WEBVTT

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Hi Dave.

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I'm the Pinsof.

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You are the Petrazuwski, and this is uh what is it?

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It's uh EP the pod.

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Evolutionary psychology the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology by Actual Evolutionary

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Psychologists

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enjoying

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David, today we have a wonderful guest, Dr.

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Hannes Rush.

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I think he has a couple PhDs uh actually.

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I think he's this guy is dripping with PhDs.

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Just a brilliant, a brilliant mind.

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Um fantastic scholar scholar in Germany at one of the Mox Planks.

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Um and we get into exploitation and group identities.

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Really beautiful insights into exploitation, I think.

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And it changed the way I think about it.

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It made it so much more precise.

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Um, really great insights onto what you know exploitation is, how we can go about measuring

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it.

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We what else do we get into?

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Uh where exploitation might be and whether or not people are aware of it.

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We also get into heroism.

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Uh we get into group identities, and uh man, we just yeah, it was

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just a lovely uh conversation about super important topics.

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And the thing I love about it the most is that Hannes is such a clear thinker and he was

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talking about things that basically haven't been touched on that are super, super

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important, right?

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Yeah, no, he takes uh seemingly airy abstract ideas like exploitation, uh tribalism,

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heroism, and he distills them into a uh into precision that is so crisp and

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mathematical and beautiful that it just it's uh it's a delight to yeah.

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We also talked about people being groupie, like in as an individual difference, which is I

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think super cool.

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Uh the idea of somebody's like groupie, like they like being part of a group or intergroup

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dominance.

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Yeah.

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Yes.

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Well, after listening to this episode, I think you will be a groupie for evolutionary

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psychology of the podcast.

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Nail that.

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Enjoy.

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Today we have uh Hannes Rush.

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Uh that is, yeah.

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Can you say it, Hannes?

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Can you do it?

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Rush.

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Yeah.

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I did it well.

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You did it, you did it much better than me.

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Yeah.

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My son says I speak funny German.

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Um so um too.

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We have uh a Dr.

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Hannes Rush, who is a um both a tenured faculty, um how do you say

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Maastricht University?

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That was almost perfect, Maastricht.

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Ah, schön.

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Okay, Maastricht.

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Okay.

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And um and then, but you also are an independent group leader at

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Freiburg in um in the Max Planck for um Institute for

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the Study of Crime Security and Law, which is the overarching institute,

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correct?

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Um no, so the the Max-Planck Society has lots of institutes, around 80 or so worldwide.

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This is just one of them.

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No, exactly, but that institute that you're at, the name of it is the uh study prime.

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Uh correct.

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Correct.

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So we've yeah, because we've had like um we've had Annie Wirtson, uh we just had Brett

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Beheim, who is at the MPI EVA in Leipzig?

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And uh I feel like every time we have a Mox Planck person on, we sort of need some

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explanation for people who are more at a standard, more university system.

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Um and so the Mox Planck you're at, there's a several uh permanent directors

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who are all somehow involved in the study of crime security and law.

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Is that right?

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okay so we have three departments each department has a director and the departments are

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one is for criminology this is also uh where my group is attached then we have one

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department for public law and one department for criminal law that sounds like a wonderful

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environment i mean maybe you can tell us about maybe as we have this conversation today

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about sort of what that's like working in a building with people who are united in that

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sort of sense.

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Um, and then uh, but you are an independent research group leader.

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Um, and the name of your group is the um uh behavioral economics of crime

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and conflict.

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Is that right?

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Yeah, super interesting.

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Um, and I was and I've been looking at this, and there's two projects.

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One is basically um exploitation, So human, I love this man

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unkind is the name of this project.

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Um, and it's basically just sort of, you know, laying out um uh and then Hannes, I'll let

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you speak in a second.

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But it's just laying, I just love this so much.

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Like it's laying out um this histories of humans exploiting one another to

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varying degrees of organization, including up to like slavery or more mundane things.

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Humanity's greatest hits.

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Yeah, exact exactly.

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Yes.

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Uh we are we are wonderful as a species.

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And then um and then another is uh how do you say this other name?

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This disc grid is this or what disgrid, yeah.

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But basically um, you know, there's so much that's uh driven by social identities.

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And so why do these levels uh high-level social identities, things like you know, ethnic

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ethnicity or race continue to exist and sort of what's pushing that around?

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Um that's just so cool that you're studying both of those things.

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Um and I I yeah, so um that's great.

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And um let's start by uh where where do you want to start, Hannes or David?

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Let's let's get into it.

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Maybe let me just give you a spoiler in advance so that the name Man Unkind that you like

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so much is actually borrowed from a Metallica song.

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Nice.

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Fantastic.

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Well we will we if we had more editing time, we would cut to that song right now, but maybe

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we can put it in the show notes.

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So why why is why is man un unkind?

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Other than that it you know it sounds cool in a a metallica song.

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So I I listened so in in preparation for for talking to you today, I actually listened to

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the episode that you recorded just recently with Pat Barkley and he's also very much into

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the evolution of cooperation, right?

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And this is also where my interest in evolutionary psychology started of sorts,

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right?

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Maybe a bit earlier, but I did a lot of work on evolution of cooperation and was always

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fascinated by this.

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But then at some point, I was thinking, okay, this literature is very well developed.

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So can I really make any fundamental contributions there anymore?

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Probably not.

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So what else is there?

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And then you suddenly turn to the not so nice features of human nature, right?

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So the dark sides of human behavior, as we usually call it in describing what the group

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does.

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And one of them is exploitation.

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I mean, I've been working on intergroup conflict also a lot.

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This is maybe well, it's a very dark side.

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Um, but if you go to to a little more subtle, a

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little milder forms of um of evil behavior, then you then you

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quite quickly arrive at slavery and um all different types of exploitative

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institutions and behaviors than humans can um can develop and can show.

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And so I had a look into the literature trying to figure out if there had been any

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systematic work on the evolution of exploitation, if you like, in humans.

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And I was astonished to find that there really is not much.

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Um and so I wrote a I wrote a grant proposal and luckily got it funded.

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And so I'm I'm now have the freedom to study this super interesting topic for five

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years on funding.

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That's fantastic.

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I I I'm very curious.

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So you're you're a a game theorist, a mathematician.

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I'm curious what you what you think exploitation is?

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Because it seems like a kind of fuzzy abstract concept, and I'm sure you have a crisp

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formal definition of it.

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And I'd love to hear what it is so that it can blow my mind.

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So, how do you how are you thinking of this phenomenon?

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So I think one one this is this is just career strategically,

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it's nice that the term exploitation has been used by Marx and is actually quite central

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in in Marx's philosophy of society, if you like.

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And so I think this has scared a lot of people away from looking into the underlying

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behavior, right?

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Because they didn't want to be associated with Marx.

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And I also, I mean, I'm I I read what he wrote about this and I find it interesting, but

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certainly not super correct.

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So um I thought, well, why not give it like 150 years later or so to give it another

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try to understand what the underlying behaviors are and really start

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investigating those with the modern methods of behavioral science that we have.

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And in that process, and also for the grant proposal, of course, I

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was always asked to define what exploitation is.

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Like you just asked me to.

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But my standard response to this is actually: I don't want to define it so precisely,

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because it's, in my view, it's a range, it's a full spectrum of different types of behavior

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that you can see.

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Some are very mild in the degree of exploitation that they um that they include, and some

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are super exploitative, like slavery, like chattel slavery, even um, so that is maybe the

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one of the worst forms.

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If you if you go into philosophy, for example, go into um the the um Stanford

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Encyclopedia and have a look how they define exploitation.

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If you want a like a formula, what you often get then is it's taking unfair

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advantage of someone else.

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But this is not a good definition because it just reduces the problem to defining what

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fairness is.

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And I mean you have 2,000 years of philosophy that are not able to come

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up with the one definition of what we're supposed to consider as fair.

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So you get into the same issues when you when you um talk about exploitation.

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So what I'm trying to do is rather to have a look around and say, okay, we we probably all

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agree that slavery is exploitative.

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So what is it that people are doing there and why are they doing it?

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So try to get rid of the of the analytical philosophy, if you like, of having to very

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clearly define what everything means, but rather look at behavior and understand the

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behavior.

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Yeah.

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I like that.

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Yeah.

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It's taking a clear example of something and then just unpacking it in terms of

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and Johannes, you can tell me or tell us sort of what your approach has been.

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Because it sounds like this is how new is this, or how far along are you into this project?

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Um the project oh good question.

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It's running for almost three years now.

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So we have two years left.

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Okay, so you're kind of right in the middle of it.

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So, how do you approach this study of that?

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So you mentioned how you because it seems like a very large, overwhelming thing, especially

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if people haven't been studying it before.

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So, can you tell us a little bit about um you talked about how you approached the concept

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of it, but now how do you empirically investigate this?

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Or what are you doing with your students?

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So maybe before I get to that, let me briefly advertise a book chapter that we recently

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wrote because it's I think it's never true that something has not been studied at all,

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right?

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So we're facing 2,000 years of science essentially as as the

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um as the result or as the insights that we are working from.

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So we we try to summarize everything that is out there on exploitation, especially in terms

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of theory on exploitation, um, in a chapter that is called um exploitation

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theory and practice.

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That is great.

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Forthcoming in the handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics.

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Maybe we can also we'll put that in the show notes or or even a link to it if uh yeah.

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Yeah, we it's also open openly available from uh from Krim Archive, I think actually.

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Great.

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Okay, so um that is where where interested readers can or

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interested listeners can read up on the on the knowledge that is already out there.

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But what we are doing is the project or the is built on

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three pillars.

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And one is just do clear microeconomic theory or the do the game theory of

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exploitative relations between people and also so one-on-one, one-on-one, n on n

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um kind of relations.

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That is the theory pillar.

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Then we have the experimental pillar where we ascend where we try to design behavioral

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experiments like the standard economic experiments that you know.

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Um, that model situations in which one side can exploit the other.

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And then we see what people really do and how they perceive it, and maybe which type of

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people go which way.

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And then the third arm is the applied microarm, as I call it, but you can also think of it

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as the archive data arm.

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So we are having a look around for essentially all available data sources out there that

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allow us to get an idea of historical forms of exploitation, but also contemporary forms of

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exploitation.

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And then we apply the methods of applied microeconomics, so causal inference

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statistics, trying to get at um what's what has happened in these historical cases, or

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several cases, if possible, of course.

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So how are how are you so you you mentioned that you're you're mathematically formalizing

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this and you're and you're studying it from the theoretical level.

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I'm curious like how you are formalizing this.

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What is an example of like an exploitative situation where person A exploits

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person B?

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So what we had in mind when we started modeling, and at least one of the modeling

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approaches we took is really um a

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slavery-like relationship.

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So assume you're the master, I'm the slave.

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Then what you want to do is you want to prevent me from running away, right?

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So you want me to stay with you.

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So what we give you as a means is you can reduce my chances, you

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can invest a little bit, so it costs you a little bit, but you can by investing a little

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bit reduce my chances of successfully leaving the interaction with you.

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So you can, and we would consider this one behavior that um that creates a situation

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of dependency which the other party is not voluntarily entering, right?

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So you're tying the person to you against their will.

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And then you can use this situation, for example, to um well,

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you can you can a mild form of exploitation under these circumstances would be that you

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then um lower the wage that you pay the person for their work.

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Right?

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The the logic is simply if you don't work for me, you have bad outside options, and I made

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your outside options bad, but yeah, I'm sorry for that.

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That was rational from my perspective.

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I did that, so now you work for me at a lower wage.

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Or under under worse conditions.

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So exploitation, the way you're thinking of it, is when an actor pays a

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cost to constrain the outside options of the recipient in

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order that the actor can uh increase the benefits that they are reaping from the

00:15:40.890 --> 00:15:46.650
interaction and and uh increasing the costs that the recipient incurs from the interaction.

00:15:47.050 --> 00:15:47.370
Yes.

00:15:47.610 --> 00:15:52.460
So that's that's this one form how we operationalize it for one of the experiments or two

00:15:52.460 --> 00:15:55.180
of the designs or paradigms that we are developing.

00:15:55.260 --> 00:15:56.700
But essentially that's it, yes.

00:15:57.020 --> 00:15:57.340
Interesting.

00:15:57.500 --> 00:16:00.220
Is there is there a another paradigm that that that you have?

00:16:00.780 --> 00:16:05.100
Well the one this one this one is we are working on developing the second one.

00:16:05.260 --> 00:16:10.300
This one is a bit too complicated to explain to people for online experiments.

00:16:10.380 --> 00:16:11.980
We realized right.

00:16:12.140 --> 00:16:13.260
So this is research.

00:16:13.340 --> 00:16:19.250
We we try to make it as simple as possible, but um still we we are aiming to

00:16:19.250 --> 00:16:23.490
use this one for laboratory experiments and play it repeatedly with people so that they can

00:16:23.490 --> 00:16:28.290
really get a feeling for how this interaction structure works and um can converge on the

00:16:28.290 --> 00:16:33.730
type of behavior that they really want to show, which might be difficult in a one-shot or

00:16:33.730 --> 00:16:37.970
con like um strategy method type online experimental setting.

00:16:38.260 --> 00:16:44.180
and the other one that we're developing now is is an even reduced version of this where um

00:16:44.340 --> 00:16:50.260
where you where we make choices super easy to understand and um the consequences super easy

00:16:50.260 --> 00:16:56.260
to understand and um limit like the the action space for for both parties but still

00:16:56.260 --> 00:17:01.140
try to maintain the exploitative act aspect of what the principle mainly we call him the

00:17:01.140 --> 00:17:06.580
principle so the person in the stronger role the master in the relationship um how they can

00:17:06.950 --> 00:17:12.870
um well it's interesting i'm i'm seeing uh a a uh an interesting parallel to abusive

00:17:12.870 --> 00:17:17.910
relationships so um if i'm in an abusive relationship with someone one tactic i might use

00:17:17.910 --> 00:17:22.950
to get them to stay with me is i might insult them lower their self-esteem uh perhaps

00:17:22.950 --> 00:17:26.950
deceptively to make them think that their outside options are are more constrained than

00:17:26.950 --> 00:17:31.440
they actually are that no one other than me would actually be with them Or if they uh you

00:17:31.440 --> 00:17:36.320
know talk to anyone else or or even you know mildly flirt with anyone else, I might, you

00:17:36.320 --> 00:17:40.400
know, inflict extreme either physical or psychological costs on them.

00:17:40.480 --> 00:17:46.000
So I'm both deterring them from pursuing outside options and tr and d deceiving them into

00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:51.520
thinking that they have outside options so that they'll stay with me and that I will reap a

00:17:51.600 --> 00:17:54.400
a greater benefit from from the relationship.

00:17:54.640 --> 00:17:59.290
Um And that they're uh and that they will incur a higher cost from being in that in that

00:17:59.290 --> 00:18:03.290
relationship than they would otherwise incur if they had an accurate uh understanding of

00:18:03.290 --> 00:18:07.610
their outside options or if they actually had uh uh viable outside options.

00:18:07.770 --> 00:18:12.170
Um and and and that would be, I guess, moving a little bit further along the continuum from

00:18:12.170 --> 00:18:14.010
extreme to to mild.

00:18:14.250 --> 00:18:17.370
Um and I'm trying to think of other situations.

00:18:17.530 --> 00:18:22.380
I mean, you you could you could even think of just you know bad mouthing your social

00:18:22.380 --> 00:18:26.940
competitors as as something that's you know on the mild on the really mild end of the

00:18:26.940 --> 00:18:31.980
continuum just spreading negative gossip uh about someone say if you're competing with them

00:18:31.980 --> 00:18:37.980
for you know a promotion or a job um that's a kind of way of reducing the outside options

00:18:37.980 --> 00:18:43.710
of of other people um and it's doing it deceptively Um uh it's not quite the same as you

00:18:43.710 --> 00:18:47.310
know threatening violence to reduce the outside options, but it's a it's a different way of

00:18:47.310 --> 00:18:49.310
reducing outside options via deception.

00:18:49.790 --> 00:18:53.150
Do you think that uh that kind of behavior belongs on the continuum?

00:18:53.550 --> 00:18:54.430
Yes, definitely yes.

00:18:54.990 --> 00:19:00.750
So sorry, go ahead, Hannes and we have a theory paper out also very recently um

00:19:00.910 --> 00:19:06.820
where we where we define or for the model there, we use three components, which in

00:19:06.820 --> 00:19:12.660
that particular setting are the actions that the exploitative party or the

00:19:12.660 --> 00:19:15.140
exploiter can use.

00:19:15.620 --> 00:19:20.260
And that is luring someone into the interaction through deception.

00:19:21.140 --> 00:19:27.140
So I can promise you love and and happiness forever, but once you marry me,

00:19:27.220 --> 00:19:28.820
I'm gonna push you very hard.

00:19:29.220 --> 00:19:32.710
So that could be in that application, could be one thing.

00:19:33.030 --> 00:19:35.270
Then that I confine you.

00:19:35.350 --> 00:19:37.670
So I make it hard for you to leave me.

00:19:38.470 --> 00:19:43.590
And I extract labor or any other benefits from you using force.

00:19:43.670 --> 00:19:44.790
So punishment.

00:19:44.950 --> 00:19:45.110
Yeah.

00:19:45.350 --> 00:19:51.350
And three these three together, um, they in that setting they define what the exploiter can

00:19:51.350 --> 00:19:51.510
do.

00:19:51.590 --> 00:19:53.990
So that's the extra action space of the exploiter.

00:19:54.120 --> 00:19:58.120
And then we try to mathematically model and understand the conditions under which it's

00:19:58.120 --> 00:20:02.200
rational or optimal for the exploiter to use which means to which degree.

00:20:02.840 --> 00:20:06.120
And that in economics we then call that comparative statics.

00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:11.960
So that gives us some predictions for what rational exploiters

00:20:12.280 --> 00:20:15.080
would be doing under certain circumstances.

00:20:15.450 --> 00:20:20.010
It it occurs to me that um an interesting aspect of your model is that the victim of the

00:20:20.010 --> 00:20:24.330
exploitation does not have to be aware of the fact that they're being exploited

00:20:24.490 --> 00:20:25.210
necessarily.

00:20:25.930 --> 00:20:31.530
All that needs to happen within them is that their space of outside options contracts.

00:20:31.770 --> 00:20:32.010
Right?

00:20:32.490 --> 00:20:37.210
And they don't need to be aware that it has been externally contracted by the exploiter.

00:20:37.610 --> 00:20:42.140
Um if they believe the deception, then from their perspective, they could be making a

00:20:42.140 --> 00:20:42.940
rational choice.

00:20:43.180 --> 00:20:48.620
All that matters is the objective outside options in in actual reality are

00:20:48.620 --> 00:20:52.380
contracted uh and that the exploiter is reaping a benefit from that.

00:20:53.180 --> 00:20:53.420
Yeah.

00:20:53.740 --> 00:20:56.380
What would it what would it oh sorry, David, go ahead.

00:20:57.500 --> 00:21:02.450
And it is often, I mean, presumably in some in many cases, it is cheaper um for the

00:21:02.450 --> 00:21:08.370
exploiter to uh exploit via deception than via threats of of violence um

00:21:08.530 --> 00:21:13.010
if they can if they can pull it off you know if if there's a plausible um lie they can tell

00:21:13.090 --> 00:21:16.930
uh because then they don't you know they have to pay lower monitoring costs you know they

00:21:16.930 --> 00:21:21.330
have to you know incur you know fewer risks from attacking someone it's it's often in the

00:21:21.330 --> 00:21:25.090
exploiter's interest to achieve their goals through deception than through uh violence.

00:21:25.490 --> 00:21:25.970
Yep.

00:21:26.280 --> 00:21:31.320
So when you look into the data on human trafficking, um, for example, which is one of the

00:21:31.320 --> 00:21:37.160
data sources that we that we're trying to use, um, then you see um that

00:21:37.640 --> 00:21:42.360
victims have been systematically surveyed on how they ended up in these kinds of

00:21:42.360 --> 00:21:43.160
relationships.

00:21:43.400 --> 00:21:49.400
And one of the one of the um means by used by exploiters that is very often mentioned

00:21:49.480 --> 00:21:53.080
in like half of the cases, for example, it depends on the database and of course how you

00:21:53.160 --> 00:21:58.750
how you ask the question, but um it is in in in 50% of the

00:21:58.750 --> 00:22:04.750
cases um in in one particular um source of data on calls to a to a human trafficking

00:22:04.750 --> 00:22:09.310
hotline in the US, for example, 50% of the interviewed victims say they have been tricked

00:22:09.310 --> 00:22:14.430
into or deceived into this relationship with a um with the exploiter in the beginning.

