Evolutionary Psychology and the Law with Keelah Williams
2025-10-14 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologist. Do you have anything else to say? No, nailed it. We got it. Boom. David, uh the law and evolution and psychology, the intersection of those three is what we talked about today. That's right. It's a beautiful example of how um anything involving human beings uh can be illuminated by evolutionary psychology. Uh and law is a thing that is affected by human beings and human minds, and you would expect law to be uh uh illuminated by evolutionary psychology. And our guest today, Keila Williams, who is a professor at Hamilton College and has both a PhD and JD, double threat, uh tells us all about law and evolutionary

psychology. Yeah, I love that we learned about sort of how jurors make decisions. We talked about the death penalty, attitudes about that. And then we even talked about Keela's work on ecology, representations, and st and how it drives a lot of stereotypes about even things like racial groups. Um, really important topics, really counterintuitive. And I think Keela is just a great example of really cutting edge empirical work in the evolutionary social sciences. Yeah, and and stay tuned for my tips on how to be a good criminal and uh Dave's hilarious rant about how everyone in the legal system is hungry, tired, and grumpy. And I'm I will put myself in that category too. Without further ado, uh grab a sandwich and listen to enjoy the episode.

Uh David, do you do you want to introduce Keila? Sure. Uh today we have uh Keila Williams, who is uh a rare guest who has both a PhD and a JD. That is, you she uh understands both the human mind and the human legal system. Uh so I I'm kind of curious. I mean, given that we we started there, how did you end up developing this combination of expertises? Uh and uh what how do you think one informs the other? When I was an undergraduate, I worked in a research lab that was looking at jury decision making. And I, as part of that, was reading literature from attorneys who were talking about the strategies that they use sometimes to select members of the jury. And I was reading research from psychologists who were writing on a similar topic, and yet

they were coming to opposite conclusions. And I thought that was really fascinating. And I wanted to develop expertise in both areas so that I could figure out what the truth was. And so is the is the uh the goal for you to understand the mind of the juror, or is it more to understand the minds of the prosecutors or the judges? What whose minds are you most interested in getting inside? I'm just generally interested in legal decision makers. So that involves jurors, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, all of the above, and lay people too, who are asked to think about legal questions. Yeah. Do you do you feel, I mean, we can maybe like poke on and unpack some of those details because there's a lot to unpack.

It's like what you're studying. But just as a starting point, once now that you've sort of wrapped your head around both views, should we feel pessimistic or optimistic about the legal system? Or do you feel more pessimistic or optimistic, or is it sort of ambivalent? Um, like is it is it worse than we think or better, or what what's your conclusion just based on being a scientist um and seeing that the way that psychologists are talking and the way that legal people are talking, they're arriving at opposite conclusions. That sounds scary to me. Like if somebody did something to me that required the legal process, that that level of inaccuracy to put it away is scary. Like you would want consistency.

Um, but sometimes like psychologists are weird and like maybe the legal system has figured out a good system by just trial and error, even without science. Like, what's your take on that? Like, do you feel better or worse? Or what what yeah, what's up? I often feel frustrated because the legal system is very, very slow to incorporate science in general and psychological science in particular. And uh sometimes they they do eventually. I think eyewitness and eyewitness memory research is a good example of this, where Elizabeth Loftus did, you know, decades of work trying to show how unreliable eyewitness memory can be. And the courts have accepted that and incorporated it into some of their processes now.

So that's a success story. But I think that there are other areas where junk science continues to permeate the quartz. And that is a frustrating thing. Is it more that there's an ignorance of of the psychological science, or is it that they're selecting the the bad psychological science as opposed to the good psychological science? Or is it a little bit of both? It's probably a little bit of both, but it's it's ultimately a resistance to change, I think. Um, that there's a reliance in the law on we've always done it this way. And so that can be difficult to fight against sometimes. Right. So it's a conservative institution, not in the political sense, but in the sort of like precise literal sense of like conservative, meaning like you kind of resistance to change,

which can be a good thing if you if those But it that that's sort of it sounds like it's a conservative institution in that respect. Yes. Yeah. You know that makes sense if there are certain stakeholders who who might not win out from the new changes or or just by virtue of the fact that it's an institution that depends on people coordinating with one another. Um, if you introduce new ideas and new procedures into it, it's going to make it harder for people to coordinate, and there are already a set of coordination points or shelling points, as we might say, uh that have you know have rooted the whole institution. That that you know everyone triangulates around these concepts of guilt, innocent mensrea,

etc., etc. And to introduce new ideas is gonna you know tamper with something that's already working well in terms of coordination. So we've already talked about psychology and the law. We haven't yet introduced the evolution piece. So how does the evolution piece fit in here? So the goal of evolutionary psychology in particular is to understand human behavior. And the goal of law is to regulate it. And the better you understand behavior, the better you're going to be able to regulate it. So I see them as really, you know, excellent bedfellows. Interesting. Regulate. So it's not merely that the legal system wants to just boss us around arbitrarily, right? It doesn't want to just tell us what to do, you know, as an end in itself.

We might think or hope that it is regulating behavior in the service of some higher ideal like justice, morality, or some something like that. Um so uh I would then ask the question of uh, you know, to what end is this behavior regulation uh in pursuit of? You know, uh we'd like to think or hope that it's in the service of justice. Do you buy that idealistic story, or do you think something else is going on? What is justice? You have one minute to define five words or less. Yeah, exactly. A someone who was just starting law school and was there on the first day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and the law professor asked them to raise their hands if they were there to study justice. A bunch of them like, here I am and then the professor said well you're in the wrong place

the philosophy department is over there so I I think it's a very cynical way of thinking about it but I don't know that that the law actually is designed in a way that promotes justice in particular what is it designed to do yeah yeah Five words or less. In a haiku format, preferably. That's okay. Great. Um I think it's designed To really hard questions attempt to solve problems. But it doesn't do so in a highly efficient way. And it doesn't do so in a way that produces equal outcomes for individuals. So depending on your definition of justice, if that is what you want to see, then I don't think that the legal system is well designed to produce those outputs. Right. So it's sort of like we're all bumbling around and like there's a view of institutions

which is sort of like we're all bumbling around and everyone is just like doing everyone's busy and hungry and tired and sleepy and just doing the minimal thing to just kind of keep themselves going and like, you know, keep their kids alive and, you know, their family alive and stuff. And most institutions are sort of run by people just sort of doing the minimal thing reasonably enough. And so what you're saying is that the justice system, if that's the word for it, or the or the legal system, is just is an institution because people had problems, it became other people's problem at some level. And so we had to come up with a mechanism to solve a set of problems. And it's sort of a good enough clue system that sort

of has a way of sort of at least on the surface resolving problems. But it's nowhere near ideally designed or efficient. It's just this consequence of lots of hungry, sleepy, grumpy people, sort of all doing doing something. Is that sort of a fair uh characterization of it? Yeah, I really liked the the terms that David was using earlier about it being a coordination problem. I think the legal system is is really trying to to coordinate um behavior. And so, like in a criminal case or like a civil case, and kind of both, it seems like there's it's it's a lot about cost and cost redress. Is that a fair characterization? Or how would you think about like what is the the deep structure of what's the problem it's

solving? Or maybe there's not a single thing. I don't know. Yeah. I know. No, I just don't we know so little. We're just we're just recapitulating like law one oh one. We're like we're just the legal at least for me. What is the meaning of the law? Uh yeah, I mean like well it seemed like the way you're talking about it, Dave, the the problem being solved is a is a conflict between people that these people are in some sort of conflict uh and uh they they would prefer not to just endlessly kill each other and their and each other's family members like Hatfields and McCoy's right and so you know because that would be a problem for everyone else if that was happening all the time and so these people's problems just become someone else's problems and then they

have to figure out how to keep them from not killing each other. And and you know I love your your adjectives, J Dave, of you know, sleepy, grumpy, hungry, tired. And and these sleepy, hungry, grumpy, tired people are just like, all right, just doing the bare minimum to keep these people from killing each other. Yeah. Um and uh that's that's what the legal system is. Is that is that a fair characterization, Keila? Yeah, I would say so. Oh wow. Okay. Because that's like uh that's also a set of selection pressures, right? I mean, like, is that like have I mean key look, Keila, like I know like we had Deb Lieberman and we talked about the intersection of like law and evolutionary psychology. Like you've done probably you're one of the people, if not the person who's sort of done

the most in integrating those two. Um, has that point sort of um, you know, that it sounds like that point um you're making, right? Is that is that a fair characterization that sort of um the law in some sense does recapitulate what are and also selection pressures, like what David just described is also something that like the our mental software design also had to deal with. Yeah, I mean, one of the the basic principles that I come from uh in my research is that these model these modern legal institutions are stemming from evolved psychological mechanisms. So how we're responding to these law related questions is being governed by the ways that natural and sexual selection have shaped our minds over

