could I could see an elephant wearing a top hat and that.

1530
01:34:57,700 --> 01:34:58,020
Exactly.

1531
01:34:58,260 --> 01:34:59,940
That's great chain of being, exactly.

1532
01:35:00,100 --> 01:35:00,900
That's the study there.

1533
01:35:01,780 --> 01:35:05,140
There's also a version of the social class thing that is the theory, right?

1534
01:35:05,220 --> 01:35:09,910
Like I mean, I actually wonder how much people like when they say social class, are they

1535
01:35:09,910 --> 01:35:11,510
actually talking about ecology, right?

1536
01:35:11,670 --> 01:35:17,190
Like I actually um like that's also the other way to talk about it is that actually in the

1537
01:35:17,190 --> 01:35:21,510
same way that race is sort of a proxy for this underlying thing.

1538
01:35:21,590 --> 01:35:25,190
I think when people are actually talking about social class, often they're talking, you're

1539
01:35:25,190 --> 01:35:30,550
right, not about like absolute amounts, but it's about, you know, these other things, which

1540
01:35:30,630 --> 01:35:33,510
there in some sense is the right thing to be looking at, right?

1541
01:35:33,920 --> 01:35:34,000
Yeah.

1542
01:35:34,080 --> 01:35:37,840
It's almost like you're what you're doing is you're providing a theory of what social class

1543
01:35:37,840 --> 01:35:38,000
is.

1544
01:35:38,320 --> 01:35:38,480
Right.

1545
01:35:38,640 --> 01:35:38,880
Right.

1546
01:35:39,040 --> 01:35:42,560
As opposed to offering, you know, a saying, you know, it's a different theory than than

1547
01:35:42,560 --> 01:35:42,640
this.

1548
01:35:42,720 --> 01:35:46,160
It's like, yeah, social class obviously matters, and we have class-based stereotypes and

1549
01:35:46,160 --> 01:35:50,720
blast class-based hierarchies, but you're providing insight into what that actually means

1550
01:35:51,040 --> 01:35:52,240
in a really interesting way.

1551
01:35:52,400 --> 01:35:54,240
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And in a non-essentialized way.

1552
01:35:54,320 --> 01:35:59,570
It's sort of saying here's the here's the like causal structure in the world, and here's

1553
01:35:59,570 --> 01:36:05,570
the uh Q structure, and it has nothing to do, it's it's a complete arbitrary

1554
01:36:05,890 --> 01:36:06,530
thing.

1555
01:36:06,770 --> 01:36:12,370
Like you could you could set up a scenario where like any attribute becomes correlated with

1556
01:36:12,370 --> 01:36:16,530
this, or any feature of the world becomes predictive of it, and you would predict this is

1557
01:36:16,530 --> 01:36:18,210
what people would latch on to.

1558
01:36:18,370 --> 01:36:24,260
So it's not only causal, but it's exactly as you said, like not it's getting rid of all

1559
01:36:24,260 --> 01:36:28,580
the essentialism that has nothing to do with skin color, has nothing to do with the way

1560
01:36:28,580 --> 01:36:33,220
people talk, it has nothing to do with any like X, Y, or Z attributes, um, you know,

1561
01:36:33,380 --> 01:36:35,700
whether it's a species, an elephant or rat.

1562
01:36:35,860 --> 01:36:39,620
It's just, it's just these, anything that correlates with this deep structure.

1563
01:36:39,780 --> 01:36:40,100
Yeah.

1564
01:36:40,500 --> 01:36:46,170
I I'm wondering, I mean, uh now now my mind is racing with thoughts about um, you know uh

1565
01:36:46,330 --> 01:36:49,930
conspicuous consumption and signaling of class membership.

1566
01:36:50,490 --> 01:36:51,850
It was the elephant in the top hat.

1567
01:36:51,930 --> 01:36:52,330
It was the elephant.

1568
01:36:52,650 --> 01:36:53,930
Yes, that that's what that's what yeah.

1569
01:36:54,890 --> 01:36:55,130
Yeah.

1570
01:36:55,210 --> 01:36:59,610
I mean presumably we have all sorts of social signals, ways of uh communicating, you know,

1571
01:36:59,690 --> 01:37:02,890
our class membership, you know, signaling that we're a member of the upper class, we're not

1572
01:37:02,890 --> 01:37:07,130
a member of the the lower class, you know, um and we you know from the way we dress, the

1573
01:37:07,130 --> 01:37:11,130
way we talk, you know, the the the books we read, the furniture we have, you know, our our

1574
01:37:11,210 --> 01:37:16,760
our our opinions uh uh presumably in in in in in significant uh part

1575
01:37:17,000 --> 01:37:18,840
function to signal our our class membership.

