WEBVTT

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Welcome.

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Okay, you start.

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Uh well uh welcome.

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I you said welcome, so I figure I should do the same thing.

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Uh I'm David Pensov and uh I'm here with uh Dave Petrozowski.

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And what is this?

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What are we even doing here?

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Uh this is uh a podcast.

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Okay.

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Uh what what what is it called?

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Uh let me look it up.

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Well, actually, I don't know.

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Okay, oh, it's evolutionary psychology.

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Oh, it's evolutionary psychology, the podcast.

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Okay.

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Ah, that's what it is.

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Okay.

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And the tagline is actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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They must be around here somewhere.

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Yep.

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I think one of them might be in this episode.

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Okay.

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Well, enjoy.

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David, good to see you.

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Good to see you too, Dave.

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We have an awesome guest with us today.

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We have uh Michael Monkrief, who is a scholar of international law, who has

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done field research in war-torn Croatia.

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Uh, we talk about so many fascinating topics.

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We talk about terrorism, interstate violence, uh, even drag queens.

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We do.

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Uh uh Yeah.

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And uh Michael has just incredible, fascinating stories across a wide range of human

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experiences, uh, works a lot with international um hu humanitarian

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lawyers uh in dealing with international armed conflict and terrorism.

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Um is a really wide ranging, interesting and important um person, and we just

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loved having him on.

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It was a lot of fun.

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I think you'll have a great time listening to it.

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Enjoy.

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So I found the record button.

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So we are now recording.

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Michael.

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Michael and David.

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Good good to see you.

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Good to see you.

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Uh Michael, today we have Michael uh Moncree.

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Wait, did I say it right?

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Michael Moncrief.

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Yeah, yeah, you got it.

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Okay, great.

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I'm done.

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David, take over.

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Okay.

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Uh Michael, you uh have been working uh

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in the same vicinity as as the UN, is that correct?

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Yeah, yeah.

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Conjunction with with the UN and with international diplomacy?

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Yeah, so so I've been working on a project in Geneva.

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And when you're working on a project in Geneva, it's very hard not to constantly run into

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the international community when it comes to issues like human rights and international

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law.

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So yeah, so so formalistically, no, uh, but we've been doing a lot of uh discussions, a lot

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of round tables, um, a lot of back and forth with uh folks from the UN and also the Red

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Cross.

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So it's kind of it's kind of one big uh incestual community out there with with

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international law, international policy.

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Uh so yeah, so it's it's it's been uh a great opportunity out there.

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I had a chance to oh sorry, go ahead, David.

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I just wanted to ask the question.

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Uh are you the only evolutionary psychologist in the international law,

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international uh relations space?

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As far as I know, there there I'm sure there's some of us lurking out there.

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But no, that as far as I know, yeah, and and you can definitely feel that when, you know,

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we're in meetings uh with folks from the UN and that, that there's there's very little EP

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voice uh coming through in those meetings.

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So, but it's a really exciting opportunity because then you, you know, something kind of

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kind of simplistic ideas from EP can be really useful because you can say, hey, what about

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this?

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And it's like, wow, we never we never thought about that before.

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I'll give you, I can give you one quick example.

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I was um I was on a call that was uh discussing why militant

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groups uh refuse to comply sometimes with international law, with international

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humanitarian law, which is the law of war.

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And so the speaker was talking about religion and how religion might play a role.

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And just a simple question like, well, what what do you think is the fundamental

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motivational differences between these collectives?

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And it kind of, you know, then you hit a silence.

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And so it's interesting too because like on that side, they don't really talk about

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motivational things in international law.

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There's been a lot of people that have said, oh, we'd love to pursue some of those ideas,

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uh, but but no one's really thinking that way yet.

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So yeah, so some some simple things that in the in the kind of the perspective that

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evolutionary psychologists take, take for granted oftentimes are just really useful for

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for thinking through those things.

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So that that's pretty that's pretty mind-boggling to me that a group of people who are

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trying to understand and predict and put a stop to

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terrorism, militant groups, uh violence, um, that they are essentially blind

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to the motivations behind it.

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Yeah.

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I mean, I think it's still very, very prevalent kind of a standard social model, right?

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So um this idea that learning is a plays a big role in in militant groups is is

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definitely apparent from some of like uh the ICRC, the Red Cross, um, their

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kind of strategies towards getting groups to comply with uh international humanitarian law

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are oftentimes based on education.

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So a lot of how can we talk to these groups?

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Um and and there's some there's some hints of ideas about incentives in there.

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Um however, you know, which is kind of more of an institutional type approach.

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But for the most part, it's it's still maybe if we if we talk to them the right way, if we

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communicate this information in the right way, then we can get these armed actors to comply

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with international law.

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So rather than a big misunderstanding, in other words, they just a

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big misunderity when it comes to like

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how best to approach it and and so so I wouldn't say that they're that they're that bad as

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thinking like oh all we have to do is is teach them in a classroom and they'll they'll

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behave better.

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Um however I do think that there's still a bit of a hint of like oh if we can just convince

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them that uh you know civilians if they protect them then uh they'll get benefits for

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instance um at the negotiation table.

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And first of all like you kind of start with this idea that every group wants to negotiate,

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which I think is also implicit in a lot of this stuff, especially with terrorism that I've

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been working on.

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It's kind of this implicit thing, like terrorism is always for bargaining when um there

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might just be you know purely other uh other reasons, such as the destruction or or

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depowering of other groups.

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So yeah, so there's so there's a lot to unpack there, a lot that's not uh been really

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discussed yet in the literature.

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Well, um, uh ideology.

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So you and and we'll eventually get to uh who you are.

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Uh um, but but I'm really happy we're just like launching into this.

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Um so David has this paper on sort of ideologies and political ideologies.

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And um the idea is that um, I mean, David can do a better job than me, but that political

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ideologies are largely confabulation for some underlying sort of alliance thing.

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And this is sort of one example of what one of the things we've talked about in this

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podcast so far, one of the themes has been that people, there's sort of

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strategic reasons underlying systems.

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Um, and for really important things like what you're talking about already that we're sort

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of launching into, you know, you really study groups in conflict, really important life or

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death decisions, and you're talking to people in these rooms.

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I mean, you and I was in a room with you where they drafted part of the Geneva Convention

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talking to international humanitarian law.

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IHL, I got it right.

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There's a lot of answer.

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My God.

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It's IHL and International Human Rights Law, IHRL.

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We're currently under IHRL, but if there was an armed conflict, we'd be under IHL.

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So hey, I I I I've been practicing.

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I feel like I'm spreading the good word of international law.

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So I'm doing my part.

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international law is really interesting.

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Actually, since I went to that thing, I've been like learning a lot about it.

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And it's it's very important um with like lots of life or death consequences for like

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millions of people.

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So it's actually really good that somebody's doing the science.

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So thank you for doing it.

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But anyway, um back to the the point about um confabulation in

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ideology.

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One question for you, Michael, is um one of the things, like I said,

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there's been sort of a theme for this uh podcast, and I think it's just a theme of EpSec in

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general, is there's sort of you have to be humble and respect why people are doing

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things.

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And there's sort of this history, especially in social sciences, of sort of patronizing to

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the people on the ground making decisions.

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And, you know, I think David's argument about political ideology

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and other arguments too.

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And I'm curious if you agree with this, Michael, is and I'm curious like how this plays out

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for you, the particular range of experiences you're having in the people you're talking to.

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But the this idea that sort of like, well, people are sort of dumb or naive.

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We need to tell them what to do, as opposed to like understand and sort of be an

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anthropologist about like, well, why are they doing this thing?

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And then figuring out from there what's the next step, as opposed to going in assuming that

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it's simple or it's learning or it's ideology, as opposed to like there's just this basic

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evolved psychology that has like basic needs and people are roughly reasonable, even when

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they do terrible things.

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Like Yeah, I have I have so much to say on this that it would it it could take days.

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But I think I've seen it in both areas that I've worked in.

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So I've worked in counterterrorism now for um probably almost a decade.

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And then before that, working on ethnic violence.

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And you see it in both of these areas.

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So uh with with terrorism uh and radicalization particularly, um

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you see that there's this constant debate about ideology and what role, and it's coming

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back again.

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So and it's actually a really hot debate in the field right now.

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So earlier models of radicalization were heavily ideological based.

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Like, you know, the focus there was on changing the message if you wanted to prevent

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someone from radicalizing or counteracting those messages and things.

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And a lot of the models of radicalization kind of put ideology at the core of this.

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And then you start to see problems along the way.

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More recently, there's been this idea of what the people have called like salad bar

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ideology, where you're getting these strange mix of like far-right actors kind of

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adopting positions that Islamists would would adopt, kind of neo-Jihadist positions.

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And all of a sudden, the folks in this field were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's happening

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here?

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This doesn't make sense.

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And so then you you have kind of this drifting away of idea from ideology and people

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saying, well, maybe ideology doesn't matter at all.

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And there's also kind of a problem there because then it diminishes it so much to a point

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where it's like, okay, then what why is it always there?

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Why is it always coming back?

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So you have to account for it somehow.

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Um and and that's where the coalition building really, I think, and I align with you,

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David, a lot on this.

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But so now there's another pushback.

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Just last week, there was an article out by a terrorism radicalization scholar in

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the UK writing on behalf of the UK government saying, no, no, we really have to take

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ideology seriously.

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Look, it's a it's a core driver of these behaviors.

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And so my take on this from what I've done in radicalization is that

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indeed it's more fundamental uh motivations that are kick starting this process.

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And and you can even tell this from like basic things in the literature, like people that

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radicalize oftentimes are really ignorant of the things that they're talking about until

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they get to a later stage when they actually start to adopt the ideology of the

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group.

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Um so so the question is what what are those things doing?

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And I think that's a good thing.

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So just to clarify, yeah.

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Sorry, uh so just to interject a bit.

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So what you're saying is that commitment to the group uh precedes

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ideology.

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That people are often committed to the group before they fully understand the doctrine or

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or the or the beliefs justifying the group's existence.

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Yeah, it seems like uh this is kind of generally how it goes.

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The person ha is in some type of usually depressed state, right?

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So that there's something that their their life's not quite going the way that they want it

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to.

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And this is what like early descriptive models of radicalization always showed.

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And then they start looking for what explains that that state that they're in.

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And oftentimes then they're in in kind of our modern day uh ecology, social ecologies, you

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have all this information about ideologies and that.

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And I I like to think of them as like expla explanation packages.

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Explain, you know, so it's like the the the person hits upon these things and says, Oh,

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that that's that's a good explanation for what I'm I'm I'm experiencing, and that aligns

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with me.

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And it helps them identify, so it has a coordinational element, I think, you know, helps

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them, and this is much of your work, helps them identify those actors that are on their

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side and that see the world the same way.

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It helps them justify and explain to others, and I think that that's a really important

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role that's like still under researched is like I have a very strong feeling that hitting

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upon the right justifications greenlights a lot of those harmful um behaviors.

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So um so I think but but the but the fact is yeah these have uh these lower the cost of

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action and increase the benefits of action, but I don't think that they're the the core um

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uh kind of organizational functional thing that's happening during radicalization.

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So they're not they're not the prime they play a role, certainly.

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Yeah, exactly.

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So that's a really good question.

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So I I uh start my talk by usually recently by saying no one really

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knows.

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Um so and there's in fact a whole literature on what is radicalization, and uh it's really

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messy.

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Essentially, it's radicalization has been defined as, and it has an ideology kind of in the

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common definition, is the adoption of an ideology that prepares uh individuals for

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collective action towards violence.

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So it's this uh changing of ideas, of ideologies and beliefs uh in favor of a group

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toward collective action is kind of the the first kind of um idea.

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But the the fact is that there's more written on no one knows what this is.

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So um uh myself and a colleague, we looked at it from a slightly different perspective and

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we tried to see like what's actually happening because what is really clear is that there

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is like a functional change.

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So there's a systematic change in um perception, in uh memory,

00:15:12.440 --> 00:15:15.870
in planning, all these different things that are kind of systematic throughout those

00:15:15.870 --> 00:15:17.070
individuals you look at.

00:15:17.390 --> 00:15:22.270
So there must be some kind of orchestrational organizing process for this.

00:15:22.430 --> 00:15:28.190
And you know, if you look towards the EP literature and John and Lita's work, you see, you

00:15:28.190 --> 00:15:30.430
know, that emotions play a prime role here.

00:15:30.590 --> 00:15:34.270
And so me and my colleague looked at this and we said, what could be playing the prime

00:15:34.270 --> 00:15:34.430
role?

00:15:34.510 --> 00:15:37.550
And we went through many different examples of different types of things, and we finally

00:15:37.550 --> 00:15:42.880
settled on envy as this emotional system that we think if you look at the envy literature

00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:47.760
that's out there, it matches very, very tightly with what with what's happening uh during

00:15:47.760 --> 00:15:52.640
radicalization as far as all these different um changes that the person's going through.

00:15:52.800 --> 00:15:57.600
And it it matches the very essence of of kind of radicalization, which is this depressed

00:15:57.600 --> 00:15:57.840
state.

00:15:57.920 --> 00:16:01.890
You have a depressed status individual uh looking at the world around them and saying,

00:16:02.050 --> 00:16:05.010
okay, how can I, how can I eliminate my competition?

00:16:05.170 --> 00:16:07.410
What can I do to bring them down to my level?

00:16:07.570 --> 00:16:12.130
And then, you know, motivating the actions to do so, whether those are, you know, really

00:16:12.130 --> 00:16:16.770
violent actions or whether that's joining a militant organization to support them in doing

00:16:16.770 --> 00:16:17.810
violent actions.

00:16:18.130 --> 00:16:22.450
But when we kind of conceptualize radicalization, we actually used more of a game theoretic

00:16:22.450 --> 00:16:27.740
approach, which is just looking at how do people think about their relationships with

00:16:27.740 --> 00:16:28.060
others?

00:16:28.140 --> 00:16:29.740
And we see that that's also changing.

00:16:29.820 --> 00:16:33.900
And so there's kind of two things: there's like a risk preference change where it's like we

00:16:33.900 --> 00:16:35.100
have to do this now.

00:16:35.340 --> 00:16:40.220
Uh, everyone should join us because if we don't do this thing now, then we're all gonna

00:16:40.300 --> 00:16:41.420
we're not gonna be here tomorrow.

00:16:41.580 --> 00:16:46.700
So there's an action preference, this risk uh taking on really risky actions that have to

00:16:46.700 --> 00:16:47.580
be done now.

00:16:47.740 --> 00:16:52.610
Um, and there's also um kind of changes in how they see others, So they see their social

00:16:52.610 --> 00:16:53.650
interactions as changing.

00:16:53.810 --> 00:16:57.730
Those that aren't participating are seen as like free riding or skirting.

00:16:58.050 --> 00:17:01.410
Whereas those that are signing up with them, there's a lot of gratitude flowing towards

00:17:01.410 --> 00:17:01.970
those individuals.

00:17:02.050 --> 00:17:06.210
And so what's really interesting here is we think that kind of game theoretically, what

00:17:06.210 --> 00:17:09.410
they're what they're trying to advertise is that they're playing this really weird

00:17:09.410 --> 00:17:13.330
game-theoretic game that's so weird that they actually it's not studied very much because

00:17:13.330 --> 00:17:17.570
it the only optimal outcome is cooperation, which is the harmony game.

00:17:17.820 --> 00:17:22.540
And so what you're seeing here is like ever these agents are acting as if they're playing

00:17:22.540 --> 00:17:25.900
this ultra cooperative game that usually only happens, like, let's say, if your group's

00:17:25.900 --> 00:17:30.300
being attacked in a real warfare, you'd all the you know the best coordinational thing is

00:17:30.300 --> 00:17:31.660
to come together and defend yourself.

00:17:31.820 --> 00:17:35.100
And that's kind of how they're they're talking about all these uh situations.

00:17:35.260 --> 00:17:37.260
So I'll stop there because I can I could go on.

00:17:37.580 --> 00:17:43.510
Yeah, it it sounds like I mean, I'm imagining obviously all this science starts with

00:17:43.910 --> 00:17:46.230
a lot of assumptions or imagined scenarios.