00:22:14.750 --> 00:22:17.390
And then the relationship started degrading, right?

00:22:17.470 --> 00:22:22.270
So then, and this is exactly so the logic behind that from an economic perspective is just

00:22:22.270 --> 00:22:26.660
like you say, it's much cheaper for the exploiter to first try deception.

00:22:26.820 --> 00:22:28.260
If that works, fine.

00:22:28.420 --> 00:22:34.260
If it doesn't, then you start using harsher means like violence or confinement.

00:22:35.140 --> 00:22:37.860
And what is the minimal cost thing then?

00:22:38.020 --> 00:22:39.060
Can you follow that along?

00:22:39.140 --> 00:22:40.900
So that's trickery at the beginning.

00:22:41.060 --> 00:22:42.820
The relationship degrades.

00:22:42.980 --> 00:22:48.580
What is the path of least resistance, or what's the the intelligence of the exploiter

00:22:48.900 --> 00:22:49.860
doing there?

00:22:50.260 --> 00:22:51.010
Um, right.

00:22:51.090 --> 00:22:52.130
So it's still cheaper.

00:22:52.370 --> 00:22:55.250
Like can you talk, yeah, can you kind of walk us through that?

00:22:55.970 --> 00:23:01.410
Oh um we haven't so the the model that we currently have actually abstracts away from this

00:23:01.410 --> 00:23:02.290
entire process.

00:23:02.530 --> 00:23:02.690
Yeah.

00:23:03.090 --> 00:23:07.010
So we're just saying we're just looking really at the outcome and we're s summarizing

00:23:07.010 --> 00:23:11.730
everything into uh a cost term for the three different types of behaviors that the expert

00:23:11.730 --> 00:23:17.100
can show and then we say okay if deception is cheaper than do using force, you're gonna see

00:23:17.100 --> 00:23:19.020
more deception than force, etc.

00:23:19.260 --> 00:23:19.420
Right.

00:23:19.500 --> 00:23:23.260
So for that model, um, we try to keep things very simple.

00:23:23.580 --> 00:23:25.660
Yeah, you have to start somewhere, yeah.

00:23:26.140 --> 00:23:30.620
I mean, yeah, just give me money for a second five years and then I will run this.

00:23:32.140 --> 00:23:33.340
It's it's incredibly cool.

00:23:33.420 --> 00:23:34.780
It's so great that you're doing this.

00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:35.500
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:35.830 --> 00:23:36.390
Very cool stuff.

00:23:36.470 --> 00:23:39.670
I mean, I uh it occurs to me that another interesting parallel is in the economic sphere.

00:23:39.750 --> 00:23:42.550
You could think of a monopoly uh as exploitative.

00:23:42.630 --> 00:23:46.790
It's it's doing exactly the same thing that, you know, uh to a to a more limited degree,

00:23:47.270 --> 00:23:50.550
the same thing that the abusive partner is doing, the the slaveholder is doing.

00:23:50.710 --> 00:23:54.470
What they're doing is they're they're uh constraining uh outside options so that you're

00:23:54.470 --> 00:23:59.540
forced to transact with the monopoly, uh and so that the monopoly can, you know, charge

00:23:59.540 --> 00:24:04.180
higher prices and extract uh uh more benefit from from the relationship.

00:24:04.340 --> 00:24:08.260
Uh so that uh have you thought about the the economic side of this as well?

00:24:09.380 --> 00:24:12.180
Um I mean we've we've had a look around the economic literature.

00:24:12.340 --> 00:24:16.660
What you're referring to now is essentially using the theory of labor markets or different

00:24:16.660 --> 00:24:19.780
types of settings within uh not labor markets, but markets in general, right?

00:24:19.860 --> 00:24:24.260
So if one if one side is reduced to one agent, like the monopolist or a few agents, the

00:24:24.260 --> 00:24:27.460
oligopolist, then you have similar structures.

00:24:29.490 --> 00:24:34.130
And so the theory that has been developed there is informative for us.

00:24:34.450 --> 00:24:40.050
But what we're particularly interested in is also so usually the market

00:24:40.050 --> 00:24:44.690
literature and economics assumes that there's an institutional framework in which agents

00:24:44.690 --> 00:24:47.810
act, and this is usually governed by law.

00:24:48.130 --> 00:24:53.520
And so the monopolist and the oligopolist are a little constrained in what they can do.

00:24:53.760 --> 00:24:59.280
And what we are doing is we're like crossing the boundary to criminology, if you like, or

00:24:59.280 --> 00:25:04.960
to law and economics by saying, what if the exploiters or the potential

00:25:05.520 --> 00:25:07.600
exploiters don't care about the law?

00:25:07.760 --> 00:25:08.080
Right?

00:25:08.240 --> 00:25:13.810
If they just say, okay, if I violate the legal framework or if I go against the rules, I

00:25:13.810 --> 00:25:17.810
might have to pay an additional extra cost if I'm caught, but it might be worth it, right?

00:25:17.890 --> 00:25:19.010
So let's try it.

00:25:19.410 --> 00:25:25.090
And this is essentially what we're adding there as a as a contribution by by saying, okay,

00:25:25.170 --> 00:25:28.850
let's just think of completely unconstrained agents on the strong side.

00:25:29.170 --> 00:25:29.410
Yeah.

00:25:29.730 --> 00:25:35.170
I love how what you did is you took an example of an important phenomenon, uh,

00:25:35.360 --> 00:25:36.480
abstracted it away.

00:25:36.560 --> 00:25:41.680
And what David's doing right now, and I'm doing too, and I think a lot of listeners are, is

00:25:41.680 --> 00:25:46.240
then turning around and saying, given how you've abstracted it, where where in other where

00:25:46.240 --> 00:25:48.480
else in life do we see this?

00:25:48.720 --> 00:25:52.880
And yeah, it's starting to feel like everything, just about, you know, like government, uh,

00:25:53.120 --> 00:25:55.200
policy, um, your jobs.

00:25:55.280 --> 00:26:00.960
We talked about jobs an episode or two ago, um, where there can be constraints uh

00:26:01.120 --> 00:26:06.970
in your options, the detection of exploitation, what would that mean

00:26:07.690 --> 00:26:10.250
from the perspective of the exploited?

00:26:10.330 --> 00:26:15.690
Um, like is there detection of exploitation when, for example, um I

00:26:15.690 --> 00:26:21.290
realize that my options are being curtailed um artificially?

00:26:21.370 --> 00:26:25.130
Or like that's also seems like a s a tricky thing.

00:26:26.570 --> 00:26:30.640
Um so we are working on this, right?

00:26:30.800 --> 00:26:34.000
We have ongoing projects that try to look into exactly this.

00:26:34.080 --> 00:26:39.440
And but we started with a project which is close to be written up, where we simply

00:26:40.320 --> 00:26:46.320
surveyed people in the US, um, a representative um sample and asked them, have you ever

00:26:46.320 --> 00:26:48.640
been exploited in your professional career?

00:26:49.110 --> 00:26:49.910
Yes, no.

00:26:50.150 --> 00:26:53.830
Have so, and 70% of the people said yes.

00:26:54.230 --> 00:26:56.790
So then we asked them, okay, what exactly happened?

00:26:56.950 --> 00:27:01.590
Who was the person exploiting you and what did the situation look like?

00:27:01.750 --> 00:27:05.990
And then we got qualitative responses from them and we're still working on coding these in

00:27:05.990 --> 00:27:07.270
a systematic way.

00:27:07.670 --> 00:27:12.790
Um, so you can think of it like it's an experienced sampling kind of um approach.

00:27:13.040 --> 00:27:17.840
But what we also ask them to do is I don't know how familiar you are with this, but there's

00:27:17.840 --> 00:27:21.360
this situational interdependence um scale and framework.

00:27:21.440 --> 00:27:27.440
So that's essentially the idea behind it is let's try to come up

00:27:27.440 --> 00:27:33.280
with a framework that um like captures all dimensions on which

00:27:33.650 --> 00:27:36.290
situations that we perceive can differ.

00:27:36.530 --> 00:27:41.410
Okay, so it's I mean it's not my research, we're just using it, but uh I like the idea,

00:27:41.490 --> 00:27:41.650
right?

00:27:41.730 --> 00:27:45.730
So that you say, okay, people probably run around with a with a framework that helps them

00:27:45.730 --> 00:27:50.770
make sense of the situations that they are in, is in particular in um social interactions.

00:27:51.010 --> 00:27:56.560
And so the social then they came up with a couple of dimensions along which

00:27:56.720 --> 00:28:00.080
um um social interactions typically differ.

00:28:00.480 --> 00:28:05.440
And we used it and asked people, okay, in this situation, for example, um

00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:12.880
how high was the degree of future inter future interdependence between yourself and the

00:28:12.880 --> 00:28:13.520
other person?

00:28:13.920 --> 00:28:16.880
So, or and several kinds of these questions.

00:28:16.960 --> 00:28:22.270
And so we're trying, we used it to try to get an understanding of what the prototypical

00:28:22.270 --> 00:28:25.470
situations look like in which people feel exploited.

00:28:25.710 --> 00:28:31.070
And then we ask you unpack what this this this notion of future interdependence or what is

00:28:31.310 --> 00:28:32.030
what does that mean?

00:28:32.510 --> 00:28:34.990
Um it think of it as repeated play.

00:28:35.390 --> 00:28:35.710
Okay.

00:28:36.030 --> 00:28:36.270
Right?

00:28:36.350 --> 00:28:40.750
So if if we play a one-shot dictator game, so if you're a random stranger on the subway in

00:28:40.750 --> 00:28:42.750
New York, I'm probably not gonna see you again.

00:28:42.830 --> 00:28:48.380
But um if you're David Pinzov and uh I you might end up my referee in some in some journal

00:28:48.380 --> 00:28:54.140
publication or so there's a chance that our uh interaction that started today will

00:28:54.140 --> 00:28:55.420
somehow continue.

00:28:55.820 --> 00:29:01.020
And so um our degree of future interdependence is a bit higher than for a random stranger

00:29:01.020 --> 00:29:02.140
in New York subway.

00:29:02.460 --> 00:29:02.540
Right.

00:29:02.700 --> 00:29:04.300
And for like a boss it would be very high.

00:29:04.460 --> 00:29:07.740
Like the person who's your boss every day and you come into work next day and the next day

00:29:07.820 --> 00:29:08.300
and the next day.

00:29:08.380 --> 00:29:08.540
Yeah.

00:29:08.780 --> 00:29:09.180
Yeah.

00:29:09.570 --> 00:29:10.050
Interesting.

00:29:10.210 --> 00:29:10.450
Okay.

00:29:10.530 --> 00:29:11.970
So we have future.

00:29:12.210 --> 00:29:15.410
So how does that factor into uh exploitation?

00:29:15.810 --> 00:29:21.090
So we what we asked them, what we asked participants, so we have now we have a set of

00:29:21.090 --> 00:29:25.410
situations where people said, okay, I was exploited in this situation.

00:29:25.650 --> 00:29:29.730
Or I felt better, let's say I felt exploited in this situation.

00:29:29.970 --> 00:29:34.360
Um and then we asked them, okay, what would need to happen?

00:29:34.680 --> 00:29:40.040
How would the situation need to change in order you in order for you to not feel exploited

00:29:40.040 --> 00:29:40.680
anymore?

00:29:41.160 --> 00:29:46.360
So they described a situation where the factors that made them feel exploited are removed.

00:29:46.440 --> 00:29:52.280
And then we asked them to rate this new situation again on the sit on this SIS on the

00:29:52.280 --> 00:29:52.920
scale.

00:29:53.160 --> 00:29:57.640
And then we can compare essentially what do people think how the situation would need to

00:29:57.640 --> 00:30:00.680
change in order for them to not feel exploited anymore.

00:30:01.650 --> 00:30:03.490
And then we took their responses.

00:30:03.570 --> 00:30:07.650
So a couple of couple of the dimensions actually showed up as significant there.

00:30:07.810 --> 00:30:11.490
But then we also wanted to get at causality, right?

00:30:11.570 --> 00:30:17.490
So what we have here is just how people think of those situations and what they think

00:30:17.490 --> 00:30:18.530
would need to change.

00:30:18.690 --> 00:30:24.050
But then we, in a third study of that paper, we turned this into a third-party observer

00:30:24.050 --> 00:30:28.780
kind of situation, and we described or we developed simple scenarios where we said, okay,

00:30:28.860 --> 00:30:32.060
here's a boss, here's an employee, the boss did this to the employee.

00:30:32.300 --> 00:30:37.980
Please rate the situation on the using the scale and tell us how strongly you think that

00:30:37.980 --> 00:30:40.460
the boss exploited the employee.

00:30:41.100 --> 00:30:46.380
And the the main thing actually that shows up there is that

00:30:46.940 --> 00:30:51.830
if people feel that that the weak party is completely under the control of the strong

00:30:51.830 --> 00:30:57.350
party, that's the strongest predictor for um feelings or or feelings of

00:30:57.590 --> 00:31:02.870
own feelings of um exploitation but also of third party observer ratings of okay, this boss

00:31:02.870 --> 00:31:05.510
is clearly uh uh exploiting this employee.

00:31:05.990 --> 00:31:11.120
But so in in the end you can say it it boils down or at least um the the main, the the

00:31:11.120 --> 00:31:16.800
strongest predictor there objectively is asymmetry of power and the stronger party

00:31:16.800 --> 00:31:21.920
making use of this power to extract something from the weak party, which is perfectly in

00:31:21.920 --> 00:31:24.880
line with the Stanford encyclopedia definition, right?

00:31:25.040 --> 00:31:31.040
So it's maybe not the biggest oh it's maybe not the biggest discovery, but it's nice to

00:31:31.040 --> 00:31:35.680
see that okay, if you if you really systematically look into how people perceive this, then

00:31:35.680 --> 00:31:38.110
you get this preside empirically back.

00:31:38.750 --> 00:31:43.390
But your way of thinking of it has a little is a little more nuanced than that, and that

00:31:43.390 --> 00:31:48.030
the power asymmetry in part derives from the exploitation itself.

00:31:48.270 --> 00:31:48.510
Right?

00:31:48.670 --> 00:31:54.110
So if I'm can so if I'm a monopolist and I and you have no other options but to buy from

00:31:54.110 --> 00:31:58.800
me, then I and and and maybe I've done that because I've I've you know any any competitor

00:31:58.800 --> 00:32:03.120
to mine I've sabotaged in some way, then I've created that power asymmetry.

00:32:03.440 --> 00:32:08.080
The exploitation itself has has bought me that power asymmetry.

00:32:08.320 --> 00:32:14.240
Um and uh uh and in addition, once I have that power asymmetry, I'm going to use

00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:19.440
it to further the exploitation, to further constrain your outside options, to to sabotage

00:32:19.440 --> 00:32:21.120
any competitors that might arise.

00:32:21.360 --> 00:32:27.250
Um and so uh it's not it's not merely that so the the power asymmetry is sort of baked into

00:32:27.250 --> 00:32:29.810
the model of of exploitation itself, right?

00:32:31.010 --> 00:32:35.010
In this particular so again, in this particular study, yes, but in general, no.

00:32:35.250 --> 00:32:40.850
So we would so we need to start somewhere with the with the

00:32:40.850 --> 00:32:44.290
vignettes, for example, that we are showing participants there, and there we don't tell

00:32:44.290 --> 00:32:48.130
them a story about how this boss became to be the boss and how the employee became to be

00:32:48.130 --> 00:32:48.850
the employee.

00:32:49.280 --> 00:32:51.920
We just started with the power asymmetry.

00:32:52.080 --> 00:32:56.640
But in a more general approach or in a general modeling approach, for example, the one that

00:32:56.640 --> 00:33:01.200
we are taking in the theory project I talked about earlier, there we would it add an

00:33:01.200 --> 00:33:06.640
additional stage where the stronger party can really increase its strength

00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:10.640
before making use of the dependence situation that it created or so.

00:33:11.520 --> 00:33:16.480
But technically so I I would I would completely agree with you that

00:33:16.800 --> 00:33:20.290
technically oh it's an interesting question.

00:33:20.370 --> 00:33:23.890
I I I we haven't really systematically maybe looked into this yet.

00:33:24.050 --> 00:33:29.650
Is is exploitation also possible between perfectly symmetrical

00:33:29.650 --> 00:33:30.450
partners?

00:33:31.250 --> 00:33:36.450
And so maybe this is a limiting case where like the the scope for exploitation vanishes.

00:33:36.530 --> 00:33:37.170
I mean I don't know.

00:33:37.250 --> 00:33:39.970
It will also probably depend on how you model it.

00:33:40.210 --> 00:33:45.200
But well, there I mean you could it's it seems like you could get that with deception.

00:33:45.360 --> 00:33:50.000
Deception would be the only means available for for equally powerful individuals to exploit

00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:50.320
each other.

00:33:50.880 --> 00:33:54.320
I could just lie to you and say that your outside options don't exist.

00:33:54.480 --> 00:33:57.680
And if you believe me, then I get to exploit you now.

00:33:57.920 --> 00:34:02.560
Um but if there's no power asymmetry, then I can't, you know, physically threaten you or

00:34:02.560 --> 00:34:06.430
threaten you with with job loss or or threaten you with some some cost because that would

00:34:06.430 --> 00:34:07.630
itself be a power asymmetry.

00:34:07.710 --> 00:34:10.750
But if there's but if I can't threaten you in any way, then the only thing I really can do

00:34:10.750 --> 00:34:11.790
is lie to you.

00:34:12.590 --> 00:34:12.990
Yeah.

00:34:13.150 --> 00:34:16.670
What what do you think about uh the relationship between exploitation and cheating?

00:34:16.830 --> 00:34:19.230
Because that seems like a neighboring issue.

00:34:19.390 --> 00:34:20.350
That's an example.

00:34:20.430 --> 00:34:22.190
Because I'm also thinking of Lita's.

00:34:22.350 --> 00:34:26.190
We we should have Lita on uh uh soon enough.

00:34:26.270 --> 00:34:30.670
Um but Lita's cheater detection work, because Hannes, what you were just describing

00:34:30.670 --> 00:34:34.140
reminded me of some of that cheater detection work.

00:34:34.300 --> 00:34:40.060
It was an employee, an employer, and it was showing that they the

00:34:40.140 --> 00:34:46.060
the bringing it back to the evolved software, there's detection of cheating, and it's

00:34:46.060 --> 00:34:47.180
really role dependent.

00:34:47.340 --> 00:34:52.220
So if you're from the perspective of the employee, there's certain behaviors that the

00:34:52.220 --> 00:34:53.180
employer might do.

00:34:53.260 --> 00:34:57.900
So for example, like you might have worked for a while, but did the employer actually give

00:34:57.900 --> 00:35:00.780
you the like the retirement benefits you're entitled to?

00:35:00.930 --> 00:35:03.890
But if you're coming from the employer's perspective, it's a very different set of

00:35:03.890 --> 00:35:04.370
behaviors.

00:35:04.450 --> 00:35:07.410
Like, did the employee um like do what they needed to do?

00:35:07.490 --> 00:35:09.010
And are they getting paid too much?

00:35:09.170 --> 00:35:14.610
And so, um, so yeah, so one question is: what's the relationship between, let me just start

00:35:14.610 --> 00:35:19.170
with, yeah, what's the relationship between cheating and exploitation?

00:35:19.330 --> 00:35:25.060
Is it is is cheating an example of an equal relationship that

00:35:25.060 --> 00:35:26.260
involves exploitation?

00:35:26.420 --> 00:35:28.260
Or because like what's that deception?

00:35:28.420 --> 00:35:29.940
Is that I mean, maybe it doesn't matter.

00:35:30.020 --> 00:35:34.100
Maybe that's like a definitional question, but what's your what's your take on cheating?

00:35:35.620 --> 00:35:39.620
So when we think back to the theory project, cheating is definitely part of the picture,

00:35:39.700 --> 00:35:39.860
right?

00:35:39.940 --> 00:35:45.870
So deception can be one means to get people into a relationship with you, or

00:35:45.870 --> 00:35:50.990
maybe make them even work on promised conditions which turn out not to be true.