1576
01:37:18,920 --> 01:37:22,600
And I wonder if you could connect this work to that, where, you know, the things that are

1577
01:37:22,600 --> 01:37:27,160
effective class signals are things that are are signaling, you know, uh aspects of these

1578
01:37:27,160 --> 01:37:30,920
ecology stereotypes like impulsiveness or present-orientedness or or whatever.

1579
01:37:31,080 --> 01:37:36,120
Like if I can sit through a long, boring uh book, you know, from the 17th century, that's

1580
01:37:36,120 --> 01:37:39,670
going to convey, you know, that I have a low present-orientedness orientedness and

1581
01:37:39,670 --> 01:37:42,470
therefore that's a cue of you know upper class culture.

1582
01:37:42,630 --> 01:37:47,270
Um and and and that might be a common thread to a lot of, you know, so so unso uh so a so

1583
01:37:47,350 --> 01:37:49,350
called um highbrow culture.

1584
01:37:49,430 --> 01:37:53,670
That the common thread there is that it takes a lot of, you know, self control and and um

1585
01:37:53,990 --> 01:37:59,590
future orientedness to uh master the the the refinery of of you know the the highbrow

1586
01:37:59,590 --> 01:37:59,910
culture.

1587
01:37:59,990 --> 01:38:03,990
That the you know I I could see lots of interesting directions uh coming out of this

1588
01:38:03,990 --> 01:38:04,550
analysis.

1589
01:38:05,120 --> 01:38:05,840
Oh, 100%.

1590
01:38:06,400 --> 01:38:11,440
We have long been interested in trying to figure out what are the cues that people are

1591
01:38:11,440 --> 01:38:13,360
using to infer ecology.

1592
01:38:13,840 --> 01:38:15,760
I think that's a very interesting question.

1593
01:38:16,480 --> 01:38:21,120
There's also the problem of like um kids are really impulsive.

1594
01:38:21,360 --> 01:38:25,840
So there would have to be like a correction on this system too for sort of like accounting

1595
01:38:25,840 --> 01:38:29,710
for the fact that they're kids, but then like within that sort of tracking, you know,

1596
01:38:29,870 --> 01:38:33,710
because I think there's also a lot of rhetoric of like there's the outgroups kids too,

1597
01:38:33,790 --> 01:38:33,950
right?

1598
01:38:34,110 --> 01:38:39,230
Like I w so I wonder like the intersection of like perception of kids um and kids being

1599
01:38:39,230 --> 01:38:42,750
impulsive is like another interesting wrinkle in all this.

1600
01:38:43,150 --> 01:38:43,630
Mm-hmm.

1601
01:38:44,430 --> 01:38:44,670
Yeah.

1602
01:38:44,830 --> 01:38:49,870
Steve Newberg would say that there aren't just independent sex stereotypes, age

1603
01:38:49,870 --> 01:38:53,950
stereotypes, ecology stereotypes, that they're actually sex age ecology stereotypes.

1604
01:38:54,350 --> 01:38:54,990
Right.

1605
01:38:56,240 --> 01:38:57,360
Super interesting.

1606
01:38:57,520 --> 01:38:58,000
Yeah.

1607
01:38:58,320 --> 01:39:00,000
So much more to talk about.

1608
01:39:01,520 --> 01:39:04,880
We are quickly running to the end of our session here.

1609
01:39:05,040 --> 01:39:09,920
We usually have a question, which is is there something we should have asked you?

1610
01:39:14,240 --> 01:39:15,680
I don't think so.

1611
01:39:16,000 --> 01:39:20,640
I think we covered all of the topics I was hoping to touch on.

1612
01:39:23,150 --> 01:39:25,550
I can't think of anything off the top of my head now.

1613
01:39:26,030 --> 01:39:28,030
What was your motive in asking that question, Dave?

1614
01:39:28,110 --> 01:39:29,710
I wonder if that should affect our.

1615
01:39:39,790 --> 01:39:41,950
And the furniture behind David and my books.