00:17:46.310 --> 00:17:51.670
And what I'm hearing is this this is sort of all of these concepts are built for sort of

00:17:51.670 --> 00:17:57.430
some kid on the internet who sort of you know is living in like somewhere, some

00:17:57.590 --> 00:18:03.110
somewhere uh sort of relatively anonymous,

00:18:03.430 --> 00:18:08.390
goes online and gets radicalized and like does some violent event.

00:18:08.720 --> 00:18:14.160
That's a different scenario than state-level violence or conflict.

00:18:14.240 --> 00:18:19.920
And I know you looked at that too in your uh really interesting like

00:18:20.160 --> 00:18:22.720
history of being a researcher of violence.

00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:28.640
And I know you looked at like ethnic conflict in uh Central Europe.

00:18:28.880 --> 00:18:34.730
Um, I'm curious, uh, maybe and this is a segue sort of into you uh too

00:18:34.810 --> 00:18:39.050
um because i think you know we we I I love how we just like delved right into the content.

00:18:39.290 --> 00:18:44.170
But um so you've been you have experiences studying ethnic violence too.

00:18:44.330 --> 00:18:48.810
Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe either go right into that or like how did

00:18:48.810 --> 00:18:49.850
you arrive there?

00:18:50.010 --> 00:18:54.170
I mean you've told me crazy stories that maybe you know if you feel comfortable repeating

00:18:54.170 --> 00:19:00.000
or not um but how how did you get into like how do how do you find yourself studying

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:04.160
ethnic conflict uh in a way that you know you're really kind of there?

00:19:05.200 --> 00:19:10.000
Yeah, um so so my early my my early passions were really um

00:19:10.960 --> 00:19:16.720
on uh religion, uh evolution of religion, uh evolution of morality that kind of comes

00:19:16.720 --> 00:19:19.440
along with that territory, uh, and conflict.

00:19:19.670 --> 00:19:24.070
And so those are kind of all married together during periods of ethnic conflict.

00:19:24.710 --> 00:19:30.550
And so, yeah, so I was in uh grad school, I I was gravitating towards these

00:19:30.550 --> 00:19:31.190
areas.

00:19:31.430 --> 00:19:36.070
And um as I was moving towards that direction, I was particularly really interested in like

00:19:36.070 --> 00:19:40.390
what happens to people's moral reasoning during periods of rising ethnic conflict.

00:19:40.630 --> 00:19:46.470
Um and so uh the former Yugoslavia provided like a really beautiful um kind of social,

00:19:46.710 --> 00:19:52.460
uh natural social experiment to to go do interviews and to do uh cognitive experiments out

00:19:52.460 --> 00:19:52.620
there.

00:19:52.940 --> 00:19:53.420
When was this?

00:19:53.580 --> 00:19:58.460
Um to ch uh so this would be uh two oh my gosh, a decade ago, which is which is wild.

00:19:58.700 --> 00:20:03.820
Uh so yeah, so uh about twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen I was out in uh along the coast of

00:20:03.820 --> 00:20:08.780
Croatia and also in the uh kind of rural villages that uh are from the coast towards

00:20:08.780 --> 00:20:09.180
Bosnia.

00:20:09.260 --> 00:20:11.340
So Zadar to Benkovetsk.

00:20:11.900 --> 00:20:17.490
And um yeah, and so what we were really interested in is uh and inspired by too, which I

00:20:17.490 --> 00:20:21.730
I've I've been teaching a class and I tell my students, and I think uh David, we talked

00:20:21.730 --> 00:20:26.290
about this when I saw you about how like coordination is such a an incredible thing, but no

00:20:26.290 --> 00:20:27.410
one notices it's there.

00:20:27.490 --> 00:20:33.330
And I mean th I there's been beautiful research here uh by Thomas and Pinker and and

00:20:33.330 --> 00:20:34.130
their crew.

00:20:34.640 --> 00:20:38.880
And I I saw I think Pinker's working on a new book to come out this fall that's also

00:20:38.880 --> 00:20:39.760
dealing with coordination.

00:20:39.840 --> 00:20:41.200
So I'm super excited about that.

00:20:41.680 --> 00:20:44.320
But um but it's one of those things that we just take for granted.

00:20:44.480 --> 00:20:47.920
And it's and I I I was kind of beating my students over the head with it recently.

00:20:48.080 --> 00:20:48.800
Yeah, what were you going to say?

00:20:48.960 --> 00:20:49.120
Yes.

00:20:49.280 --> 00:20:53.520
Uh I I think it might be worthwhile for people who might not be privy to this stuff what

00:20:53.520 --> 00:20:59.440
coordination means, uh, what what common knowledge means, why why this

00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:02.160
is the water we swim, why, why it's underrated.

00:21:02.750 --> 00:21:03.070
Yeah.

00:21:03.310 --> 00:21:05.710
So I think I'll start with why it's underrated.

00:21:05.870 --> 00:21:10.270
It comes so naturally to us that it's just like we're completely blind to the fact that

00:21:10.270 --> 00:21:12.350
this is what's happening around us all the time.

00:21:12.590 --> 00:21:18.190
Um but the simplest kind of uh coordinational game is just trying to uh align

00:21:18.190 --> 00:21:21.550
individuals towards the same goal, and and that's it.

00:21:21.710 --> 00:21:27.390
That I mean, you're trying to uh achieve a state of kind of common knowledge, which is this

00:21:27.390 --> 00:21:33.180
idea that, you know, I know that this other person knows that I'm willing to engage in this

00:21:33.180 --> 00:21:36.940
action, and vice versa, kind of uh odd in infinitum.

00:21:37.180 --> 00:21:42.780
And I'll give you like a great example of this that I love using in my classes, is um the

00:21:42.780 --> 00:21:44.940
fall of the Soviet Union in Poland.

00:21:45.180 --> 00:21:50.060
So there's this great video, it's very short online, where this guy is discussing how uh

00:21:50.310 --> 00:21:54.150
they would go around and put these radio transponders from Radio Free Europe throughout

00:21:54.150 --> 00:21:55.190
people's homes.

00:21:55.990 --> 00:22:00.230
And they wouldn't tell those individuals that they had these transponders or not because

00:22:00.230 --> 00:22:01.990
they wanted them to have deniability.

00:22:02.230 --> 00:22:05.510
So they would kind of hide them in people's homes and everything.

00:22:05.590 --> 00:22:10.550
And so one night, you know, all these people were f were frustrated and fed up with the

00:22:10.550 --> 00:22:10.870
system.

00:22:11.110 --> 00:22:17.100
And one night um they said, hey, if everyone listening would go on to their lights and

00:22:17.100 --> 00:22:18.460
flick them on and off.

00:22:18.620 --> 00:22:22.700
And so what happened is you saw all these lights flicking on and off throughout the city.

00:22:22.780 --> 00:22:26.060
And within a couple days after, you you had these mass protests and everything.

00:22:26.140 --> 00:22:31.420
And what it did was everyone had their kind of private knowledge uh to themselves, but they

00:22:31.420 --> 00:22:37.330
didn't know that everyone else also had the same inclination to let let's get rid of this

00:22:37.330 --> 00:22:37.970
government.

00:22:38.130 --> 00:22:42.850
Um, until you you saw these kind of coordinational signals out there, which helps everyone

00:22:42.850 --> 00:22:46.930
kind of converge and provides that recursive knowledge state of, oh, I know that they know

00:22:47.010 --> 00:22:48.290
that I know, and vice versa.

00:22:48.690 --> 00:22:49.250
That's fascinating.

00:22:49.490 --> 00:22:53.570
So so this was mere this was turning on and off one's lights.

00:22:53.890 --> 00:22:54.050
Yeah.

00:22:54.450 --> 00:22:55.810
This served as a signal.

00:22:56.210 --> 00:22:59.490
This served as a signal that I am unhappy with the regime.

00:22:59.960 --> 00:23:00.760
And I'm not alone.

00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:01.800
And it's that other people.

00:23:02.600 --> 00:23:02.680
Yeah.

00:23:02.840 --> 00:23:07.240
And this is why, and this is I mean, Michael, you might know this history better, but like

00:23:07.320 --> 00:23:12.760
my when I teach like uh even intro-syc, it's sort of like one of the reasons why like

00:23:12.760 --> 00:23:18.520
dictators crack down on protests that are seen even very small is this concern that it it

00:23:18.520 --> 00:23:23.560
can create common knowledge of if everybody's miserable but isolated, nobody knows how many

00:23:23.560 --> 00:23:24.200
of us there are.

00:23:24.360 --> 00:23:28.520
But the second that other people say oh there's other people like even the classic Solomon

00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:34.490
Ash studies, which actually do replicate, as I understand, this thing of, you

00:23:34.490 --> 00:23:38.570
know, so they show people, they bring people into this room, and there's just like three

00:23:38.570 --> 00:23:42.330
lines, and one of them is obviously like shorter than the other ones.

00:23:42.650 --> 00:23:48.650
And the the people who are participating in the study think all of the people sitting next

00:23:48.650 --> 00:23:54.330
to them are all participants, but they're actually in in in cahoots uh with the

00:23:54.330 --> 00:23:55.530
experimenter.

00:23:55.930 --> 00:23:58.250
And they say the wrong line.

00:23:58.520 --> 00:24:01.480
And the question is, what will the actual participant do?

00:24:01.640 --> 00:24:02.760
Will they conform?

00:24:03.320 --> 00:24:07.400
And sort of remarkable levels of conformity one gets.

00:24:07.480 --> 00:24:11.480
I mean, it's not 100%, but it's still like pretty high, you know, it's like 30% or

00:24:11.480 --> 00:24:12.280
something, even more.

00:24:12.440 --> 00:24:18.360
And then depending on on, but you don't get conformity if at least just one

00:24:18.360 --> 00:24:20.470
other person doesn't agree.

00:24:20.630 --> 00:24:24.630
So and it doesn't, you know, it's so it's really just the fact that I'm alone versus

00:24:24.630 --> 00:24:25.590
everybody else.

00:24:25.830 --> 00:24:29.750
And if you have at least one other person, that makes a huge difference.

00:24:29.830 --> 00:24:31.590
It's like the dam is broken.

00:24:32.950 --> 00:24:37.670
Do you do you think that the flicking on and off of the light, do you think the seeming

00:24:37.670 --> 00:24:43.350
disconnect from the content of I'm unhappy with the regime is a feature and not a bug, in

00:24:43.350 --> 00:24:47.350
the sense that if you're trying to coordinate with other people that you're uh opposed to

00:24:47.350 --> 00:24:53.060
the regime, um It is very risky for you to say that out loud in a conspicuous way.

00:24:53.220 --> 00:24:54.180
I hate the regime.

00:24:54.340 --> 00:24:56.900
You might get imprisoned or executed as a dissident.

00:24:57.620 --> 00:25:02.740
So people have to somehow find a way to coordinate and create common knowledge that they're

00:25:02.740 --> 00:25:07.940
on the same team against the regime without those signals getting picked up on by the

00:25:07.940 --> 00:25:08.500
authorities.

00:25:08.660 --> 00:25:13.270
And so the beauty of this signal of turning on and off one's lights uh i is that its

00:25:13.430 --> 00:25:18.550
disconnect from the content is is a design feature and that it makes it difficult for the

00:25:18.550 --> 00:25:20.870
authorities to to catch on to what is being done.

00:25:21.110 --> 00:25:22.710
Would would you agree with that assessment?

00:25:23.270 --> 00:25:24.070
Yeah, absolutely.

00:25:24.230 --> 00:25:30.230
And I mean, um this is this is just a really cool example because it it really gets

00:25:30.230 --> 00:25:32.070
you to to to to conceive of this.

00:25:32.230 --> 00:25:35.350
But there's all sorts of interesting things in this area that are done with cost and

00:25:35.350 --> 00:25:38.460
benefits, how those influence individuals.

00:25:38.620 --> 00:25:43.500
Even something as simple as, I know there's some research like sharing the same locality or

00:25:43.500 --> 00:25:47.900
accent can actually shift your ability to coordinate a bit better.

00:25:47.980 --> 00:25:53.660
And also people that are in relationships very long periods of time have

00:25:53.900 --> 00:25:57.100
much greater ease of coordination with tasks than that.

00:25:57.180 --> 00:26:01.650
So it's a really cool thing that our mind is is picking up here, but I I totally agree with

00:26:01.650 --> 00:26:06.930
you uh that yeah, indeed, it's it's it's because uh there's that ability still for

00:26:06.930 --> 00:26:09.970
plausible deniability uh that comes into this.

00:26:10.050 --> 00:26:15.730
Uh and and so you know, Pinker's work where uh this kind of underlies a lot of things, like

00:26:15.810 --> 00:26:18.770
you know, he always talks about would you like to come up and see my etchings?

00:26:19.170 --> 00:26:21.250
And of course, this kind of indirect speech.

00:26:21.490 --> 00:26:21.730
Yeah.

00:26:22.130 --> 00:26:26.690
So so there's I mean it, but it it's it's so pervasive that my students in my uh a recent

00:26:26.720 --> 00:26:30.560
uh political science class that I taught, I kind of I I didn't realize but I was kind of

00:26:30.560 --> 00:26:34.320
beating them over the head with it every every couple classes because I was like, guys,

00:26:34.400 --> 00:26:36.960
look, this is a coordinational s like issue right here.

00:26:37.200 --> 00:26:39.440
Like, all right, all right, coordination again.

00:26:39.600 --> 00:26:44.000
Um but it but it's really it's really fascinating because like our entire global economy

00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:45.440
works off coordination.

00:26:45.600 --> 00:26:49.360
Um you know that's why when when people talk about cryptocurrencies, people are like, well

00:26:49.440 --> 00:26:50.560
there's no there's no value there.

00:26:50.640 --> 00:26:55.030
What's you know and it's really hard to explain to people that coordinational value is a

00:26:55.030 --> 00:26:55.910
value in itself.

00:26:55.990 --> 00:26:59.670
And so you know, Hardin did a bunch of work here where he showed that you know there's

00:26:59.670 --> 00:27:04.950
exchange value from coordination, that there's uh you know collective power that comes from

00:27:04.950 --> 00:27:05.590
coordination.

00:27:05.670 --> 00:27:10.950
So all these things are like crucially important, uh, particularly in in this the startup

00:27:10.950 --> 00:27:15.830
of uh mass conflict, is it's really a coordinational thing, and then it becomes more of a

00:27:15.830 --> 00:27:17.670
cooperative endeavor as it builds.

00:27:17.910 --> 00:27:19.190
Um but yeah.

00:27:19.640 --> 00:27:23.160
But we got we are distracted from the light flicking to Croatia.

00:27:23.240 --> 00:27:23.800
Yeah.

00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:25.320
I got distracted.

00:27:26.040 --> 00:27:26.520
No, it's great.

00:27:26.680 --> 00:27:27.160
No, no, no.

00:27:27.240 --> 00:27:28.040
It's it's really great.

00:27:28.120 --> 00:27:31.720
I mean, this is also one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast is to just get uh

00:27:31.960 --> 00:27:37.080
people a feel of what it's like, what people just like discussing science is like, and this

00:27:37.080 --> 00:27:39.080
is uh what it is like.

00:27:39.320 --> 00:27:43.240
But I want to get us back so get us back to Croatia and and what you're doing there and

00:27:43.240 --> 00:27:45.170
what you're experiencing, Yeah.

00:27:45.330 --> 00:27:50.610
So so in Croatia what I was really looking for is um you know, so there's there's some uh

00:27:50.690 --> 00:27:56.370
theories of morality uh that um that put coordination as as kind of a centerpiece.

00:27:56.530 --> 00:28:01.250
Um so it's this idea that, you know, I'm I'm willing to give up certain behaviors as so

00:28:01.250 --> 00:28:03.970
long as other people coordinate on those same actions.

00:28:04.290 --> 00:28:07.970
Um and in in doing so we all, you know, kind of benefit.

00:28:08.050 --> 00:28:13.900
We we we might give up and maybe we'll be, you know, uh a bit uh um hypocritical at at

00:28:13.900 --> 00:28:19.660
times, but we we kind of give up um we take on some cost for for kind of a wider

00:28:19.660 --> 00:28:20.140
benefit.