00:35:51.230 --> 00:35:57.230
But if you don't have any additional power asymmetry or means for

00:35:57.230 --> 00:36:02.430
the stronger side to limit the options of the weaker side, then you just have a market like

00:36:02.510 --> 00:36:07.150
where where a free market where if I don't like the interaction with you, I could go to

00:36:07.150 --> 00:36:10.430
someone else and say, Well, Dave lied to me, so I'm not gonna go now.

00:36:10.510 --> 00:36:13.310
I'm gonna go to David and see if he has better conditions.

00:36:13.550 --> 00:36:13.870
I see.

00:36:14.030 --> 00:36:16.640
So that you would have different dynamics, right?

00:36:16.720 --> 00:36:22.400
Because one just quick follow-up then is

00:36:22.400 --> 00:36:26.400
related to that, and this is again based on the cheater detection work, is that from an

00:36:26.400 --> 00:36:31.280
evolved psychological perspective, there should be quote unquote biases in these systems,

00:36:31.440 --> 00:36:31.680
right?

00:36:31.840 --> 00:36:37.840
So if I'm exp if I'm in the role of exploiting somebody, all else equal,

00:36:38.080 --> 00:36:42.870
my evolved psychology should take advantage of that, but not frame it as exploitation,

00:36:42.950 --> 00:36:43.190
right?

00:36:43.270 --> 00:36:47.030
I'm just doing what's in my interest and what's my family's interest.

00:36:47.430 --> 00:36:52.790
But if I on the conversely, I should be very ultra vigilant for being put in the

00:36:52.790 --> 00:36:54.950
perspective of being exploited.

00:36:55.190 --> 00:37:01.030
And so that sort of bias or error management idea of, and you you were

00:37:01.030 --> 00:37:04.550
mentioning that you're, you know, telling people a third party perspective, which might be

00:37:04.550 --> 00:37:05.510
more objective.

00:37:05.750 --> 00:37:10.420
Have you started to look into or thought about those those biases.

00:37:11.140 --> 00:37:11.540
Yes.

00:37:11.700 --> 00:37:16.900
So um that's ongoing work, but we we also have one or we have several projects actually

00:37:17.060 --> 00:37:21.460
trying to understand the justifications, maybe like um

00:37:22.420 --> 00:37:28.340
overtly, but also maybe also just um undercover, so to say, um,

00:37:28.420 --> 00:37:33.780
that exploiters might be using to explain to themselves and to others why they are taking

00:37:33.780 --> 00:37:36.100
unfair advantage of the weaker party.

00:37:36.810 --> 00:37:37.130
Right.

00:37:37.210 --> 00:37:40.010
So and why it's justified that they do this.

00:37:42.010 --> 00:37:47.130
You will in in normal circumstances, you will hardly ever get people to say to open the

00:37:47.130 --> 00:37:51.850
admit and say, well, yeah, I was the employer, this person was undereducated, so I gave

00:37:51.850 --> 00:37:53.690
them shitty conditions and they work for me.

00:37:53.770 --> 00:37:55.050
So it's their own fault, right?

00:37:55.210 --> 00:37:59.130
But this this already is is a justification strategy, right?

00:37:59.210 --> 00:38:05.020
So that you say, oh, I just made use of their low degree of education to

00:38:05.020 --> 00:38:09.260
have them work under conditions which smarter people wouldn't have accepted.

00:38:09.420 --> 00:38:10.620
So it's their fault.

00:38:10.860 --> 00:38:11.180
Right.

00:38:11.500 --> 00:38:17.020
But the the moral question there is so the moral question there is, is it really their

00:38:17.020 --> 00:38:17.340
fault?

00:38:17.500 --> 00:38:20.060
Is this behavior by the employer okay?

00:38:20.300 --> 00:38:21.260
Is it not?

00:38:21.500 --> 00:38:26.700
I mean it's it's also what you see economists might it it's it's difficult to well, I mean

00:38:26.780 --> 00:38:31.090
I I shouldn't be generalizing to all economists anyway.

00:38:31.730 --> 00:38:36.050
Um, but you have this discussion, for example, in the context of the gender pay gap, right?

00:38:36.130 --> 00:38:40.370
So some people might say, yeah, if one group is just not good enough at bargaining for

00:38:40.370 --> 00:38:42.850
higher wages, it's their own fault.

00:38:43.490 --> 00:38:48.050
Structurally, they might have the same power of leaving conditions they don't like and

00:38:48.050 --> 00:38:51.010
being in high demand if they're qualified on the labor market.

00:38:51.250 --> 00:38:56.290
If they don't leverage the power they have, it's their own fault if we underpay them.

00:38:57.100 --> 00:38:59.100
I I just put this on the table, right?

00:38:59.180 --> 00:39:01.260
So we could discuss about this forever.

00:39:01.740 --> 00:39:05.740
Well that this is an inter this this brings me to this is an interesting distinction

00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:11.500
because uh on the one hand, so if if I have actively constrained uh my partner's

00:39:11.500 --> 00:39:16.860
outside options and I'm using and and you know because of that that allows me to uh extract

00:39:16.860 --> 00:39:21.900
benefits from them um then that's a clear case of exploitation but what about in cases

00:39:21.900 --> 00:39:26.610
where I have not constrained the outside options at all, the partners' outside options have

00:39:26.610 --> 00:39:29.330
already been constrained before I've even entered the picture.

00:39:29.570 --> 00:39:33.730
So let's say you know there's there's a person that I'd like to hire and they have very few

00:39:33.730 --> 00:39:36.850
uh marketable skills, they can't really get a job anywhere else.

00:39:37.010 --> 00:39:40.770
Uh, really, I'm the only uh person who would be willing to hire them.

00:39:40.930 --> 00:39:45.490
Uh and because you know I've correctly seen that their outside options are low and that

00:39:45.490 --> 00:39:49.170
they they can't really work anywhere else, and you know, you know, whatever I give them,

00:39:49.250 --> 00:39:51.810
they'll they'd be lucky to get, I give them a low salary.

00:39:52.040 --> 00:39:56.200
Would would in that condition would that count as exploitation, even though I have not

00:39:56.200 --> 00:39:57.240
constrained them?

00:39:58.680 --> 00:40:02.840
You're asking me to like draw a clear line and say, okay, this is exploitative, this is

00:40:02.840 --> 00:40:04.120
not, but I won't do that, right?

00:40:04.280 --> 00:40:06.920
Because all I can tell you it's a spectrum.

00:40:07.160 --> 00:40:12.760
And where you draw exactly the line, this depends on your ethical views, on your

00:40:12.760 --> 00:40:16.280
political background, maybe, on your own experiences, whatever, right?

00:40:16.360 --> 00:40:20.600
On what the legislative framework that you're exposed to is actually saying.

00:40:20.760 --> 00:40:25.470
So this is also not what we are really interested in the project, where exactly this

00:40:25.470 --> 00:40:31.070
definitional boundary is, because it varies across countries, it varies across political

00:40:31.070 --> 00:40:33.230
ideologies, it varies across time.

00:40:33.550 --> 00:40:38.670
So maybe an interesting project might be to explain at some point, but this has probably

00:40:38.670 --> 00:40:44.220
been done under under different labels, um, would be to look at okay, what pushes the

00:40:44.220 --> 00:40:47.980
definitional boundary more to this side and more to this side, right?

00:40:48.140 --> 00:40:54.060
So but this is going into debate about okay, inequality, the emergence of inequality and

00:40:54.060 --> 00:40:54.860
all these kinds of things.

00:40:54.940 --> 00:40:59.100
So political science, I would suspect, has probably as I say, under different labels,

00:40:59.180 --> 00:41:01.500
maybe, but done a lot of research on this.

00:41:01.820 --> 00:41:04.460
So I think that we cannot contribute much, maybe.

00:41:04.870 --> 00:41:07.590
But I think that answer is the contribution, right?

00:41:07.670 --> 00:41:09.430
Like that, it's a different perspective.

00:41:09.590 --> 00:41:15.590
So, like, you know, if I'm looking at a low-wage worker, um, but I am the employer, I

00:41:15.590 --> 00:41:19.750
might not think I'm being exploitative because, you know, like the cons as David said, the

00:41:19.750 --> 00:41:21.110
constraints already exist.

00:41:21.350 --> 00:41:25.910
But then from an outside perspective, somebody who's really concerned about that person's

00:41:25.910 --> 00:41:31.460
welfare, they might just run the counterfactual of, well, if there were institutions that

00:41:31.460 --> 00:41:36.660
gave them outside options that I can easily imagine, then they wouldn't have to be in that

00:41:36.660 --> 00:41:37.700
difficult job.

00:41:37.940 --> 00:41:42.980
And so it's just that again, it comes back to like this evolved psychology of bias where

00:41:43.540 --> 00:41:48.660
depending on the perspective you take, it's exactly right, Hannes, there's no objective

00:41:48.660 --> 00:41:54.430
definition of exploitation, but it's that every individual has strategically

00:41:54.430 --> 00:42:00.430
sort of has a position towards am I the locus of exploitation or is exploitation

00:42:00.430 --> 00:42:02.430
even happening um at all?

00:42:02.590 --> 00:42:05.070
So I do feel like you do have a lot to contribute in that.

00:42:05.150 --> 00:42:07.390
That's what you're basically bringing to the table.

00:42:08.190 --> 00:42:13.950
I want to get into um collective action for exploitation or a group that

00:42:14.030 --> 00:42:17.140
uh works together to exploit another group.

00:42:17.380 --> 00:42:20.820
You know, the history books are littered with examples like this.

00:42:21.700 --> 00:42:27.700
Do you think it's possible for a group of humans to collectively exploit another

00:42:27.700 --> 00:42:33.380
group of humans while the exploitation being common knowledge, overt,

00:42:33.460 --> 00:42:34.420
and on the surface?

00:42:34.580 --> 00:42:37.940
We all know that we're just evil people who are exploiting these people, and that's the

00:42:37.940 --> 00:42:38.900
reason we're doing it.

00:42:39.140 --> 00:42:40.500
And let's go out and do it.

00:42:40.740 --> 00:42:46.290
Has that do you see that as a plausible uh pathway for intergroup exploitation to emerge,

00:42:46.370 --> 00:42:50.530
or do we need some kind of moralistic or religious pretext?

00:42:52.050 --> 00:42:56.690
Yeah, I was so I also listened to you, I think it's the third episode where you discussed

00:42:56.690 --> 00:42:57.650
this part, right?

00:42:57.810 --> 00:43:02.850
So yeah, and I wanted actually to like if I get the chance and now I have the chance, like

00:43:03.170 --> 00:43:08.360
object a little bit because um My view is more that

00:43:08.360 --> 00:43:10.520
ideology follows the incentives.

00:43:10.680 --> 00:43:15.480
You don't need the ideology if in in the first or as the starting point.

00:43:15.800 --> 00:43:20.600
But when the incentives are there for one group of people to exploit the others to enslave

00:43:20.600 --> 00:43:25.720
them to what do whatever atrocities to them, they'll do it and then they'll come up on the

00:43:25.720 --> 00:43:30.600
spot, maybe, or with a little delay with an ideology that justifies what they are doing to

00:43:30.600 --> 00:43:31.240
themselves.

00:43:32.550 --> 00:43:34.070
This is more my view, right?

00:43:34.230 --> 00:43:36.150
I mean, this is a big philosophical debate.

00:43:36.470 --> 00:43:36.710
Right.

00:43:36.790 --> 00:43:37.910
It's it's more of a post hoc.

00:43:38.310 --> 00:43:40.310
Mind follows matter or the other way around.

00:43:40.630 --> 00:43:43.030
But I think Marx, Marx has this saying, right?

00:43:43.190 --> 00:43:49.190
So you could say mind follows matter and would blame philosophers to see

00:43:49.190 --> 00:43:50.390
it the other way around.

00:43:50.870 --> 00:43:56.780
Yeah, no, I certainly buy that the post hoc uh aspect of it exists, but I think maybe I can

00:43:56.780 --> 00:43:59.900
try to convince you that the pre hawk uh exists as well.

00:44:00.220 --> 00:44:00.700
Yeah, yeah.

00:44:01.100 --> 00:44:02.620
No, I I completely agree.

00:44:02.780 --> 00:44:07.100
I mean, we've developed cultural systems and and all these kinds of ideologies that are

00:44:07.100 --> 00:44:11.820
pretty useful and just on the spot, not just justifying once you've discovered a new

00:44:11.820 --> 00:44:15.740
opportunity for exploiting other people, but also even to see new opportunities for

00:44:15.740 --> 00:44:17.180
exploiting other people, right?

00:44:17.850 --> 00:44:22.170
So I I completely agree that's an interplay between ideology and incentive.

00:44:22.250 --> 00:44:23.530
So that's that's going on.

00:44:24.650 --> 00:44:25.130
Oh yeah.

00:44:25.370 --> 00:44:31.130
So Hanus, just to clear about what you just said, it's the idea that some ideological

00:44:31.370 --> 00:44:37.210
communication like by a leader, for example, what is actually being communicated, maybe

00:44:37.210 --> 00:44:42.090
not verbally, but it everybody is coordinated around, is that I am communicating to you an

00:44:42.090 --> 00:44:46.460
opportunity to exploit people in a way that hasn't existed before.

00:44:46.620 --> 00:44:48.700
That's a really is that what you're saying?

00:44:49.100 --> 00:44:53.740
Well, what I'm what I'm the way I'm thinking about it is a little bit like we need

00:44:53.740 --> 00:44:54.860
coordination devices.

00:44:54.940 --> 00:44:57.980
And you also used this term earlier in in the episode.

00:44:58.220 --> 00:45:04.220
We need coordination devices to figure out if a sufficient mass of people in

00:45:04.220 --> 00:45:10.210
our group is willing to like show the behavior that is that we're um that

00:45:10.210 --> 00:45:11.730
we might be coordinating on.

00:45:11.890 --> 00:45:17.730
So if if the leader says, okay, there's out group X, they're all idiots,

00:45:17.890 --> 00:45:19.730
let's take advantage of that.

00:45:20.210 --> 00:45:25.810
This leader is essentially making a suggestion and checking if there's a sufficient

00:45:25.810 --> 00:45:30.450
degree of consensus within the group to go along and do it or not.

00:45:31.490 --> 00:45:35.440
And then this doesn't need to be so don't think of this democratically, right?

00:45:35.520 --> 00:45:40.960
So um, but I rather think of this, he may he might just need the three the three

00:45:40.960 --> 00:45:43.840
strongest people in the in group to carry on.

00:45:44.160 --> 00:45:50.080
And then he just makes the suggestion if he has a powerful coalition within his

00:45:50.080 --> 00:45:51.520
group, they're gonna do it.

00:45:51.680 --> 00:45:54.080
If not, then they're just gonna forget about it, right?

00:45:54.160 --> 00:45:58.960
So it's also cheap essentially to say, Oh yeah, it was just a suggestion, let's not do it,

00:45:59.040 --> 00:45:59.200
right?

00:45:59.280 --> 00:46:00.800
Maybe not the best idea.

00:46:01.730 --> 00:46:01.890
Yeah.

00:46:02.210 --> 00:46:06.770
It sounds like a high school or like school, like where kids will pick on kids and then

00:46:06.770 --> 00:46:09.090
they kind of like see do the other kids go along with it.

00:46:09.170 --> 00:46:09.410
Yes.

00:46:09.570 --> 00:46:12.850
And then it's just sort of it's these like exploitation feelers, right?

00:46:12.930 --> 00:46:16.930
Where it's sort of like just checking is there common knowledge or coordination or

00:46:16.930 --> 00:46:17.570
willingness to go on.

00:46:17.810 --> 00:46:21.010
I re that's super super interesting, super important.

00:46:21.090 --> 00:46:21.330
Yeah.

00:46:21.490 --> 00:46:27.420
Well, so much of human If you're interested in in this

00:46:27.420 --> 00:46:31.820
particular type of behavior, my my co-author and friend Gönl Down, she has a super nice

00:46:31.820 --> 00:46:33.420
paper with Klaus Abink.

00:46:33.900 --> 00:46:36.300
Um I think it's called the Mobbing Game.

00:46:37.740 --> 00:46:38.620
Oh, I'm familiar with this paper.

00:46:38.860 --> 00:46:40.460
Oh yeah, that's the really good one, yeah.

00:46:42.700 --> 00:46:43.260
Yeah.

00:46:43.500 --> 00:46:45.770
Yeah, no, I'm I'm I'm starting to to work.

00:46:45.930 --> 00:46:51.370
So basically the mobbing game uh is uh it's just a coordination game and we all have to

00:46:51.370 --> 00:46:52.330
decide who pays the cost.

00:46:52.570 --> 00:46:55.290
Is that uh from what I remember, that's that's how the game works.

00:46:55.450 --> 00:46:59.930
Um and that's another version of the simple majority game, where we play a coordination

00:46:59.930 --> 00:47:04.010
game to see you know which subset of us is going to uh receive a benefit and which subset

00:47:04.010 --> 00:47:05.130
is going to incur a cost.

00:47:05.210 --> 00:47:08.460
Um and there's shockingly little work on on this game.

00:47:08.540 --> 00:47:12.300
Uh and I'm starting to to work on a paper exploring some of the, you know, simplest

00:47:12.300 --> 00:47:13.100
dynamics of it.

00:47:13.260 --> 00:47:17.260
But I think there's so much insight to be gained um in in in thinking about this.

00:47:17.740 --> 00:47:19.900
Um we should invite you to our group hangout.

00:47:20.380 --> 00:47:24.220
Yeah, that would be if you want to yeah if you can pitch the idea to the group please.

00:47:24.540 --> 00:47:25.020
Yeah I'd love to.

00:47:26.060 --> 00:47:28.860
D David, the cost would be like the person or both of you.

00:47:29.020 --> 00:47:33.690
So the cost would be like so like just to make make sure I'm being clear, um, if there's

00:47:33.690 --> 00:47:37.690
like a bunch of kids on a playground and there's one kid sort of the scapegoat, that's the

00:47:37.690 --> 00:47:38.010
cost.

00:47:38.170 --> 00:47:40.970
And so everyone else is sort of gaining status.

00:47:41.530 --> 00:47:46.970
Um, or I guess to give it teeth, it's sort of I don't know actually what would the benefit

00:47:46.970 --> 00:47:52.570
be there that they they actually there's a coordination that if I'm the victim,

00:47:53.210 --> 00:47:59.020
I might be willing to like give up a toy or resources and it's becoming common

00:47:59.020 --> 00:47:59.820
knowledge, right?

00:47:59.900 --> 00:48:02.620
Like to give it to give it evolutionary teeth.

00:48:02.940 --> 00:48:08.940
It's it's that um if you guys are dominant over me and and you behave in such a

00:48:08.940 --> 00:48:13.500
way that it's common knowledge to all of us and third parties, and it's sort of a

00:48:13.500 --> 00:48:17.820
recalibration that like you guys will get stuff from me more or less.

00:48:17.980 --> 00:48:22.540
Is that sort of yeah yeah basically um you can think about it like

00:48:25.430 --> 00:48:30.870
Well what's interesting about it is because it's a coordination game, um, focal points are

00:48:30.870 --> 00:48:31.910
needed to coordinate.

00:48:31.990 --> 00:48:37.430
And it explains sort of why the weird kid or the conspicuously different kid is often the

00:48:37.430 --> 00:48:38.630
one who gets picked on.

00:48:38.870 --> 00:48:43.030
It's not necessarily that they're that they're they're dumb or or or or incompetent or mean

00:48:43.110 --> 00:48:43.750
or something like that.

00:48:43.910 --> 00:48:47.110
It's just that they're visibly different from everyone else, and that helps us coordinate.

00:48:48.070 --> 00:48:53.100
Um and so what what uh your colleagues found in the mobbing game is that um people rapidly

00:48:53.100 --> 00:48:55.100
converged on different ways of coordinating.

00:48:55.260 --> 00:48:58.380
And so they had one condition where there were like, you know, some rich people and some uh

00:48:58.540 --> 00:49:00.060
and and some conspicuously poor people.

00:49:00.140 --> 00:49:01.740
And what they found was that people didn't really care.

00:49:01.900 --> 00:49:05.340
Sometimes they gang up on the rich people, sometimes they gang up on the poor people.

00:49:05.500 --> 00:49:08.380
Well, it wasn't really it didn't really matter what the level of wealth was.