1616
01:39:50,140 --> 01:39:55,740
Keila, is there anything um that if people are interested in sort of the

1617
01:39:55,740 --> 01:40:01,740
intersection of evolution and the law, um, like can you point them either to you or like

1618
01:40:01,820 --> 01:40:05,820
what would if you if if there's like a student or just like some person out in the world

1619
01:40:05,820 --> 01:40:10,700
who's sort of interested in evolutionary approaches to the law, what would you sort of

1620
01:40:10,700 --> 01:40:16,530
point them towards as sort of inroads into that or um obviously your

1621
01:40:16,530 --> 01:40:17,570
your own work.

1622
01:40:18,050 --> 01:40:22,450
You know, is there a certain work of yours that they should start reading, or what would

1623
01:40:22,450 --> 01:40:23,970
you point them towards?

1624
01:40:24,930 --> 01:40:26,050
Oh, great question.

1625
01:40:26,290 --> 01:40:32,290
Um I would say that I had the distinct

1626
01:40:32,290 --> 01:40:38,050
pleasure and honor of co-organizing a special issue in evolution and human

1627
01:40:38,050 --> 01:40:41,010
behavior on uh evolution and law.

1628
01:40:41,410 --> 01:40:47,380
And so that is a bait collection from some fantastic people, all thinking

1629
01:40:47,380 --> 01:40:52,180
about legal questions or justice related questions from an evolutionary perspective.

1630
01:40:52,340 --> 01:40:55,220
So I think that would be a great place to start.

1631
01:40:55,460 --> 01:41:00,260
Um, I really like the paper that I contributed to that special issue.

1632
01:41:00,420 --> 01:41:04,740
It was an ecology stereotypes paper, but it was looking specifically at stereotypes of

1633
01:41:04,740 --> 01:41:05,700
criminality.

1634
01:41:05,940 --> 01:41:09,700
So who we think commits different kinds of crime.

1635
01:41:09,860 --> 01:41:15,550
Um, and it turns out that race based criminality stereotypes are actually

1636
01:41:15,550 --> 01:41:17,950
ecology based criminality stereotypes.

1637
01:41:18,670 --> 01:41:23,310
So that I think is cool work that I would like people to be aware of.

1638
01:41:24,110 --> 01:41:28,030
I would also say shout out to Carlton Patrick.

1639
01:41:28,270 --> 01:41:32,670
I don't know if you've had him on to interview already.

1640
01:41:32,910 --> 01:41:33,710
No, not yet.

1641
01:41:34,030 --> 01:41:39,220
Well, he is an evolutionary psychology and law person.

1642
01:41:39,460 --> 01:41:42,100
He's also funnier and better looking than I am.

1643
01:41:42,340 --> 01:41:47,620
So he would be a great, great guest to have um to chat with.

1644
01:41:47,860 --> 01:41:49,860
And his work is really, really cool.

1645
01:41:50,100 --> 01:41:53,220
So I would point people in his direction as well.

1646
01:41:53,700 --> 01:41:54,420
Fantastic.

1647
01:41:54,580 --> 01:41:55,300
That's great.

1648
01:41:55,860 --> 01:41:56,420
Thank you.

1649
01:41:56,500 --> 01:41:57,300
That's that's great.

1650
01:41:57,380 --> 01:42:02,420
We'll have to have Carlton on and uh Carlton should Venmo you or something after that.

1651
01:42:02,500 --> 01:42:03,140
Yeah.

1652
01:42:05,170 --> 01:42:07,170
Uh yeah, this is wonderful.

1653
01:42:07,250 --> 01:42:11,810
David, do you have anything, any last any last minute questions to help you with your life

1654
01:42:11,810 --> 01:42:12,770
of crime?

1655
01:42:13,250 --> 01:42:19,170
Um well I think uh I uh I hereby declare

1656
01:42:19,170 --> 01:42:22,850
this episode guilty of being uh interesting and fun.

1657
01:42:25,820 --> 01:42:26,620
Sustained.

1658
01:42:27,020 --> 01:42:27,340
Oh.

1659
01:42:27,660 --> 01:42:28,140
All right.

1660
01:42:28,460 --> 01:42:28,940
Nice.

1661
01:42:29,100 --> 01:42:30,380
Uh fantastic.

1662
01:42:30,620 --> 01:42:36,300
So um on that note, um, let let the what does the foreman do?

1663
01:42:36,460 --> 01:42:39,420
Do they it's like the members of the jury are adjourned?

1664
01:42:39,580 --> 01:42:40,540
What is that?

1665
01:42:41,340 --> 01:42:41,580
Yeah.

1666
01:42:42,460 --> 01:42:43,020
Court adjourned.

1667
01:42:43,260 --> 01:42:44,300
Yeah, the court adjourns.