00:28:20.380 --> 00:28:23.580
So this so there's without getting too much into it, there's all these coordinational

00:28:23.580 --> 00:28:24.300
theories of morality.

00:28:24.380 --> 00:28:29.180
And so what we were looking at in in in you know the former Yugoslav is could there be

00:28:29.180 --> 00:28:29.580
differences?

00:28:29.740 --> 00:28:33.980
What you oftentimes see with ethnic violence in particular is that it tends to start in

00:28:33.980 --> 00:28:37.570
rural communities and move to more urban environments.

00:28:37.730 --> 00:28:41.810
And I'm not talking about like massively urban environments, but urban environments of a

00:28:41.810 --> 00:28:44.610
couple hundred thousand, hundred thousand people a lot of times.

00:28:44.690 --> 00:28:50.210
But it really starts in oftentimes the initial kind of sparks start in rural

00:28:50.210 --> 00:28:50.850
communities.

00:28:51.010 --> 00:28:54.690
And so we were thinking, you know, one of the things that you have is a difference between

00:28:54.930 --> 00:28:59.960
rural and urban communities is this heightened sense of pre-existing coordination.

00:29:00.120 --> 00:29:05.000
So people um have frequent encounters with each other, they know each other very, very

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:07.480
well, they spy on each other, they gossip.

00:29:07.880 --> 00:29:10.280
So that there's a lot of expectations there.

00:29:10.360 --> 00:29:14.760
And so we were wondering, uh indeed you see these moral differences too, right?

00:29:14.840 --> 00:29:20.440
Where there's moral m higher moral condemnation um in in kind of rural communities versus

00:29:20.440 --> 00:29:21.320
these urban communities.

00:29:21.480 --> 00:29:24.190
So we were looking at does coordination play a role?

00:29:24.350 --> 00:29:28.830
And we we kind of operationalize that as what do you think your neighbor would do in this

00:29:28.830 --> 00:29:29.390
circumstance?

00:29:29.550 --> 00:29:31.150
How would they think about this?

00:29:31.310 --> 00:29:34.430
And you know, urban environments, people don't know their neighbors as much.

00:29:34.590 --> 00:29:38.910
Or they, you know, they might have a few pools of people, their work colleagues, their

00:29:39.470 --> 00:29:43.710
friends, but it's not these extensive networks that exist, uh, these impicated kind of

00:29:43.710 --> 00:29:45.790
overlapping networks that exist in these rural communities.

00:29:46.120 --> 00:29:46.280
Yeah.

00:29:46.360 --> 00:29:51.240
And so you're going to so you so like you're actually going to these communities and

00:29:51.240 --> 00:29:52.680
talking to people face to face.

00:29:52.840 --> 00:29:53.480
Is that right?

00:29:54.040 --> 00:29:54.360
Yeah.

00:29:54.520 --> 00:29:59.240
And so yeah, so we spent a lot of time uh in the urban and rural communities doing

00:29:59.240 --> 00:29:59.640
interviews.

00:29:59.720 --> 00:30:01.480
We did about 60, I think, interviews.

00:30:01.960 --> 00:30:06.680
Um this is about the history of this conflict that they had just gone through relatively

00:30:06.680 --> 00:30:07.240
recently.

00:30:07.790 --> 00:30:08.590
Yeah, yeah.

00:30:08.750 --> 00:30:13.070
So I mean the the conflict officially ended in nineteen ninety five.

00:30:13.150 --> 00:30:19.150
Um however uh you know, as with any conflict it lingers and the the the after effects

00:30:19.150 --> 00:30:20.110
linger for a very long time.

00:30:20.270 --> 00:30:24.510
And the I mean the memories are still extremely fresh in all those regions if you go down

00:30:24.510 --> 00:30:27.630
there, uh especially to rural communities that were the hardest hit.

00:30:27.870 --> 00:30:32.520
Um, you know, the memories were yesterday of of losing a loved one or of of losing your

00:30:32.520 --> 00:30:37.480
home or et cetera et cetera these terrible things uh and can just just just to like I mean

00:30:37.640 --> 00:30:43.640
just like the the human experience I mean in a rural community is it that there

00:30:43.640 --> 00:30:48.200
were people that they knew or it was like people that were distant but that came that were

00:30:48.200 --> 00:30:53.960
actually doing the harm to them both um so yeah so uh

00:30:54.120 --> 00:31:00.070
there were there were some kind of the early initiation in that region was uh some

00:31:00.310 --> 00:31:04.870
um kind of paramilitants from Serbia that came in and started stirring up trouble.

00:31:05.030 --> 00:31:10.710
But once the war got fully on way, uh underway, it was very much like uh you know, when

00:31:10.710 --> 00:31:14.950
talking with participants, it was it was like, Oh, I you know, I knew these these this

00:31:14.950 --> 00:31:19.750
group of guys since you know I was I was uh I knew them since they were children.

00:31:19.910 --> 00:31:24.780
And now they're you know, and and then um you know, one interview in particular, I remember

00:31:24.780 --> 00:31:30.700
she said, you know, this particular uh group uh would come to her and they

00:31:30.700 --> 00:31:35.020
would show up at her house and demand things, demand that she cook for them.

00:31:35.180 --> 00:31:39.660
Um and and and then they ended up actually um killing her husband in the end.

00:31:40.140 --> 00:31:44.380
And so so yeah, so there was a lot it was a lot of personal relationships with these

00:31:44.380 --> 00:31:44.540
people.

00:31:44.620 --> 00:31:49.670
And that that also is why it's so uh in particular in every ethnic conflict, it's so

00:31:49.670 --> 00:31:53.430
striking like how personal these relationships can be and how quickly they can, like the

00:31:53.430 --> 00:31:54.630
moral sphere shrinks.

00:31:54.790 --> 00:31:57.830
And so what we were doing is looking at what role does coordination play?

00:31:57.990 --> 00:32:02.950
If you have heightened coordination in these places, could you necessarily shift to a new

00:32:02.950 --> 00:32:07.750
sort of set of kind of moral uh rules uh very quickly, which you have more difficulty doing

00:32:07.750 --> 00:32:12.790
in in an urban environment or a less coordinated, uh pre-existing coordinated environment.

00:32:13.030 --> 00:32:18.960
Um And so we think uh part of that parts a a part of plays a partial role, excuse

00:32:18.960 --> 00:32:22.720
me, in this shift towards violence that you see um in those communities.

00:32:22.880 --> 00:32:27.040
So we were looking at that and also some of the the narratives and looking at you know the

00:32:27.120 --> 00:32:32.240
the field of coalitional psychology is quite uh new still, and this is 10 years ago.

00:32:32.400 --> 00:32:37.760
Um and so we were looking at do these narratives uh support some of the initial predictions

00:32:37.840 --> 00:32:40.880
uh from the field of uh you know coalitional psychology with an EP?

00:32:41.230 --> 00:32:42.270
What was that like?

00:32:42.430 --> 00:32:44.670
Because you know, we had an anthropologist.

00:32:44.830 --> 00:32:48.510
Actually, and I we can maybe know about your background, because I don't know if you're it

00:32:48.510 --> 00:32:51.150
was it was in anthropology or psychology or both.

00:32:51.630 --> 00:32:56.670
Yeah, I was in uh psychology early on and I worked doing like cognition and experiments

00:32:56.670 --> 00:33:02.110
with um human robotic interactions and like these very technical experimental uh

00:33:02.110 --> 00:33:02.750
designs.

00:33:02.830 --> 00:33:05.950
And then I went to anthropology, social anthropology later on.

00:33:06.190 --> 00:33:10.220
Yeah, because I mean you're you're what was that like just like either scientifically or

00:33:10.220 --> 00:33:13.660
personally to like go to this place, hear these stories.

00:33:14.300 --> 00:33:16.300
Um and this is not an abstraction.

00:33:16.460 --> 00:33:18.060
And I mean there's two ways to think about it.

00:33:18.220 --> 00:33:23.900
One is um, you know, one thing I like about

00:33:23.900 --> 00:33:29.740
Evpsy is that I feel like it it it sort of rises to meet all the wonderful and horrible

00:33:29.740 --> 00:33:31.820
things humans are capable of, right?

00:33:31.900 --> 00:33:35.590
Like it's not sort of bullshitty to to to genuflect towards David.

00:33:35.750 --> 00:33:41.350
Like it's just sort of like the as good or bad or mundane or out, you know,

00:33:41.510 --> 00:33:46.390
remarkable in both good and bad ways people ever get, you know, I think like there's

00:33:46.470 --> 00:33:49.670
there's sort of evolutionarily informed theories of that.

00:33:49.830 --> 00:33:55.620
So um one one question was sort of like even though that's true, Did it

00:33:55.620 --> 00:33:57.700
feel like, oh wow, like this is real?

00:33:57.860 --> 00:34:03.380
This is like real people had horrible experiences, and like the science isn't adequate to

00:34:03.380 --> 00:34:08.500
meet the richness and horror of these experiences, um, or not?

00:34:08.660 --> 00:34:10.660
Maybe you were like, Oh no, this all fits whatever.

00:34:10.820 --> 00:34:15.300
And then the other question is so that's a scientific question, and then the the personal

00:34:15.300 --> 00:34:20.950
question was sort of like, I don't, I mean, not everybody gets to experience that, And

00:34:21.110 --> 00:34:24.710
I don't know if that changes you or the way you think.

00:34:24.870 --> 00:34:27.990
And it I don't know if you carry that experience forward.

00:34:28.150 --> 00:34:30.470
I would imagine it's got to have an impact on you.

00:34:30.550 --> 00:34:35.350
I'm just curious how that has changed you as a person or scientifically.

00:34:35.750 --> 00:34:36.150
Yeah.

00:34:36.310 --> 00:34:37.990
Um, I think so.

00:34:38.070 --> 00:34:41.190
I'll I'll try to address there's so many things that come to mind.

00:34:41.430 --> 00:34:47.220
So the first one, and it's a very um mundane one, is when you

00:34:47.220 --> 00:34:51.620
take you know, the first time you go to some rural community and you have like you've been

00:34:51.620 --> 00:34:55.540
working on this research for for you know over a year now.

00:34:55.700 --> 00:34:59.940
You've got all these excellent translations of like the best, you know, you try to look for

00:34:59.940 --> 00:35:03.860
the best measures, and one of the ones that I was using was this measure of ethnic

00:35:03.860 --> 00:35:04.740
affiliation.

00:35:05.300 --> 00:35:10.180
And and it was supposed to be like the best one used in the world, uh, you know, thousands

00:35:10.180 --> 00:35:11.860
of articles published on it.

00:35:12.020 --> 00:35:17.090
And um take it to this rural community and and the people are filling it out around a

00:35:17.090 --> 00:35:19.730
kitchen table, and the one just starts laughing.

00:35:20.050 --> 00:35:22.290
And she's like, What the hell does this even mean?

00:35:22.450 --> 00:35:23.250
This is so stupid.

00:35:23.810 --> 00:35:25.410
And then they're all talking about it.

00:35:25.570 --> 00:35:28.210
And they're all like mocking the the scale.

00:35:28.370 --> 00:35:31.010
And when you look at it and you you you're looking at it from their perspective, you're

00:35:31.010 --> 00:35:32.050
like, Yeah, this doesn't match.

00:35:32.130 --> 00:35:33.650
This doesn't, this doesn't work here.

00:35:33.810 --> 00:35:37.570
So I think from a very like though that was the initial thing that was like, Oh, the

00:35:37.570 --> 00:35:42.290
benefit of doing field work is, you know, you you see, does this work, does it not?

00:35:43.010 --> 00:35:48.620
And then as far as the what was really interesting is when we first arrived, we we were

00:35:48.620 --> 00:35:51.900
starting to kind of organize interviews, and it took it took a long time.

00:35:52.060 --> 00:35:53.340
I was there almost a year.

00:35:53.580 --> 00:35:59.340
It took a long time to get from our early kind of gatekeepers in these

00:35:59.340 --> 00:36:03.820
communities to actually speaking with people that had been really, really affected by the

00:36:03.820 --> 00:36:04.060
war.

00:36:04.540 --> 00:36:08.620
And that only came towards probably the end of the of the time that I was there.

00:36:08.850 --> 00:36:14.050
And that's when it was like all of the most horrific uh stories and

00:36:14.210 --> 00:36:17.090
experiences were kind of uh put together at once.

00:36:17.250 --> 00:36:20.850
Um, and I remember uh in one particular interview it was very, very difficult.

00:36:20.930 --> 00:36:26.770
It was a lady that um, you know, had just experienced every hardship of the war, lost

00:36:26.770 --> 00:36:32.370
her husband, uh, lost her um her brother and her nephew in front of her, had

00:36:32.530 --> 00:36:36.930
watched that happen, went went to uh testify for for war crimes.

00:36:38.460 --> 00:36:42.620
And just listening to her experience and also having a colleague of mine just break down

00:36:42.620 --> 00:36:42.940
crying.

00:36:47.580 --> 00:36:51.420
And that yeah, that of obviously like will always last with me.

00:36:51.500 --> 00:36:55.980
And it and it it shows you the, you know, you don't always see the the importance of social

00:36:55.980 --> 00:36:58.620
science research because it's so disconnected.

00:36:59.100 --> 00:37:03.420
And you you really hope to make some type of impact, even if it's really, really tiny.

00:37:03.650 --> 00:37:06.050
So th those those experiences were definitely.

00:37:06.210 --> 00:37:10.610
And it was during that time too where what was really kind of bizarre to me is toward the

00:37:10.610 --> 00:37:16.450
end of the time I was out there was when um here in Orlando, where I'm at right now, was

00:37:16.450 --> 00:37:22.450
the uh the Pulse nightclub uh kind of massacre uh that killed almost 50 individuals.

00:37:22.690 --> 00:37:27.810
And uh a lot of my friends worked there as as bartenders and other and so I came back to

00:37:27.810 --> 00:37:33.620
Orlando after um for a short visit, and I was meeting people that had been there that night

00:37:33.620 --> 00:37:37.060
and listening to their stories, and I was like, oh my God, this sounds just like what I've

00:37:37.060 --> 00:37:38.740
been listening to in Croatia.

00:37:39.060 --> 00:37:44.180
Um and so there's a there's also a lot of um similarities in that regard, you know, and

00:37:44.180 --> 00:37:49.220
that that really hit home because I was like, wow, it really uh even reinforced, gave me

00:37:49.220 --> 00:37:52.420
even a different perspective on the people I was talking to out there and really living

00:37:52.420 --> 00:37:56.020
through uh in a much fresher way, you know, what what they had been through.

00:37:56.260 --> 00:38:01.810
So yeah, so I mean uh that kind of work is is really and it also just teaches you so much

00:38:01.970 --> 00:38:06.690
being in a place, you get a you get this you know, you you understand why the great uh

00:38:06.690 --> 00:38:11.250
ethnographers uh were so interesting for the data that they produce, because it's like you

00:38:11.330 --> 00:38:13.490
you get such an experience of being in a place.

00:38:13.730 --> 00:38:18.050
You get to understand the the quirks and the nuances and how people socially organize and

00:38:18.290 --> 00:38:22.530
that that you just can't get through, you know, reading or you know, or trying to

00:38:22.530 --> 00:38:24.210
hypothesize your way through that.

00:38:24.370 --> 00:38:30.300
So um one of the themes of this has been also like listening to people who haven't

00:38:30.300 --> 00:38:31.260
been heard.

00:38:31.500 --> 00:38:37.260
Um and I feel like that's sort of m uh a a a common thing through your uh

00:38:37.420 --> 00:38:38.460
through some of your work.

00:38:38.540 --> 00:38:43.900
I remember you you also told me there's like you've done research on like stonewall or you

00:38:43.980 --> 00:38:47.990
is it have you done research on stonewall or was this just things you looked at?

00:38:48.230 --> 00:38:54.150
No, no, so uh so I did I did a bunch uh I did uh one article that uh has done really

00:38:54.150 --> 00:39:00.150
well and it was on the uh uh the kind of the natural emergence of the drag queen phenomenon

00:39:00.310 --> 00:39:02.070
and and what led to that.