00:49:08.460 --> 00:49:11.020
It wasn't that we had like an animosity toward rich people or poor people.

00:49:11.100 --> 00:49:13.660
It was just that they were conspicuously different and that helped us coordinate.

00:49:14.540 --> 00:49:16.380
Uh which which I think is really interesting.

00:49:16.540 --> 00:49:16.860
Yeah.

00:49:17.020 --> 00:49:20.990
Um you were gonna say something when I was asking the question.

00:49:21.070 --> 00:49:21.310
Yeah.

00:49:21.870 --> 00:49:26.990
Wanted to to add because you were asking for what the material benefits of this type of

00:49:26.990 --> 00:49:28.350
mobbing behavior are.

00:49:28.510 --> 00:49:34.350
I think there's also a signaling aspect to this, that it might just be enough to to gang up

00:49:34.350 --> 00:49:39.230
with two strong guys and push around a third uh weaker guy just to signal to everyone else

00:49:39.310 --> 00:49:41.700
if you mess with the two of us, that's what you're in for.

00:49:42.500 --> 00:49:42.660
Yeah.

00:49:42.900 --> 00:49:47.460
It doesn't really matter essentially what they immediately get from it, but it's more the

00:49:47.460 --> 00:49:52.100
signaling deterrence kind of logic that might be playing a roof.

00:49:52.580 --> 00:49:58.100
And and another kind of mind-bending benefit they might get is to themselves avoid being

00:49:58.100 --> 00:49:59.700
the targets of a gang of bullies.

00:50:00.500 --> 00:50:04.580
So this is an interesting uh way I've been modeling this is what what I call the witch hunt

00:50:04.580 --> 00:50:04.820
game.

00:50:04.980 --> 00:50:08.500
So let's say we're all certain that one of us is a witch.

00:50:08.660 --> 00:50:13.410
Um that means at the start of the game, we each have a uh one third probability of being

00:50:13.410 --> 00:50:15.170
found guilty of witchcraft.

00:50:15.330 --> 00:50:19.650
And so if Hannes and I form an alliance against Dave and accuse him of witchcraft, we've

00:50:19.650 --> 00:50:22.690
now increased our payoffs from negative one third to zero.

00:50:22.850 --> 00:50:26.450
And so that just that increase to zero is itself our benefit.

00:50:26.850 --> 00:50:27.010
Right.

00:50:27.410 --> 00:50:28.050
That's super cool.

00:50:28.210 --> 00:50:31.970
That also suggests like sensitivity in the design to like a mobbing.

00:50:32.050 --> 00:50:33.650
Like, are we in a mobbing ecology?

00:50:33.730 --> 00:50:39.560
And if so, that should really crank up uh conflict because if you're in a low mobbing

00:50:39.720 --> 00:50:44.040
situation where that doesn't happen often it doesn't benefit you to gang up on people or if

00:50:44.040 --> 00:50:48.680
it does it's sort of there could be leveling coalitions but if we're all implicitly in a

00:50:48.680 --> 00:50:53.880
mobbing ecology right where sort of like it's there's no um

00:50:54.360 --> 00:51:00.360
there's no benefit to to sort of being seen by everybody as sort of magnanimous

00:51:00.680 --> 00:51:05.970
then it just immediately becomes a thing if I don't gang up on other people then other

00:51:05.970 --> 00:51:07.090
people will gang up on me.

00:51:07.170 --> 00:51:11.570
And whatever cues there are in the environment that that's true should really ratchet up

00:51:11.650 --> 00:51:13.490
the ganging up or mobbing.

00:51:13.970 --> 00:51:14.610
Yes.

00:51:15.170 --> 00:51:15.570
Absolutely.

00:51:15.730 --> 00:51:15.890
Yeah.

00:51:15.970 --> 00:51:20.290
The more the more paranoid you are about being uh ganged up on, the more willing you should

00:51:20.290 --> 00:51:21.810
be to gang up on exactly.

00:51:21.890 --> 00:51:23.650
Yeah, that's about that's a great way to put it.

00:51:23.810 --> 00:51:23.970
Yeah.

00:51:24.130 --> 00:51:24.610
Super cool.

00:51:24.770 --> 00:51:25.170
Amazing.

00:51:25.330 --> 00:51:25.650
Yeah.

00:51:26.690 --> 00:51:27.330
Cool.

00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:28.480
All right.

00:51:28.640 --> 00:51:30.160
Well, we've we've run the gamma.

00:51:30.320 --> 00:51:34.480
We've we've we've really delved into exploitation in a in a fascinating way that's gonna

00:51:34.480 --> 00:51:36.240
have me thinking about it for for many weeks.

00:51:36.320 --> 00:51:40.240
Um but we've gone from exploitation to intergroup exploitation.

00:51:40.480 --> 00:51:43.040
I guess that's a good segue into intergroup conflict in general.

00:51:43.200 --> 00:51:47.760
You have an interesting paper called uh the knowns and unknowns of intergroup conflict.

00:51:47.920 --> 00:51:50.720
What are what are some of those knowns and unknowns?

00:51:53.670 --> 00:51:54.950
It's a great title, by the way.

00:51:57.750 --> 00:52:00.470
This is also borrowed from I think Don Romsfeld or so.

00:52:01.110 --> 00:52:01.830
Oh yes, of course.

00:52:02.070 --> 00:52:05.590
There's the known there's the the known unknowns and the unknown knowns.

00:52:05.830 --> 00:52:07.510
Like you have all four cells or something.

00:52:07.670 --> 00:52:08.790
Yes, exactly.

00:52:13.180 --> 00:52:17.900
So I need to like explain the background a little bit.

00:52:17.980 --> 00:52:22.620
So the paper is written from the more from the angle of economics than from the angle of

00:52:22.620 --> 00:52:23.500
psychology.

00:52:23.740 --> 00:52:23.900
Okay.

00:52:24.380 --> 00:52:30.380
And in economics, a very central model that is being used in order to

00:52:30.380 --> 00:52:36.380
try to understand why conflict might emerge is the so called

00:52:36.380 --> 00:52:37.580
bargaining model.

00:52:38.060 --> 00:52:43.970
The idea there is let's say that there is a big pie we can fight about the

00:52:43.970 --> 00:52:45.810
pie or we can bargain about the pie.

00:52:46.050 --> 00:52:49.730
If we fight about the pie, we waste time, we waste energy.

00:52:49.970 --> 00:52:53.170
And essentially you can think of that reducing the pie size.

00:52:53.330 --> 00:52:58.450
So fighting in itself is most of the time very inefficient.

00:52:58.530 --> 00:53:04.530
It's destroying opportunity um options or it's destroying energy

00:53:04.530 --> 00:53:06.610
and destroying resources.

00:53:08.130 --> 00:53:13.800
And in a perfect world, you should always be able to a

00:53:13.800 --> 00:53:19.400
priori or ex ante negotiate about a split of the pie

00:53:20.040 --> 00:53:25.720
that prevents this destruction and makes everybody better off than they would be under

00:53:25.720 --> 00:53:26.680
conflict.

00:53:27.480 --> 00:53:27.800
Okay.

00:53:28.120 --> 00:53:32.520
So even if there's uncertainty about you know which side is more formidable?

00:53:32.950 --> 00:53:35.270
This is the this is where the problems come in, right?

00:53:35.350 --> 00:53:40.230
So but let's start from the very simple, simple um setting where everybody knows how strong

00:53:40.230 --> 00:53:46.230
everybody is, the pie size is known, everything is known, and also bargaining is

00:53:46.230 --> 00:53:48.710
is perfectly transparent and so on, right?

00:53:48.790 --> 00:53:54.150
So ideal conditions, then it is under these conditions, it's very

00:53:54.540 --> 00:54:00.060
frustrating to see why people end up in this irrational, inefficient type of behavior,

00:54:00.140 --> 00:54:02.060
which is fighting about the pie.

00:54:03.340 --> 00:54:07.580
Okay, and then you have so we're we're with the knowns now, right?

00:54:07.660 --> 00:54:11.500
So this is the model that economists often start from, political scientists also.

00:54:11.740 --> 00:54:17.260
And then they discovered lots of lots of um modifications that you can make to the simple

00:54:17.260 --> 00:54:23.210
story, which will then allow rational actors who really understand the complete logic

00:54:23.210 --> 00:54:27.290
of the situation still to end up in this trap of conflict.

00:54:27.690 --> 00:54:30.010
And one of them is exactly what you pointed to.

00:54:30.170 --> 00:54:33.130
One of them is I might not know how strong you are.

00:54:33.290 --> 00:54:36.810
So I might not be willing, I might underestimate your strength.

00:54:36.890 --> 00:54:40.890
So I might not be willing in the bargaining process to give you a share which would

00:54:40.890 --> 00:54:42.090
actually be appropriate.

00:54:42.330 --> 00:54:43.290
You know this.

00:54:43.640 --> 00:54:49.080
so you know what kind of share you could essentially be um acquiring if we fought.

00:54:49.400 --> 00:54:54.440
And so um we won't reach an agre an agreement in bargaining, so we have a bargaining

00:54:54.440 --> 00:54:57.000
failure, and this is going to cause us to fight.

00:54:57.320 --> 00:54:57.640
Right?

00:54:57.720 --> 00:54:59.640
So this is one thing that can happen.

00:54:59.880 --> 00:55:04.760
There's lots of lots of different modifications to the setup that can explain why even

00:55:04.760 --> 00:55:10.600
rational people would end up or rational actors, groups would end up fighting.

00:55:10.830 --> 00:55:16.750
And so in the paper, I give a long or a little overview of mechanisms that have been

00:55:16.750 --> 00:55:22.270
studied theoretically and also empirically that might explain why

00:55:22.270 --> 00:55:23.870
bargaining can fail.

00:55:24.670 --> 00:55:30.350
And then I give a list essentially of questions where um which I think um are

00:55:30.350 --> 00:55:31.950
worth thinking about more.

00:55:32.190 --> 00:55:35.150
One of them is how identity plays a role in here.

00:55:35.630 --> 00:55:40.180
So this is mainly the view, um, or this this is actually like relating back to what we

00:55:40.180 --> 00:55:41.380
already discussed.

00:55:41.700 --> 00:55:47.700
Um, this in this entire literature, the groups have mostly been taken

00:55:47.700 --> 00:55:51.940
as exogenous, as given, right, and their characteristics.

00:55:52.180 --> 00:55:55.460
And I know of no good model, for example.

00:55:55.780 --> 00:55:59.140
I know of one which is good, but it's not fully developed.

00:55:59.220 --> 00:56:04.870
So um that there's good starting starting work at least, But where you have the

00:56:04.870 --> 00:56:09.110
situation where a leader would be saying, okay, let's define an outgroup, let's

00:56:09.110 --> 00:56:13.910
strategically define an outgroup and see if I can if we can get a strong enough coalition

00:56:13.910 --> 00:56:19.270
to go into a fight with them, which is essentially worth it for us, right?

00:56:19.350 --> 00:56:24.230
So which under a under relatively neutral cost-benefit calculations would be worth it.

00:56:24.620 --> 00:56:30.540
And what you have the a typical setting or a simple simple um result that

00:56:30.540 --> 00:56:35.260
would come out there is, for example, rich minorities are at high risk, right?

00:56:35.340 --> 00:56:41.100
Because they are rich, so it really pays to fight against them, to um uh

00:56:41.420 --> 00:56:46.220
and at the same time um they cannot really defend themselves because they are small.

00:56:47.180 --> 00:56:51.740
And so that's a simple simple situation where you would um see this kind of

00:56:52.450 --> 00:56:55.970
emergence of conflict to to like not exploit in this.

00:56:59.010 --> 00:57:03.490
Trying to model this, but w I would one more layer to this in addition to wealth and small

00:57:03.490 --> 00:57:06.210
numbers is um social alienation.

00:57:06.690 --> 00:57:10.610
Because um if they if the reason why the small group is more wealthy is because they're

00:57:10.610 --> 00:57:15.720
more productive, then there are uh potential benefits uh from associating with them and

00:57:15.720 --> 00:57:17.320
cooperating with them, interacting with them.

00:57:17.480 --> 00:57:19.640
They might share some of those resources with you voluntarily.

00:57:19.880 --> 00:57:24.280
But if they're socially alienated such that you're never going to get a piece of of those

00:57:24.280 --> 00:57:28.360
resources anyway, um the only way you can is by ganging up on them.

00:57:28.520 --> 00:57:33.160
Then in that case that that would be another ingredient that would uh uh instigate

00:57:33.160 --> 00:57:33.640
conflict.

00:57:34.520 --> 00:57:40.200
But I would go one step I'm I don't know what your idea of social alienation there is, but

00:57:40.190 --> 00:57:43.150
I would consider this maybe also as endogenous, right?

00:57:43.230 --> 00:57:48.910
So we could inalien alienate them because we know that there's a lot to be get got from

00:57:48.910 --> 00:57:49.630
gotten from them.

00:57:49.710 --> 00:57:52.830
And so this could also be part of the picture.

00:57:54.110 --> 00:57:54.510
Yeah.

00:57:54.670 --> 00:57:59.150
But that even there might be some cases where it would be cheaper just to buddy up with

00:57:59.150 --> 00:58:03.310
them and you know and form form a collaborative partnership with them where they, you know,

00:58:03.550 --> 00:58:06.420
their benefits would, you know, flow to you at least to some degree.

00:58:06.500 --> 00:58:09.780
And that might be cheaper than violently ganging up on them.

00:58:10.020 --> 00:58:11.620
But if if there's no share them?

00:58:11.780 --> 00:58:11.860
Yeah.

00:58:12.100 --> 00:58:12.420
Yeah.

00:58:12.660 --> 00:58:18.420
But if they're um but if if that's difficult and and the cheaper option of buddying up with

00:58:18.420 --> 00:58:23.860
them isn't available, then in that case you might favor the the uh darker option.

00:58:23.940 --> 00:58:29.510
Aaron Powell This is very interesting because like one of the tropes of uh demagoguery is

00:58:29.750 --> 00:58:34.550
that there is a group that has stuff and they're bad actors.

00:58:34.790 --> 00:58:40.550
And it that really uh sounds a lot like it's killing several birds with one stone

00:58:40.710 --> 00:58:46.310
because what it's doing is it's sort of articulating there's a numerical minority group

00:58:46.630 --> 00:58:48.950
that uh has stuff we want.

00:58:49.180 --> 00:58:54.300
So it's doing this like exploitation feeling out, but it's also sort of painting them as

00:58:54.300 --> 00:59:00.220
bad actors, which, if accepted by everybody, actually reduces their options, that numerical

00:59:00.220 --> 00:59:00.620
minority.

00:59:00.700 --> 00:59:06.620
So if I'm walking around telling Hannes that David is a terrible person

00:59:07.500 --> 00:59:13.470
and Hannes accepts this, it's not only that we're um we're not only sort

00:59:13.470 --> 00:59:18.910
of like ganging up on David, but we're also sort of reducing his social options in the

00:59:18.910 --> 00:59:23.230
sense that we're agreeing on a signal that other people will be like, oh, he's a pariah.

00:59:23.550 --> 00:59:29.310
Um and to the degree we have power, you know, just uh then uh even if

00:59:29.550 --> 00:59:34.000
people would prefer to cooperate with David, but they know that you and I Hannists are

00:59:34.000 --> 00:59:39.200
going to gang up on David or punish people who cooperate with him, then they're not going

00:59:39.200 --> 00:59:39.360
to.

00:59:39.520 --> 00:59:45.520
And so I feel like a lot of quote unquote scapegoating or demagoguery is this

00:59:45.520 --> 00:59:50.160
is just beautifully capturing this deep structure of of exploitation.

00:59:50.720 --> 00:59:51.120
Yeah.

00:59:51.280 --> 00:59:51.680
Mm-hmm.

00:59:51.920 --> 00:59:52.240
Yeah.

00:59:53.040 --> 00:59:55.890
No, there's a way that this that coordination can feed on itself.

00:59:56.130 --> 01:00:00.930
If we've all agreed to coordinate uh against the outgroup, it's kind of hard to break out

01:00:00.930 --> 01:00:01.410
of that.

01:00:01.730 --> 01:00:06.770
Um and as soon as a a particular coordination equilibrium gets established, you know, that

01:00:06.770 --> 01:00:09.410
becomes the path of least resistance for everybody.

01:00:09.570 --> 01:00:13.090
And so it could just be that the coordination itself takes on a life of its own and that

01:00:13.090 --> 01:00:17.250
could be another factor in intergroup conflict, and that we've always it's always been this

01:00:17.250 --> 01:00:20.770
way, and so it continues to be this way, because anyone who departs from this way is going

01:00:20.770 --> 01:00:22.130
to face costs.

01:00:22.820 --> 01:00:23.220
Yes.

01:00:23.380 --> 01:00:26.820
And by I mean by doing this you also create enemies, right?

01:00:26.900 --> 01:00:32.420
And they if if you can't wipe them out entirely, so that's the the logic of a genocide,

01:00:32.500 --> 01:00:38.500
maybe it the genocide idea can be thought through as being just what you need

01:00:38.500 --> 01:00:43.140
to do in order to really reduce the risk of retaliation by the group that you've attacked

01:00:43.140 --> 01:00:43.940
to zero.

01:00:44.500 --> 01:00:48.420
If you really want to make sure that they don't get back to you, you just need to kill them

01:00:48.420 --> 01:00:48.660
all.

01:00:49.250 --> 01:00:54.850
So I I don't think this has happened often historically, and it's interesting to study why,

01:00:55.090 --> 01:00:55.330
right?

01:00:55.490 --> 01:00:56.850
But the logic is of course there.

01:00:56.930 --> 01:01:02.210
You're creating, you're marking the enemy group, and if you leave too many of them alive,

01:01:02.370 --> 01:01:04.130
then you have an enemy sitting there, right?

01:01:04.210 --> 01:01:07.570
And they might get support from other groups and they might get back to you later.

01:01:07.730 --> 01:01:08.770
So Wow.

01:01:08.850 --> 01:01:14.760
Yeah, I never thought about that twisted logic behind genocide that it really

01:01:14.760 --> 01:01:19.800
does matter to a you know to an evil rational agent to make sure that they're all gone.

01:01:20.840 --> 01:01:21.320
Yeah.

01:01:21.560 --> 01:01:23.320
Um it's a fascinating point.

01:01:23.800 --> 01:01:29.080
This last thing we started talking about of the dynamics of coordination is leading into

01:01:29.800 --> 01:01:34.920
um this maybe second part of what you study Hannes, which is group

01:01:34.920 --> 01:01:36.040
memberships.

01:01:36.430 --> 01:01:39.870
um and in this disc grid um project.

01:01:40.030 --> 01:01:41.630
Can you talk a little bit about that?

01:01:41.710 --> 01:01:45.310
And sort of because we've talked a lot about exploitation, which is fantastic.

01:01:45.470 --> 01:01:49.070
I mean, not that people are exploiting it, but it's fantastic that you're studying it.

01:01:49.230 --> 01:01:52.030
Um, but can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with this?

01:01:52.110 --> 01:01:56.030
And it sounds like it's about identities, um, or yeah.

01:01:56.590 --> 01:02:02.440
Yeah, so I mean um it's it's my very small

01:02:02.440 --> 01:02:07.000
contribution to the as you can could call it the in-group-out group literature, right?

01:02:07.080 --> 01:02:11.480
Which is it's super huge in in evolutionary psychology, but in psychology more generally

01:02:11.560 --> 01:02:15.480
also, and since the 2000s also in economics.

01:02:16.760 --> 01:02:22.680
Um and what I wanted to do, or one of the main projects in the

01:02:23.730 --> 01:02:29.730
In the disk grid project is actually trying to replicate and

01:02:29.730 --> 01:02:35.730
then to look into the possible temporal dynamics of

01:02:36.370 --> 01:02:42.050
preferences which have been recently discovered, you could say, or um Rachel Cranton and

01:02:42.050 --> 01:02:48.050
Seth Senders and colleagues, they've suggested that you might be able to classify people

01:02:48.050 --> 01:02:53.820
into different types where a type defines how they react to group markers.

01:02:54.140 --> 01:02:59.820
And so the this is this grouping groupiness or groupy behavior, they um they labeled it.

01:03:00.140 --> 01:03:06.060
I I think for English native speakers, this this name is always like uh feels feels funny

01:03:06.140 --> 01:03:09.180
for for Germans, it's perfectly fine to say somebody is groupy.