evolutionary time. Yeah and one of the themes that like we've had on this um podcast has been to sort of say that taking an evolutionary approach moves you out of naive realism, which is just sort of the idea that it's trivial to sort of process any part of the world. You know, we know from evolutionary and cognitive science that there's a lot of mental software that's necessary to get anything, even like vision off the ground. And the idea that sort of there's a lot of content rich, infant rich, inference rich machinery, a lot of which is social, a lot of which is strategic, which is also a theme of like David's worldview and themes. Um that's a very different way of thinking about people, and that they're full of sort

of motivated reasoning. Um, and I would imagine that that really butts up against an idea that's sort of jurors or judges or just legal scholars are just maybe, I mean, you can tell us like, is that the worldview of them that that I mean, I mean I may, I guess there's an idea that people are sort of self-interested sometimes. But I mean, I even know like when I've seen like I've been on juries, like people will say, like, oh yeah, just disregard what you just heard. And the idea that's sort of like the little me in my head can sort of go in and like remove that information on all the consequences that information had in my mind is sort of very it is very naive. Um so is that is that fair? Like that that there's sort of like this this very like almost cynical view of people

from an evolutionary perspective butting up against a very sort of naive view of legal scholars? Or again, is that like a cartoon where I'm being self serving to my side? No, I think that's a I think that's a realistic description of um the differences between how as evolutionary scientists we would think about the ways that people think and behave uh and how legal scholars tend to approach it from uh this I would agree a more naive perspective of how the mind works. Yeah. And I think some of your work, I mean, like are do you have are can you are there certain examples like people might not know? Uh like people who haven't read your work, like are there examples um either in your work or other work that you're aware of that's sort of a good example of that where sort of

people have taken a naive view and then, oh, from an evolutionary perspective, we would expect this. And that sort of clarifies um either legal issues or at least sort of um we might have like a a systematic way of saying like look people are gonna be biased systematically this way or that way. Uh it's hard to pick one because I'll we have a lot of time. So yeah, yeah. A lot of my research is looking at exactly that. Um so this is probably a recency effect, but the one that immediately came to the mind is a paper I published last month that was looking at the influence of criminal motive on people's decision making. And so from a very strictly legal sense, motive, the reason why somebody did what they did, um not supposed

to matter when it comes to adjudicating guilt. that uh whether or not you stole twenty dollars because you needed to buy life-saving medicine or you stole twenty dollars to buy illicit drugs, it doesn't matter. You're guilty of theft all the same. And so the law really makes it clear that motive is not supposed to matter. Interesting. Would it would it would it affect sentencing? Or it would it is it I mean maybe it does you know in the real world, but is it supposed to be a consideration when it comes to sentencing? Yes at the sentencing phase judges are explicitly allowed to to use motive information um as both a mitigating or or an and an aggravating factor for determining sentences. So it's it's a little bit different there.

It's more on the side of when you're deciding guilt. It's not necessary for a prosecutor to prove motive, for example. I see. So just just to make sure I'm keeping up with this. So intent matters. So like if you accidentally so like if I went to a store and I accidentally put like I had my son, for example. I'm I I I don't think I've ever done this, but I could easily imagine like, you know, I have my son, I'm keeping an eye on him, there's a $20 item and just by pure accident I walk out of the store versus I steal the twenty dollars because it's life-saving medication versus I steal the twenty the twenty dollar item because it's illicit drugs. The last two categories are intent and the motives different.

And so the intent is what matters for guilt. Is that is that right? Yes. So the intentionality of it, that's the mensrea, the guilty mind component. And so you do have to prove that the person intended to commit the act. So if I did it by accident, then it would be probably hopefully they would just sort of uh say, don't do that again. Right? Well, I mean, may maybe they could could still convict you of something. I mean, 'cause I know that you could I mean, manslaughter is like unintended murder and you can still, you know, be convicted of manslaughter and have to go to prison for that, even though it wasn't your intention. You know, if you just you know, you were reckless driving or something like that and you

accidentally hit someone or or whatever. Um, you weren't intending to kill that person but you you ended up killing them, um, you know, that could land you in a lot of legal trouble. You know, similarly with like medical malpractice, you end up, you know, the doctor ends up killing the patient by some accident or something like that. Um so even an accidental uh crime, can you can still be guilty of that, right? Yeah. So there are different uh levels of intentionality. There's knowingly, purposefully, recklessly, negligently, um, and so uh different levels of the extent of intent that you have. So is there a difference between recklessly and negligently? Yes, there is a difference between them.

Could you enlighten us on what the difference is there? 'Cause they seem indistinguishable to me. Yes. So uh reckless, if you're asking me to recall my my intro criminal class. Anybody who's like studying for the bar. Uh exactly. Yeah. This will be helpful for me when I'm planning my life of crime so that I can, you know, carefully contort behavior to so that it fits the, you know, the the behavior with the lower sentence. So tell me yes tell us what the difference is and then what the lower sentence is. So again, I'm holding this back from the absolute recesses of my mind. This should probably be fact checked before it gets. We'll run it by ChatGPT. Don't worry. Exactly. But there's a difference between if you

should have known that what you were doing was wrong versus you knew and ignored what you were doing was wrong. Right. Um I could have. So like if David is building a bridge and he's like using shoddy bolts and it's gonna fail and he knows he's doing that versus he's just incompetent because it's his first day on the job. One is reckless because he's like he's just like, Yeah, this bridge is gonna fail. I don't care. It looks fine. And then the other one is he's just incompetent. Sorry, David, but um and uh so that would be negligent. Is that is that I think so. I think so. Okay. I'm I'm starting. I mean, this is a really s psychologically subtle distinction. Um it's very psychological too. Like it's yeah, extremely yeah, yeah.

But we're but we were we're digressing from the uh our looping back here to the example of evolutionary uh principle. So this is about the um the motive of uh the the effect of motive on the criminal. Um and so we've established right that um that intent matters for guilt, but that uh and motive shouldn't according to the law, whereas motive should matter for the strength of sentencing. And David has some information about how to start his life of crime or at least shoddy bridge building. Um maybe that's a reason for strategic ignorance. For you know, may maybe I you know Exactly. I don't want to read, you know, the actual uh instructions on how to build a good bridge because you know then then I'll I'll be more likely to be convicted of of recklessness as

opposed to mere negligence. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Um so we're we're I think we are bumbling our way. Dave and I are bumbling our way into a life of crime here. So can you keep us up to speed now? So I think we've got the intent or the motive shouldn't matter for guilt. So yeah, I think that's where we're at so far. Yeah. Okay. So why why does why doesn't the motive matter for guilt? That's just what the law has determined. That uh why you the reason behind why you're doing the illegal thing doesn't matter in terms of deciding whether or not you have done it with the requisite intent. Um and so it's just supposed it's supposedly irrelevant. That doesn't mean that it's impermissible to talk about motive, and

prosecutors definitely do, which was one of the reasons why my collaborators and I were interested in this paper is because why is it that this thing that the law considers so irrelevant is nonetheless really heavily emphasized in a trial to help to craft a narrative of what the individual did and to make an adjudication of guilt more likely. We had looked at what previous literature had said, other psychologists had said about motive and found that their conclusions were really unsatisfying. It was essentially like we care about motive because we want to punish bad people and we want to punish bad people because we have this inherent um desire to to punish people who we think are bad. Yeah. Yeah.

That's clo classic circular psychology reasoning right there. So you you take the y and x and you transpose their order and then you got it. I'm figuring out how to be a um uh old school. This is this is non-evolutionary psychology 101. This is how teaching you this is how to do the theory crisis one oh one. Okay, great. Got it. So good. I got X and Y, and now I'm gonna change the order to Y and X in the first zero. Okay, got it. Okay, I'm up to speed. Great. We're learning how to be criminals and uh bad psychologists. Got it. Okay. so so yeah so we found that explanation pretty unsatisfying um and so we wanted to take an adaptationist approach to thinking about why would motive be so impactful.

And what we suggested one reason is uh might be because motive matters for assessing association value. So whether or not this is a person we want to keep in the future as a cooperation partner. Um, so motive is feeding into this calculation of association value. And we propose that the reason why it's doing that or the mechanism through which it's doing that in part is by um affecting our calculation of the welfare trade off ratios. That we talked that other people have. David, did we talk about welfare trade off ratios? We might have talked about briefly. We talked about it, we I think we talked about it briefly in the context of anger, but uh, we haven't really delved into it that that fully.