00:39:02.230 --> 00:39:08.150
And it was just like the right type of social constraints in the gay community um that

00:39:08.150 --> 00:39:13.500
we think kind of led to the opening up of this pathway towards status building, And that

00:39:13.500 --> 00:39:19.260
was one way of adopting this really aggressive outward persona that was like walking

00:39:19.260 --> 00:39:19.900
through the streets.

00:39:20.060 --> 00:39:25.980
We're talking like 1930s, 1940s, 1950s in women's clothing, and and

00:39:25.980 --> 00:39:30.940
uh you know, standing up and and being so formidable as a take-on that challenge.

00:39:31.020 --> 00:39:36.630
And a lot of these individuals uh in its early history were really um kind of down and out

00:39:36.630 --> 00:39:38.070
characters in the gay community.

00:39:38.310 --> 00:39:42.550
They either were living on the streets, had very little money, they were kicked out of

00:39:42.550 --> 00:39:47.510
their families' homes, etc., detached from their social connections, you know, had very

00:39:47.510 --> 00:39:51.190
little money, little uh little kind of attractiveness.

00:39:51.510 --> 00:39:57.030
So that was one way of adopting this persona and becoming this

00:39:57.080 --> 00:40:01.480
fighter for for these communities was one way to build status if you were good enough.

00:40:01.560 --> 00:40:06.040
Uh and that's we think is kind of what the the initiation, which again ties back into

00:40:06.200 --> 00:40:08.040
Stonewall and everything there.

00:40:08.280 --> 00:40:11.880
Um yeah, so so it was a really fascinating uh history in that regard.

00:40:12.280 --> 00:40:16.120
So the idea is that, and I think this is I'm just parroting what you've told me in the

00:40:16.120 --> 00:40:21.110
past, but the idea is that it was such a high cost thing to do.

00:40:21.510 --> 00:40:27.510
Um, but it was it was sort of um you are willing to uh these these people

00:40:27.510 --> 00:40:30.470
who were down and out did this thing.

00:40:30.710 --> 00:40:36.630
It was sort of a um uh th they they sort of uh v basically proverbial

00:40:36.710 --> 00:40:40.150
put a target on their back for the group in some sense.

00:40:40.230 --> 00:40:41.280
Is that correct?

00:40:41.680 --> 00:40:41.920
Yeah.

00:40:42.080 --> 00:40:44.640
And it's uh it's funny actually how it came about.

00:40:44.800 --> 00:40:49.840
Um I was uh my colleague, uh a good friend of mine, uh Matthew Martinez, he was working on

00:40:49.840 --> 00:40:55.760
his dissertation work, and uh he was looking at uh these uh self harm

00:40:55.760 --> 00:40:57.600
practices around the world.

00:40:57.680 --> 00:41:01.760
Um, particularly, he was looking in Mauritius at the time, and but but really kind of

00:41:01.760 --> 00:41:02.320
globally.

00:41:02.560 --> 00:41:07.510
You see in particular social environments that there's these practices like Typusum, which

00:41:07.510 --> 00:41:11.750
is in Mauritius, where people will put hooks in their backs and like be pulled down the

00:41:11.750 --> 00:41:12.070
street.

00:41:12.150 --> 00:41:16.310
In fact, so bad it got it it it kind of ratcheted up over time that the government had to

00:41:16.310 --> 00:41:19.590
put uh kibosh on some of the more extreme practices.

00:41:19.830 --> 00:41:25.430
But they uh he was working on um a model of that, which is a costly signaling model, which

00:41:25.430 --> 00:41:31.270
suggests that hey, these are low status individuals by doing these really um uh kind of

00:41:31.270 --> 00:41:37.100
grotesque uh but formidable enhancing displays to others that they can gain some type of

00:41:37.100 --> 00:41:39.100
uh status and credit in the community.

00:41:39.340 --> 00:41:43.100
And as we were we were in a meeting about it, and I was like, wow, this really reminds me

00:41:43.100 --> 00:41:44.140
of drag queens.

00:41:44.460 --> 00:41:48.620
And it was like from that moment where we were like, oh, wait a second, you know, what

00:41:48.700 --> 00:41:50.860
let's see what we can go and do with this.

00:41:51.100 --> 00:41:55.820
And indeed, when you start to map out, it was right when the pressure on the gay community

00:41:55.820 --> 00:41:59.260
was building, um, is when you see the emergence of these individuals.

00:41:59.340 --> 00:42:03.810
And they always are kind of coming from this this lower status position.

00:42:03.970 --> 00:42:06.130
And then uh only a few really make it.

00:42:06.210 --> 00:42:09.330
Even today within that community, it's hyper competitive.

00:42:09.570 --> 00:42:13.090
Um, and they which I I I'll say one one side note.

00:42:13.250 --> 00:42:16.850
I wouldn't say that the dynamics of today are the same thing that our paper describes.

00:42:16.930 --> 00:42:21.170
I think now it's become much more of a theatrics and much more of a a competitive element

00:42:21.170 --> 00:42:25.090
that's a taken on, which is kind of cool because it's cultural evolution at work right

00:42:25.090 --> 00:42:25.410
there.

00:42:26.180 --> 00:42:31.780
But uh but yeah, but when it really started to emerge, you know, 1950s, 1960s, one of the

00:42:31.780 --> 00:42:36.900
earliest ethnographic accounts was from a University of Michigan um grad student, I think

00:42:36.900 --> 00:42:40.580
she was at the time, where she went around with uh drag queen through the streets of

00:42:40.580 --> 00:42:41.140
Detroit.

00:42:41.220 --> 00:42:44.820
And she wouldn't, she said in one part of the book that she didn't want to walk near her

00:42:44.900 --> 00:42:48.180
because she thought she was going to get you know the crap beat out of her.

00:42:48.420 --> 00:42:54.310
So you can see like the intense uh pressure and violence that was put towards these

00:42:54.310 --> 00:42:54.710
individuals.

00:42:54.790 --> 00:43:00.550
And by doing so, and also it's still part of the persona today, which is to be fierce, to

00:43:00.550 --> 00:43:02.150
be uh aggressive in that.

00:43:02.390 --> 00:43:07.270
But it's really interesting how that that pathway kind of emerged from these just exact

00:43:07.270 --> 00:43:08.550
social uh constraints.

00:43:08.710 --> 00:43:11.350
And also note that these individuals just couldn't leave.

00:43:11.430 --> 00:43:15.660
Like, you know, the community, once you join it during those periods like you had no other

00:43:15.660 --> 00:43:19.820
social status um opportunities outside that because if you're you know if you're gay you

00:43:19.820 --> 00:43:23.660
can't obviously unless you're gonna go back in the closet, you know, succeed in other

00:43:23.660 --> 00:43:24.060
places.

00:43:24.220 --> 00:43:28.540
Uh so yeah, so it's the just the r the right kind of constraints that can emerge and and

00:43:28.620 --> 00:43:31.100
you know make these pathways towards status emerge.

00:43:31.420 --> 00:43:36.570
It's a really lovely example of looking at phenomena in the world from this

00:43:36.570 --> 00:43:37.530
perspective.

00:43:37.770 --> 00:43:43.610
And like to your credit, Michael, figuring out sort of how can I deduce

00:43:43.690 --> 00:43:49.610
sort of what's going on in a way that is uh explanatory, call you know, and and just

00:43:49.610 --> 00:43:54.570
lovely in the sense of, Oh, yeah, no, I see the deep elements of adaptations, cognitive

00:43:54.570 --> 00:43:59.370
mechanisms, human nature, however we want to talk about it, in this phenomenon to like as a

00:43:59.370 --> 00:44:01.050
one way to understand it.

00:44:01.720 --> 00:44:02.280
Yeah, yeah.

00:44:02.360 --> 00:44:05.800
And I think the the one thing that you know is interesting is you see the proximate

00:44:05.800 --> 00:44:06.840
psychology working.

00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:08.840
Like there's no fitness payoff here.

00:44:09.000 --> 00:44:09.080
Right.

00:44:09.400 --> 00:44:12.760
Um and so um so that's also really interesting.

00:44:12.840 --> 00:44:15.800
Because a lot of the other things that we tend to think of as status enhancing, we tend to

00:44:15.800 --> 00:44:18.520
think of, oh, you can measure the reproductive payoff at the end.

00:44:18.680 --> 00:44:22.440
Um but here, you know, it's the system is the proximate psychology is working.

00:44:22.520 --> 00:44:25.320
Uh and and so that's detached from that ultimate outcome.

00:44:25.720 --> 00:44:27.400
Yeah, super cool.

00:44:28.450 --> 00:44:33.890
So I wanna uh ask you a question that we've asked all uh I think all of our guests.

00:44:34.130 --> 00:44:39.890
Um so uh you're in this field of coalitional psychology, ethnic

00:44:39.890 --> 00:44:42.290
conflict, terrorism, wh whatever you want to call it.

00:44:42.530 --> 00:44:46.530
Um so we got a bit of your origin story there.

00:44:46.850 --> 00:44:52.540
Uh but we didn't get your origin story for why you think that evolutionary

00:44:52.540 --> 00:44:54.700
reasoning is useful here as a lens.

00:44:54.940 --> 00:45:00.940
So what f brought you into the realm of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary thinking,

00:45:01.100 --> 00:45:06.860
out of all the perspectives to take on these incredibly important issues, why choose the

00:45:06.860 --> 00:45:08.460
evolutionary perspective?

00:45:09.550 --> 00:45:15.150
Um okay, so so diving back into my former life, uh so

00:45:15.470 --> 00:45:21.470
I before I got into psychology or anything, I um from from very young age, I was

00:45:21.470 --> 00:45:25.550
about twelve, thirteen at the time, I started working like this is the weird part about

00:45:25.550 --> 00:45:26.750
growing up in Florida, right?

00:45:26.910 --> 00:45:28.990
You know, you see like the Tiger King and everything.

00:45:29.150 --> 00:45:31.870
That was kind of like part of my life when I was younger.

00:45:32.110 --> 00:45:37.740
So I worked uh at a lot of zoos and aquariums and uh with wildlife uh

00:45:37.740 --> 00:45:42.300
organizations when I was young, volunteering at first, and then when I was 14 I got my

00:45:42.300 --> 00:45:44.220
first positions as an employee.

00:45:44.380 --> 00:45:50.380
Um and kind of I had this whole career before um going into the social sciences of

00:45:50.380 --> 00:45:55.980
working with uh sh oh my gosh, uh sharks, dolphins, alligators, snakes,

00:45:56.220 --> 00:45:57.500
birds of prey.

00:45:57.660 --> 00:46:02.550
Um and so it was really from those kind of biological

00:46:03.190 --> 00:46:07.670
origins that I was really interested in, like, oh, well, you know, what drives animal

00:46:07.670 --> 00:46:08.550
behavior?

00:46:09.030 --> 00:46:14.950
And um and over that kind of naturally over time, um, I think

00:46:15.030 --> 00:46:17.750
you know, when you especially when you're going through high school and then uh you know

00:46:17.910 --> 00:46:21.880
early college years, you start to think more uh about people around you.

00:46:21.960 --> 00:46:24.120
And you're like, okay, why do these people behave that way?

00:46:24.280 --> 00:46:28.280
So I think like the earliest influences on my thinking in this way were like Eo Wilson's

00:46:28.360 --> 00:46:31.960
like early, early works and everything, and then of course Lita and John's.

00:46:32.200 --> 00:46:37.640
Um and and the one thing that I was when I got into more in psychology, the initial thing

00:46:37.640 --> 00:46:39.640
was like, okay, but why?

00:46:39.960 --> 00:46:44.840
Like I was so frustrated by this why question, which is like, you know, I I remember taking

00:46:44.840 --> 00:46:50.250
a personality theory course and kind of memorizing the 30-sum

00:46:50.570 --> 00:46:51.690
theories of personality.

00:46:51.770 --> 00:46:56.890
And I was always like, but why, like, why did why, even if any of these are correct, which

00:46:56.970 --> 00:46:59.530
you know, I have a lot of skepticism.

00:47:00.010 --> 00:47:01.370
Um, why?

00:47:01.530 --> 00:47:04.090
Like there was always that why, that nagging why question.

00:47:04.170 --> 00:47:09.610
And I think that's when, like, um, yeah, I mean, all you know, all the greats, bus, um,

00:47:16.440 --> 00:47:20.520
And it finally provided uh really satisfying answers to that why question.

00:47:20.680 --> 00:47:25.000
And now I'm like, now now that I've been working in this framework for so many you know,

00:47:25.160 --> 00:47:31.080
many years, I I can't imagine not having that that foundational

00:47:31.240 --> 00:47:36.890
piece because it's always like where I start any question is um even

00:47:36.970 --> 00:47:40.170
something that's that's very like I'll give you a quick example.

00:47:40.250 --> 00:47:46.250
I've been working on um this issue of in um that they're worried

00:47:46.250 --> 00:47:51.130
about in human rights law, which is this shifting towards uh more responsive policing

00:47:51.130 --> 00:47:53.770
activities and counterterrorism, towards more preemptive.

00:47:54.090 --> 00:47:57.930
Uh what they call like the pre crime space, and the in the they they uh have these

00:47:57.930 --> 00:48:02.410
administrative measures that are very common now and throughout Europe, the UK, France, um,

00:48:02.650 --> 00:48:07.140
even Switzerland's adopted them now, which is essentially like pre-crime measures, like if

00:48:07.140 --> 00:48:12.980
they suspect you of potentially becoming a terrorist or affiliating with anyone

00:48:12.980 --> 00:48:18.420
that's suspicious, they can uh the executive can put these

00:48:18.420 --> 00:48:19.940
restrictions on you.

00:48:20.100 --> 00:48:24.900
And because oftentimes the human rights issue comes up here, is because they're executive

00:48:24.970 --> 00:48:29.930
uh orders and not judicial ones, there's no recourse for getting these taken away.

00:48:30.010 --> 00:48:32.490
That's that's very satisfying in most uh circumstances.

00:48:32.650 --> 00:48:35.690
Anyways, so so you know, I was given this kind of topic.

00:48:35.850 --> 00:48:38.330
We want to see why is this shifting this way?

00:48:38.490 --> 00:48:42.810
Why is there more and so immediately I kind of you know go back to the evolutionary

00:48:42.810 --> 00:48:45.610
perspective and I say, okay, well, what kind of threat does this present?

00:48:45.820 --> 00:48:48.460
And I think terrorism in particular presents a very interesting thing.

00:48:48.540 --> 00:48:53.500
Like I have a paper that talks about this, is that I think it's uh what the mind is keen to

00:48:53.500 --> 00:48:58.220
detect here, and it's using cues to detect it, is something that is really an all-out, all

00:48:58.300 --> 00:49:00.220
or nothing coalitional threat.

00:49:00.380 --> 00:49:05.100
And that's the kind of thing that these actors hit upon those cues, even though they're

00:49:05.100 --> 00:49:07.740
sometimes single or just a small group of actors.

00:49:07.980 --> 00:49:11.980
If you can do these things that signal to others that you're going to come for the whole

00:49:11.980 --> 00:49:14.990
collective, Like you're going to indiscriminately target them.

00:49:15.310 --> 00:49:19.550
You're going to do so with stealth and all these other things and not, you know, announce

00:49:19.550 --> 00:49:20.910
when you're when you're going to do these things.

00:49:20.990 --> 00:49:25.710
If you don't target the bargaining aggression wing, like the military, but you target the

00:49:25.710 --> 00:49:26.110
civilians.

00:49:26.590 --> 00:49:30.270
All these cues that traditionally throughout human history would have indicated that there

00:49:30.270 --> 00:49:32.350
was another group coming to eliminate your group.

00:49:32.510 --> 00:49:35.230
So you better be on high alert and you better.

00:49:35.390 --> 00:49:37.870
And what you see is all these downstream responses, right?

00:49:37.950 --> 00:49:40.350
These precautionary responses that we would expect.

00:49:40.620 --> 00:49:43.340
And so that was kind of the perspective I started taking there.

00:49:43.500 --> 00:49:46.300
And I have some experimental data that I haven't published yet.

00:49:46.540 --> 00:49:48.140
I'm a bit bad backlogged.