01:03:09.580 --> 01:03:11.340
But I like the label.

01:03:11.500 --> 01:03:17.050
The idea is um If I'm strongly not

01:03:17.050 --> 01:03:22.890
groupy, you can put me into sports teams and say, Hannes, you're now with the

01:03:22.890 --> 01:03:24.730
green team, please fight for the green team.

01:03:24.890 --> 01:03:27.210
I will say, I don't care about the teams.

01:03:27.450 --> 01:03:32.250
You put me in another group context, which could be Germans against what have you, right?

01:03:32.330 --> 01:03:34.810
Then I will say, I don't care about nationalities.

01:03:34.890 --> 01:03:40.480
I'll just be nice to people who I think deserve being that I should be nice to them and uh

01:03:40.480 --> 01:03:42.240
be nasty towards others.

01:03:42.480 --> 01:03:44.240
So I don't care about group markers.

01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:48.080
And what they do, they have a clever experimental design, I think, to distinguish between

01:03:48.080 --> 01:03:49.120
these types of preferences.

01:03:49.200 --> 01:03:53.600
And then they see, okay, there's really there seem to be some people who never react to any

01:03:53.600 --> 01:03:55.680
group markers, any group contexts.

01:03:55.840 --> 01:03:58.800
And then there are people, and so this is also a spectrum, right?

01:03:58.880 --> 01:04:03.280
So you have different degrees of how strongly you can react to group markers.

01:04:04.250 --> 01:04:09.530
And what they what I think what the cleverest and nicest aspect of their experimental

01:04:09.530 --> 01:04:15.210
design is they put people into a minimal group context, like the Kleikandinski thing,

01:04:15.370 --> 01:04:21.290
and they put the same people, so within participant design, put them into a natural group

01:04:21.290 --> 01:04:25.930
context, which in their paper is um Republicans versus Democrats.

01:04:26.200 --> 01:04:31.480
But in my replication and like longitudinal extension of the of that

01:04:31.800 --> 01:04:37.720
paradigm, I couldn't use that because it's I ran the experiment in a in a European context.

01:04:37.960 --> 01:04:43.960
So what I'm using is actually it's a lab in the field experiment, and one group of

01:04:43.960 --> 01:04:49.160
participants is police cadets, and the other in their first year, and the other group is

01:04:49.160 --> 01:04:51.320
economics and business students in their first year.

01:04:51.400 --> 01:04:54.520
And so I can compare essentially how they develop over time.

01:04:54.760 --> 01:04:59.810
The idea was, of course, that it's also interesting to study people who like the police

01:04:59.810 --> 01:05:03.650
cadets who are exposed to a very strong group identity, right?

01:05:03.730 --> 01:05:07.330
So they study in uniform, they get sworn in, all these kinds of things.

01:05:07.570 --> 01:05:13.250
And gradually over time, I ran the Cranton experiment with them three times

01:05:13.570 --> 01:05:19.320
over the course of the first year, just to look into: okay, does this exposure to such a

01:05:19.320 --> 01:05:21.560
strong identity change anything?

01:05:21.800 --> 01:05:26.280
Does it make you does it maybe create more groupy people over time, if you like?

01:05:26.440 --> 01:05:32.440
And these kinds of all these kinds of things are um I can I can look into

01:05:32.440 --> 01:05:33.800
these in this kind of setting.

01:05:33.960 --> 01:05:38.440
The the very interesting thing I found, and this is also the main message of the resulting

01:05:38.440 --> 01:05:43.950
paper, is actually, and please correct me and please point me to the papers if I'm

01:05:43.950 --> 01:05:49.950
overlooking something, but I did not see any papers yet where this would

01:05:50.350 --> 01:05:56.270
like the minimal in-group or in-group favoritism in minimal group context would ever have

01:05:56.270 --> 01:05:59.150
been studied longitudinally within participants.

01:05:59.950 --> 01:06:03.580
So a huge literature, it's a huge omission.

01:06:03.820 --> 01:06:07.420
Yeah, and this this was really just part of my experimental design.

01:06:07.740 --> 01:06:08.220
Amazing.

01:06:08.380 --> 01:06:14.380
Um and so for for the natural group relations there, I used essentially um you

01:06:14.380 --> 01:06:19.900
are so you are part of students at one university and you are matched for the experiment

01:06:19.900 --> 01:06:24.220
with students at a foreign university, which was actually true because they were run in two

01:06:24.220 --> 01:06:25.340
different countries.

01:06:25.650 --> 01:06:30.850
Um and what I see for both group contexts is that um in group

01:06:31.010 --> 01:06:34.450
favoritism is super unstable within persons.

01:06:34.850 --> 01:06:40.610
So um it's not like I'm I'm favoring my in-group today in six months

01:06:40.610 --> 01:06:46.370
from now this is relatively almost not predictive of whether I will be doing it um again,

01:06:46.530 --> 01:06:48.690
right at the second um measurement.

01:06:48.850 --> 01:06:50.850
And at the third measurement even less so.

01:06:51.010 --> 01:06:56.720
So um I have like a 0.0 something correlation between wave one in

01:06:56.720 --> 01:07:00.560
group favoritism and wave three um in group favoritism that's that's fascinating.

01:07:00.720 --> 01:07:05.680
So um so you're just to clarify, you're talking about say so the minimal group paradigm is

01:07:05.760 --> 01:07:10.400
you know I like Kandinsky paintings versus Klee paintings and and that is going to put me

01:07:10.400 --> 01:07:14.400
into the Klee group or the Kandinsky group and it's a totally it's totally arbit arbitrary.

01:07:14.560 --> 01:07:20.050
You know uh and uh and by virtue of being in the klee group, I'm going to be nicer to the

01:07:20.050 --> 01:07:22.370
people in the Klee group than in the Kandinsky group.

01:07:22.530 --> 01:07:27.330
So what you're saying is if you run that same minimal group paradigm where, you know, first

01:07:27.330 --> 01:07:30.690
you you put me in the Klee group and see how nice I am to the Klee people versus the

01:07:30.690 --> 01:07:31.730
Kandinsky people.

01:07:31.810 --> 01:07:36.610
And then a few months later you run that study again and you put me into the the Klee group

01:07:36.610 --> 01:07:38.050
versus the Kandinsky group.

01:07:38.370 --> 01:07:44.340
What you're saying is if I'm really tribal about Klee the first time around.

01:07:44.500 --> 01:07:49.060
That is basically not going to predict how tribal I'm going to be toward Klee the next time

01:07:49.060 --> 01:07:49.220
around.

01:07:49.540 --> 01:07:50.420
Precisely, yes.

01:07:51.380 --> 01:07:56.420
So I have a question about that, which is so there's some work, it's not at all

01:07:56.420 --> 01:08:02.020
longitudinal in this sense, but it's like Rebecca Biegler developmentally, where and if

01:08:02.020 --> 01:08:06.350
people don't know about this, it's worth looking at, but this sort of like blue eyes, brown

01:08:06.350 --> 01:08:10.430
eyes experiment that was done by a school teacher.

01:08:11.150 --> 01:08:16.670
And uh, and it was a situation where you take an arbitrary identity, but then in the

01:08:16.670 --> 01:08:22.030
classroom, it actually gets used as a basis like by the children, right?

01:08:22.190 --> 01:08:24.510
Like to sort of like let the experiment run.

01:08:24.830 --> 01:08:30.270
And so what uh Becca Biegler, Rebecca Biegler found was that to the

01:08:30.270 --> 01:08:35.640
extent that the arbitrary markers organized social

01:08:35.640 --> 01:08:41.160
interaction and access to desired things like, you know, turns or

01:08:41.160 --> 01:08:44.760
resources, the kids would sort of go along with it.

01:08:45.080 --> 01:08:49.320
Um, so that's not super longitudinal, but in a sense, that's sort of the closest thing.

01:08:49.480 --> 01:08:51.400
So that's amazing, Hannas, that you're doing that.

01:08:51.560 --> 01:08:56.200
One question then for you is is the lack of a correlation

01:08:57.320 --> 01:09:02.970
does that is that because there's no sense in which the

01:09:02.970 --> 01:09:08.970
arbitrary groups matter, such that, for example, like let's say in the classroom example,

01:09:09.610 --> 01:09:14.490
if the if the structure of the world actually tracks the arbitrariness.

01:09:14.570 --> 01:09:19.130
So it's just say, like, you know, we're the yellows and the blues, and we're all of a

01:09:19.130 --> 01:09:25.130
sudden in a classroom, and there's actually some social teeth to the yellows and blues, and

01:09:25.130 --> 01:09:26.890
it starts to be enforced.

01:09:27.520 --> 01:09:33.200
would in that context do you think individual differences start to um be

01:09:33.200 --> 01:09:38.960
stable or we don't know that we don't know my my best guess

01:09:38.960 --> 01:09:44.480
would be so when you so the group relations that I'm using these group contexts are like

01:09:44.480 --> 01:09:48.960
you say pretty much meaningless yeah except for the police thing I mean I guess that's a

01:09:48.960 --> 01:09:53.920
sense in which it's not I mean it's not like as strong as sort of like a very overarching

01:09:57.770 --> 01:10:02.970
But they they at least they are not that relevant to how people make these social decisions

01:10:02.970 --> 01:10:05.530
in these like dictator games and stuff.

01:10:05.770 --> 01:10:11.450
Um and it's also easy for you um to realize okay, they are telling me I'm matched with

01:10:11.450 --> 01:10:15.850
someone who is, I don't know, studying at another university, but why should I treat them

01:10:15.850 --> 01:10:16.970
any better or worse?

01:10:17.920 --> 01:10:22.800
But if you if you you use a group context, so I haven't done this, but there's at least

01:10:22.800 --> 01:10:27.520
some data out there which might be used to look into this.

01:10:39.120 --> 01:10:44.320
And I think when you use when you use these kinds of group markers, which have a stable

01:10:44.320 --> 01:10:50.270
meaning outside the lab and then repeat the games, then behavior within participants will

01:10:50.270 --> 01:10:51.390
be much more stable.

01:10:52.030 --> 01:10:56.190
But I think it will not be like, well, this is pure speculation, right?

01:10:56.270 --> 01:11:00.670
I we should I think, well, give me another grant that I will study this.

01:11:01.230 --> 01:11:06.910
Um the I I'm I'm I would be super

01:11:06.910 --> 01:11:11.710
interested in in understanding whether, okay, there there's different types of people with

01:11:11.710 --> 01:11:13.230
different degrees of groupiness.

01:11:13.310 --> 01:11:19.100
If you put some of them into this stable intergroup like hostility kind of setting,

01:11:19.180 --> 01:11:24.300
they will pick it up and they will start discriminating and do so stably, while other

01:11:24.300 --> 01:11:26.140
people would still say, no, right?

01:11:26.220 --> 01:11:29.180
So I don't care about your group context, leave me alone.

01:11:29.500 --> 01:11:35.340
Um so yeah, so I would be really interested in like independently

01:11:35.340 --> 01:11:40.230
determining people's level of groupiness and then put them into this kind of stable

01:11:40.310 --> 01:11:45.190
political or what have you um context and have them and and look at their behavior there.

01:11:45.430 --> 01:11:46.070
Yeah.

01:11:46.550 --> 01:11:49.430
But yeah, it's all a future future one.

01:11:49.830 --> 01:11:50.630
That's super cool.

01:11:50.790 --> 01:11:50.950
Yeah.

01:11:51.350 --> 01:11:54.870
Did you so did did you look longitudinally at the non-minimal groups as well?

01:11:55.030 --> 01:11:59.830
So like if people were you know tribalist about their their university or their political

01:11:59.830 --> 01:12:02.550
party, they would also be tribal about it the next time around?

01:12:02.710 --> 01:12:05.110
And would did you find the same same result or a different result?

01:12:06.150 --> 01:12:11.920
This is very interesting because one of the main results of Cranton, um Cranton and Sanders

01:12:12.000 --> 01:12:17.920
and colleagues, I should say, um, is that they only have one day essentially,

01:12:18.000 --> 01:12:18.240
right?

01:12:18.320 --> 01:12:20.560
So they they survey people on one day.

01:12:20.880 --> 01:12:26.240
And when you do this, then their behavior, their in-group favoritism in the minimal

01:12:26.400 --> 01:12:31.440
context is correlated to their um in-group favoritism in the natural context.

01:12:31.970 --> 01:12:33.090
So there's a lot of things that is the main insight.

01:12:34.610 --> 01:12:38.050
This is also and yeah, what my so I replicate this pattern, right?

01:12:38.130 --> 01:12:43.250
So in my data, in every wave there's a correlation between the context uh contexts.

01:12:44.050 --> 01:12:47.730
But it's different people doing the in-group favoritism on different days.

01:12:48.770 --> 01:12:50.210
So it's like a validation.

01:12:50.370 --> 01:12:50.530
Yeah.

01:12:50.610 --> 01:12:52.600
It's like coalitional.

01:12:52.680 --> 01:12:54.040
Let me let me propose it to them.

01:12:54.360 --> 01:12:54.760
Coalitional.

01:12:54.920 --> 01:12:56.440
No, no, no, not not even, but like group.

01:12:56.760 --> 01:12:58.120
Are you in a coalitional mood today, Dave?

01:12:58.760 --> 01:12:59.160
How are you feeling?

01:12:59.480 --> 01:13:00.280
Yeah, no, exactly.

01:13:00.440 --> 01:13:05.560
No, that's really nice that it validates the it's sort of like a sanity check, like that

01:13:05.560 --> 01:13:10.200
the arbitrar the minimal group is sort of tapping the the the software setting that day of

01:13:10.200 --> 01:13:11.560
the coalitional system.

01:13:12.600 --> 01:13:16.520
In the paper, I think I say, are you in a groupy state today or are you in a group in an

01:13:16.600 --> 01:13:17.720
ungroupy state today?

01:13:18.120 --> 01:13:18.440
Yeah.

01:13:18.600 --> 01:13:21.270
Um yeah, What do you think about the term coalitional?

01:13:21.350 --> 01:13:22.790
I mean like Hannes or David.

01:13:22.870 --> 01:13:27.350
Like, I mean, so groupie tribal, like what's the is it groupy better than coalitional?

01:13:27.510 --> 01:13:30.150
Like how coalitional is somebody, or like how groupie is somebody?

01:13:30.310 --> 01:13:30.630
I don't know.

01:13:30.710 --> 01:13:31.350
What do you guys think?

01:13:31.750 --> 01:13:32.870
Potato potato.

01:13:32.950 --> 01:13:33.110
Yeah.

01:13:33.990 --> 01:13:36.470
We're talking about the same thing, we're just flapping our mouths differently.

01:13:36.630 --> 01:13:36.870
Yeah.

01:13:37.270 --> 01:13:37.910
You know.

01:13:38.310 --> 01:13:38.630
Yeah.

01:13:38.870 --> 01:13:40.070
I would I completely agree.

01:13:40.150 --> 01:13:45.260
There's a famous quote by a German mathematician who who said, Tische Stühle Bierseiter.

01:13:45.420 --> 01:13:51.020
So it essentially means I don't I don't mind if you call something a desk, a chair,

01:13:51.260 --> 01:13:56.380
or a glass of beer, as long as you define what you mean in the context, we're good, right?

01:13:56.460 --> 01:13:57.020
So Yeah.

01:13:57.500 --> 01:13:58.540
Yeah, totally.

01:13:59.740 --> 01:14:01.180
Um great.

01:14:01.340 --> 01:14:07.260
So uh so that that's is that uh so that's the identity or you talked about types of

01:14:07.260 --> 01:14:11.630
people earlier in the episode, which I thought was really interesting in terms of like

01:14:11.630 --> 01:14:12.430
locating types.

01:14:12.590 --> 01:14:13.790
Is that what you were referring to?

01:14:13.950 --> 01:14:18.590
Like the groupiness or coalitionality, or are you looking at other individual differences

01:14:18.830 --> 01:14:19.470
too?

01:14:21.390 --> 01:14:27.150
So the main point of that paper is of course to replicate um

01:14:27.150 --> 01:14:32.780
this classification of people into types, groupiness types, and then also look into

01:14:32.860 --> 01:14:33.180
okay.

01:14:33.260 --> 01:14:38.860
So the the assumption behind the design was of course or the ambition was to replicate and

01:14:38.860 --> 01:14:42.860
then to explain who would be groupy versus who would be less groupy.

01:14:43.420 --> 01:14:47.420
But actually since since it's within person it's not stable, right?

01:14:47.580 --> 01:14:53.260
So it's it's yeah this part of the research question can't really be answered.

01:14:53.500 --> 01:14:53.820
Right.

01:14:54.540 --> 01:14:59.010
So So you can't you can't correlate something that doesn't exist if there's people

01:14:59.330 --> 01:14:59.970
individual differences.

01:15:00.050 --> 01:15:00.130
Yeah.

01:15:00.370 --> 01:15:01.570
So I never I never got the answer.

01:15:01.730 --> 01:15:07.010
So so there was also no correlation between say university favoritism or political party

01:15:07.010 --> 01:15:09.090
favoritism from one month to the next?

01:15:09.330 --> 01:15:11.010
Was that the same result there?

01:15:11.810 --> 01:15:15.490
Within contexts, there is no con correlation over time, right?

01:15:15.570 --> 01:15:17.730
So very low correlation.

01:15:17.970 --> 01:15:20.130
Over one year there's zero correlation.

01:15:20.530 --> 01:15:20.850
Wow.

01:15:21.250 --> 01:15:21.490
Okay.

01:15:21.820 --> 01:15:26.060
So my if I if I'm really tribal toward my political party, that's not going to predict how

01:15:26.060 --> 01:15:28.300
tribal I'm going to be a year for a year from now.

01:15:28.700 --> 01:15:32.140
But I don't have political parties in my experiment, right?

01:15:32.380 --> 01:15:33.260
But you have universities?

01:15:33.500 --> 01:15:35.740
I have universities and Kleikandinski.

01:15:36.220 --> 01:15:36.620
Got it.

01:15:36.700 --> 01:15:36.940
Okay.

01:15:37.100 --> 01:15:38.700
So the university is the same result.

01:15:39.180 --> 01:15:40.380
University is the same result.

01:15:40.540 --> 01:15:46.430
My suspicion, my my suspicion would be if we rerun this with political parties,

01:15:46.510 --> 01:15:50.750
especially in a setting like the US, political party would be stable.

01:15:51.070 --> 01:15:52.430
Yeah, I'd bet that as well.

01:15:52.510 --> 01:15:52.910
Yeah.

01:15:53.310 --> 01:15:58.910
But I I would think there this is not to be confused with like

01:15:59.070 --> 01:16:02.190
the person being groupy forever.

01:16:02.430 --> 01:16:02.510
Yeah.

01:16:02.750 --> 01:16:07.780
But the person just really having bought into for some reason into this intergroup relation

01:16:07.860 --> 01:16:12.420
and and trying to like enforce this intergroup relation between these two parties.

01:16:12.740 --> 01:16:13.140
Yeah, yeah.

01:16:13.300 --> 01:16:18.180
Yeah, I think that's really important because uh yeah, uh just uh because I think like

01:16:18.260 --> 01:16:24.260
traditionally psychology has sort of operated at the level of behavior and just sort of

01:16:24.260 --> 01:16:27.220
sought to say like our individual differences stable.

01:16:27.460 --> 01:16:32.710
But I think an evolutionary approach or more sophisticated approach is even when it is,

01:16:32.790 --> 01:16:37.910
like you said, Hannes, I think it's really important to highlight that it's the result of

01:16:37.910 --> 01:16:43.110
this software calculating costs and benefits and sort of what am I, what's my um, what's

01:16:43.110 --> 01:16:46.230
sort of my role or my strategy now.

01:16:46.550 --> 01:16:50.630
And so you might even get somebody who is stable for a while, but then sort of sees an

01:16:50.630 --> 01:16:50.950
opening.

01:16:51.110 --> 01:16:54.950
It comes back to these like market dynamics of like what are my outside options.

01:16:55.190 --> 01:17:00.880
And so you might have a very stable politician who's really, really um dedicated to their

01:17:00.880 --> 01:17:01.120
party.

01:17:01.200 --> 01:17:05.680
And as David has sort of pointed out, you know, the ideology comes second or even Hannes,

01:17:05.840 --> 01:17:06.400
as you said it.