Yeah. So maybe that? Yeah. Yeah. So what yeah, what is a welfare trade-off ratio? So essentially, and feel free to jump in and adjust my explanation at any point, but um you can take somebody's welfare into account a little bit, not at all, a whole lot. And you can also figure out switch points between when people start taking their own welfare more into account than when they take other people's welfare into account. And this information is really useful because the extent to which someone takes your welfare into account is predictive of really important information, like, for example, if they're going to exploit you or not. Is there anything else that you want to add to? I mean, we might we sort of intuitively talk about welfare trade-off ratios as like how

much someone cares about you. Um, you know, w whether they they really value or care about you. If you if they or if they don't give a shit about you, then they would have a low welfare trade off ratio. It's basically an attempt to turn this intuition about you know caringness into like hard math where like they're willing to impose a cost of ten dollars on you to gain a measly one dollar for themselves, that's a really low welfare trade-off ratio. But if they're willing to impose a cost of ten dollars on you to save themselves ten dollars, then maybe it's m more understandable, more forgivable. And if they're imposing a cost of ten dollars on you to save twenty dollars for themselves, then it's like, okay, you know, maybe I would have done that if I was in their shoes and I

can understand that. And so it's an attempt to uh take this intuitive notion of how much a person cares about us or values us and translating it to something hard and numerical that we can study empirically and then we could think about um in in adaptationist terms, um, where you know surrounding yourself with people who have high welfare trade-off ratios toward toward yourself would have been a strong selection pressure. And the ability to negotiate and recalibrate other people's welfare trade-off ratios would have also been a strong selection pressure. And that led to the evolution of emotions like anger, uh for for you know trying to recalibrate other people's welfare trade-off ratios, guilt for recalibrating your own

welfare trade-off ratio if it was too low, um, etc. etc. Um okay. So we have so we care about motive because um it it reflects or it is indicative of the perpetrator's welfare trade off ratio. And we care about that because um that tells us something very important about the underlying character of the of the perpetrator and whether we want to associate with them. Exactly. And there's there's a really great example that Aaron Sell has used um talking about did somebody ruin your sweater because they needed to wipe their mouth? Or did they ruin the sweater because they needed to staunch their child's bleeding wound? And so the crime of the ruined sweater is exactly the same. But the motive behind why they did it tells you something about how much they care about

you and your welfare, and thus what their behavior is likely to be in the future. And so from a legal perspective, what does the law say about welfare trade-off ratios? Or what does the law say about a juror caring about how much the defendant is going to value them? That you should not care about that thing. And in fact, they they set up some rules so that they don't have people who are invested in particular outcomes serving as jurors. Um, right. Like if if your brother is on trial, you're not allowed to be a juror in that case. Maybe unless you hate your brother. Well, you can't hate your brother or really like your brother. You have to be completely indifferent. Exactly. So so I should so I I kind of want to clarify.

So we're not talking about the presence or absence of a motive. We're talking about the presence of one motive versus the presence of a different motive. Because I might expect that the presence or absence of a motive might be a crucial piece of evidence in a criminal proceeding. You know, if if if I'm trying to argue that um the defendant is guilty and he has a plausible motive for doing the crime that's going to be count as evidence that he is guilty of the crime. If he has no motive, no reason to have committed the crime that will count as evidence against the idea that he's guilty. So you're not talking about that, right? Because that presumably would matter in assessing a defendant's guilt.

So I am not talking about that, but I also would say that that does not need to be a component. Like prosecutors could say nothing about motive and still Provide the evidence that the person is guilty. You don't need to prove someone is guilty. It's not necessary, but it's certainly impactful. And that's why prosecutors use it. I will say though, uh, since what you just said reminded me of this, that the absence of a motive also has implications for WTRs. Like if you just killed the fourth person that walked by you on the street, that implies something about your how much you care about other people's welfare relative to your own and what kind of threats you're likely to pose in the future. So sometimes the absence of motive conveys important information too.

I see. In that case, it would point in two opposite directions. So if I have less of a motive or less of a plausible motive, it would make it less likely that I did the thing at all. But if I did do the thing, it would it would uh make me a much worse person and give me a much worse sentence. So th that so the lack of a motive leads to both less likelihood of guilt, but if guilty, a s more severe sentence. Potentially, yes. So, David, more severe because you did the random thing versus if you knew the person? More more severe because if I killed the person capriciously or arbitrarily, that would have very low benefit to myself. Yeah. And thus convey a much lower welfare trade-off ratio than if I killed someone, say, out of

self-defense or or something like that. No, exactly. But I think this is, I mean, and yeah, and Keila, you can unpack this for us much better than me bumbling. But like uh I what I like about an evolutionary approach is that it it unpacks that and gives it a causal why. Right. So like I think we all have the intuition that if it was if if somebody, as in Keila's example, was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna count up to fourth person and I'm just gonna kill the person, versus like, oh man, you know, like somebody killed somebody because like some interaction they had, they they still killed the person, but the intuition is like the the counting to four person is way worse, right? Um, and and I think an evolutionary approach gives you well, one of the

benefits is that it gives you an explanation for why that is, like David said, right? Um, and it also, I mean, Keila, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but like it also relates back to what you're talking about, which is if I'm a juror, um, I'm evaluating from an evolved perspective, like I'm designed to care about myself and like my interests. And so if I'm sitting in the jury box and I hear a story about somebody who killed somebody because that person wronged them, I'm thinking, well, did I wrong that person? No. So, you know, and how likely is it I would wrong them versus could I walk past them, right? And that's very likely. And so it's much more likely that the person who counts to four and kills somebody is

gonna hurt me or my family than the person who had a very like specific interaction that me and my family didn't have. So from an evolutionary perspective, it makes total sense that I would really, really dislike the counting to four person much more than the interaction person. And that that's another, I mean, that would be another example of the evolutionary logic being very powerful in offering an explanation for why those very different scenarios feel so different. Yeah, in our paper, we use uh exactly the example of we are going to be less upset by the person who kills their boss because their boss didn't give them a raise rather than the person who kills the fourth random person who walks by them on the

street. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Scary. So you did number four strikes again. Yeah. Don't be four. Um, how did you or yeah, you should just like like make sure you have a is this going to be in your screenplay, number four. Exactly. And then you just make sure you have like four people in front of you all the time. And then you just like have a backup. So you could you could game this as a strategy. Um, this is a very good screenplay, David. Um, can you walk us through like how do you actually do that study? Like, do you get um participants to think they're imagined they're jurors, or like what what are the what are the like what on the ground, like what kind of studies do you do um to actually assess this?

So the paper that we published was purely theoretical. It was not an empirical. That's great. You're talking to T. Yes. It was just us pontificating. Yeah, that's great. So but we did say not just, yeah. We did say that you'd need empirical research to to flesh out the ideas that we were proposing. Um but I think that there are a couple implications that that lend themselves really nicely to empirical tests. So one of them is this idea that we can find perpetrators with different motives being similarly responsible for an offense, but reach very different conclusions about their WTRs. And that should then predict how much we want to punish them. Um, that the ratio of cost to benefits to the parties matters to people who

are observing um these actions. So if there's an action that produces a great benefit to a perpetrator, like the more acceptable the motive is perceived to be, um, then that's going to better than if you have a motive that is not providing great benefit to the actor. So that I think could be easily tested. Also, if the future behavior of this offender is anticipated to in some way be benefit-enhancing, then that even a bad motive will result in less punishment compared to an offender who's going to be seen as imposing future costs. And then related to that, if their future association value is high, then their motive is going to be less influential in general on your desire to punish them. And so I think all of those are quite testable questions.

Yeah, those last two seem really important. Can you give examples of those? Because those are like really subtle, kind of complicated ideas. Um, so if you have some situation in which you think that the person is going to benefit you in the future, um, so for example Like a famous person. Like let's imagine I'm a juror and the person like is or like a doctor, you know, a top a top surgeon, I see who specializes in difficult to treat cancer cases, right? Or something. Okay. Um versus uh a homeless person off the street. Right. That their motive, even if the doctor has a worse motive than the homeless person, you might still see people less willing to punish the doctor harshly. Right. And this might and this is something where like character might come in.

So if there are a lot of people who testify that the doctor's a wonderful father, you know, a wonderful doctor who's helped a lot of people, he has really great character, that might affect the juror's opinion, affect sentencing, even if even if you know his motive was really bad in in this case, we might still view his association value as as high if in general he's a really good guy. Um it's like the interpersonal legal version of like the bank's too big to fail, right? It's sort of like too valuable to convict. So do you so uh you mentioned that um motive is um irrelevant for assessing guilt, um, but it is relevant for assessing the severity of the sentencing. Given your knowledge of how the human mind works with regard to evaluating motives, do you

think that is the right way to set up the legal system? Is it good to to separate out whether when the motive matters uh uh in terms of which part of the procedure, or do you or do you view this as the a wrong-headed way of approaching uh the justice system I think that it's a little bit naive to think that motive is irrelevant for adjudicating guilt. Um I think it is good that judges are legally permitted to use motive because they would do it anyway. So I could so my intuition is that it's a good thing. And let me see if I can run this argument by you. Um because there when you're thinking about whether the person did it versus how much how badly they should be punished if they did do it, these are two very different questions.