00:49:48.300 --> 00:49:53.260
But essentially, what I was able to show is indeed when you present these cues to people

00:49:53.260 --> 00:49:58.780
that show that this is an uh you kind of manipulate little features of these cues, you can

00:49:58.780 --> 00:50:03.820
uh get people much more willing to take precautionary responses and approve of

00:50:03.820 --> 00:50:09.580
administrative actions rather than wanting to wait and investigate and do these things,

00:50:09.740 --> 00:50:13.190
which has ultimately, if you want to tie it back to policy, has these really important

00:50:13.190 --> 00:50:15.910
ramifications for human rights and things like that.

00:50:16.070 --> 00:50:21.350
So sometimes highlighting those things can help people think through the problem uh

00:50:21.590 --> 00:50:23.510
easier and how to combat it.

00:50:23.750 --> 00:50:27.590
And also just knowing the foundational psychology there, what's causing that to be to be

00:50:27.590 --> 00:50:28.390
the case.

00:50:28.550 --> 00:50:33.480
So without evolutionary psychology, I I yeah definitely couldn't I couldn't you know think

00:50:33.480 --> 00:50:37.800
in that regard and I think that's what I think John Tube said it uh you know something

00:50:37.800 --> 00:50:42.280
about having superpowers uh with EP and I really think that I think you know you can be in

00:50:42.280 --> 00:50:46.760
a room with a bunch of people but if they don't um they don't have at least a flavor of

00:50:46.760 --> 00:50:52.760
that perspective um there's then there's easy low-hanging fruit to to go after to say

00:50:52.840 --> 00:50:55.560
hey look guys there there's a bigger picture here.

00:50:57.110 --> 00:51:03.110
Um, I wanna uh chime in on that bit about terrorism, because that

00:51:03.110 --> 00:51:04.870
really piques my interest.

00:51:04.950 --> 00:51:06.870
I'm sure it piques a lot of people's interests.

00:51:07.110 --> 00:51:12.470
Uh terrorism is extremely uh evocative to the human mind.

00:51:12.550 --> 00:51:17.430
Uh we can't stop paying attention to it as a society, despite the fact that objectively

00:51:17.510 --> 00:51:21.750
terrorism does not pose a very significant threat to us as individuals.

00:51:21.910 --> 00:51:27.340
The number of people who die from car accidents or heart attacks or you know any other

00:51:27.340 --> 00:51:30.700
cause of deaths you go through, terrorism is going to be at the bottom of the list.

00:51:30.940 --> 00:51:36.780
And yet the outsized emotional response it has on us is enormously

00:51:36.780 --> 00:51:37.580
influential.

00:51:37.980 --> 00:51:43.260
I mean it it was uh the main cause are arguably of uh the Iraq war.

00:51:43.580 --> 00:51:47.980
Um this was you know extremely expensive both in time and resources.

00:51:48.140 --> 00:51:53.910
Um one of the biggest uh foreign policy blunders uh in a in a long time,

00:51:53.990 --> 00:51:59.990
uh arguably, um, all caused by uh a terrorist attack which claimed the lives

00:51:59.990 --> 00:52:03.590
of you know far fewer people than than most other causes of death.

00:52:03.910 --> 00:52:09.910
So is is your argument that our outsized response to terrorism

00:52:09.910 --> 00:52:12.310
is a kind of evolutionary mismatch?

00:52:12.550 --> 00:52:18.380
That in ancestral environments, uh seeing these kinds of attacks, this kinds of dam this

00:52:18.380 --> 00:52:23.340
kind of damage, uh would have been a reliable cue of a coalitional threat that we needed to

00:52:23.340 --> 00:52:29.260
take action against uh as soon as possible and as uh uh uh swiftly and and aggressively as

00:52:29.260 --> 00:52:29.820
possible.

00:52:29.980 --> 00:52:35.900
Um but in the modern environment, when we live in these mass societies, these cues are

00:52:35.900 --> 00:52:37.260
no longer accurate.

00:52:37.500 --> 00:52:43.310
That uh that um we're responding uh uh to these attacks uh with our Stone

00:52:43.310 --> 00:52:47.390
Age minds um when we sh when we should be responding with our modern minds.

00:52:47.550 --> 00:52:49.790
Is that the argument or or is it something else?

00:52:50.430 --> 00:52:52.750
No, no, I think uh uh very much so.

00:52:52.910 --> 00:52:58.110
Um I think that there's uh I'm always a bit hesitant to to to I don't know why.

00:52:58.190 --> 00:53:02.670
There there's something that I think it's because it's used so often, that mismatch idea,

00:53:02.750 --> 00:53:06.040
that I tend to be a little precautious when I like go as far as that.

00:53:06.120 --> 00:53:07.320
But yeah, in a sense.

00:53:07.800 --> 00:53:09.640
But I think there's a lot more to be said here.

00:53:09.800 --> 00:53:14.200
So it's funny that that paper of mine is like the least read.

00:53:14.360 --> 00:53:18.920
And I think I I I was I think I told you both at some point that I was joking that I think

00:53:18.920 --> 00:53:24.920
I wrote it for myself because uh the the the folks in the terrorism field um they see

00:53:24.920 --> 00:53:29.400
the the evolutionary psych side and I think they get a little uh turned off by it.

00:53:29.630 --> 00:53:33.950
And the folks in Evolutionary Psych don't know the full range of the argument that's

00:53:33.950 --> 00:53:39.790
happening in the field of terrorism to really know the nuance of what I'm trying to talk

00:53:39.790 --> 00:53:40.110
to.

00:53:40.670 --> 00:53:42.030
So just a couple things with that.

00:53:42.190 --> 00:53:47.710
I think that what's really interesting is you see that all, and this has been a debate now

00:53:48.510 --> 00:53:53.820
pre-9-11, where there's never a satisfying definition of terrorism.

00:53:53.980 --> 00:53:58.540
And so this is like a big debate in all in the legal field and the policy field.

00:53:58.700 --> 00:54:03.180
And essentially everyone's like, we somebody will say, well, this is the definitive

00:54:03.180 --> 00:54:06.140
definition, and someone will say, no, it's not, because it doesn't include this, and you

00:54:06.140 --> 00:54:07.740
know, and it goes back and forth.

00:54:07.980 --> 00:54:13.900
Um, and so one of the things that I was trying to show there, um, which everything kind

00:54:13.900 --> 00:54:19.850
of comes together in this picture, is the fact that um if these are kind

00:54:19.850 --> 00:54:21.610
of representational systems, right?

00:54:21.770 --> 00:54:25.290
And individuals have different social positions.

00:54:26.090 --> 00:54:31.770
And so for instance, this is always the old saying, you know, one person's freedom

00:54:31.770 --> 00:54:36.410
fighters, another's terrorist kind of thing, which is crude, but it kind of gets you this

00:54:36.410 --> 00:54:41.290
idea that the different uh positions, social positions of the agents doing the evaluation

00:54:41.290 --> 00:54:44.570
will matter a lot to whether those systems are triggered or not.

00:54:44.890 --> 00:54:50.600
And so if one of the things I think is that there's a lot of representational

00:54:50.680 --> 00:54:51.400
mismatch.

00:54:51.560 --> 00:54:56.680
There's there's not a very high degree of uh coordination amongst minds when it comes to

00:54:56.680 --> 00:55:01.160
what is terrorism, um, because some acts hit on certain cues.

00:55:01.240 --> 00:55:06.200
Also, you have the social position of the person doing the evaluation, um, and then another

00:55:06.280 --> 00:55:09.160
uh number of other things that I kind of talk about in the article.

00:55:09.240 --> 00:55:14.170
Um, But there's this mismatch, and I think that that's probably one of the reasons why it's

00:55:14.170 --> 00:55:15.930
because terrorism hits on certain cues.

00:55:16.010 --> 00:55:20.330
And actually, when you ask people in experiments, is this terrorism or not?

00:55:20.650 --> 00:55:24.330
People do, when you give them a bunch of cues, they actually say, Oh, yeah, that's

00:55:24.330 --> 00:55:25.450
definitely terrorism.

00:55:25.610 --> 00:55:30.570
And when you degrade those cues, they're much less likely to say that that's terrorism.

00:55:30.650 --> 00:55:33.290
They might say, oh, that's mass shooting and things like that.

00:55:33.780 --> 00:55:38.420
So there is something interesting going on that you can see that's like this representation

00:55:38.420 --> 00:55:39.860
thing that's happening.

00:55:41.140 --> 00:55:46.580
And so yeah, so there's but but then also it comes together with the precautionary idea,

00:55:46.660 --> 00:55:51.220
too, is that once those things are hit upon, then you get this full-blown precautionary

00:55:51.220 --> 00:55:51.780
response.

00:55:51.940 --> 00:55:56.980
So it kind of brings together a number of elements, which is the representation thing, why

00:55:56.980 --> 00:56:01.540
we lack a good solid definition, which by the way, when I was finishing the paper, I said,

00:56:01.700 --> 00:56:07.190
well, if this is much closer to uh what's happening with something like genocide, there

00:56:07.190 --> 00:56:11.990
should be less arguments about genocide because it's properly hitting a lot of these cues.

00:56:12.070 --> 00:56:15.510
And indeed, when you go look, there's much less argumentation about a definition of

00:56:15.510 --> 00:56:16.230
genocide.

00:56:16.390 --> 00:56:20.070
There's still arguments about what constitutes or doesn't, and what politics, and that's

00:56:20.150 --> 00:56:23.590
again comes down to the political agent that's doing that evaluation.

00:56:23.910 --> 00:56:29.640
But but uh but uh terrorism has a much uh much more uh much more

00:56:29.640 --> 00:56:31.400
ambiguity in this regard.

00:56:31.640 --> 00:56:37.000
Um so yeah so I think that that's kind of it's it's uh it's definitely that was a uh a a

00:56:37.000 --> 00:56:38.120
really fun paper to work on.

00:56:38.200 --> 00:56:40.920
But it again it's kind of like in between these fields.

00:56:41.080 --> 00:56:43.080
Um so so that's where I was with that.

00:56:43.480 --> 00:56:47.000
One one uh just to to follow up on the mismatch idea.

00:56:47.080 --> 00:56:53.070
Um actually um uh Michael since you invited me to the this thing with

00:56:53.070 --> 00:56:58.190
the international human rights law, I've sort of been looking as an amateur into this.

00:56:58.430 --> 00:57:02.430
One thing I found was I'm really interested in conflict and war.

00:57:02.670 --> 00:57:08.510
Um, and I realized in sort of I've I feel like I've been humbled reading

00:57:08.510 --> 00:57:12.110
through the expert analysis of these things.

00:57:12.270 --> 00:57:16.750
Um, one thing I found was there's something called the Watson Institute at Brown

00:57:16.750 --> 00:57:19.950
University, and they're trying to assess the costs of war.

00:57:20.240 --> 00:57:25.920
And to me, this was, I didn't realize this that um, so for example, um, just a conservative

00:57:25.920 --> 00:57:31.520
estimate is that displaced people since the nine-ele since 9-11, uh,

00:57:31.760 --> 00:57:37.760
because of wars in um Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Philippines, Libya, and

00:57:37.760 --> 00:57:40.960
Syria is uh the estimate is 37 million people.

00:57:42.690 --> 00:57:46.690
And in that displacement, both internal and external.

00:57:47.250 --> 00:57:53.170
A conservative estimate of the death toll could be about four and a half to four

00:57:53.170 --> 00:57:58.770
point seven million and uh especially um children.

00:57:59.010 --> 00:58:04.880
Um and so uh and this is you know uh this is the

00:58:04.880 --> 00:58:09.040
results of a reaction to this horrific event, right?

00:58:09.200 --> 00:58:14.160
But I think like in the sense of the importance of understanding the

00:58:14.160 --> 00:58:18.640
psychology, um, and this is not a partisan issue.

00:58:18.720 --> 00:58:24.400
I mean, the there's this book, the the um Afghanistan papers, um, you know, people

00:58:24.560 --> 00:58:30.230
even within the within the military, I know I I personally know people who served in these

00:58:30.230 --> 00:58:33.670
wars, you know, um they're friends of mine, they're relatives of mine.

00:58:33.910 --> 00:58:39.510
Um many of them were like, well, you know, with like with Afghanistan being a good example

00:58:39.510 --> 00:58:41.110
of like what the hell are we doing there?

00:58:41.270 --> 00:58:42.230
They don't, you know.

00:58:42.390 --> 00:58:47.910
Um the the psychology of under s of wanting retribution, retaliation,

00:58:48.710 --> 00:58:54.580
and the consequences of it, uh it's it's it's just interesting to think

00:58:54.580 --> 00:59:00.420
about how our evolved psychology um you know it feels good to sort of

00:59:00.420 --> 00:59:06.100
like not treat 9-11 like a uh a police as something where we should just find the

00:59:06.100 --> 00:59:11.140
individuals who did it um and this might lead into some of this idea about like what groups

00:59:11.140 --> 00:59:15.860
are doing and the projection of group identities in in international conflict but

00:59:16.250 --> 00:59:22.170
regardless, you know, of all these bad things, there's just this incredible amount

00:59:22.170 --> 00:59:27.770
of human suffering is done um because of of our

00:59:27.770 --> 00:59:31.290
evolved psychology and I think understanding it better.

00:59:31.770 --> 00:59:35.210
Like these numbers I was just shocked about.

00:59:35.290 --> 00:59:38.170
And I hadn't come across them before.

00:59:38.890 --> 00:59:39.130
Yeah.

00:59:39.210 --> 00:59:43.290
And it's I mean to to kind of add to what you're saying there, you know, those like and and

00:59:43.290 --> 00:59:48.880
what David was saying, um when you when you look at actual warfare numbers that are

00:59:48.880 --> 00:59:51.040
astronomical compared to terrorism.

00:59:51.280 --> 00:59:51.440
Yeah.

00:59:51.680 --> 00:59:56.480
Um and and I say this being currently on the job market, so I'm trying not to downplay my

00:59:56.640 --> 00:59:57.920
my uh hopeful next job.

00:59:58.000 --> 01:00:03.600
But but really, I mean there there was a great book by uh Mueller and Stewart that runs the

01:00:03.600 --> 01:00:09.280
numbers um and does a really good job of showing like um in this regard how terrorism is

01:00:09.280 --> 01:00:15.050
really, really minuscule uh compared to to other um even risks, you know,

01:00:15.130 --> 01:00:18.810
that we take for granted every day, it's it's a very, very low number, but it

01:00:18.810 --> 01:00:24.010
overwhelmingly, disproportionately uh evokes these really strong emotions.

01:00:24.090 --> 01:00:29.610
Uh and and so as you were saying, David, I think understanding uh that

01:00:29.610 --> 01:00:35.610
retaliatory mindset and and where what is triggering that and and also

01:00:35.610 --> 01:00:40.010
having safeguards in place, and this is really comes down to a policy thing, which is

01:00:40.010 --> 01:00:41.530
really, really difficult to do.

01:00:42.180 --> 01:00:48.180
But the problem after 9-11 was that there was that hair trigger response to do something

01:00:48.260 --> 01:00:53.460
and a strong political response, which was totally reasonable from kind of an evolved

01:00:53.460 --> 01:00:54.900
perspective, like of course.

01:00:55.620 --> 01:01:01.300
However, you know, in that regard, all these sweeping legislation pieces have gone into,

01:01:01.780 --> 01:01:07.380
especially in the Western world, that were never really thought that

01:01:08.250 --> 01:01:09.050
heavily about.

01:01:09.130 --> 01:01:12.410
So you get a lot of laws overlapping with other laws.

01:01:12.570 --> 01:01:17.290
You have all these in international humanitarian law dealing with the law of warfare.

01:01:18.010 --> 01:01:23.850
You see this huge issue when the Bush administration decided to declare

01:01:23.850 --> 01:01:27.690
terrorist groups as organized armed groups under international law.

01:01:27.770 --> 01:01:32.640
So thus kind of triggering this whole new legal framework where instead of using a police

01:01:32.640 --> 01:01:37.760
framework for going after these individuals, you could now use a targeted approach.

01:01:38.240 --> 01:01:43.920
And what's kind of happened in the legal field since then is that they've been trying to

01:01:44.080 --> 01:01:48.960
figure out what to do with that because it became a new legal reality for them.