1668
01:42:44,620 --> 01:42:45,740
Thank you so much for your time.

1669
01:42:45,900 --> 01:42:46,380
Yeah.

1670
01:42:46,460 --> 01:42:48,940
I really appreciate getting the chance to speak with you both.

1671
01:42:49,250 --> 01:42:50,530
Yeah, no, it's fantastic.

1672
01:42:50,690 --> 01:42:53,090
I I love um I love this work.

1673
01:42:53,170 --> 01:42:55,410
And Keila, you're just one of the people.

1674
01:42:55,570 --> 01:43:00,770
When I think of like who's the usual suspects doing fantastic cutting edge experimental

1675
01:43:00,850 --> 01:43:06,850
psychological work um in uh in just evolutionary psychology,

1676
01:43:06,930 --> 01:43:09,010
like you are one of the people I always think of.

1677
01:43:09,250 --> 01:43:15,170
And so um thank you for coming on and being uh and representing um the work that's being

1678
01:43:15,170 --> 01:43:15,410
done.

1679
01:43:15,490 --> 01:43:17,090
I think it's it's really important.

1680
01:43:17,520 --> 01:43:23,360
Um, and it's it's super important given that there are literally like life and death

1681
01:43:23,360 --> 01:43:24,880
consequences to all this stuff.

1682
01:43:25,040 --> 01:43:30,320
So thank you for sharing it um and giving people to a chance to listen to to what you're

1683
01:43:30,320 --> 01:43:30,640
doing.

1684
01:43:30,960 --> 01:43:32,160
Thanks so much.

1685
01:43:36,640 --> 01:43:42,430
Um, David, um you are um not only allowed to, but

1686
01:43:42,430 --> 01:43:45,230
we would encourage you to uh support the podcast.

1687
01:43:45,470 --> 01:43:50,750
It's not against the law um to not support the podcast, but it would still be nice if you

1688
01:43:50,750 --> 01:43:51,390
did do that.

1689
01:43:51,790 --> 01:43:57,230
Yeah, it's not uh super erogatory, as the philosophers would say, but it is uh uh, you

1690
01:43:57,230 --> 01:43:58,430
know, uh admirable.

1691
01:43:58,830 --> 01:43:59,550
What does that mean?

1692
01:43:59,870 --> 01:44:04,980
I think uh last I read it was like something about how it's not like uh oblig obligatory,

1693
01:44:05,060 --> 01:44:07,940
but like it's still praiseworthy, like like donating to charity.

1694
01:44:08,020 --> 01:44:12,500
You're not like required to donate to charity, it's super erogatory if you do it, you know.

1695
01:44:12,900 --> 01:44:13,220
Okay.

1696
01:44:13,460 --> 01:44:16,820
It sounds not it sounds like something else, but that's great.

1697
01:44:16,900 --> 01:44:19,220
Um, it's a good word of the day for you.

1698
01:44:19,620 --> 01:44:25,620
Um subdogsastic is another one, which to my mind is just means um it's not conscious

1699
01:44:25,700 --> 01:44:27,300
and there's like complicated stuff going on.

1700
01:44:27,620 --> 01:44:30,100
Sub persona believes, yeah, subdogsastic.

1701
01:44:30,180 --> 01:44:31,300
So yeah, this philosopher is man.

1702
01:44:31,540 --> 01:44:37,470
Anyway, um, please, if you're willing to tolerate the fancy words and

1703
01:44:37,470 --> 01:44:42,110
you're enjoying the guests in the conversation and the topics that we're covering, we would

1704
01:44:42,110 --> 01:44:43,390
encourage you to support the podcast.

1705
01:44:43,470 --> 01:44:45,150
And David, how can people do that?

1706
01:44:45,790 --> 01:44:49,310
They can uh say a kind word about us on social media.

1707
01:44:49,390 --> 01:44:52,910
They can leave us a kind review, they can visit our Patreon page.

1708
01:44:53,070 --> 01:44:58,350
Uh any little thing you do helps, and it gives us the time and money to read more fancy

1709
01:44:58,350 --> 01:45:02,420
books to learn fancy words like uh subdoxastic and supererogatory.

1710
01:45:02,660 --> 01:45:03,060
Awesome.

1711
01:45:03,140 --> 01:45:07,540
Uh without further ado, uh that here here's the end of the

1712
01:45:08,660 --> 01:45:09,220
goodbye.

1713
01:45:09,860 --> 01:45:11,220
Here's the goodbye.