The first question is just about trying to figure out what's true, just trying to figure out the facts of of whether they actually did the thing. And um and then the second question is, okay, given that they did the thing, how bad of a person are they and how how bad of a punishment do they deserve? Um, and it seems like you wouldn't want facts from the second part to contaminate parts from the first part. Like in the first part, you just really want to have a clear-headed view of whether they actually did the thing and what the what the evidence is. And if you're uh biased in answering that question by your hatred of the person, that's going to give you a less reliable answer to the question of whether they actually did do

the thing, right? And so it seems like it might actually be smart to separate those two questions and say, first we just want to figure out what the facts are, you know, what actually happened, you know, what the person did, you know, whether they whether they did it intentionally or accident by accident. Let's figure out what happened. And then once we figured out what happened, then we can start to get into the you know the person's character and how badly they deserve to be punished. Does that argument make sense to you or do you disagree? It makes sense, but I I think it's unrealistic to believe that it's not going to matter in that first half. It reminds me a little bit of uh this is sort of tangential, but uh another

thing in the justice system that has always boggled my mind. Um, that jurors are not allowed to be told what will happen to individuals who are found not guilty by reason of insanity. And they tend to assume that the person will just walk free when actually what happens is they often are institutionalized. Not guilty. So you mean you mean so wouldn't it be guilty, but so interesting. So they're they're found guilty of the crime, but but they're but they're judged to have committed it because of a mental illness? Yes. Yes. So they're technically not guilty. Tech oh interesting. David, I think maybe maybe let me poke on David's assumption here. And Keila, you can tell me if I'm wrong. David, I think you are giving the legal system maybe too much credit, or it's more of a

it's more of a like a flow chart. So guilt is not a uh guilt is an operational definition. It just has like sort of if you're guilty, this happens. Right. So like it's not as if, like, I mean, for example, um, if you're guilty, there might be a minimum sentence that's already imposed by definition. So this might be a place where, you know, it's not like I have the f discretion as a judge to just do whatever based on an objective view of they did it or not. I might my hands might be tied. So I might actually say not guilty, because I want to avoid the minimal sentence. Is that true, Keila? Or am I completely making that up? I guess I'm not I'm not following. So I think David is correctly, if we were going to start from scratch and do the pins off

Williams, Petrazuki legal school of thought, um, is basically saying, like, look, there's just facts on the ground. Like, did somebody do it or not. And we should just not imbue that we should not contaminate that with value judgments. So we should just establish whether or not it happened. And then after that, figure out what makes sense and is rational to do. And I completely agree with that. But what I'm saying is the definition of guilty or not guilty comes with it automatically, certain built-in consequences Such that it's not really possible to do what David's saying in some cases of just sort of like let the facts be the facts. And then we have full flexibility in choosing how we value what

happened. Right. So in other words, just to make it concrete, like, let's say somebody, it's a horrible example. Let's say like somebody's family is like killed by somebody, and the person who's left like seeks revenge on that person, right? And let's say that happens in a state where there's just like a minimum sentence for somebody who commits murder. The jury or the prosecutor, the judge might just decide look, this was such a heinous crime that the that the person was revenging, that we don't want them to be punished at all. So we're just going to declare them not guilty, even though technically, you know, it would be better if we could just say, well, they are guilty, but there's such exonerating

circumstances, we're just not going to punish them at all. But maybe that's just not an option in that state, for example. That's that's what I'm saying. I see. There's a a term for that. It's called jury nullification when it's juries who are doing it. Okay. That um that if they say, yes, we've come to the conclusion that the person did it, but for reasons X, Y, and Z, we don't want to say guilty. We're going to say not guilty. I see. So that would be an example of the value that the tied, the hands being tied, sort of consequences of the assessment actually goes back and changes the assessment, which I think is a smart. I mean, given the institutional constraints, that's not an unreasonable thing.

I mean, imagine it's abuse too, right? But like in your example, like we don't want the surgeon to go to jail, so we're gonna change the conviction or something. Right. That's interesting. Yeah, it seems to me intuitively like that's a bad dis badly designed system. Like that you'd want to separate those two questions. Like we'd first want to establish that the guy did avenge his family's death and did kill the person. And then once we know that, if we if we decide that, you know, it was such a heinous act that he was avenging, he doesn't deserve to be punished, then that's fine. So we'd say in that case, he's guilty, but his punishment is zero because he, you know, he he was justified. Um that to me makes much more sense than like blending the two questions together in the

way that the legal system currently works. Uh do you agree with that, Keeler or do you think it's uh it's good to blend them? Well, I think the legal system is it's trying to keep them separate. Got it. Um that it's human psychology that's blending them in these ways. Yeah. So it's like a dynamic, right? So sort of like, so like if I'm a politician, I'm like, uh anybody who kills somebody, we should have a minimum sentence because we don't want to let murderers go free. And everyone's like, that's great. And so I impose that structure without thinking through the consequences. And then the person who's avenging, you know, their whole family's death has this issue. So that would be an example, right?

Of like we create an institution that sort of fights against the realities that the politician wasn't thinking about, for example. That's interesting. Um so given that we don't take the motive into account um when we're evaluating guilt. Um there's this interesting question of, you know, when a jury is hearing this case, um, we know from our psychologist's perspective that the jury is going to be evaluating the prospective benefits that the perpetrator might um heap onto the juror and and the prospective costs that the perpetrator might inflict onto the juror. And that is going to weigh their decision making to a quite substantial degree. And so do you do you also think this this type of reasoning has implications for juror

selection and and impartiality of you know which jurors are likely to have an impartial perspective on on the crime? What do you think about that question? Yeah, that's a I think that's a fantastic question. That it it certainly seems to be the case that and I think the law does recognize this and and does its best to try to remove the partiality, the partial jurors from being able to sit on cases. But it would be interesting to think about I think more deeply what are the kinds of cues that uh offenders are going to give off that jurors might might lead jurors to be less impartial? Right. Like like if you're, I mean, just thinking it concretely, like if you're a family member of a homeless person, you know, like that's a really that's that's that's a really terrible

thing if like the fact that somebody on the juror thinks that, you know, my uncle is gross and wouldn't want to be around them, which has zero bearing on whether or not they did something, has zero bearing on like what is objectively right to do legally. But the simple fact that, like, you know, my poor uncle is gross to this person who's sitting in the jury box is gonna have an effect on their psychology. That seems important to know. And like it's and like this is happening now, right? Like this, the idea, at least the the idea in theory, and presumably it plays out. And I think there's probably lots of cases where this idea of association value um affecting these decisions, that seems really important.

Is this known at all? Like in the legal community? Oh, I I think that they're They tend to rely really heavily on intuition. Uh, attorneys, uh especially in the context of jury selection, that individual attorneys will have really arbitrary things that they think matter. Like to give a concrete example, um, I knew of one attorney who always looked at the socks that prospective jurors were wearing because he felt like he could determine personality characteristics from what their socks were like. Right. And there was another attorney who would always ask if you were at the airport. So he would ask prospective jurors if you were at the airport and you had to buy a magazine at the bookstand, what magazine would you pick?

And then would use that to try to infer something useful about which jures they should select. And so it's it's not a very scientifically informed process, I would say, um for the most part. If you were design if you if we were designing the Keila Williams uh uh approved legal system, would you have uh every prospective juror fill out a prospective welfare trade-off ratio questionnaire with regard to the perpetrator toward themselves and then look at the uh the average uh welfare trade-off prospective welfare trade-off ratio and exclude jurors with uh whose whose uh scores were, you know, say more than a standard deviation away from from the mean or something like that? That would certainly be an interesting approach.

I mean, because that that is a very legal, a very law, a very lawyer-y response. Very legal healing response. Exactly. But but that seems to be what lawyers are intuitively trying to do. Like, you know, if if say a black person was murdered, uh, and uh, you know, they're gonna look at the the race of each pr prospective jury member to see if they're gonna be an impartial um, you know, uh juror for for the crime. If it was racially motivated, that's gonna, you know, d depending on people's racial views, that's gonna potentially influence their decision. So presumably that happens a lot in in legal proceedings if they're if it was related to religion or sexual orientation or all the basically any detail of the crime is going to be

relevant for excluding jurors who might have a stake in the outcome or who might be, you know, biased in in one way or the other. And and lawyers have an intuitive sense of, you know, what's going to affect a person's level of impartiality. So presumably they're already doing something like this intuitively, but this would just be, you know, putting it, you know, in more concrete terms. I'm curious, have either of you been called for jury duty or served as a juror? I have been, um, but I um I've gotten out of it, or maybe I was kicked out either way. Um, so uh there there's been only one or two times where I wanted to because I had the time, and even then I wasn't allowed to typically, you know, it's just like I'm a I'm an

experimental psychologist and sort of that excludes me. Um, but uh there's been times both whether or not I want to, uh I've never been um allowed to be on a jury. Yeah, I've been uh no I've never served on a jury. I came close once, but I didn't want to, and I found a way to get out of it. Um so like I uh so the uh like I there was the trial was gonna be like when a friend was coming to visit me and I would have had to like miss him coming to visit. Uh and um and so I like I wanted to get out of it. Um and so what I did was I you know I I didn't lie, I gave honest information about my background. We can edit this out. Uh so you know, I you know mentioned I was a PhD psychologist and you know I I you know

said I I was skeptical of eyewitness testimony because I've read all the literature from Elizabeth Loftus that eyewitness testimony is unreliable and then the case involved eyewitness testimony and I you know I said that maybe a little bit more forcefully than I otherwise would have just you know to hopefully scare the the lawyer away and it it it worked and the the other the prosecutor uh did not want me as a juror for that reason. Um and so that was a successful strategy for getting out of it. Um so yeah, that that's a pointer for anyone else who's listening who wants to try to get out of jury duty. Um so we got recommendations for, you know, committing crimes, for getting out of jury duty, for writing bad screenplays about uh the number four killer.