01:17:06.480 --> 01:17:12.160
And so, but then when there's an opening for more status or resource competition comes up,

01:17:12.400 --> 01:17:14.320
then immediately could just turn on a dime.

01:17:14.400 --> 01:17:19.040
And there's no inconsistency from the perspective of the underlying software, because it's

01:17:19.040 --> 01:17:21.840
really looking for social strategic options.

01:17:22.000 --> 01:17:27.510
I think that's a really important thing to highlight that you just d did nicely, and I just

01:17:27.510 --> 01:17:28.790
want to emphasize Hannes.

01:17:28.950 --> 01:17:29.510
Yeah.

01:17:30.230 --> 01:17:31.350
I completely agree.

01:17:31.430 --> 01:17:31.670
Yes.

01:17:32.150 --> 01:17:33.270
Could could not agree more.

01:17:33.350 --> 01:17:39.270
I'm tempted to use that study uh as further ammunition in my argument against this idea

01:17:39.270 --> 01:17:41.830
that uh conservatives are more groupie than liberals.

01:17:41.910 --> 01:17:45.750
There's a lot of research in social psychology that that suggests that you know

01:17:45.830 --> 01:17:49.990
conservatives have a groupy personality, and that's why they're more nationalistic or, you

01:17:49.990 --> 01:17:50.550
know, whatever.

01:17:50.630 --> 01:17:54.540
You know, Jonathan Height says that they they're higher on the in-group loyalty foundation

01:17:54.620 --> 01:17:55.260
or whatever.

01:17:55.340 --> 01:17:59.980
Um, and I have a paper uh critiquing that idea among other ideas as as being implausible,

01:18:00.060 --> 01:18:02.380
uh, both theoretically and and empirically.

01:18:02.460 --> 01:18:07.980
Uh and uh I've I have a new a new piece of evidence in favor of that argument that it it's

01:18:07.980 --> 01:18:12.380
not even clear whether groupiness even exists as a coherent uh individual difference

01:18:12.380 --> 01:18:13.020
marker.

01:18:13.580 --> 01:18:14.220
Yeah.

01:18:14.860 --> 01:18:18.610
But I think at least in in the minimal groups context.

01:18:22.050 --> 01:18:27.810
Because um I I also applied um Granton Sand Sanders method to classify people into these

01:18:27.810 --> 01:18:31.730
types and you and I get a quite similar distribution of types.

01:18:32.210 --> 01:18:37.490
But this is n and also even the distribution is stable across time, but it's not the same

01:18:37.490 --> 01:18:39.730
people in the different things.

01:18:40.130 --> 01:18:40.850
That's so interesting.

01:18:40.930 --> 01:18:41.250
Yeah.

01:18:41.570 --> 01:18:45.880
So do you do you have thoughts about I mean, is it literally just like what is the group

01:18:45.880 --> 01:18:47.720
they're thinking about the day that day?

01:18:47.960 --> 01:18:51.560
Well, no, they can't be right because you're actually t keeping the group identity

01:18:51.560 --> 01:18:52.040
constant.

01:18:52.200 --> 01:18:54.920
It's very puzzling that it's so malleable.

01:18:55.240 --> 01:18:59.160
I'm wonder is it they're in a bad mood that day? 'Cause I'm I'm thinking of I'm I'm sure

01:18:59.160 --> 01:19:03.400
you're familiar with um Michael Bank Peterson's work on Need for Chaos.

01:19:03.560 --> 01:19:08.110
Uh uh and he finds basically that the people who want to watch the world burn, who

01:19:08.110 --> 01:19:12.110
literally agree with the statement, I want to watch the world burn on a survey, that these

01:19:12.110 --> 01:19:17.230
people are more likely to spread hostile rumors and political, politically dubious, you

01:19:17.230 --> 01:19:21.310
know, what we might call fake news to try to sow chaos and discord.

01:19:21.470 --> 01:19:25.790
And and and what's interesting is they'll they'll spread fake news even if it's on the left

01:19:25.790 --> 01:19:26.270
or on the right.

01:19:26.430 --> 01:19:27.310
Like they don't really care.

01:19:27.470 --> 01:19:29.070
They just they just want to watch the world burn.

01:19:29.150 --> 01:19:32.350
They just want to spread stuff and start shit, basically.

01:19:33.150 --> 01:19:38.000
Um and I just say need for chaos is what sounds like a Metallica song name or a

01:19:39.680 --> 01:19:39.680
few years.

01:19:39.840 --> 01:19:41.120
By getting back to Metallica, yeah.

01:19:41.920 --> 01:19:46.560
Um and and he finds fascinatingly enough that these people tend to be pretty, you know, low

01:19:46.720 --> 01:19:52.640
status loner people who might you you might expect to benefit from uh you know uh an

01:19:52.640 --> 01:19:54.080
overturning of the social order.

01:19:54.160 --> 01:19:57.520
You know, there's that great quote from Game of Thrones: Chaos is a ladder.

01:19:57.680 --> 01:20:01.710
Well, if you're at the bottom of the ladder, uh it might be in your interest to sow chaos,

01:20:01.950 --> 01:20:06.990
because if you if if if the social order is uh is an upheaval, that that might be an

01:20:06.990 --> 01:20:09.390
opportunity for you to rise uh in status.

01:20:09.470 --> 01:20:11.950
Uh or at least you have, you know, barely anything to lose.

01:20:12.030 --> 01:20:17.070
So you might as well, you know, try to roll the dice on on how society is is arranged.

01:20:17.230 --> 01:20:22.110
Um, and so maybe it's just fluctuations and like personal, maybe, you know, I got insulted

01:20:22.110 --> 01:20:25.550
that day and I'm feeling a little insecure about my social status, so I'm gonna be extra

01:20:25.550 --> 01:20:26.510
groupy that day.

01:20:26.860 --> 01:20:30.940
But another day, I mean uh I got uh promotion, I got complimented, so I'm not gonna be so

01:20:30.940 --> 01:20:31.340
groupy.

01:20:31.420 --> 01:20:31.820
I don't know.

01:20:32.060 --> 01:20:34.620
Is there any plausibility to that or am I out of my mind?

01:20:36.060 --> 01:20:39.180
This is essentially the discussion section of the paper, right?

01:20:39.260 --> 01:20:40.460
So we need to study this.

01:20:40.540 --> 01:20:46.220
I I have no good idea of when people enter the groupy state and when they don't.

01:20:46.460 --> 01:20:46.620
Yeah.

01:20:46.780 --> 01:20:49.420
So this just needs to be studied empirically more.

01:20:49.670 --> 01:20:52.470
Yeah, it might also be like just coming back to exploitation too.

01:20:52.550 --> 01:20:56.870
Like some days I feel like I'm exploited by the group identities I am a member of, and some

01:20:56.870 --> 01:20:59.830
days I don't, you know, and that just is sort of a fluctuation too.

01:20:59.910 --> 01:21:01.510
And that might have something to do with it.

01:21:01.590 --> 01:21:02.070
But yeah.

01:21:02.470 --> 01:21:03.030
Yeah, indeed.

01:21:03.110 --> 01:21:08.710
I mean, also with with these in-group-out-group settings, you can have so the in-group is

01:21:08.710 --> 01:21:09.990
also heterogeneous, right?

01:21:10.070 --> 01:21:14.790
And if I had a bad experience with an in-group member on a day, I might say, Well, I really

01:21:14.790 --> 01:21:18.070
don't like being associated with the Germans that much anymore today.

01:21:19.000 --> 01:21:23.000
So you might just like look for friends in different out groups that day.

01:21:23.480 --> 01:21:25.000
Yeah, that's super cool.

01:21:25.240 --> 01:21:31.000
Um one, so we've covered sort of exploitation and um the start of

01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:32.520
talking about the identity stuff.

01:21:32.680 --> 01:21:37.400
Is there other work while we while we have you that you would like to sort of cover?

01:21:37.560 --> 01:21:42.200
Um because I you've you've done so many different things, and I you know I love the

01:21:42.200 --> 01:21:48.190
throughput line of sort of being really careful, logical, and sort of um

01:21:48.430 --> 01:21:52.510
having an economic approach married to an evolutionary psychological approach.

01:21:52.590 --> 01:21:53.630
I think it's just so cool.

01:21:53.710 --> 01:21:58.430
And the way you're approaching these difficult real-world phenomena, distilling them down

01:21:58.430 --> 01:22:03.230
in a way that's captures something, but you can still be kind of quantitative about it.

01:22:03.870 --> 01:22:07.710
Are there other projects that you think might be worth mentioning?

01:22:07.790 --> 01:22:13.440
Or maybe also, I mean, people listening, if there's sort of uh uh an ad for sort of like

01:22:13.440 --> 01:22:17.920
joining projects that might still be ongoing or or even in the future,

01:22:19.520 --> 01:22:25.200
um but this is very much off topic, but of course I'm now um

01:22:25.680 --> 01:22:28.880
very interested also in in everything crime, right?

01:22:28.960 --> 01:22:33.450
So why would somebody be inclined to break rules?

01:22:33.610 --> 01:22:38.970
Why would somebody will be willing to take the risks of doing this and so on?

01:22:39.210 --> 01:22:45.050
So there's been a lot of work in the economics of crime, but also in the um psychology

01:22:45.050 --> 01:22:50.090
literature and in criminology itself, of course, there's lots of um work being done.

01:22:50.730 --> 01:22:56.540
So that that's a new interest I have, or relatively recent, but it's

01:22:56.540 --> 01:23:02.540
still it still fits in well with me being interested in all sorts of dark behaviors

01:23:02.700 --> 01:23:04.060
that humans can show.

01:23:04.300 --> 01:23:04.860
Yeah.

01:23:05.660 --> 01:23:10.060
One thing that we haven't touched upon, and which is a little, I don't know if I should

01:23:10.060 --> 01:23:10.780
call it a hobby.

01:23:10.860 --> 01:23:15.740
It was a huge fascination that I always had and which I want to continue a little bit.

01:23:15.900 --> 01:23:21.500
Currently, I'm just not really actively working on it, is heroism and high-stakes altruism.

01:23:21.930 --> 01:23:27.530
because I think in in this domain there's the more and more data is becoming

01:23:27.530 --> 01:23:28.570
available.

01:23:29.290 --> 01:23:35.130
And so the the very informative, high quality, applied micro kind of

01:23:35.130 --> 01:23:39.450
studies that I as I would call them become more and more possible.

01:23:40.090 --> 01:23:45.780
Um and I think I I I still have this feeling that the theories

01:23:45.780 --> 01:23:51.300
about altruism that we have developed and the mainly the

01:23:51.300 --> 01:23:56.900
experimental games, the economic games that we have used to study those don't

01:23:56.900 --> 01:23:57.780
fully match.

01:23:58.020 --> 01:24:03.970
And so I'm I'm not co like 100% convinced that you can test

01:24:03.970 --> 01:24:08.850
a theory about inclusive fitness and how inclusive fitness would be increasing your chances

01:24:08.850 --> 01:24:12.930
to be an altruist using dictator games of ten dollars.

01:24:13.330 --> 01:24:14.610
I've done those myself.

01:24:14.690 --> 01:24:17.250
I'm I think they are a very good methodology.

01:24:17.330 --> 01:24:21.490
They are maybe among the best things that we have because we can control for everything.

01:24:21.730 --> 01:24:26.690
Very nice, but they still leave open this possibility that for high stakes things might be

01:24:26.690 --> 01:24:27.650
somehow different.

01:24:27.970 --> 01:24:28.450
Right.

01:24:28.610 --> 01:24:28.930
Right.

01:24:29.250 --> 01:24:34.840
And so that's why I'm still very interested in and also following the

01:24:34.840 --> 01:24:39.000
literature a little bit um on uh work on heroism.

01:24:39.320 --> 01:24:40.280
Yeah, that's super cool.

01:24:40.600 --> 01:24:45.320
Defined, yeah, defined defined, sorry, um defined as really like

01:24:45.880 --> 01:24:51.000
high-stakes altruistic behavior in natural contexts.

01:24:51.320 --> 01:24:54.680
And so you can define heroism again as a question, how do you define it?

01:24:54.760 --> 01:25:00.610
And you can you can come up with alternative um uh definitions which allow for

01:25:00.610 --> 01:25:03.330
everyone to act heroically in social situations.

01:25:03.490 --> 01:25:05.090
This is not what I mean essentially.

01:25:05.170 --> 01:25:09.570
What I mean is really: you're the guy who runs into the burning building to rescue the kid,

01:25:09.650 --> 01:25:14.930
or you're the soldier who like throws himself on the grenade to protect his comrades.

01:25:15.090 --> 01:25:19.490
These kinds of naturally occurring high-stakes altruistic behaviors.

01:25:19.730 --> 01:25:19.890
Yeah.

01:25:20.420 --> 01:25:22.100
It's interesting you you call them high stakes.

01:25:22.180 --> 01:25:24.100
That evokes kind of a gambling context.

01:25:24.260 --> 01:25:28.580
I mean, are you are you are you formalizing this as like kind of a risky altruistic act

01:25:28.660 --> 01:25:32.340
where like the payoffs could be huge, but also the cost could be huge too, and you're just

01:25:32.340 --> 01:25:34.420
taking a huge gamble either way.

01:25:34.500 --> 01:25:35.540
Is that how you're thinking of it?

01:25:36.020 --> 01:25:38.820
So I think the the costs, the costs are the main aspect.

01:25:38.900 --> 01:25:40.340
Yeah, the costs are super high.

01:25:40.580 --> 01:25:44.740
So they reach a level where they really have an impact on your future life.

01:25:44.900 --> 01:25:47.700
They might even kill you in in the examples that I gave, right?

01:25:47.860 --> 01:25:47.940
Yeah.

01:25:48.260 --> 01:25:49.510
Can also be a little lower.

01:25:49.590 --> 01:25:54.790
So there's also reach uh research on um what's it called?

01:25:54.870 --> 01:25:59.270
It's I think undirected organ donations or so that essentially you say, Well, I have a

01:25:59.270 --> 01:26:03.190
kidney and I'm going to donate it to whoever needs it, and I don't even want to know who

01:26:03.190 --> 01:26:04.070
this person is.

01:26:04.310 --> 01:26:05.910
This has an impact on my life, right?

01:26:05.990 --> 01:26:08.870
So I increase my risks of becoming ill and everything.

01:26:09.190 --> 01:26:15.140
But it is a very altruistic act which um which has really

01:26:15.300 --> 01:26:19.300
high or really severe consequences or can have at least it has a high risk of having severe

01:26:19.300 --> 01:26:20.660
consequences for you.

01:26:21.940 --> 01:26:22.020
Yeah.

01:26:22.260 --> 01:26:26.260
I wonder if it's certainly certainly higher than just $10 in a dictator game.

01:26:26.740 --> 01:26:28.500
I wonder, I mean, it's interesting.

01:26:28.580 --> 01:26:33.780
I see kind of a weird twisted parallel between that idea and Ed Hagan's work on

01:26:33.780 --> 01:26:36.020
suicidality, who we had on the podcast.

01:26:36.100 --> 01:26:41.940
So his idea there is that if you are um in a conflict with other people uh and you have

01:26:41.940 --> 01:26:46.230
really low uh bargaining power, um and you're being exploited.

01:26:46.310 --> 01:26:49.670
I mean, your your work also fits in nicely with his work as well.

01:26:49.830 --> 01:26:55.750
Um uh you you need some way of credibly signaling that that you that you're in need and you

01:26:55.750 --> 01:26:57.830
need the terms of the relationship to change.

01:26:57.910 --> 01:27:01.510
Uh and you also need some way of of bargaining to change your situation.

01:27:01.670 --> 01:27:05.270
And what he would argue is that a lot of depression and suicidality and self harm, these

01:27:05.430 --> 01:27:09.110
that these are both are simultaneously bargaining strategies in the same way that, you

01:27:09.110 --> 01:27:13.380
know, a a union might go on strike to withhold benefits from the company to get a higher

01:27:13.380 --> 01:27:13.620
wage.

01:27:13.860 --> 01:27:17.940
So they're there are simultaneously bargaining strategies and also costly signals and that

01:27:17.940 --> 01:27:23.460
they're they're they're signaling need in a way that is comes with a true cost.

01:27:23.540 --> 01:27:26.420
And in some cases, you know, the the cost is risking your life.

01:27:26.580 --> 01:27:31.060
And so he finds that most suicide attempts are not successful.

01:27:31.220 --> 01:27:36.630
And so you're you're taking a small risk of death in order to potentially reap the benefit

01:27:36.630 --> 01:27:38.950
of a renegotiated relationship.

01:27:39.350 --> 01:27:44.070
And that it seems like a similar logic to your heroism where you're taking a small risk of

01:27:44.070 --> 01:27:47.030
death to potentially uh receive some other benefit.

01:27:47.110 --> 01:27:50.550
Maybe it's to rescue someone, maybe it's to to get status or something.

01:27:50.630 --> 01:27:53.750
Uh but it seems like the logic is is somewhat similar there.

01:27:53.830 --> 01:27:55.270
Would you buy that parallel?

01:27:56.870 --> 01:28:01.830
I'm I'm completely not an expert on uh suicidality.

01:28:03.110 --> 01:28:08.960
Um from the from the mathematical angle, I mean, um, or just from the costly

01:28:08.960 --> 01:28:11.920
signaling perspective, I see the argument, yes.

01:28:12.080 --> 01:28:12.320
Yeah.

01:28:12.640 --> 01:28:17.920
But I I will have to read up on his work on on this to to make up my mind in more detail.

01:28:18.000 --> 01:28:21.520
But it sounds plausible in the the way you explain it, yes.

01:28:21.760 --> 01:28:26.160
Well, we're we're happy to be a Yenta a matchmaker for you and Ed to collaborate.

01:28:26.480 --> 01:28:30.080
Yeah, and what one thing I wanted to say quickly is that it's important, Hannes.

01:28:30.160 --> 01:28:33.490
You were talking earlier about the games not matching up, and I just want to like connect

01:28:33.490 --> 01:28:37.570
the dots for listeners that one of the reasons why it's important for the games to

01:28:37.570 --> 01:28:43.090
correspond to the phenomenon is from an evolutionary perspective, the games sort of

01:28:43.090 --> 01:28:44.930
embody the selective logic, right?

01:28:45.010 --> 01:28:49.970
So it's the question of why would genes for quote unquote or designed for

01:28:50.610 --> 01:28:54.210
doing something in a particular situation be selected for.

01:28:54.450 --> 01:28:59.730
And it's the games that sort of distill that down into something that can actually be sort

01:28:59.730 --> 01:29:02.690
of a genetic, like this is favorite over this.

01:29:02.920 --> 01:29:08.760
And as you're saying, if you don't model the costs and benefits correctly, so

01:29:08.840 --> 01:29:13.240
for example, as you said, Hannes, like, you know, if saving somebody's life only benefits

01:29:13.240 --> 01:29:17.160
you ten dollars, but it's David saying it's hugely beneficial, it might get you like, you

01:29:17.160 --> 01:29:23.080
know, a whole better life, for example, then uh we're not going to be accurate about

01:29:23.080 --> 01:29:25.160
what would be selected for the psychology.

01:29:25.320 --> 01:29:26.200
So that's why it's important.

01:29:26.280 --> 01:29:30.040
It's not just sort of like a mundane like bookkeeping thing, it's actually really important

01:29:30.040 --> 01:29:31.710
for what would be selected for.

01:29:31.870 --> 01:29:35.710
I also just want to say quickly, Anthony Lopez and I started doing a project we we still

01:29:35.710 --> 01:29:41.310
have to do it and Anthony, we should have on um about valor and sort of combat situations.

01:29:41.390 --> 01:29:45.710
And one thing that sort of immediately struck me is there's also a difference between sort

01:29:45.710 --> 01:29:48.350
of bravery or valor and recklessness.

01:29:48.750 --> 01:29:51.310
Um like in the cost benefit thing too.

01:29:51.390 --> 01:29:54.910
And I think that's an interesting question of sort of when is behavior, even from a third

01:29:54.990 --> 01:30:00.840
party perspective, seen as reckless um versus like heroic or or yeah.

01:30:01.240 --> 01:30:07.240
Oh I I I read all the Medal of Honor citations for World War One, World War Two, the

01:30:07.240 --> 01:30:11.480
Korean War and the Vietnam War for a study that I did back in the days.