01:01:49.360 --> 01:01:54.930
And it's really, in the recent years, really sent the field into uh and now we're even

01:01:54.930 --> 01:01:58.930
getting into murkier waters when we're dealing with uh, you know, more cyber terrorism.

01:01:59.090 --> 01:02:02.210
Um, what they're preparing for now is you know war in space.

01:02:02.370 --> 01:02:08.370
Uh so these are even even you know uh gonna be looking less and less like traditional wars

01:02:08.370 --> 01:02:13.090
used to look, like World War I, World War II, and preceding wars, where it's very clear on

01:02:13.090 --> 01:02:14.450
the battlefield who's who.

01:02:15.040 --> 01:02:20.480
And so this raises a whole like plethora of new problems for international

01:02:20.720 --> 01:02:26.080
law, which in my position, I think can really only be

01:02:26.080 --> 01:02:32.080
satisfactorily resolved if you take if you start to understand the psychology behind these

01:02:32.080 --> 01:02:32.240
things.

01:02:32.400 --> 01:02:37.280
Why do people coordinate around certain laws when other ones just poof, you can put as many

01:02:37.280 --> 01:02:39.920
laws in place as you want, no one's going to follow it.

01:02:40.080 --> 01:02:44.810
And especially at the international legal state, you know, at that arena, you're dealing

01:02:44.810 --> 01:02:50.410
with purely coordinational problems because there is no third party to police it.

01:02:50.570 --> 01:02:56.330
Um so it's not like domestic law where you know you you have at least some semblance of a

01:02:56.330 --> 01:03:00.250
court system and all these things that can hold people to account and a monitor and

01:03:00.250 --> 01:03:01.690
sanction behavior there.

01:03:01.930 --> 01:03:05.930
It's really based upon coordination games and who's willing to push.

01:03:06.010 --> 01:03:10.090
Um and so now, you know, there's this new debate going on in international law, which is

01:03:10.090 --> 01:03:12.800
like, is it worth, you know, have we failed?

01:03:12.960 --> 01:03:14.960
Has the international legal framework failed?

01:03:15.040 --> 01:03:18.800
And now you have a lot of debate about that, from both sides, obviously.

01:03:19.120 --> 01:03:24.400
Um but I think, yeah, it's it's getting us into a new area where we need to um I think as

01:03:24.400 --> 01:03:29.040
far as my perspective, a lot of um I was talking to a friend of mine that that's an

01:03:29.040 --> 01:03:32.470
international lawyer, and I said, you know, actually, if you're interested, because he was

01:03:32.470 --> 01:03:36.310
talking to me about what areas should he study up on to become to have more of a social

01:03:36.310 --> 01:03:36.870
science background.

01:03:36.950 --> 01:03:38.870
And I said, a lot of this is game theory.

01:03:39.030 --> 01:03:43.350
A lot of this is actually, you know, looking at how actors coordinate and when

01:03:43.350 --> 01:03:45.830
discordination or miscoordination occurs.

01:03:45.990 --> 01:03:51.190
Um, and so there's some really interesting things that that need to be um almost there

01:03:51.190 --> 01:03:55.590
needs to be an emerging field now, which is the social sciences integrating with uh

01:03:55.590 --> 01:03:58.390
international law if it's going to survive, I think.

01:04:00.440 --> 01:04:06.200
discouraging to um I mean I remember sitting in the room of the international

01:04:06.200 --> 01:04:12.120
human rights lawyers and like them laughing about uh how much you

01:04:12.120 --> 01:04:18.120
know powerful countries just ignore uh you know the ICRC or the ICC

01:04:18.200 --> 01:04:24.200
or any of these acronyms that are sort of you know um does is that discouraging for you

01:04:24.360 --> 01:04:29.550
or um I mean, me

01:04:30.830 --> 01:04:31.950
huh, that's interesting.

01:04:32.110 --> 01:04:34.590
And not for me personally, and I'm trying to think why.

01:04:34.830 --> 01:04:37.710
I think it's because I see the broader game.

01:04:37.870 --> 01:04:41.710
And I think it's like it's just like any other social interaction.

01:04:41.870 --> 01:04:47.640
And this is another thing too that I think is is oftentimes uh diminished when

01:04:47.800 --> 01:04:53.160
speaking in an IR international relations type perspective is that these individuals are

01:04:53.160 --> 01:04:56.040
decision makers, just like when we study human psychology.

01:04:56.120 --> 01:05:00.840
And I think that there's always this disconnect, especially amongst many political

01:05:00.840 --> 01:05:03.400
scientists, many international relations scholars.

01:05:03.480 --> 01:05:06.200
I just saw a piece, I haven't read it yet, but I saw the abstract, it looked really

01:05:06.200 --> 01:05:10.840
interesting, just came out a week or two ago, that is applying EP to international

01:05:10.840 --> 01:05:11.160
relations.

01:05:11.240 --> 01:05:12.840
So I'm looking forward to reading that.

01:05:13.080 --> 01:05:19.070
But I think there's this idea that because it's states interacting, that there's some

01:05:19.310 --> 01:05:25.230
there's something that's um so uh what is the word I'm looking for, so divergent from

01:05:25.550 --> 01:05:30.510
emergent, an emergent phenomenon that can't be reduced at all, when a lot of the same

01:05:30.510 --> 01:05:34.910
things you see with world leaders, I mean, just is coming down to human psychology.

01:05:35.070 --> 01:05:40.270
Um so I so I guess I stay positive when I think that maybe this coordinational

01:05:40.350 --> 01:05:46.220
configuration that we have now is not uh the most optimal given what we face

01:05:46.220 --> 01:05:46.940
coming up.

01:05:47.100 --> 01:05:49.820
However, does that mean that there can't be another solution?

01:05:49.980 --> 01:05:50.780
I I don't think so.

01:05:50.860 --> 01:05:55.580
I think I think that there are ways of crafting it uh in such a way where there can be more

01:05:55.580 --> 01:05:57.420
optimal solutions along the way.

01:05:57.580 --> 01:06:02.140
So I don't think um, you know, throwing out kind of the baby with the bathwater uh is

01:06:02.140 --> 01:06:02.540
correct.

01:06:02.620 --> 01:06:08.380
It just needs um needs a different perspective, needs um uh fresh perspectives as well.

01:06:08.460 --> 01:06:14.070
Um, because if you know this legal system was really developed at a different time.

01:06:15.190 --> 01:06:20.470
The you know, the earliest ideas here were coming out of the Great World Wars and

01:06:20.870 --> 01:06:26.790
looking at how states coordinate and how you know different actors uh what what role do

01:06:26.790 --> 01:06:27.110
they play?

01:06:27.270 --> 01:06:31.510
And it was only until the kind of the more modern period where you had this notion of non

01:06:31.590 --> 01:06:36.950
international armed conflicts that's become now the the priority uh mainly of the field,

01:06:37.110 --> 01:06:42.070
which is all these armed actors that are popping out like in Syria and other other domains,

01:06:42.480 --> 01:06:46.560
where you know the the the the folks looking into these conflict situations can't tell

01:06:46.560 --> 01:06:52.000
who's who and so now their their very clean kind of legal system that they once had is is

01:06:52.080 --> 01:06:55.840
you know facing a lot of challenges and the question is how do they how do they cope with

01:06:55.840 --> 01:06:59.840
those challenges and then everyone kind of presents their own logic behind what you know

01:07:00.000 --> 01:07:02.160
what's a new way of kind of going about this.

01:07:03.070 --> 01:07:08.190
But a lot of it kind of spins in circles without this kind of outside input from social

01:07:08.190 --> 01:07:08.670
scientists.

01:07:08.750 --> 01:07:14.350
And I think it was at that meeting where we had even a political scientist say, all my

01:07:14.350 --> 01:07:19.630
years of working in conflict, I've never been invited to talk to anyone in international

01:07:19.630 --> 01:07:20.110
law.

01:07:20.270 --> 01:07:23.310
And so I think that like right there is really interesting.

01:07:23.630 --> 01:07:29.550
How there's such a disconnect that, you know, you don't get that back and forth a lot

01:07:29.550 --> 01:07:30.510
of times.

01:07:31.180 --> 01:07:33.100
So I'm I'm hopeful.

01:07:33.180 --> 01:07:35.340
I don't know what is your perspective, both of yours.

01:07:35.500 --> 01:07:38.940
I mean, maybe, maybe I'm I'm I'm tend to be more of an optimistic person.

01:07:39.020 --> 01:07:43.020
So that's why I think I can deal with uh with terrorism and conflict more.

01:07:43.180 --> 01:07:47.820
But yeah, I mean I think for me at least, since I was invited to this thing, I've been sort

01:07:47.820 --> 01:07:53.660
of shocked at um, you know, uh the degree to which I I'm

01:07:53.820 --> 01:07:57.020
I'm I am like a very like I'm an American.

01:07:57.180 --> 01:08:01.550
I grew up, you know, like I I I am not a very partisan person.

01:08:01.870 --> 01:08:06.110
And I sort of knew, you know, like the US had sort of, you know, like, you know, installed

01:08:06.110 --> 01:08:08.910
the, you know, like things in Iran and things like that.

01:08:08.990 --> 01:08:13.630
You know, like, you know, um, so I knew like we had sort of a patchy record.

01:08:13.790 --> 01:08:19.550
Um, but just sort of looking at the the literature of um

01:08:20.190 --> 01:08:25.150
when you have international humanitarian law, which is just reasonable things that like if

01:08:25.150 --> 01:08:30.380
you look at like Q research or other things like you know, for example, the US population

01:08:30.380 --> 01:08:36.300
is overwhelmingly nonpartisanly supportive of like, you know, not attacking civilians or

01:08:36.300 --> 01:08:41.660
not providing arms to groups that like attack civilians, you know, in in uh regardless of

01:08:41.660 --> 01:08:43.740
like the particulars of the situation.

01:08:43.980 --> 01:08:49.660
Um but yet um this kind of thing across administrations, different administrations,

01:08:49.820 --> 01:08:53.260
different political administrations, different sides, it's not a partisan thing.

01:08:53.340 --> 01:08:55.260
This this this these things just happen.

01:08:55.420 --> 01:09:01.130
Um I'm just sort of I'm still personally sort of just realizing that

01:09:01.930 --> 01:09:07.450
the numbers of people affected are huge by sort of state action.

01:09:08.250 --> 01:09:13.930
And for me, I'm like thinking a lot about um, you know, we're not getting the

01:09:13.930 --> 01:09:17.530
evolved cues of, for example, like all these displaced people or all the kids.

01:09:17.770 --> 01:09:22.330
Like I was reading a conservative estimate is like for every person killed in a war,

01:09:22.410 --> 01:09:27.500
there's at least four non-combatants killed, just sort of like actuarially, just because of

01:09:27.500 --> 01:09:31.820
like disease, famine, displacement, um, et cetera.

01:09:32.540 --> 01:09:38.460
And um again, if you like ask people on the street, like what do they think

01:09:38.460 --> 01:09:38.940
about that?

01:09:39.100 --> 01:09:44.780
Um, they're they're the public is sort of right, but like uh countries, like our own

01:09:44.780 --> 01:09:49.130
country and other countries, uh, whether we've consider those countries good countries or

01:09:49.130 --> 01:09:54.170
bad guys, it's sort of a universal thing where I think countries and states are doing

01:09:54.170 --> 01:09:59.370
things that most of their their citizens don't agree with.

01:09:59.610 --> 01:10:04.090
And for me at least, I'm just sort of, I don't know if I'm optimistic or pessimistic, but

01:10:04.090 --> 01:10:06.970
I've been thinking a lot about why that is.

01:10:07.450 --> 01:10:13.450
Um, and for example, like that we're not getting the evolved cues of all these people

01:10:13.450 --> 01:10:14.010
affected.

01:10:14.170 --> 01:10:19.580
You know, like I didn't, I had no idea there were that many people impacted in in our

01:10:19.580 --> 01:10:21.740
attack of Afghanistan, for example.

01:10:21.820 --> 01:10:25.980
Um and I'm not saying that I mean the Taliban was is horrible, right?

01:10:26.060 --> 01:10:31.900
Um, but uh and and there's no but, but and um uh the

01:10:32.460 --> 01:10:38.300
the experience of seeing people of impacted or knowing that people are impacted would have

01:10:38.300 --> 01:10:39.900
been part of our evolutionary history.

01:10:39.980 --> 01:10:45.270
Like if if somebody attacked us and did this horrible thing, we would

01:10:45.270 --> 01:10:51.030
retaliate, but we would also sort of know the cue how much our retaliation impacted other

01:10:51.030 --> 01:10:51.270
people.

01:10:51.430 --> 01:10:53.670
And there's sort of a natural check on that.

01:10:53.830 --> 01:10:59.110
Um, and I'm just sort of I'm just sort of wondering aloud right now, stumbling around,

01:10:59.190 --> 01:11:04.790
thinking about this issue a lot of the consequences of these sort of feel-good

01:11:04.790 --> 01:11:05.590
retaliations.

01:11:05.750 --> 01:11:07.270
Number one, are they rational?

01:11:07.520 --> 01:11:10.160
Do they actually make us safe or are they effective?

01:11:10.480 --> 01:11:13.760
And that's that's an issue that's independent of even the science.

01:11:13.920 --> 01:11:19.520
And then the second issue is just sort of morally is that the right thing to do?

01:11:19.600 --> 01:11:24.800
And how can the science inform sort of minimizing the moral horrors that that are that are

01:11:24.800 --> 01:11:25.360
happening?

01:11:25.840 --> 01:11:27.360
I'll just I'll say one quick thing.

01:11:27.440 --> 01:11:33.440
Uh I think it's it's always a debate that swirls in my head: is uh, for instance, how do

01:11:33.440 --> 01:11:38.670
you deal with um a threat that is truly a predatory actor in the modern world.

01:11:38.830 --> 01:11:41.470
Because in the modern world what do you mean by by predatory?

01:11:41.550 --> 01:11:42.830
Just Oh, uh yeah.

01:11:42.910 --> 01:11:48.910
So so if you you know, this is going into Aaron Sell's work, um and Lopez's work

01:11:49.070 --> 01:11:51.150
and uh Landers and all these folks.

01:11:51.310 --> 01:11:56.030
Uh so the so this idea of, you know, if it's uh kind of the function of of hate is what

01:11:56.030 --> 01:11:56.910
they've been looking at.

01:11:57.100 --> 01:12:02.380
And really that's, you know, to the the goal there is to

01:12:02.380 --> 01:12:08.220
eliminate your uh the individual or the group if um that kind of

01:12:08.540 --> 01:12:12.620
their existence um is negative for your your fitness.

01:12:12.860 --> 01:12:18.140
Uh and so in that sense, and that there's some really uh I I have a book chapter coming out

01:12:18.220 --> 01:12:21.020
which is looking at radicalization as predatory aggression.

01:12:21.100 --> 01:12:25.630
And in envy and hatred is kind of organizing emotional systems there.

01:12:25.870 --> 01:12:31.870
On the other hand, you have more bargaining aggression, which is more limited

01:12:31.870 --> 01:12:32.350
aggression.

01:12:32.430 --> 01:12:38.430
And this is as far as militaries go in Western societies, this is generally what most

01:12:38.430 --> 01:12:40.990
people think about our aggression, is that it's limited.

01:12:41.150 --> 01:12:45.550
We're going to use these as tactical things, strategic things to get something to concede

01:12:45.550 --> 01:12:51.260
resources or land or political concessions.

01:12:51.500 --> 01:12:55.980
Um and then there's a very different uh kind of state of mind that comes with those those

01:12:55.980 --> 01:12:57.020
two different systems.

01:12:57.100 --> 01:13:01.980
And so the question is when you're when you're uh you know a modern state um being

01:13:01.980 --> 01:13:05.900
aggressed by a predatory actor, uh how do you respond?

01:13:06.060 --> 01:13:11.650
Because on the one side, if you respond too weakly, um then that encourages further

01:13:11.650 --> 01:13:12.530
aggression.

01:13:13.650 --> 01:13:18.050
But of course, we we tie our hands under international law and for very good reasons.

01:13:18.130 --> 01:13:23.250
I'm not saying uh for ethical, wonderful reasons, we tie our hands to a lot of this.