We got a lot of why why else would you why else would you uh either learn about the law or listen to a podcast? I know. This is just a treasure trove of insights for our listeners. Um anyway, affordances, right? Affordances, right? That's one of the because Keila, you came out of the ASU um school of evolutionary. Can you talk like just as a we do tangents all the time. Um you're from the ASU school, is that right? Arizona State? Yes. Yeah. And your advisors were Steve Newberg in the psych department and Michael Sachs in the law school. Oh fantastic. Cool. And what what is the um their thing is sort of affordances, is that right? Yeah. So affordance management theory, the idea that the goal of the social mind is to identify

threats and opportunities in our environment and to respond to them in opportunity enhancing and threat mitigating ways. What a crazy idea. I cannot believe. How could it just make no sense at all to me that we would have evolved to avoid threats and uh pursue benefits? I mean, what a crazy way of thinking. It must sound stulted to people who are unaware of the history of the behavioral sciences or the legal sciences, right? To sort of s say that because it's sort of like, well duh. But then exactly Keel as you're saying, like it sounds like what you are doing is exactly in a lovely example of applying that really important idea to a really important area where it hasn't been done before, which is just to say, look, jurors are assessing affordances

in a way that's completely independent from what the letter of the law is. And one of my primary research areas has been about understanding people's attitudes towards the death penalty. And that is a really interesting area to think about applying affordances too. So tell us more about that. So I uh worked on a project with Ashley Votruba and uh our advisors, and it was looking at how resource scarcity influences people's attitudes towards the death penalty and their willingness to impose death on uh offenders. And uh It was really an interesting project because so much of the death penalty attitudes, literature, and psychology has focused on really proximate explanations. So, for example, political ideology that conservatives are more likely to endorse the death

penalty than liberals are. I'm not bagging on that work by any means. But there weren't really any approaches looking at more ulti explanations. And so we started from the premise of when you are faced with a serious offender in your group, you have to make an important decision about whether or not you're going to try to rehabilitate them or if you are going to eliminate them, whether that's like banishment from the group or actually killing them, whichever. You either need to decide if you're going to get rid of them or you're going to try to incorporate them back into the group. And what we suggested was that the amount of available resources in the environment is going to affect that calculus.

That if you have plentiful resources, then you're going to be more willing to take a chance on rehabilitating the person. And if your resources are scarce, you're going to be less willing to risk repeated offending. And so you're going to be more likely to get rid of the person. And we found some evidence to support that, both archivally across the globe, in the United States, and then uh experimentally as well in the lab. So that was a really, a really fun project. Well, how do you assess or manipulate resources or what what is meant by resources? So what we did for our lab studies was we gave people a slideshow about the economy, and it either suggested that the economy was doing great and was in an upswing and there are all these available jobs and everything is fantastic, or it

said that the economy is in the shitter and is just getting worse and there are no jobs and so forth. And at the time that we ran that study, uh it was shortly after the Great Recession. So it was actually pretty believable that the economy could be either good or bad at that time. Um and then after they read the economy information, then they answered questions about um their attitudes toward the death penalty. So did they think that the death penalty is necessary? Do they think that it should occur faster? Those sorts of things. So just can I let me flesh this out? And you can tell me if it's right or wrong, but at different scales. So um of sort of um a time sampling, there's sort of software in

my mind for detecting resource availability. So like, you know, uh do are things, you know, it's intuitive, right? Like are things nice, kept well kept up. There's enough stuff for me, for my family, whatever. And then uh, or like it's just desperate. There's a lot, I see lots of desperation. There's just not enough stuff and then if you encounter somebody like a criminal, there's just this issue of like, and it's gonna take resources to rehabilitate them. This idea that sort of like, well, it's gonna it's gonna be cheaper and quicker to just kill 'em. I mean, this is like very blunt, but the psychology is sort of like it's gonna be cheaper and quicker to just kill them as opposed to like invest all this time and energy and money

in is that fair? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Now, is that accurate in any way? Like, even assuming that people can accurately assess resources, like, is that even true? That like um uh like imprisoning people is very expensive. I think killing people is even more expensive, let alone the morality of it. Like uh like this seems like a very like mismatchy kind of thing, um, let alone like letting people decide who should die because of like ambient feelings about scarcity. So it is true that killing someone in America with the death penalty is more expensive than keeping them alive for life. And that is because of all of the mandatory appeals processes that we have. If it were the case that the person would be found guilty and sentenced to death and then

taken out back and shot, it would not be more expensive. It would be way cheaper. Um it's more legally expensive, but not the actual act is is not more expensive. Got it. Right. I can say as somebody who lived in Germany, uh do not recommend the first or the the cheaper option. There or like there's a long history of that being a really bad uh scenario. So be careful what yeah, the uh pr money's not everything. Yes, exactly. Interesting. Would would would you expect, you know, making people aware of this fact, say the expensiveness, um, would that be another variable that could push people one way or the other? Say, you know, if I'm if I think resources are really scarce, I might as well get rid of

this person 'cause they're another mouth to feed and, you know, there's not enough stuff to go around. Uh but if then if you if you tell me that actually executing him is going to be even more expensive uh than putting him in prison, then, you know, maybe that'll push me in the other way. Would you make that prediction? We actually tested that. We measured we measured how people how expensive people thought um one was relative to the other. And that did not actually push around their their death penalty decisions. So even even if you tell people it's cheaper to keep them alive when they detect scarcity, they still say kill 'em. Yes. So to what what what is your why is that? What do you think?

Is it just sort of like the system is just sort of doesn't believe that explicit information or I think it's because The mind doesn't actually care that much about the reality of the cost of doing it. That when resources are scarce, even if you tell me that it's less expensive, the mind is still going to want to do that. It's just so counterintuitive. Yeah. I think it's just a it's a counterintuitive idea at the end of the day. Like you might tell me, yeah, I might explicitly say, yeah, okay, I I believe that it's more expensive, I, you know, but intuitively it doesn't seem like that's right. And and that might be what's what's shaping people's attitudes. Aaron Powell I wonder is could it be and Keel, I'm sure you've thought of this and maybe I

I'm just sort of slow to catch up, but like could it also be sort of a folk or like a smart folk version of sort of uh deterrence. So sort of if we're in a very difficult, scarce world, then if somebody is like doing something bad, it's a higher cost, right? So sort of like I really want to like slap down bad behavior. Like it's this is this is no joke, kids. Like you can't do bad stuff, right? Like that's the mode you're in. And so it's this it's this flipping into like punitive mode when costs are high for for just doing the wrong thing, right? Um and that would be a different thing. And that would even be, if that was the the the causal structure for why that would be, it would, it would even be rational, quote unquote, to even ignore the cost of that one

murder in the sense of if if people believe the death penalty is more uh deterrent, even if the people aren't consciously thinking this, then it's sort of it's still rational because you're you're you're deterring more other people from doing the wrong thing in a highly scarce environment. That might be wrong, but that would be, I don't know, have I'm sure you've thought of that. Like what do you think about that? Well, one thing that's interesting is that we've found that resource scarcity doesn't make people more punitive in general, that it doesn't just heighten their their desire to punish and punish harshly, that it's specific to the use of capital punishment. Wow. That's cool. That's amaz.