01:30:11.720 --> 01:30:15.480
And I can tell you so if you're interested in this difference, then read them.

01:30:16.200 --> 01:30:17.240
So I can also give you my data.

01:30:17.320 --> 01:30:19.640
I mean, I would love to just or just have a chat about it.

01:30:20.040 --> 01:30:24.430
I I I recall reading one study where they looked at uh Medal of Honor recipients and they

01:30:24.430 --> 01:30:28.750
looked at the number of offspring they had and they found that um uh honor uh medal

01:30:28.750 --> 01:30:32.670
recipients end up ended up siring more offspring, which is kind of an interesting um.

01:30:36.270 --> 01:30:40.270
Um I remember uh I I always thought of bravery.

01:30:40.350 --> 01:30:44.750
At some point, I maybe I'll think about writing this up, but it it seems like the stag hunt

01:30:44.840 --> 01:30:49.160
captures bravery really nicely, and that there are two so in the stag hunt, we can either

01:30:49.160 --> 01:30:54.200
all work together to hunt stag, or um I can uh we can all hunt hair uh

01:30:54.360 --> 01:30:55.320
individually.

01:30:55.800 --> 01:30:59.400
Um and um and so there's a potential for a larger collective benefit.

01:30:59.480 --> 01:31:03.160
We all get more food if we can work together to hunt stag, but we have this temptation to

01:31:03.160 --> 01:31:07.880
just uh uh do the the low risk thing and just get hair by ourselves, and at least we'll

01:31:07.880 --> 01:31:08.440
have some food.

01:31:08.520 --> 01:31:12.040
But if I try to hunt stag and no one else joins me, then I get nothing.

01:31:12.270 --> 01:31:17.070
And so we all we are all better off if we coordinate on the stag equilibria.

01:31:17.390 --> 01:31:22.190
Um, and but the problem is that hair is also an equilibrium uh in that game.

01:31:22.350 --> 01:31:26.030
Um and so uh so it's a it's a it's an interesting coordination game.

01:31:26.110 --> 01:31:32.110
But what I think bravery is, or it might be, is uh the person who's

01:31:32.110 --> 01:31:35.040
the first person to stick their neck out to go for stag, right?

01:31:35.280 --> 01:31:38.560
Because they're providing uh uh basically a group service.

01:31:38.720 --> 01:31:41.760
They're helping us coordinate on the better equilibrium between those two.

01:31:41.840 --> 01:31:45.600
And you could think of you know an analogous situation, you know, if we're in a

01:31:45.600 --> 01:31:48.080
totalitarian regime, it's a similar kind of stag hunt.

01:31:48.160 --> 01:31:52.080
We could all work together to overthrow the regime, or we could privately kowtow to the

01:31:52.080 --> 01:31:55.200
regime and you know, curry favor with them and gain our own private benefits.

01:31:55.360 --> 01:31:59.440
Um and what what a brave person is, is they're a person who takes a stand against the

01:31:59.440 --> 01:32:05.010
regime and tries to shift the equilibrium toward the more uh group beneficial uh one.

01:32:05.330 --> 01:32:10.530
Um and and and you know the reason why we have we hold brave people to such high esteem is

01:32:10.530 --> 01:32:11.970
because they're doing a kind of public good.

01:32:12.130 --> 01:32:15.970
They're doing a service for the group to help us converge on the more group beneficial uh

01:32:15.970 --> 01:32:16.930
equilibrium.

01:32:17.330 --> 01:32:22.130
Anyway, that's just a uh at some point I had that that idea about that it might be cool to

01:32:22.130 --> 01:32:23.410
formalize bravery in those terms.

01:32:23.490 --> 01:32:25.650
Do you buy that or or is there something to that?

01:32:28.210 --> 01:32:33.820
So again sounds sounds at first uh hearing at first very

01:32:33.820 --> 01:32:39.580
plausible but i i've just anecdotally i have some some um

01:32:40.460 --> 01:32:45.180
information for you on this one because i talked to a psychologist who was actually working

01:32:45.180 --> 01:32:50.780
for the dutch military i think at that point neuroscientist slash psychologist he said well

01:32:50.940 --> 01:32:55.740
it's it's not very difficult to select people on fearlessness right so you could also say

01:32:55.900 --> 01:33:01.650
bravery is something like showing that you are not afraid of anything and he said

01:33:02.210 --> 01:33:07.570
essentially we could like recruit only fearless people into the military but we don't do

01:33:07.570 --> 01:33:07.730
this.

01:33:07.970 --> 01:33:13.970
Oh wow because um being afraid is very important in

01:33:13.970 --> 01:33:14.290
war.

01:33:14.450 --> 01:33:14.690
Yeah.

01:33:15.330 --> 01:33:21.090
So that you don't risk your life for the for the for the most um

01:33:21.330 --> 01:33:23.010
like minuscule goal, right?

01:33:23.090 --> 01:33:23.810
Just to show off.

01:33:23.890 --> 01:33:23.970
Yeah.

01:33:24.610 --> 01:33:29.650
But you really want soldiers to be able to calculate risks and benefits and only go for it

01:33:29.650 --> 01:33:34.880
if the calculation is right and like don't overperceive small benefits and all these kinds

01:33:34.880 --> 01:33:35.760
of things.

01:33:36.160 --> 01:33:39.200
Um so Yeah, that's recklessness, right?

01:33:39.280 --> 01:33:43.120
Like that's actually, I mean, that was part of the analysis for Anthony and I was sort of

01:33:43.120 --> 01:33:45.920
that, yeah, or for me, like the that recklessness.

01:33:46.080 --> 01:33:48.160
Yeah, you only have so much life.

01:33:48.320 --> 01:33:49.280
You're not a cat.

01:33:49.680 --> 01:33:50.320
Yeah, it's interesting.

01:33:50.480 --> 01:33:55.450
I have the intuition that that a brave person is not someone who's fearless, but someone

01:33:55.450 --> 01:33:57.690
who is afraid but does it anyway, right?

01:33:57.850 --> 01:33:59.610
Does the brave thing despite their fear.

01:34:01.530 --> 01:34:05.930
Yeah, but I think, David, that's really important because I also think it's sort of there's

01:34:05.930 --> 01:34:11.770
also a a perspective shift in in bravery or in valor, which is that it's actually not

01:34:11.770 --> 01:34:17.530
about the person doing it, but it's actually a third party holding up a

01:34:17.600 --> 01:34:21.360
behavior of somebody did and say, do more of this.

01:34:21.680 --> 01:34:22.000
Right.

01:34:22.240 --> 01:34:27.840
So for from so from the perspective, it's almost like rhetoric or propaganda, sort of like,

01:34:28.000 --> 01:34:32.240
look, let's hold up this behavior somebody did, do more of it.

01:34:32.400 --> 01:34:37.200
So if you're like a military and somebody sort of like did something brave, the person on

01:34:37.200 --> 01:34:39.440
the ground might have just been at the right place at the right time.

01:34:39.600 --> 01:34:41.450
Like I'm not saying like people aren't brave.

01:34:41.530 --> 01:34:43.130
There's incredible bravery in the world.

01:34:43.210 --> 01:34:47.210
But but there's also situations where somebody's just like, Well, I'm in this situation.

01:34:47.450 --> 01:34:48.650
What's the best thing to do?

01:34:48.730 --> 01:34:49.610
And they do it.

01:34:49.770 --> 01:34:54.570
And then the military sees the benefits of that or they put themselves at risk and they're

01:34:54.570 --> 01:34:56.970
aware that other people weren't willing to do that.

01:34:57.050 --> 01:35:01.210
And they just sort of like prop this up as do more of this.

01:35:01.450 --> 01:35:06.620
So, David, it's exactly like this group coronation thing, but it's a more sort of cynical

01:35:06.780 --> 01:35:12.380
take on it, which is we have this entry of like here, this person did something beneficial

01:35:12.380 --> 01:35:14.620
to the group that was self-sacrificing.

01:35:14.860 --> 01:35:18.940
And whether or not they liked doing it, whether or not they want to tell other people to do

01:35:18.940 --> 01:35:20.860
it, we're gonna tell other people to do it.

01:35:21.020 --> 01:35:24.220
And we're gonna tell people it was great and we're gonna reward it.

01:35:24.380 --> 01:35:24.620
Right.

01:35:24.810 --> 01:35:29.770
So it's like the same similar thing of like, if you do this too, we're gonna reward it too.

01:35:29.930 --> 01:35:33.290
So it's so it's like rhetoric for sacrificing for the group.

01:35:34.010 --> 01:35:38.250
I can I can really only recommend systematically reading these Medal of Honor citations

01:35:38.330 --> 01:35:43.930
because you have the full spectrum of what has been awarded a medal for bravery there.

01:35:44.250 --> 01:35:48.250
And there are some cases where you would immediately say, Okay, this is like the the super

01:35:48.330 --> 01:35:53.840
brave, this is the typical scenario that you think of where somebody runs like into

01:35:54.080 --> 01:36:00.000
enemy front lines just to rescue the injured comrade and he and takes him back um safe,

01:36:00.080 --> 01:36:02.400
or maybe even dies doing this.

01:36:02.720 --> 01:36:04.480
But there are also other cases.

01:36:04.640 --> 01:36:10.640
This is from World War II, where I don't know the exact situation anymore, but

01:36:10.640 --> 01:36:15.150
the setup was essentially: I'm an injured American soldier.

01:36:15.310 --> 01:36:16.510
I cannot move anymore.

01:36:16.670 --> 01:36:20.830
My my squad, my group wants to retreat because the Germans are coming.

01:36:20.990 --> 01:36:23.310
I tell them, Well, you leave me behind here.

01:36:23.390 --> 01:36:27.230
I'm gonna take this machine gun and like hold them back as long as I can.

01:36:27.550 --> 01:36:33.390
And then I literally I remember almost literally the citation then read essentially,

01:36:33.630 --> 01:36:38.990
when they returned to recover his body the next morning, they found 100 dead Germans lying

01:36:38.990 --> 01:36:39.870
around his position.

01:36:40.030 --> 01:36:40.190
Right.

01:36:40.350 --> 01:36:41.630
I was like, whoa, okay.

01:36:41.950 --> 01:36:45.380
So this guy really like went down fighting.

01:36:45.540 --> 01:36:45.940
Yeah.

01:36:46.180 --> 01:36:51.780
He got the medal posthumously for this, just like you would suggest, I think, for for other

01:36:51.780 --> 01:36:55.300
people to see here's how you're supposed to die if you die.

01:36:55.620 --> 01:36:56.020
Right?

01:36:56.180 --> 01:37:02.020
So if you have to die, do it this way and don't just kill yourself or um don't just um

01:37:02.020 --> 01:37:02.660
give up.

01:37:02.900 --> 01:37:05.380
I mean, he could have easily just taken his own life, right?

01:37:05.460 --> 01:37:09.790
So he could have been super afraid there's a battalion of Germans coming, and he just

01:37:09.790 --> 01:37:14.510
anticipates that he has to die, so he wants to do it in a humane way.

01:37:14.670 --> 01:37:18.030
No, but he just took the machine and held them off as long as possible.

01:37:18.350 --> 01:37:18.670
Yeah.

01:37:18.910 --> 01:37:22.750
And I just say too, just as you bring that up, and Hannes, you and I kind of laughed about

01:37:22.750 --> 01:37:28.030
this, is that one thing I love about science in people and just groups, it's worth saying

01:37:28.190 --> 01:37:30.350
is like, you know, my son was born in Berlin.

01:37:30.430 --> 01:37:31.150
I'm an American.

01:37:31.310 --> 01:37:34.030
We're Germans and Americans here.

01:37:34.510 --> 01:37:40.360
Um, you know, if it was, if you rewinded the clock um you know decades ago, we would be in

01:37:40.360 --> 01:37:42.600
a very different relationship than we are now.

01:37:42.680 --> 01:37:43.960
We would have been fighting.

01:37:44.120 --> 01:37:48.840
Um, and I think just one thing that's horrible about people is is that we do that.

01:37:48.920 --> 01:37:54.920
But then also what's wonderful about people is that uh we group boundaries change

01:37:55.000 --> 01:37:56.280
or relationships change.

01:37:56.360 --> 01:38:00.920
And I just love the fact that, you know, Hannes, you and I reflected on like, you know, our

01:38:00.920 --> 01:38:06.850
ancestors were on different sides, but um, you know, we have a lovely relationship, and

01:38:06.930 --> 01:38:08.850
you know, my son was born in Berlin.

01:38:09.010 --> 01:38:14.930
Um, and uh I just I just love um uh that that

01:38:14.930 --> 01:38:20.610
group boundaries and relationships can change very, very strongly relatively

01:38:20.610 --> 01:38:22.850
quickly, and that's like a nice lesson.

01:38:23.010 --> 01:38:26.290
Um you know, for example, German and American.

01:38:27.140 --> 01:38:32.420
I I I do tend to see the picture a bit more complex, even and would be thinking, well, even

01:38:32.420 --> 01:38:36.740
if we had lived during those times, we might have been very constructively peer-reviewing

01:38:36.740 --> 01:38:41.860
each other's academic papers while if you had pushed us onto the battlefield, essentially

01:38:42.020 --> 01:38:43.140
would have shot at each other, right?

01:38:43.300 --> 01:38:43.940
Yeah, yeah.

01:38:44.100 --> 01:38:46.100
Um, who uh who was it?

01:38:46.260 --> 01:38:49.140
It wasn't um one of the 10ologists.

01:38:49.220 --> 01:38:55.110
Um, Conrad, no, wasn't Conrad Lorenz, it was maybe it was um wrote one of

01:38:55.110 --> 01:39:00.950
the um one of the excellent things in uh a uh Russian gulag, like with bird

01:39:00.950 --> 01:39:03.910
beaks, um, is incredible um things.

01:39:03.990 --> 01:39:09.190
So yeah, just interesting, uh interesting real life sort of consequences.

01:39:09.350 --> 01:39:13.030
But yeah, no, I that's a that's an interesting point, Hannes.

01:39:13.270 --> 01:39:13.750
That's right.

01:39:13.910 --> 01:39:19.510
That even in that situation, we might have had a sort of a multi-faceted

01:39:19.600 --> 01:39:21.040
relationship with the groups.

01:39:21.200 --> 01:39:21.520
Yeah.

01:39:22.160 --> 01:39:25.920
And for me, like returning a little bit to what we discussed about the stability of

01:39:25.920 --> 01:39:31.520
in-group favoritism, of course this is overstretching this one particular empirical result

01:39:31.680 --> 01:39:32.480
that I have there.

01:39:32.560 --> 01:39:38.480
And but I I I I tend to be inspired by it to think, well, if

01:39:38.770 --> 01:39:43.330
one day the incentives force us to shoot at each other, that doesn't mean that it creates

01:39:43.330 --> 01:39:47.250
such a hatred and hostility between us that the next day we wouldn't be able to discuss

01:39:47.250 --> 01:39:48.770
academic stuff again, right?

01:39:49.090 --> 01:39:49.570
Right.

01:39:51.090 --> 01:39:52.690
Yeah, I think that's a flip side.

01:39:52.770 --> 01:39:56.850
I think people have, especially people who haven't been through conflict, have this idea

01:39:56.850 --> 01:40:02.530
that it's sort of a monster, like it's monsters who do these things.

01:40:02.900 --> 01:40:07.380
And I think when you hear people talk, they're always shocked that somebody who is like

01:40:07.460 --> 01:40:12.660
especially like in a genocide or a civil war, somebody who picked up a gun and shot at

01:40:12.660 --> 01:40:17.540
people, you know, a decade or two decades later is just a normal person and might even be

01:40:17.540 --> 01:40:21.940
interacting with the people that they were trying to kill.

01:40:22.100 --> 01:40:25.620
And I think it's it's sort of an ambivalent thing because on the one hand it's sort of

01:40:25.620 --> 01:40:29.130
like, well, anybody could do this, but it's exactly right, Hannes.

01:40:29.610 --> 01:40:34.010
On the flip side, though, is that it makes it so it's not inevitable, right?

01:40:35.050 --> 01:40:35.690
Yeah.

01:40:38.890 --> 01:40:44.890
So I think in the paper at some point I write it shows us that in-group favoritism

01:40:45.050 --> 01:40:47.770
is malleable for better or for worse.

01:40:48.730 --> 01:40:54.600
And so you can you can make people enemies, but you can also repair that again,

01:40:54.680 --> 01:40:55.320
hopefully.

01:40:55.640 --> 01:40:55.960
Yeah.

01:40:56.120 --> 01:41:02.120
So I guess maybe a lesson is be very careful about the people who are telling you who your

01:41:02.120 --> 01:41:03.000
enemies are.

01:41:03.320 --> 01:41:04.920
Yeah, that that of course.

01:41:05.880 --> 01:41:09.880
This is just the evil leader holding up the coordination sign and saying, let's just gang

01:41:09.880 --> 01:41:11.720
up on those people, don't trust those people.

01:41:11.800 --> 01:41:11.960
Yeah.

01:41:12.250 --> 01:41:12.490
Exactly.

01:41:12.730 --> 01:41:12.890
Yeah.

01:41:12.970 --> 01:41:14.250
I mean, bringing it full circle.

01:41:14.330 --> 01:41:18.170
I mean, that that is itself a kind of exploitation, is the way we defined it, where you are

01:41:18.330 --> 01:41:24.010
the leader is trying to demonize all the outside options to their leadership, um,

01:41:24.170 --> 01:41:27.610
and in so doing is able better able to exploit their their followers.

01:41:27.930 --> 01:41:28.170
Yeah.

01:41:28.570 --> 01:41:28.730
Yeah.

01:41:28.890 --> 01:41:30.490
Slight of hand sometimes, right?

01:41:30.650 --> 01:41:36.010
Because there's also, as we talked about at the beginning too, it's also if you are being

01:41:36.010 --> 01:41:41.500
exploited, uh, it's really not in the exploiter's interest to tell you that.

01:41:41.660 --> 01:41:45.900
And maybe that's even in their interest to sort of like scapegoat another group, right?

01:41:45.980 --> 01:41:50.700
So if I'm exploiting David, boy, it's in my interest to tell David that it's really honest

01:41:50.860 --> 01:41:52.380
who's doing this to you.

01:41:52.620 --> 01:41:57.980
And it comes back to this, it's cheaper to sort of fool somebody than like imprison them,

01:41:58.060 --> 01:41:58.300
right?

01:41:58.380 --> 01:42:00.140
Or like, you know, or fight them.

01:42:00.300 --> 01:42:06.140
Uh so if I can sort of deceive David about why he's being exploited or who's doing

01:42:06.140 --> 01:42:12.110
it, even if David has the time or energy or strength to fight, if I can convince him

01:42:12.110 --> 01:42:17.150
he the about the wrong villain, then I don't incur any of the cost.

01:42:17.230 --> 01:42:20.110
And so that should be especially important design too.

01:42:20.190 --> 01:42:20.430
Yeah.

01:42:20.750 --> 01:42:20.830
Yeah.

01:42:20.910 --> 01:42:21.390
It's interesting.

01:42:21.470 --> 01:42:26.030
I mean, there have been lots of you know false flag operations throughout history where um

01:42:26.030 --> 01:42:31.300
a regime will stage an attack in order to uh galvanize oppon opposition to a group and it

01:42:31.460 --> 01:42:33.300
it it harkens back to exactly this logic.

01:42:33.380 --> 01:42:38.500
It's often even cheaper to stage an elaborate false flag than it is to actually um

01:42:38.740 --> 01:42:41.300
coercively force someone to do your bidding.

01:42:41.380 --> 01:42:44.580
Um even when the deception is very costly it's still often cheaper.

01:42:45.860 --> 01:42:46.340
Yeah.

01:42:46.740 --> 01:42:50.580
Hannes we always ask is there anything that we should have asked you?

01:42:53.540 --> 01:42:57.310
Um I mean, you're the hosts, right?

01:42:57.470 --> 01:43:00.030
So by definition, yeah.

01:43:00.190 --> 01:43:01.790
Yeah, that's the um.

01:43:02.030 --> 01:43:07.390
I mean, can you talk a little bit about how did you come across evolutionary uh stuff?

01:43:08.510 --> 01:43:09.630
Lucky coincidence.

01:43:09.710 --> 01:43:13.790
So I had a very, very, very inspiring professor in philosophy.