01:13:23.490 --> 01:13:29.250
Um and then when when actors do kind of predatorily re-engage, um,

01:13:29.330 --> 01:13:34.130
you know, there there's this backlash, and then obviously you have this massive cost of

01:13:34.130 --> 01:13:37.010
lives that occurs oftentimes with that aggression.

01:13:37.170 --> 01:13:41.860
And so it's um it's very interesting to me to think through like how do you most

01:13:41.940 --> 01:13:47.300
effectively respond to an actor uh like a terrorist uh organization.

01:13:47.540 --> 01:13:53.540
Um but do so um, you know, I guess it's it's kind of the walk softly and carry a

01:13:53.540 --> 01:13:55.300
big stick kind of ideology, I guess.

01:13:55.460 --> 01:13:57.700
But um but yeah, how do you balance that?

01:13:57.780 --> 01:13:59.860
And it's easier said than done, I think a lot of times.

01:14:00.190 --> 01:14:00.350
Yeah.

01:14:00.430 --> 01:14:01.790
And David, I know you want to say something.

01:14:01.870 --> 01:14:03.070
I just want to follow up really quick.

01:14:03.470 --> 01:14:08.190
One thing I've noticed in looking at this too is it seems like there's also obviously the

01:14:08.190 --> 01:14:11.630
people who are in charge are often political politicians.

01:14:11.790 --> 01:14:15.630
And there's a common knowledge issue of I don't want to look weak.

01:14:15.790 --> 01:14:20.910
So for example, even if objectively I'm going to make more

01:14:20.910 --> 01:14:25.020
terrorists by doing this really strong reaction.

01:14:25.260 --> 01:14:30.940
I'm worried about people l uh looking looking weak to

01:14:30.940 --> 01:14:35.900
constituents, and not only constituents, but there's another group of people who want my

01:14:35.900 --> 01:14:37.340
position as a politician.

01:14:37.420 --> 01:14:42.940
And they are incentivized to say, hey, look, he's being weak, Dave's being weak, because

01:14:42.940 --> 01:14:46.140
he's not attacking these people who attacked us.

01:14:46.300 --> 01:14:51.810
And so I am registering this of like, I need to survive in my, I want my position.

01:14:52.050 --> 01:14:55.810
There are people who are coming for me who are saying I'm weak.

01:14:55.970 --> 01:15:01.890
And so you can even see how people, even if every agent is sort of well-intended,

01:15:01.970 --> 01:15:03.970
which is probably not the case, right?

01:15:04.050 --> 01:15:09.970
Um, but but even if they are, how that sort of just dynamic leads to a situation

01:15:09.970 --> 01:15:15.760
that favors Erring on the side of satisfying the appetites, for example, of

01:15:15.760 --> 01:15:21.360
revenge, especially if we're not getting all the cues of the consequences

01:15:22.000 --> 01:15:23.040
of that revenge.

01:15:23.120 --> 01:15:28.240
And so I think it's a really important dynamic to understand

01:15:29.600 --> 01:15:35.520
for everyone if we're gonna sort of address address this, because there may

01:15:35.520 --> 01:15:41.250
be some real errors made because of the sort of institutional

01:15:41.250 --> 01:15:43.890
or structural monsters we've created.

01:15:44.130 --> 01:15:45.170
Um yeah.

01:15:45.730 --> 01:15:46.610
Absolutely.

01:15:47.810 --> 01:15:53.810
So you you made this uh really crucial and underappreciated distinction between

01:15:53.810 --> 01:15:57.970
predatory aggression and bargaining aggression.

01:15:58.210 --> 01:16:04.180
Um the way I see it is it's the difference between aggression as a means to an end, so as

01:16:04.180 --> 01:16:10.100
a means to get treated better, to get a better deal, to get some territory, to

01:16:10.100 --> 01:16:16.020
get some resource, uh whatever, versus aggression as

01:16:16.020 --> 01:16:17.860
the end in and of itself.

01:16:18.020 --> 01:16:23.460
The goal is is to destroy the benefit that the attacker receives from the

01:16:23.460 --> 01:16:28.470
aggression is the destruction or the disempowerment of the enemy itself.

01:16:30.230 --> 01:16:35.990
And unfortunately, I think it is very easy to confuse those two

01:16:35.990 --> 01:16:41.030
types of aggression because you're not really, it's really hard to tell the difference when

01:16:41.030 --> 01:16:42.470
you're on the receiving end of it.

01:16:42.630 --> 01:16:47.670
If people are dying and things are being destroyed, it's hard to know what the motive

01:16:47.670 --> 01:16:49.510
behind that destruction was.

01:16:50.120 --> 01:16:54.520
But knowing the motive behind it is actually crucial for responding in the right way

01:16:54.680 --> 01:17:00.600
because uh uh confusing predatory aggression for bargaining aggression could be extremely

01:17:00.600 --> 01:17:02.120
counterproductive.

01:17:02.280 --> 01:17:08.040
Um and vice versa, confusing um bargaining aggression for predatory

01:17:08.040 --> 01:17:11.400
aggression could be extremely disastrous as well.

01:17:11.720 --> 01:17:16.920
Um do you see this confusion being made in the international

01:17:17.730 --> 01:17:18.370
arena?

01:17:18.530 --> 01:17:19.650
Is this a danger?

01:17:19.730 --> 01:17:23.970
Uh and how how can we avoid uh making this mistake?

01:17:24.130 --> 01:17:27.810
And what is the best way to respond to each of these types of aggression?

01:17:28.530 --> 01:17:30.610
Yeah, I mean, yes, definitely.

01:17:30.690 --> 01:17:35.410
There's definitely um a confusion of these uh of these different types, and that I mean

01:17:35.490 --> 01:17:41.010
that is a um not only from EP, but you know, the idea of predatory aggression is is a bit

01:17:41.010 --> 01:17:41.330
wider.

01:17:41.410 --> 01:17:45.010
There's been um other studies in other fields that have have looked.

01:17:45.090 --> 01:17:50.980
Um There's you know different uh neurosignatures of these different disassociated

01:17:50.980 --> 01:17:51.380
systems.

01:17:51.540 --> 01:17:56.980
So we know, I mean, there's a rich literature here in EP and also outside of EP on uh these

01:17:56.980 --> 01:17:58.020
different systems.

01:17:58.260 --> 01:18:03.220
Um I'll do I'll give you an example of when it can go wrong, is in my own field of

01:18:03.220 --> 01:18:04.020
terrorism.

01:18:04.260 --> 01:18:10.260
And so there's this tendency in the literature to look at radicalized actors as

01:18:10.580 --> 01:18:14.570
doing it in response for retaliatory reasons.

01:18:14.730 --> 01:18:19.850
And so a lot of the idea here is that radicalization is what they say is a grievance-based

01:18:19.850 --> 01:18:20.330
thing.

01:18:20.570 --> 01:18:25.930
So people radicalize because something's been done to them by the state, by their local

01:18:25.930 --> 01:18:26.650
community.

01:18:26.970 --> 01:18:30.490
And so most of the models that are out there are very much reactive models.

01:18:30.570 --> 01:18:34.810
And so me and my colleague, what we did was we said, no, no, we we need to start looking at

01:18:34.810 --> 01:18:35.690
this a little bit differently.

01:18:35.850 --> 01:18:41.280
In fact, some of this, uh, first of all, is accepting the fact that aggression is good from

01:18:41.280 --> 01:18:42.800
an evolutionary perspective.

01:18:42.960 --> 01:18:48.560
Not meaning for us, for ethics, but the sense of that

01:18:48.560 --> 01:18:52.400
aggression can be a really beneficial thing for certain actors.

01:18:52.720 --> 01:18:57.200
And so when you start to take this other perspective, what we've started to do is trying to

01:18:57.200 --> 01:19:02.480
shift the perspective of no, this isn't what radicalizing people are radicalizing is not in

01:19:02.480 --> 01:19:03.600
response, oftentimes.

01:19:03.760 --> 01:19:07.590
They might give you those when you ask them why they've radicalized.

01:19:07.670 --> 01:19:12.390
Um and we think that might be part of the system to to kind of look for excuses and

01:19:12.390 --> 01:19:13.030
justifications.

01:19:13.350 --> 01:19:15.110
That's fascinating to Yeah.

01:19:29.190 --> 01:19:32.380
Um does that make sense to you?

01:19:32.460 --> 01:19:36.780
Because if they're not aware that of your predatory intentions, they might try to make

01:19:36.780 --> 01:19:41.980
concessions to you, uh and that's good for you, and then you'll just keep on attacking

01:19:41.980 --> 01:19:42.220
them.

01:19:42.380 --> 01:19:43.660
Um yeah.

01:19:45.500 --> 01:19:45.820
Yeah.

01:19:46.140 --> 01:19:50.940
Oh, not only that, but and this is Anthony Lopez's point, and we should have him on, is

01:19:50.940 --> 01:19:56.670
that uh leaders, the they're the group that is doing the aggression is not a

01:19:56.670 --> 01:19:57.790
unitary thing either.

01:19:57.950 --> 01:20:03.710
And so there can be times where there is a small number of people whose interest is

01:20:04.190 --> 01:20:08.830
the aggression for their own benefit.

01:20:09.150 --> 01:20:13.630
So in some sense, they are being predatory, but most people are not

01:20:14.430 --> 01:20:15.230
predatory.

01:20:15.390 --> 01:20:20.660
And so they'll often, this is Anthony has this paper, Making My Problem Our Problem, where

01:20:20.660 --> 01:20:26.340
the point is to sort of spin this narrative of the group I want to be predatory towards, if

01:20:26.340 --> 01:20:32.020
I'm the leader, I tell my people who I want to support my interest in

01:20:32.020 --> 01:20:35.060
aggressing, they're attacking us.

01:20:35.380 --> 01:20:40.660
So you're basically you're uh coalescing support for my aggressive

01:20:40.660 --> 01:20:46.470
endeavors to um to support me by framing

01:20:46.470 --> 01:20:52.310
it as this is a case of um retaliatory aggression.

01:20:52.470 --> 01:20:58.470
And you actually see this at every scale of social um interaction where there

01:20:58.470 --> 01:21:03.110
are agents who are who are differentially benefiting, and you see this even

01:21:03.110 --> 01:21:06.390
cross-culturally in small-scale social groups.

01:21:06.550 --> 01:21:10.740
There are just a subset of agents who will benefit from a raid, for example, or from

01:21:10.740 --> 01:21:14.020
intergroup conflict, and then the other people who will not.

01:21:14.340 --> 01:21:20.180
And their job, the people who will benefit to be belligerent, is to figure out a way to

01:21:20.180 --> 01:21:26.020
frame or encourage the people to at least go along with it, be okay with it, treat it

01:21:26.020 --> 01:21:28.020
as yes, we are all attacking them.

01:21:28.180 --> 01:21:33.300
So I just want to say like that, even in some sense, that even further complicates the

01:21:33.300 --> 01:21:38.660
predatory versus retaliatory aggression, because it can literally be the case that the same

01:21:38.660 --> 01:21:44.230
set of people on the same side who are throwing the same spears or dropping the same

01:21:44.230 --> 01:21:50.070
bombs are actually in one head it's irretaliatory in another head it's predatory

01:21:50.710 --> 01:21:56.550
yeah and I think uh I'll I'll say here is that I think for so many years um

01:21:56.710 --> 01:22:02.460
the researchers that have been talking to radicalized folks have been assuming that the

01:22:02.460 --> 01:22:07.260
reasons and justifications that they're providing for their actions are the cause of those

01:22:07.260 --> 01:22:07.900
actions.

01:22:08.780 --> 01:22:14.700
And so we we we would like to, you know, we wanted to uh go further, and I think

01:22:14.700 --> 01:22:17.100
this is a direction for future research.

01:22:17.420 --> 01:22:22.860
But also, you know, our pres our position is that envy is driving a lot of that home-based

01:22:22.890 --> 01:22:23.850
radicalization.

01:22:23.930 --> 01:22:26.650
That is kind of the focus, core focus of that literature.

01:22:27.210 --> 01:22:32.890
And we think one of the things, the downstream things that Envy does is it searches for

01:22:32.890 --> 01:22:37.530
these reasons and excuses and justifications to mask itself as well.

01:22:38.010 --> 01:22:43.690
So you said, you know, you're advertising towards the victims, and that might be one

01:22:43.900 --> 01:22:47.900
group as a predatory actor to advertise to to say, no, no, no, you know, I'm going to stop

01:22:47.900 --> 01:22:50.060
if you guys just let up a little bit.

01:22:50.220 --> 01:22:54.300
Um, and there's also you're advertising towards those others, like you're saying, uh, Dave,

01:22:54.460 --> 01:22:56.220
on your own side.

01:22:56.380 --> 01:22:59.980
And I think this plays such a critical role when you're seeing like ethnic violence start

01:22:59.980 --> 01:23:00.140
up.

01:23:00.220 --> 01:23:05.340
It's these predatory actors that are the first to move, and they get a lot of pleasure out

01:23:05.340 --> 01:23:05.580
of this.

01:23:05.740 --> 01:23:09.820
Is another thing that that hasn't been discussed really much, is that you see across the

01:23:09.820 --> 01:23:14.270
radicalization literatures that excitement, joy, a thrill.

01:23:14.510 --> 01:23:20.350
And everyone kind of they've they've appreciated the fact that it's there, but why is it

01:23:20.350 --> 01:23:20.590
there?

01:23:20.750 --> 01:23:26.270
And and it's like, I think it's really getting back down uh to some of the the research

01:23:26.270 --> 01:23:31.150
that they've uh suggested with uh negative association values and how that can invert cost

01:23:31.230 --> 01:23:34.030
and benefits um in the minds of those actors.

01:23:34.190 --> 01:23:40.160
So suddenly you and you heaving out cost and destroying your enemy is really

01:23:40.160 --> 01:23:43.840
pleasureful, probably you know, close to sexually pleasureful.

01:23:43.920 --> 01:23:45.440
Um, and that's where you get these weird.

01:23:45.840 --> 01:23:50.320
And so one of the things that's never been discussed is like, why what is the one thing I

01:23:50.320 --> 01:23:52.800
always ask uh when I before I give a talk?

01:23:53.040 --> 01:23:56.720
Is like, what's the one thing that's really peculiar about radicalized people?

01:23:56.880 --> 01:24:02.400
And it's funny, is members, I've given this talk uh in DC amongst policymakers and that,

01:24:02.480 --> 01:24:05.010
and they immediately hit on it, and my mom hits on it.

01:24:05.170 --> 01:24:08.690
But the people studying radicalization, they like they can't, they're like, oh, what is it?

01:24:08.770 --> 01:24:09.410
What is it?

01:24:09.570 --> 01:24:14.050
Um, but it's really this idea of like, oh, that person looks crazy.

01:24:14.290 --> 01:24:20.210
Like, like if a if a person goes and um, you know, commits a mass shooting

01:24:20.210 --> 01:24:25.170
at an elementary school, or or any of these, you know, a lot of these radicalized actors,

01:24:25.330 --> 01:24:30.210
the initial reaction to people is they can't wrap their head around why that actor would do

01:24:30.210 --> 01:24:31.570
that type of thing.

01:24:31.810 --> 01:24:36.720
Um, and so I think that there's a lot to be said here about this inversion of costs and

01:24:36.720 --> 01:24:40.080
benefits, that radicalization, that's part of that process.

01:24:40.160 --> 01:24:44.720
And that's that's part of that process that that envy in in that case of domestic

01:24:44.720 --> 01:24:50.160
radicalization is trans kind of um moving the agent towards those actions that feel really

01:24:50.160 --> 01:24:56.160
pleasureful and exciting and thrilling in order to eliminate or you know depower their

01:24:56.160 --> 01:24:57.520
their adversaries.

01:24:58.990 --> 01:25:04.990
Would you think would you say that um the international relations

01:25:04.990 --> 01:25:10.830
community uh is of the perspective that terrorism is generally

01:25:10.830 --> 01:25:15.310
motivated by grievance, by retaliation, by bargaining aggression, whatever you want to call

01:25:15.310 --> 01:25:15.550
it?