That's such beautiful data. Yeah. And yeah. We're I am we're real time going through the uh you're correcting us. This is wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was an interesting hypothesis, but yeah, that that that data uh speaks against that hypothesis. Yeah. Interesting. There's also this thing, I mean, like there's this trope and I think believe it's true. Like, you know, like for the example, like, you know, I w I watched a YouTube video of like a northern European prison, which you know depicted the prisoner getting up in the morning and like, you know, leaving his apartment and going to work, you know, and coming home in the day. You know, and that's a very different kind of, and this is like for a pretty serious crime,

you know. Um, and and so that that's an example of sort of like there's a social, um a very big social safety net people feel taken care of in like northern European social democracies. And that seems to correlate with sort of non-punitive sort of retraining or you know minimizing recidivism sort of policies versus the trope of sort of, you know, in the somewhere like certain places in the US where it's sort of like, you know, oh, you shoplifted three times, we're gonna have to kill you. I'm sorry, you know, like um is that uh is that a character, caricature, or is that sort of borne out in the data? Like am I um am I reading into that with anecdotes or is that sort of what you're saying? That like somewhere, so for example, like you could actually would the would the would it

would it be that, you know, if you had somewhere, for example, you took somewhere with really bad social safety notes, Healthcare is expensive, it's not available, people's kids are hungry, food is expensive. And you just shifted to a northern European model where food is cheap, healthcare is free and universal, childcare is free and universal, people feel taken care of, that would immediately change sort of how people feel about prisoners. Is that sort of what this is saying? That's interesting. I can speak from the data that we have that when we were looking at the global data that we were using the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index as our proxy for resource availability. And that does incorporate a number of the things that you're talking about, like education,

in addition to just resources themselves. And we found that places that have lower human development were more likely to have the death penalty as a form of punishment. So I I want to dig so my hypothesis here is that it's not so much about resources at an absolute level. Because if you think about it in the modern world, our absolute access to resources is probably uh significantly higher than it would have been in ancestral environments. Um what it's what it's indexing is not so much you know whether there's a lot of stuff or not a lot of stuff, but the zero sumness of the stuff available. So if we live in a world that's more positive sum where um you know maybe there aren't that many resources in an absolute sense, but uh, you know, eliminating you is not going to

increase the amount of resources available to me. Because it's just about positive sum cooperation. Um, and you know, maybe having more people will increase the amount of cooperation and increase the pie for for everyone. And so it doesn't it doesn't really make sense to try to eliminate someone. But if we are in a state where there are limited resources and where there is zero sum competition over them. Then in that case, eliminating you is going to be a pretty appealing prospect because it's going to directly increase the amount of resources available to me. So of course, I would expect, you know, zero-sumness and absolute resource levels to probably be correlated, but they're still distinguishable and they're not the same thing.

And so I would expect, you know, this human development index, poorer countries are tend to be countries with uh crappier institutions, with more uh zero-sum competition and corruption, uh, you know, in in politicians, where the society is much more about fighting over uh the slices of the pie uh than it is about growing the pie, uh and which which you tend to find in in in wealthier countries. And so in those in those more zero-sum contexts where there's more there's competition over power um and resources are it's less about cooperation and and growing the pie and more about just forming coalitions and grabbing what little of the pie is is left. That in those uh contexts, there's more of a zero-sum mentality.

And maybe that is what's driving this result rather than well, absolute levels of wealth. No, I I think that's really insightful. Um it it reminds me a little of the the fact that we saw differences across states based on state per capita income and whether or not they were likely to have the death penalty, even controlling for the political ideology of the state. So I I totally agree with you that I think it's it's about a relative comparison, not about the absolute um number of resources. Can I add another layer of complexity to this? No. So Ashley and I also thought that the value of the offender would matter in this calculation. So when resources are scarce, so even if resources are scarce, you're not going to

get rid of the most valuable group member, no matter what they do. So we set up some experiments where we tested this, where we manipulated the value of the group member by making the offender either a very good hunter or an artist or a schlub who was lazy and didn't contribute anything to the group. And then looked to see how resource availability would affect people's willingness to punish, and found that when resources are scarce, people actually became much less willing to ban it was banishment in this case, to banish the hunter from the group. Interesting. I mean, I wonder it seems like the logic you're laying out here with regard to capital punishment would also apply equally to immigration.

So that's another case where you are, you know, as opposed to eliminating a member of the group, you are welcoming in a new member of the group. And so in that case, the same logic should apply, where if there's a limited amount of stuff and we're letting another person into the group, that is going to reduce the amount of stuff available for me if we if we live in a zero sum world. And so have you thought about maybe extending this logic to um to immigration attitudes? I haven't, but I I love that idea. I think that makes total sense. And there is research out there. I think Carrie Pick is one person who's been working on this, looking at the different kinds of threats that different immigrant groups are seen to pose.

And the um finds that Mexican Americans are seen to pose a more economic threat. And so I wonder if maybe it also would be affected by what whether or not the immigrants are seen as posing an economic threat versus a safety threat versus some other type of threat or benefit. That's great. Yeah, no, I'm aware of there's there's some interesting data, I think a political scientist by the name of Haynes Mueller or Hans Mueller, uh basically showing that when you specify the characteristics of the immigrants, you know, whether what country they're from, you know, whether they're religious or not, whether they're high highly educated or highly skilled or not, um, you tend to actually eliminate most partisan differences in in

immigration attitudes. So if it's like a if it's specified that this is a highly skilled, highly educated person who's coming in to immigrate, you don't really see partisan differences. You know, Democrats, Republicans are happy to let that person in, which I think speaks to this hypothesis that it's really about options of of zero sumness and association value. You only really get partisan differences when it comes to uh Latin American immigrants and Muslim immigrants. And why that is the case is an interesting question. Uh with uh with the case of m Muslim intr uh immigrants, I would expect, you know, religiosity to play a role there. And, you know, uh I would expect, you know, people who are more um devout to be more

threatened by a religious rival, perhaps. Uh with with Latin Americans, I'm not sure it it may have something to do with with economic threat and the and the perception that maybe they're gonna be competing with uh with you know working class white people for low skilled labor. That could that could be uh a part of it. But it's an interesting, interesting topic. I mean also those two regions were are also sort of like we have a a very checkered history of s of like, you know, the the global north sort of dominating Muslim countries or global south countries. And so I mean I think like a very rational reaction is like these are people coming from more desperate circumstances, all sequel, right?

Which is fairly accurate all sequel. Yeah. Sorry, Keila, you were gonna say something No, I was just saying that's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, this also speaks to like this also predicts, for example, that like association value uh and high resources should go together in like uh rhetoric about like outgroups, which I think is borne out too. Like this is the this idea, like David, you were talking about like the re the kind of resources based on what Keela's saying, that like, you know, um, if I want to sort of like say that we should really um be upset if I'm like a speaker, you know, like a demagogue or something, I should be like, look, there's these low association value people who have who have who are taking resources or have resources

that belong to you. Like that's the sort of like the deep structure of like a demagogue in a way. And I think that's pretty borne out, um, you know historically right like you know um again I'm thinking you know just because of Germany but like you know the the idea that sort of like you know the Slavs have our uh have our uh or have our like you know space you know for the Third Reich you know so sort of like these people who are subhuman are occupying this wonderful land and area that belongs rightly to us. Um and you just fill in the blank of other examples. So it's a I I think this idea is sort of a lovely example of sort of like the deep structure of like this political rhetoric. Yeah. Um speaking of resources and um their availability or lack thereof, um I know you've

done some interesting research on stereotypes and how they relate to perceptions of resource scarcity and resource availability. So I'm curious if you could uh elaborate on on some of that work because I think it's really interesting. Thank you. Yes. So I have done some work. This was with Oliver Sung and Steve Newberg. And we were interested in this idea of ecology stereotypes, about whether or not people hold beliefs based on inferences of the kinds of environments that others come from, and specifically how that might be related to race stereotypes in the US. So I I wonder if I should start from the beginning in terms of the theory behind this or just talk about it. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly, I'm so glad David brought it up.

It's such incredible work. So yeah, and I'm sure many people don't know about it who are listening. So yeah, please just start from wherever you think. Yeah. So the the starting point is that the kinds of environments that people grow up in does actually affect their behavior. That when people grow up in environments that are resource poor and unpredictable, that they this tends to engage more present-focused strategies. So more impulsivity, more opportunism, more sexual promiscuity, less investment in education, and less investment in children. Whereas people who grow up in more resource-rich and predictable environments do sort of see opposites. So being less impulsive, more planning for the future, more future oriented, more

sexually restricted, et cetera, et cetera. So that work is already out there. Lots of people have have uh quite a bit of robust research on that. And so we are coming again from the affordance management perspective of the mind interested in seeking out these threats and opportunities, that people should be attuned to this ecology information. If it provides really useful information about how others are likely to think and behave, then it would make sense for us to have stereotypes that are based on ecology. And so the first study that we did in our first ecology stereotypes paper was just exploring generally if people do possess these ecology stereotypes, as we called them. So we gave participants vignettes that described a person who was either from an

environment that was really resource poor and unpredictable, or resource rich and predictable. And we asked them how likely is this person to be impulsive, be invested in their education, be sexually promiscuous, et cetera. And we found that people do have these ecology stereotypes, that they stereotyped people from more harsh ecologies as being more present focused and people from these more hopeful ecologies as being more future focused. So that was our first just establishing the base, basic effect. Then we did some additional studies that were trying to sort of rule out alternative explanations. We showed that people have these ecology stereotypes for environments that are seen both as being primarily white inhabited and primarily black inhabited.