01:43:14.350 --> 01:43:17.150
And Gerhard Foulmer is his name.

01:43:17.580 --> 01:43:23.420
And he is well known in the German landscape, philosophy landscape, for

01:43:23.420 --> 01:43:26.460
bringing evolutionary ideas into epistemology.

01:43:26.620 --> 01:43:29.900
So he wrote a book called Evolutionary Epistemology.

01:43:30.220 --> 01:43:35.740
And he was someone who trained me right from the beginning of my studies, actually, to see

01:43:35.900 --> 01:43:40.860
every type of human behavior through evolutionary angles.

01:43:41.970 --> 01:43:47.810
and maybe a bit too much so right um but um this is

01:43:47.890 --> 01:43:53.170
this is where i got in in in contact first with that and i i just was like

01:43:53.810 --> 01:43:59.810
primed by it and never stopped thinking this way with with a little grain of salt because

01:43:59.970 --> 01:44:05.890
the more I'm into economics now so I switched fields around I don't know after my first

01:44:05.890 --> 01:44:10.660
PhD And in

01:44:10.660 --> 01:44:15.460
economics, evolutionary thinking is relatively underdeveloped.

01:44:15.700 --> 01:44:21.540
It was a thing in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and there's some really good work still being

01:44:21.540 --> 01:44:23.540
done, and also from back in the days.

01:44:23.860 --> 01:44:28.740
But economists tend to think more in terms of social norms, for example.

01:44:28.820 --> 01:44:32.500
So rational behavior, of course, incentives and rational behavior, that's the baseline.

01:44:32.740 --> 01:44:38.690
But then also social norms and how people like came up with institutions that

01:44:38.690 --> 01:44:42.610
then govern how they should be doing things, and part of those are social norms.

01:44:43.090 --> 01:44:48.610
And I think this very interesting like domain where you think about I I

01:44:48.930 --> 01:44:54.850
still am complete completely by the brain as a developed, how

01:44:54.850 --> 01:44:58.850
you always say it, like a like an evolved machine that helps you make sense of stuff and

01:44:58.850 --> 01:45:01.170
behave in the world, completely by this.

01:45:01.570 --> 01:45:06.080
But there's there's an additional layer of information that goes into this machine, which

01:45:06.080 --> 01:45:07.200
is norms, of course.

01:45:08.640 --> 01:45:13.920
Um I I think these norms can have and the evolution or the development

01:45:14.160 --> 01:45:20.160
dynamics of institutions over time, they can live a life of them of their own a little

01:45:20.160 --> 01:45:24.480
bit, not completely detached from the requirements of the machine of the brain.

01:45:24.640 --> 01:45:24.800
Yeah.

01:45:25.280 --> 01:45:29.200
Also the incentives that you have when you have people interacting in economies or in

01:45:29.440 --> 01:45:30.480
countries.

01:45:30.880 --> 01:45:36.850
Um but when you take the evolutionary perspective

01:45:36.850 --> 01:45:42.610
and overly do so, then you might like reduce the importance of norms and

01:45:42.610 --> 01:45:47.010
institutions a bit too much, in my view now.

01:45:47.170 --> 01:45:53.090
So I got quite interested in this like getting rid or not getting rid, but

01:45:53.090 --> 01:45:58.530
just ignoring, abstracting away from the underlying evolved functionality of the brain a

01:45:58.530 --> 01:46:04.300
little bit, and then just seeing where you can get in terms of expla explanatory value just

01:46:04.300 --> 01:46:05.980
with norms and institutions.

01:46:06.300 --> 01:46:06.620
Right.

01:46:06.860 --> 01:46:12.140
And um this is also, I mean, this is this is also what I what I like doing now.

01:46:12.860 --> 01:46:16.540
But I haven't forgotten about evolutionary underpinnings of everything.

01:46:16.620 --> 01:46:22.300
So yeah, I think you've recapitulated sort of the cultural evolution and adaptationist sort

01:46:22.300 --> 01:46:25.900
of thing, where it's it's sort of we talk, you know, it's sort of you can have a, as

01:46:25.900 --> 01:46:31.010
Christina Moya would put it, it's sort of not a strong commitment, but it's just sort of

01:46:31.010 --> 01:46:33.250
like a heuristic, right?

01:46:33.490 --> 01:46:37.970
Where it's you can simplify or even just ignore the psychology and just assume sort of

01:46:38.050 --> 01:46:43.090
people are rational, and then just ask the question of given rationality, um, what would uh

01:46:43.250 --> 01:46:47.890
what kinds of norms would stabilize given interest dynamics and agent based dynamics,

01:46:47.970 --> 01:46:48.210
right?

01:46:48.290 --> 01:46:52.370
And it's sort of beyond the level of what's called individual or methodological

01:46:52.370 --> 01:46:55.410
individualism, which is just jargon for just studying the individual person.

01:46:55.570 --> 01:47:00.680
Um, but then at a certain point, rationality, if you unpack it, is a Q-based evolved

01:47:00.680 --> 01:47:00.840
system.

01:47:00.920 --> 01:47:03.720
And so the more you know about one, the more you can know about the other.

01:47:03.960 --> 01:47:05.640
So no, I think that's that's right.

01:47:05.720 --> 01:47:11.640
And I I that's um you've you've recapitulated, I think, a very deep and fundamental

01:47:11.960 --> 01:47:13.240
historical point.

01:47:13.400 --> 01:47:18.840
Um, and you know, to your credit, you're sort of um articulating it even in your own work.

01:47:18.920 --> 01:47:19.560
Yeah.

01:47:20.680 --> 01:47:20.920
Yeah.

01:47:21.110 --> 01:47:24.550
No, uh the way I see it is j is different levels of analysis.

01:47:24.710 --> 01:47:29.110
It's one thing to understand an individual human mind and how it's structured and how it

01:47:29.110 --> 01:47:29.430
works.

01:47:29.590 --> 01:47:33.430
It's quite another thing to put uh a bunch of human minds together and see how they

01:47:33.430 --> 01:47:34.550
interact over time.

01:47:34.710 --> 01:47:39.510
And in that case, you get uh you know a different level of analysis, you get the population

01:47:39.510 --> 01:47:45.030
level of analysis, which can often lead to um wild, chaotic, random things

01:47:45.030 --> 01:47:49.860
emerging, um, through the interaction of of these different minds that are sensitive to

01:47:50.100 --> 01:47:51.140
different variables.

01:47:51.220 --> 01:47:55.540
Um and uh yeah, and at times it can even take on a life of its own, which which we might

01:47:55.540 --> 01:48:00.820
call cultural evolution, we might call um you know institutional history or or or something

01:48:00.820 --> 01:48:01.300
like that.

01:48:01.540 --> 01:48:02.900
But um yeah.

01:48:03.300 --> 01:48:05.380
Yeah, I think it's also gotten better.

01:48:05.540 --> 01:48:09.460
I mean, at least in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, I think our generations have

01:48:09.460 --> 01:48:10.420
gotten better.

01:48:10.660 --> 01:48:14.670
I mean, I think it was there were some necessary battles in the previous generations, but

01:48:14.670 --> 01:48:18.430
at least in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, I think most of us sort of understand

01:48:18.430 --> 01:48:19.870
that they're not in conflict.

01:48:19.950 --> 01:48:22.190
You know, I don't know how it is in economics still.

01:48:22.350 --> 01:48:23.070
Like, I don't know.

01:48:23.150 --> 01:48:27.070
I I mean, I know there was a character of economics that's sort of it's very rational.

01:48:27.230 --> 01:48:30.030
And like, you know, there's like a little person in the head, and you're not allowed to say

01:48:30.030 --> 01:48:30.990
there's evolved design.

01:48:31.070 --> 01:48:36.640
And I know you again, as you said before, you don't want to paint a whole community in one

01:48:36.640 --> 01:48:39.920
broad brush and say all economists think this way.

01:48:40.320 --> 01:48:45.280
And there's certainly like you and other people, evolutionary economists or sophisticated

01:48:45.280 --> 01:48:47.520
economists who think about the psychology.

01:48:47.680 --> 01:48:49.280
But I think it's gotten better.

01:48:49.520 --> 01:48:52.720
But what I don't know, what's your take on us in economics?

01:48:52.960 --> 01:48:57.120
Or is that a false question because it's not a unitary field?

01:48:57.600 --> 01:49:03.270
Yeah, of course it's it would be overgeneralizing to say all

01:49:03.750 --> 01:49:08.310
economists think of people as purely rational or purely irrational or what have you.

01:49:09.270 --> 01:49:15.110
But I think part of the part of the answer to

01:49:15.110 --> 01:49:19.750
why economists focus on different aspects is also because they're interested in different

01:49:19.750 --> 01:49:20.230
questions.

01:49:20.710 --> 01:49:25.750
It's just one of the main economic questions is how do we need to design institutions in

01:49:25.750 --> 01:49:31.000
order them to it like enforce collective behavior that is

01:49:31.000 --> 01:49:36.600
efficient and optimal with respect to certain criteria that we can define ourselves.

01:49:36.680 --> 01:49:36.840
Right.

01:49:37.000 --> 01:49:42.120
So we could also ask the question as an economic research question, how do we need to

01:49:42.120 --> 01:49:47.000
design a redistribution, an institution that redistributions that

01:49:47.000 --> 01:49:52.680
redistributes um wealth and resources in a society for everybody to accept that

01:49:52.680 --> 01:49:55.640
institution and consider it fair to some degree.

01:49:56.210 --> 01:50:00.770
It's a question that you can work on using economic methodology.

01:50:01.810 --> 01:50:07.170
And you need to in order to to to to like

01:50:07.730 --> 01:50:11.890
really work on it, you probably need a good understanding of what fairness is, what people

01:50:11.890 --> 01:50:12.850
perceive as fair.

01:50:12.930 --> 01:50:17.410
And there again you enter the realm of psychology and all the evolutionary um things become

01:50:17.410 --> 01:50:18.610
relevant again.

01:50:19.040 --> 01:50:24.960
But yeah, so I think it's it's not in do or die either, or it's really just

01:50:25.040 --> 01:50:29.840
um if you want to design institutions that achieve a certain type of behavior, you can do

01:50:29.840 --> 01:50:31.680
that without thinking about the underlying thing.

01:50:31.760 --> 01:50:34.640
You can just try it out and see what works.

01:50:34.880 --> 01:50:40.800
Um or you can do it in a more informed uh way and then try to understand what people really

01:50:40.800 --> 01:50:42.480
perceive as fair and so on.

01:50:42.560 --> 01:50:43.840
So yeah.

01:50:44.810 --> 01:50:45.050
Yeah.

01:50:46.250 --> 01:50:46.490
Yeah.

01:50:47.690 --> 01:50:52.650
The reason actually why or why I would say I like economics so much is that we have the

01:50:52.650 --> 01:50:56.330
formal language that allows us to model all these kinds of questions.

01:50:56.970 --> 01:51:01.290
It's not that we're the better psychologists or that we're the better sociologists or so.

01:51:01.370 --> 01:51:06.570
It's just um the methodology is a bit more sharp, I would say.

01:51:06.730 --> 01:51:07.050
Yeah.

01:51:07.320 --> 01:51:10.120
Which can be an advantage or a disadvantage.

01:51:10.200 --> 01:51:15.080
But I could tell you about this because like putting everything into maths also doesn't

01:51:15.080 --> 01:51:16.120
solve all the problems.

01:51:16.280 --> 01:51:19.640
It's just makes communication sharper and clearer.

01:51:21.320 --> 01:51:26.600
But I do like economics a lot because of this, because it's possible at least to do this.

01:51:27.890 --> 01:51:32.930
Yeah, no, I'm I'm a fan of of the discipline as well, and uh and you know wish there were

01:51:33.010 --> 01:51:36.210
more integration between economics and and evolutionary psychology.

01:51:36.370 --> 01:51:42.130
Uh and I I I also like the the precision that um formalizing things allows you to achieve.

01:51:42.210 --> 01:51:47.650
Uh if if if you don't try, at least make the the attempt to formalize your

01:51:47.650 --> 01:51:52.260
intuitions, then um then your communication is just going to be uh way less precise.

01:51:52.340 --> 01:51:56.980
And I think you're gonna achieve fewer and deeper insights uh than if you if you really

01:51:56.980 --> 01:52:00.500
tried to think hard about you know how you're defining things in a way that you could even

01:52:00.660 --> 01:52:04.020
you could translate it into into a number or or a parameter.

01:52:04.260 --> 01:52:09.780
Um also makes it, by the way, easier to see if something has been worked on before.

01:52:10.180 --> 01:52:15.970
So if if your research question and your modeling approach converges to something to

01:52:16.130 --> 01:52:20.130
like a formula or a model that's out there in the literature already, then you directly

01:52:20.130 --> 01:52:22.850
see, ah, okay, I you I'm using different labels.

01:52:22.930 --> 01:52:25.330
So my Tische Stuhle Bierseide, right?

01:52:25.410 --> 01:52:29.250
So I'm using different different labels there, but the question seems to be the same.

01:52:29.330 --> 01:52:34.210
And then you can just more easily draw on the existing knowledge without having to reinvent

01:52:34.210 --> 01:52:34.930
everything.

01:52:35.330 --> 01:52:35.970
Yeah.

01:52:36.320 --> 01:52:41.280
Yeah, I think Deanne Conroey Beam has a talk about evolutionary approaches and

01:52:41.280 --> 01:52:41.920
formalization.

01:52:42.000 --> 01:52:43.600
Maybe we can have a group talk.

01:52:43.840 --> 01:52:49.760
I can I can be on the side of uh formalization, swimalization, but I

01:52:49.760 --> 01:52:54.480
don't I don't actually think that, but I do think there's like I've there there's a it can

01:52:54.480 --> 01:52:55.920
be gamed like anything else, you know.

01:52:56.000 --> 01:52:59.990
And I think there's sort of like you you it's just like any other tool you know you gotta

01:52:59.990 --> 01:53:04.310
use it in the right way for the right purpose and yeah but uh yeah yeah I I obviously I

01:53:04.310 --> 01:53:05.830
don't disagree with this this part.

01:53:05.990 --> 01:53:06.630
Yeah.

01:53:07.350 --> 01:53:13.030
Well uh Hannes, I think we're coming up on the end here, but um you know I I will say that

01:53:13.110 --> 01:53:16.390
uh you are just doing such incredibly important work.

01:53:16.550 --> 01:53:22.550
Um and I just love how thorough and logical it is and I just to your credit, I mean even

01:53:22.550 --> 01:53:27.260
just this conversation, it's gotten me thinking so much about um every time I talk to you,

01:53:27.340 --> 01:53:29.180
I'm just excited about science.

01:53:29.420 --> 01:53:34.540
Um, and I think studying a really important real-world thing with that level of

01:53:34.540 --> 01:53:35.980
formalization, I think is really hard.

01:53:36.060 --> 01:53:41.020
And I think you have a real knack for um for combining those two in a way that I think most

01:53:41.020 --> 01:53:42.780
of us really struggle with.

01:53:42.940 --> 01:53:45.020
So you're thank you for doing that.

01:53:45.100 --> 01:53:49.580
Um, it's a you're you're very um special and talented at doing that.

01:53:50.090 --> 01:53:55.130
Thank you so much for A having me and for B running the podcast because I think it's it's

01:53:55.290 --> 01:54:01.130
really a valuable contribution to the evolutionary psychology

01:54:01.530 --> 01:54:02.250
community.

01:54:02.410 --> 01:54:08.010
And also like I think it fills it fills a gap that I was always like um

01:54:08.410 --> 01:54:11.050
aware of, but never really found a good way to fill.

01:54:11.290 --> 01:54:15.040
So I was always thinking it would be nice to have a format which is called fireplace

01:54:15.040 --> 01:54:18.400
conversations with interesting researcher A or B or C, right?

01:54:18.640 --> 01:54:19.760
This is exactly what you're doing.

01:54:19.840 --> 01:54:21.200
So I I like it a lot.

01:54:21.520 --> 01:54:22.080
Yeah.

01:54:22.400 --> 01:54:24.400
We have to work on the fireplace.

01:54:24.720 --> 01:54:25.040
Yeah.

01:54:25.200 --> 01:54:28.000
Maybe we should get some fake fireplace backgrounds behind us.

01:54:28.560 --> 01:54:30.640
Some some some soundtrack.

01:54:30.880 --> 01:54:35.360
Um uh yeah, but um no, no, no, but Hannes, yeah, no, thank you so much.

01:54:35.440 --> 01:54:36.640
And thank you for being interesting.

01:54:36.720 --> 01:54:37.680
I mean, that's the hardest part.

01:54:37.760 --> 01:54:42.250
The fire is easy, the interesting uh researcher D or H in this case.

01:54:42.410 --> 01:54:42.650
Yeah.

01:54:42.970 --> 01:54:43.530
Yeah.

01:54:43.930 --> 01:54:45.930
Uh but yeah, thank you so much again, Hannes.

01:54:46.010 --> 01:54:51.530
And again, I would just want to plug for um, you know, uh if you're looking at for

01:54:51.850 --> 01:54:57.530
interesting um uh context to work in, I really want to stress the Max Planck

01:54:57.770 --> 01:55:03.770
uh institute and um Hannes, I think if there's any justice in the world, maybe you'll get a

01:55:03.770 --> 01:55:05.370
permanent directorship someday.

01:55:05.680 --> 01:55:10.800
So if if the MPG is listening, please consider Hanus for for one.

01:55:11.920 --> 01:55:12.960
Thank you so much, David.

01:55:13.040 --> 01:55:15.520
I mean and and a and a medal of honor too while we're in it.

01:55:17.440 --> 01:55:18.160
No, no.

01:55:19.200 --> 01:55:21.120
Maybe just to advertise for the society.

01:55:21.200 --> 01:55:26.000
I mean, we currently have a the society currently has a call out for um group leader

01:55:26.000 --> 01:55:26.480
positions.

01:55:26.560 --> 01:55:31.280
So if you think this could be something for you, go to the website, Max Planck Society, and

01:55:31.280 --> 01:55:32.560
check it out, apply.

01:55:33.030 --> 01:55:33.350
Yeah.

01:55:33.590 --> 01:55:38.550
It's a it's an incredible institution in the broad sense of the word, and also

01:55:38.550 --> 01:55:42.470
specifically, and there's lots of different MPIs, lots of different places.

01:55:42.630 --> 01:55:48.470
And uh it's a lovely uh place uh where research and deep thinking

01:55:48.630 --> 01:55:54.630
and novel thinking that pushes boundaries is valued for real, which is lovely so and rare.

01:55:54.790 --> 01:55:56.550
So thank you, Johannes, for being on.

01:55:56.630 --> 01:55:59.350
Thank you for doing the work you're doing, and thanks for your time.

01:55:59.670 --> 01:56:01.190
Thanks for having me.

01:56:06.020 --> 01:56:10.500
David, if you enjoyed this episode, well, first, David, did you enjoy this episode?

01:56:10.980 --> 01:56:11.700
I had a great time.

01:56:11.780 --> 01:56:12.580
I learned a lot.

01:56:12.820 --> 01:56:13.380
I love this.

01:56:13.620 --> 01:56:18.420
I had so I uh you know, this is I I'm happier after being part of this episode.

01:56:18.500 --> 01:56:22.660
So um and if you feel that way, then uh please keep listening.

01:56:22.740 --> 01:56:24.820
Uh please leave a positive review.

01:56:24.980 --> 01:56:30.020
Um, and you know, just yeah, uh honestly just spread the word um so that more and more

01:56:30.020 --> 01:56:31.220
people are listening.

01:56:31.450 --> 01:56:37.370
And um, if you want to also, you know, we have a Patreon and send send us or,

01:56:37.450 --> 01:56:41.050
you know, a a more wealthy friend of yours than you are our way.

01:56:41.370 --> 01:56:41.610
Yeah.

01:56:41.770 --> 01:56:41.930
Yeah.

01:56:42.090 --> 01:56:42.970
Do all of those things.

01:56:43.130 --> 01:56:44.330
Leave us a kind review.

01:56:44.410 --> 01:56:49.050
And uh since this episode was about exploitation, I will say that all those other podcasts

01:56:49.050 --> 01:56:49.850
really suck.

01:56:49.930 --> 01:56:52.250
We're the only one that you should listen to.

01:56:52.490 --> 01:56:53.130
Yeah.

01:56:54.680 --> 01:56:56.920
Uh see you all next week.