We showed that these stereotypes are not derivatives of wealth stereotypes, that within high and low wealth, we still see these ecology stereotypes occurring. And then we also showed that it's not just a positivity bias towards people in hopeful ecologies, that the stereotypes are really specific to these present versus future focused in psychological suites of behavior. And so then our final study in that project was looking at if maybe that these ecology stereotypes could help to explain race stereotypes in the US. And the reason why we thought that that might be the case is because in America, race and ecology are confounded in the sense that black Americans are more likely to live in resource-poor and unpredictable environments, and white Americans are more likely to live

in resource rich and predictable environments. And so if there is this confound, then it would make sense for the mind to be using race as a proxy for ecology. So we essentially separated race and ecology information in that last study. And we first replicated our finding that when you give people just ecology information, you see that those from harsh ecologies are stereotyped as more present focused than those from Hopeful Ecologies. Then we looked at just race information. So if we asked people to imagine a black individual or a white individual, people were stereotyping the black individual to be more present-focused than the white individual. But when you provide people with both race and ecology information, that's when the really

interesting results happened. That people's stereotypes tracked ecology and not race. So it essentially wiped out the effect of the race stereotypes. So black Americans from hopeful ecologies were stereotyped as being just as future focused as white Americans from hopeful ecologies. And similarly, black Americans from harsh environments were stereotyped as just as present-oriented as white Americans from harsh ecologies. So that was the those are really exciting findings for us. Yeah, that's that's really amazing. I mean, in the sense of, you know, I mean, tell me if I'm if I'm wrong, but I mean uh the literature and also I think just sort of common knowledge was sort of that this is all about race.

Is that fair? Yes. Yeah, and so this would yeah. I mean it it's I mean it's again, you know, uh viewing the mind, uh viewing humans as idiots, basically. Um, you know, we're just you know blindly we just don't like people who look different than us, and and that explains this. And we have these crude stereotypes that aren't really tracking anything in reality, and it's just we're just dumb bigots. Um, and you know, while a lot of the the downstream outcomes of these stereotypes uh might be might be deplorable. The underlying uh logic to the mind that is uh creating these stereotypes is there there's something rational about it. That it's it's connecting to something uh deep about the connection between uh human

ecology and and human behavior. And people are picking up on this regularity. Um and uh it's n it's not just a blind, crude thing. It's it's it's it's stemming from something real, uh which I think is is is really interesting. Uh and it and you know it echoes some of Dave's work. You know, it basically, you know, the the paper can race be erased? And if you find that, you know, race is confounded with all sorts of things. It's confounded with ecology, as you mentioned. It's also confounded with uh coalition. Um, and when you deconfound those things, you can uh erase uh uh race effects. You know, we uh with with Dave's work, you know, if if you um deconfound um skin color with, you know, whose side of a of a group conflict you're on, that can uh decrease or some

in some cases eliminate racial categorization in your case. If you deconfound race with ecology, that can um uh el eliminate uh differences in in uh uh racial stereotypes. So I I think it's a really interesting um line of work that that delves you know deeper into the nuts and bolts of this important you know part of uh you know modern culture uh and and and really uh I don't know giving a lot of insight into it. And the the underlying evolutionary logic here um that I'll just toss out maybe for listeners who aren't familiar with it is that um humans across evolutionary history would not have encountered people of different races, um, very often, if at all. And so we wouldn't have expected evolved mechanisms that would encode race as

a social category. Right. And it's I I think to me, it's a lovely example of, and I think all everything we've talked about, like juror decision making, legal decision making, racial categorization, it's the idea that beneath the surface, there's sort of a hidden logic that if you understand it, you can better understand what's happening and possibly change it, right? So like you're talking about legal decisions that are happening right now as we speak. Like people are literally deciding if somebody's guilty or not as we speak. And it's for reasons that maybe aren't good, like because somebody just seems gross to them. And that's completely irrelevant and bad that they're doing that. Um and so I think what I like about all this work is that it shows that there's sort of a a

hidden logic that if you unpack it, you can sort of get at the the machinery in a way that we can then better evaluate. Like does this make sense, yes or no? Which is a different issue, but still um yeah. So I I like that that that's sort of a through line of all that work. Yeah. People have used the phrase deep rationality. And I think it's a good one. Yeah. Have you thought it all? Um, because I know we're both here. Um, and people ask me all the time, like, what do you think about the relationship between the coalitional work and the ecology work? And, you know, maybe we can also just pin that for another time, or you and I can talk about like I I I am not sure what I think about it. And I'm curious if you've thought about that that relationship in the sense that we

both have done this work showing that race is being used as a proxy for some other deep rationality thing. But what what have you thought about sort of what what's up with the relationship between ecology and coalition? I have not put a lot of thought towards it, other than um I've also seen that there is likely a connection there. And that it's interesting that that race is being used as a proxy for both of those things. Yeah. Um, but I haven't no. I would like to talk more at something about it. Maybe we can have that another time or something. Yeah. I it's a good example of sort of like yeah, me too. I've thought about that, but I I've meta thought about it. I've thought about it abstractly, but not actually gone through it.

So yeah. So I mean I mean the go ahead. No, you know, no, I've just I I I I've been trying to understand, you know, political alliance structures and and why um you know uh the the so on the so called white working class has uh recently gravitated a lot toward the Republican Party, um which is sort of a recent phenomenon in in American history. Um and uh I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around that and and why we see a lot of this anti-immigrant sentiment um and uh racially coded policy preferences coming from the white working class. Um, you know, depending on how you want to measure it, you you tend to see these effects. Uh and um uh just thinking out loud, I mean, th these are people that you know,

if you think of the white working class and and African Americans, they're coming from kind of similar ecologies. Uh and I'm wondering if if if there's something about being in a similar ecology um you know evokes a kind of um competitiveness. Like you know, we we we talked with um Ann uh Pizor about um how it's not so much um uh uh the how far apart uh two groups are that that will elicit antagonism. It's often the groups that are more similar to each other in terms of their status or formidability that where you see the most conflict. Uh and I'm wondering if something like that could explain this uh this political realignment where you see um, you know, uh uh the white working class developing these sort

of ethnic resentments that that steer them toward um the Republican Party and toward these, you know, uh more uh populist policies. Um so I'm cu I'm I'm just thinking out loud here and then spit blank but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. That's really interesting. Um, it also reminded me uh as another example uh backs up what you're saying. You see that with intersexual aggression too, that um women tend to be most competitive with women who are similarly attractive, right? They're not being competitive with the the superhottis or the ugos. It's yeah. Technical terms, huh? Right. Um it reminds me of the the Saturday Night Live sketch that was Black Jeopardy. Um, I don't know if you saw that, but they they had Tom Hanks on it, um, who was

uh MAGA supporter um along with two um other black contestants. And and the whole shtick was that the contestants were all agreeing on things, and how surprising was it that that there was such agreement? Um and I think it it's because of this shared ecology uh that that it really does drive similar cognition and behavior. Yeah. Interesting. Cool. Well, I was also just oh go ahead. All right. I was also just going to say that we very recently published a paper that shows that ecology stereotypes are quite universal. So you see them existing in many, many countries around the world. And it's not always confounded with race. So for example, in Japan, it's very homogenous, racially homogeneous. And so you wouldn't expect ecology by race effects, but we do see effects of cat

other categories that have been confounded with ecology, specifically family structure. So there you see that single parent households get stereotyped like harsh ecologies, people from harsh ecologies. Is the idea that um predicting people's impulsivity is really important. And so you're picking up cues that would predict that. And so that's why we're having this. So in that context, maybe people you said which country was it? I'm sorry. Japan. Japan. It was Japan. Okay. I thought it was. Um, so in Japan, if I if I live in Japan, I might just really experience that boy, the family composition of people just really pops out to me. Um, the idea would be though that the reason why that is happening is there's this

underlying, probably non-conscious process that I'm trying to infer what somebody's going to be like, quote unquote. And I may not even be aware of it. Is that sort of a fair thing? Absolutely. Interesting, yeah. So that yeah, because I think most people, I mean, even when I heard this work, I mean, I was skeptical of the coalition work, I was skeptical of the ecology work, and in part it's because it doesn't jive with my intuition, right? As you said, like a lot of law is based on intuition. And we know as psychology, like one of our things is that intuition is valuable because it it is sort of a readout of our software, but it's not the description of the software. And so like I experience, you know, race, I experience like these pop-out effects of

certain things, but why I do, or even why I'm attending to it, might not be hidden. And I think this is a lovely example of like, I don't think anybody listening would think, like, oh yeah, no, ecology is something I'm tracking, or like I'm trying to figure out how impulsive somebody is. I mean, maybe, like, you know, occasionally I'd be like, oh, that person seems really impulsive, but like it's not a category that is sort of intuitive. Um, but in the same way, you know, like your visual system calculates like how far apart the images are on each eye. And that's part of how you experience depth. Like we experience depth, but we don't experience like how that's actually working. I think it's a similar thing where there's all these sort of like social illusions, but the

underlying logic is different. And I just love, like, I think the ecology work is so important as an example of that. Um, yeah. So yeah, so I don't know if I have a a question, but yeah, I just want to say, I mean, do you think about uh how have people responded to the work? Um, like, have you gotten much feedback one way or the other? I know it runs counter to a lot of existing theory that had been sort of very much in this sort of like it's about race or it's about ideology that doesn't look at this underlying deep logic. Like, what's the response been? So generally the response has been really positive. Um, but I'll focus on the the two less positive responses that I've gotten. Um one has been, are you saying that black people are impulsive?

Are you claiming that there's a kernel of truth to the stereotype? And I am surprised by that criticism because actually the work is saying quite the opposite. It's saying that there's nothing about blackness that makes people impulsive, that you can put a white person in the same ecology and expect it to elicit the same behavior. So actually it's very anti-essentialist. And then the other critique that we've gotten is well, are you just talking about social class? Is this really just social class stereotypes or wealth stereotypes? And we tried to get at that with that study that that manipulated wealth orthogonally to ecology. But I I find the the social class question to be a really amusing

one because um social class theorists don't come from the same perspective at all and they they would I think be quite unwilling to say that their theory applies, for example, across species? Whereas we are claiming that you do see across species these ecology effects. And so would you call, this is one question that we've had for social class theorists is, you know, would you say that an elephant is a higher class animal than a rat? Um and I don't think that they would be willing to make those claims. Right. So yeah. Interesting. That's a good question. Intuitively, yes. I could I could see an elephant wearing a top hat and that. Exactly. That's great chain of being, exactly. That's the study there.

There's also a version of the social class thing that is the theory, right? Like I mean, I actually wonder how much people like when they say social class, are they actually talking about ecology, right? Like I actually um like that's also the other way to talk about it is that actually in the same way that race is sort of a proxy for this underlying thing. I think when people are actually talking about social class, often they're talking, you're right, not about like absolute amounts, but it's about, you know, these other things, which there in some sense is the right thing to be looking at, right? Yeah. It's almost like you're what you're doing is you're providing a theory of what social class

is. Right. Right. As opposed to offering, you know, a saying, you know, it's a different theory than than this. It's like, yeah, social class obviously matters, and we have class-based stereotypes and blast class-based hierarchies, but you're providing insight into what that actually means in a really interesting way. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And in a non-essentialized way. It's sort of saying here's the here's the like causal structure in the world, and here's the uh Q structure, and it has nothing to do, it's it's a complete arbitrary thing. Like you could you could set up a scenario where like any attribute becomes correlated with this, or any feature of the world becomes predictive of it, and you would predict this is

what people would latch on to. So it's not only causal, but it's exactly as you said, like not it's getting rid of all the essentialism that has nothing to do with skin color, has nothing to do with the way people talk, it has nothing to do with any like X, Y, or Z attributes, um, you know, whether it's a species, an elephant or rat. It's just, it's just these, anything that correlates with this deep structure. Yeah. I I'm wondering, I mean, uh now now my mind is racing with thoughts about um, you know uh conspicuous consumption and signaling of class membership. It was the elephant in the top hat. It was the elephant. Yes, that that's what that's what yeah. Yeah. I mean presumably we have all sorts of social signals, ways of uh communicating, you know,

our class membership, you know, signaling that we're a member of the upper class, we're not a member of the the lower class, you know, um and we you know from the way we dress, the way we talk, you know, the the the books we read, the furniture we have, you know, our our our our opinions uh uh presumably in in in in in significant uh part function to signal our our class membership. And I wonder if you could connect this work to that, where, you know, the things that are effective class signals are things that are are signaling, you know, uh aspects of these ecology stereotypes like impulsiveness or present-orientedness or or whatever. Like if I can sit through a long, boring uh book, you know, from the 17th century, that's

going to convey, you know, that I have a low present-orientedness orientedness and therefore that's a cue of you know upper class culture. Um and and and that might be a common thread to a lot of, you know, so so unso uh so a so called um highbrow culture. That the common thread there is that it takes a lot of, you know, self control and and um future orientedness to uh master the the the refinery of of you know the the highbrow culture. That the you know I I could see lots of interesting directions uh coming out of this analysis. Oh, 100%. We have long been interested in trying to figure out what are the cues that people are using to infer ecology. I think that's a very interesting question.

There's also the problem of like um kids are really impulsive. So there would have to be like a correction on this system too for sort of like accounting for the fact that they're kids, but then like within that sort of tracking, you know, because I think there's also a lot of rhetoric of like there's the outgroups kids too, right? Like I w so I wonder like the intersection of like perception of kids um and kids being impulsive is like another interesting wrinkle in all this. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Steve Newberg would say that there aren't just independent sex stereotypes, age stereotypes, ecology stereotypes, that they're actually sex age ecology stereotypes. Right. Super interesting. Yeah. So much more to talk about.

We are quickly running to the end of our session here. We usually have a question, which is is there something we should have asked you? I don't think so. I think we covered all of the topics I was hoping to touch on. I can't think of anything off the top of my head now. What was your motive in asking that question, Dave? I wonder if that should affect our. And the furniture behind David and my books. Keila, is there anything um that if people are interested in sort of the intersection of evolution and the law, um, like can you point them either to you or like what would if you if if there's like a student or just like some person out in the world who's sort of interested in evolutionary approaches to the law, what would you sort of

point them towards as sort of inroads into that or um obviously your your own work. You know, is there a certain work of yours that they should start reading, or what would you point them towards? Oh, great question. Um I would say that I had the distinct pleasure and honor of co-organizing a special issue in evolution and human behavior on uh evolution and law. And so that is a bait collection from some fantastic people, all thinking about legal questions or justice related questions from an evolutionary perspective. So I think that would be a great place to start. Um, I really like the paper that I contributed to that special issue. It was an ecology stereotypes paper, but it was looking specifically at stereotypes of

criminality. So who we think commits different kinds of crime. Um, and it turns out that race based criminality stereotypes are actually ecology based criminality stereotypes. So that I think is cool work that I would like people to be aware of. I would also say shout out to Carlton Patrick. I don't know if you've had him on to interview already. No, not yet. Well, he is an evolutionary psychology and law person. He's also funnier and better looking than I am. So he would be a great, great guest to have um to chat with. And his work is really, really cool. So I would point people in his direction as well. Fantastic. That's great. Thank you. That's that's great. We'll have to have Carlton on and uh Carlton should Venmo you or something after that.

Yeah. Uh yeah, this is wonderful. David, do you have anything, any last any last minute questions to help you with your life of crime? Um well I think uh I uh I hereby declare this episode guilty of being uh interesting and fun. Sustained. Oh. All right. Nice. Uh fantastic. So um on that note, um, let let the what does the foreman do? Do they it's like the members of the jury are adjourned? What is that? Yeah. Court adjourned. Yeah, the court adjourns. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. I really appreciate getting the chance to speak with you both. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. I I love um I love this work. And Keila, you're just one of the people. When I think of like who's the usual suspects doing fantastic cutting edge experimental

psychological work um in uh in just evolutionary psychology, like you are one of the people I always think of. And so um thank you for coming on and being uh and representing um the work that's being done. I think it's it's really important. Um, and it's it's super important given that there are literally like life and death consequences to all this stuff. So thank you for sharing it um and giving people to a chance to listen to to what you're doing. Thanks so much. Um, David, um you are um not only allowed to, but we would encourage you to uh support the podcast. It's not against the law um to not support the podcast, but it would still be nice if you did do that. Yeah, it's not uh super erogatory, as the philosophers would say, but it is uh uh, you

know, uh admirable. What does that mean? I think uh last I read it was like something about how it's not like uh oblig obligatory, but like it's still praiseworthy, like like donating to charity. You're not like required to donate to charity, it's super erogatory if you do it, you know. Okay. It sounds not it sounds like something else, but that's great. Um, it's a good word of the day for you. Um subdogsastic is another one, which to my mind is just means um it's not conscious and there's like complicated stuff going on. Sub persona believes, yeah, subdogsastic. So yeah, this philosopher is man. Anyway, um, please, if you're willing to tolerate the fancy words and you're enjoying the guests in the conversation and the topics that we're covering, we would

encourage you to support the podcast. And David, how can people do that? They can uh say a kind word about us on social media. They can leave us a kind review, they can visit our Patreon page. Uh any little thing you do helps, and it gives us the time and money to read more fancy books to learn fancy words like uh subdoxastic and supererogatory. Awesome. Uh without further ado, uh that here here's the end of the goodbye. Here's the goodbye.