01:25:15.790 --> 01:25:21.310
And do you find yourself in the minority position arguing that no, this is not

01:25:21.470 --> 01:25:26.430
retaliatory, grievance-based bargaining, whatever you want to call it, but this is actually

01:25:26.430 --> 01:25:27.710
uh predatory?

01:25:28.220 --> 01:25:28.620
Yes.

01:25:28.780 --> 01:25:29.660
Yeah, 100%.

01:25:30.220 --> 01:25:34.060
Um I and I and it starts to resolve a lot of the issues.

01:25:34.220 --> 01:25:39.980
In fact, you know, the main kind of stream definition of terrorism is uh something

01:25:39.980 --> 01:25:41.660
that's religious or political.

01:25:41.900 --> 01:25:46.940
And it it it it's uh I I'm not gonna verbatim get it, but it essentially it's framed as

01:25:46.940 --> 01:25:47.900
bargaining aggression.

01:25:47.980 --> 01:25:51.210
It's to get political, some type of political gains, right?

01:25:51.370 --> 01:25:55.850
And that's kind of the mainstream view of literally what it defines terrorism.

01:25:56.010 --> 01:26:00.890
Um, so you I've seen just recently someone online saying, oh, they're not using the word

01:26:00.890 --> 01:26:06.330
terrorism correctly, because that person's not, in in in our verbiage, not using bargaining

01:26:06.330 --> 01:26:11.290
aggression, which in my mind is is completely the opposite of what I think these folks are

01:26:11.290 --> 01:26:17.160
doing, but it doesn't to to kind of the economical mind or the our own rationality, that

01:26:17.160 --> 01:26:21.160
doesn't make sense, like unless you take into consideration this inversion of some costs

01:26:21.160 --> 01:26:22.120
and benefits.

01:26:22.360 --> 01:26:25.480
Um, because you know it would just be befuddling.

01:26:25.720 --> 01:26:28.920
Like, why are that why why would someone give up their own life?

01:26:29.080 --> 01:26:34.280
You know, and it doesn't seem to quite make sense unless it's for a broader political uh

01:26:34.250 --> 01:26:34.890
agenda.

01:26:35.050 --> 01:26:39.290
Then it's suddenly like you see the cost benefits and it matches your own intuitions about

01:26:39.290 --> 01:26:40.330
costs and benefits.

01:26:40.490 --> 01:26:43.050
And then it's like, oh, that must be what's happening here.

01:26:43.210 --> 01:26:47.690
And that's not to say that anger, you know, bargaining aggression and predatory aggression

01:26:47.690 --> 01:26:48.730
can't coactivate.

01:26:48.890 --> 01:26:52.410
So there might, oh, and then within a terrorist organization, this is not to say that

01:26:52.410 --> 01:26:53.930
everyone's radicalized.

01:26:54.570 --> 01:26:59.210
Some agents might be there for other reasons, for you know, self interest or numerous other

01:26:59.210 --> 01:27:02.740
things, and this is what we see in warfare all the time is that you have, you know, kind of

01:27:02.740 --> 01:27:08.260
the radicalized actors that start the conflict, and then the next in line that suddenly the

01:27:08.420 --> 01:27:11.060
in the social environment shifts the costs and benefits.

01:27:11.220 --> 01:27:14.500
Costs start to rise of not joining, the benefits of joining start to.

01:27:14.660 --> 01:27:20.180
And that just that also that that idea that that flow of cost-benefits can really have such

01:27:20.180 --> 01:27:25.300
a strong influence on behavior is also a bit underappreciated.

01:27:26.820 --> 01:27:31.370
Oftentimes you you you get this intuition that, oh God, there's got to be something more,

01:27:31.450 --> 01:27:31.690
right?

01:27:31.770 --> 01:27:36.250
Like it can't be that selfish or that's that shallow of a psychology.

01:27:36.410 --> 01:27:39.930
There has to be some moralistic thing or there has to be something else driving these

01:27:39.930 --> 01:27:40.170
people.

01:27:40.330 --> 01:27:45.130
And I think when when you shift cost benefits, people will look for the the reasons and

01:27:45.130 --> 01:27:46.890
justifications for those actions.

01:27:47.050 --> 01:27:51.690
Um and that's oftentimes that, you know, this is like a Tamur Quran type situation where

01:27:51.690 --> 01:27:56.720
these shifting costs and benefits of in his regard, you know, ethnification, but you see

01:27:56.720 --> 01:28:00.160
this shift, and then more and more people bandwagon and get on board.

01:28:00.320 --> 01:28:03.760
And even the ones that aren't truly on board that will always have a problem with the

01:28:03.760 --> 01:28:07.840
aggression, they can't do otherwise because to do so would be to kill, you know, be killed

01:28:07.840 --> 01:28:08.640
yourself.

01:28:09.120 --> 01:28:14.960
Do you think, just to uh to ask a clarification question, do you think that the predatory

01:28:14.960 --> 01:28:20.960
versus bargaining aggression thing is actually that distinction

01:28:21.200 --> 01:28:25.690
versus it's more of a almost proximate ultimate thing of

01:28:26.250 --> 01:28:32.090
predatory is people who are either certain that they're going to have to in

01:28:32.090 --> 01:28:33.530
just exert a high cost.

01:28:33.610 --> 01:28:39.610
And it actually is for an all for bargaining, but it's just that um the bargaining is

01:28:39.610 --> 01:28:40.490
so distant.

01:28:40.650 --> 01:28:44.010
It just looks like it's just destroy everything.

01:28:44.330 --> 01:28:50.220
But in fact it it it ultimately is is that and I'm just to be like devil's advocate, is

01:28:50.220 --> 01:28:52.140
that um I'm sure you've thought of this.

01:28:52.220 --> 01:28:56.940
Like, what would you say to somebody or that thought um that it is in fact it is all

01:28:56.940 --> 01:28:57.980
bargaining aggression?

01:28:58.060 --> 01:29:03.660
It's just the severity of it makes the extreme version of bargaining

01:29:03.980 --> 01:29:09.740
aggression indistinguishable from just this berserk flip to

01:29:09.900 --> 01:29:10.620
destruction.

01:29:10.860 --> 01:29:16.570
I mean, I I understand the point of just extermination, Like I'm,

01:29:16.810 --> 01:29:20.410
you know, like like that is that is different than bargaining for better treatment.

01:29:20.490 --> 01:29:25.610
Like if it's a if it's an interest to just have this entity destroyed.

01:29:25.770 --> 01:29:28.410
And maybe that's ultimately the difference.

01:29:28.890 --> 01:29:34.890
But I'm just thinking, like again, in this cartoonish way, if you look at somebody

01:29:34.890 --> 01:29:38.090
who is willing to blow themselves up on a bus, right?

01:29:38.640 --> 01:29:44.160
The question is so clearly they're they're saying the benefit of destroying

01:29:44.160 --> 01:29:47.520
destruction is is is just intrinsic.

01:29:47.840 --> 01:29:50.080
But the question is, is that psychology?

01:29:50.320 --> 01:29:56.240
Because ultimately that destruction in that local case is a larger scale bargaining

01:29:56.240 --> 01:29:57.120
issue.

01:29:57.760 --> 01:29:59.200
Does that make sense?

01:29:59.920 --> 01:30:05.530
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on it it depends on too, because this is the

01:30:05.530 --> 01:30:08.650
perspective that a lot of people have taken is the altruistic perspective.

01:30:08.810 --> 01:30:12.250
Um so this idea that you know these individuals are doing these things on behalf of a

01:30:12.250 --> 01:30:14.250
greater good for their collective.

01:30:14.570 --> 01:30:20.570
Um I I don't, you know, in that in that regard I I find some of it

01:30:20.570 --> 01:30:20.970
difficult.

01:30:21.130 --> 01:30:25.050
You you also have the collective action problem that kind of pops up there, which if you

01:30:25.050 --> 01:30:29.760
take more of the predatory actor route, you you can bypass that fundamental problem pretty

01:30:29.760 --> 01:30:29.920
easily.

01:30:30.240 --> 01:30:30.640
That's interesting.

01:30:30.720 --> 01:30:33.280
Yeah, so let's let's unpack that a bit, uh, because that's a really interesting thought

01:30:33.280 --> 01:30:34.320
that hadn't occurred to me.

01:30:34.560 --> 01:30:40.320
So there is a collective action problem if if the goal is to benefit the entire group, and

01:30:40.320 --> 01:30:44.240
that each individual has an interest of getting the benefits of the collective action

01:30:44.240 --> 01:30:46.080
without incurring the costs themselves.

01:30:46.160 --> 01:30:47.920
So you have this free rider problem.

01:30:48.160 --> 01:30:53.330
Um So if the if the goal is to benefit the group, uh it's hard to create the kind of

01:30:53.330 --> 01:30:57.010
selective incentives to mobilize the group toward the collective action.

01:30:57.170 --> 01:31:01.650
And insofar as any individual is willing to make a huge sacrifice for the benefit of the

01:31:01.650 --> 01:31:06.370
group, like say committing suicide, um, that's really puzzling to explain.

01:31:06.610 --> 01:31:11.880
Um on the other hand, if it is predatory and um there

01:31:12.440 --> 01:31:17.880
and each individual gets a direct benefit uh from the costs inflicted on the

01:31:17.880 --> 01:31:23.800
enemy, then it's no longer so much of a collective action problem uh because any

01:31:23.800 --> 01:31:29.480
amount of destruction on the enemy uh uh is perceived as a benefit to everyone in the group

01:31:29.480 --> 01:31:29.960
automatically.

01:31:30.040 --> 01:31:35.000
So it's not really so much of a sacrifice at all if if you're getting this immediate payoff

01:31:35.000 --> 01:31:40.550
of of you Yeah, absolutely.

01:31:40.710 --> 01:31:44.310
And and again going back to the kind of the mismatch idea, that might be playing a role

01:31:44.310 --> 01:31:47.670
here as well, is what are the cues that are kind of calibrating these different systems.

01:31:47.910 --> 01:31:50.470
But also, David, I would say that or Dave, sorry.

01:31:50.790 --> 01:31:56.780
I would say that uh I uh I think I I start, you know how to

01:31:56.860 --> 01:31:57.180
say this.

01:31:57.340 --> 01:32:01.420
I think we've spliced things in such a way because we didn't have a functional perspective

01:32:01.420 --> 01:32:02.220
for so long.

01:32:02.780 --> 01:32:07.580
That now when I'm when I'm starting to look, I I think actually I'm getting ready like for

01:32:07.580 --> 01:32:12.540
the next papers, getting more away even from the concept of envy because it confuses the

01:32:12.540 --> 01:32:13.420
heck out of everyone.

01:32:13.500 --> 01:32:17.180
Uh, because people, A, come to it with kind of their own preconceived notion of what is

01:32:17.180 --> 01:32:17.740
envy.

01:32:17.900 --> 01:32:22.370
Um, B, uh, they come to it with like, oh, I've experienced NBV before.

01:32:22.450 --> 01:32:26.530
There's no way that, you know, my desire for this something that someone else has could

01:32:26.530 --> 01:32:27.490
drive me to do this.

01:32:27.970 --> 01:32:32.450
Um, there's also just like we're not sure where the boundaries of that system are, and it's

01:32:32.450 --> 01:32:33.730
very, very confusing.

01:32:33.890 --> 01:32:39.890
Um and what I'm seeing more and more in my mind is kind of like in the virtual reality

01:32:39.890 --> 01:32:43.170
system that is my mind, is like this cost benefit landscape.

01:32:43.250 --> 01:32:43.330
Yeah.

01:32:43.490 --> 01:32:47.800
And those individual actors in that cost benefit landscape, and what are the systems that

01:32:47.800 --> 01:32:51.320
are detecting and what are the cues that they're using to detect when those costs and

01:32:51.320 --> 01:32:53.080
benefits are shifting in such a way.

01:32:53.320 --> 01:32:53.560
Right.

01:32:54.440 --> 01:32:58.040
This isn't really addressing your question because like I don't have a good answer yet.

01:32:58.360 --> 01:32:58.520
Yeah.

01:32:58.680 --> 01:33:00.520
Well do you guys have any any ideas there?

01:33:00.760 --> 01:33:02.600
Well even like I think Aaron Blackwell had a paper.

01:33:02.680 --> 01:33:07.800
I don't know if it's out or whatever, but like even like suicide bombers, you know, the the

01:33:07.880 --> 01:33:13.690
the cost of them doing that clearly, like the entities that want them

01:33:13.690 --> 01:33:18.890
to do that, there's all kinds of social structures of like your family will be financially

01:33:18.890 --> 01:33:19.610
better off.

01:33:19.770 --> 01:33:23.690
And if you like look at the data, like it's clearly that there's a manipulation of the cost

01:33:23.770 --> 01:33:29.770
benefit landscape even for um something as sort of uh crazy

01:33:29.770 --> 01:33:34.650
and irrational as suicide bombing, the to even, you know, because the person is still at

01:33:34.650 --> 01:33:38.250
the end of the day, it's like, you know, I'm I'm incurring the cost, and the person next to

01:33:38.250 --> 01:33:38.970
me is not.

01:33:39.130 --> 01:33:44.880
And so there's all kinds of um things around trying to get around that

01:33:44.880 --> 01:33:48.800
issue of the evolved psychology sort of saying, wait a minute, what am I doing?

01:33:48.960 --> 01:33:49.840
Don't do this.

01:33:50.080 --> 01:33:55.120
And in there's all of this institutional structure to push people towards.

01:33:55.280 --> 01:34:00.880
So it's in Aaron's data, Aaron Blackwell's data was, you know, people with a lot of family.

01:34:01.040 --> 01:34:06.370
Um, so there's lots of siblings, they're uh really, it's it's the difference between sort

01:34:06.370 --> 01:34:10.850
of the family being taken care of and not uh the financial support if they do it.

01:34:11.010 --> 01:34:16.530
Um so you know you can really see how there just there's a lot of social structure sorting

01:34:16.690 --> 01:34:20.770
throwing as many benefits to that individual as possible.

01:34:21.010 --> 01:34:23.970
And even then, most many don't, right?

01:34:24.130 --> 01:34:30.130
And even then, there's even just things of like uh making it so the handler

01:34:30.130 --> 01:34:35.200
of the person has more control than the person themselves over like actually getting them

01:34:35.200 --> 01:34:40.480
to do that because it's really hard to get a human being to like try to kill themselves,

01:34:40.560 --> 01:34:44.720
and especially when there's ecologically valid, like evolutionarily recurrent cues in that.

01:34:44.800 --> 01:34:44.960
Yeah.

01:34:45.360 --> 01:34:49.520
I think I think this is a fundamental problem too that comes along with this is that we can

01:34:49.520 --> 01:34:54.240
look across like a conflict setting and we see all these people engaging in violence and

01:34:54.240 --> 01:34:55.920
behaving very similarly.

01:34:56.000 --> 01:34:59.120
Like this gets back to your point about how do we distinguish between bargaining and

01:34:59.120 --> 01:35:00.720
predatory aggression and all these things.

01:35:00.880 --> 01:35:05.310
And the one circumstance, you know, this person might be doing it because they uh are

01:35:05.470 --> 01:35:10.030
trying to protect their family, um, whereas the other one is doing it because in the end he

01:35:10.030 --> 01:35:11.870
knows that he'll get a better payoff.

01:35:12.030 --> 01:35:16.190
And oftentimes, like in ethnic violence, what you see very definitively, it's like it's

01:35:16.190 --> 01:35:17.310
actually a very small proportion.

01:35:17.390 --> 01:35:21.470
I think in uh in the new paper I have coming out, it's like I I think looking back at that

01:35:21.470 --> 01:35:25.710
data, it's about 16% of the adult male population, then just we're right around there.

01:35:25.950 --> 01:35:30.360
That is the first active starters in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

01:35:30.760 --> 01:35:34.600
Um that and and they have a very particular profile.

01:35:34.680 --> 01:35:39.000
They're generally young, kind of the age of radicalized actors in in domestic settings.

01:35:39.160 --> 01:35:40.440
Um they have a lot to gain.

01:35:40.600 --> 01:35:43.320
They have very low social connections with the community.

01:35:43.480 --> 01:35:47.880
Um and and yeah, so you see like the cost benefit is different for those actors.

01:35:47.960 --> 01:35:53.030
So if you look across the conflict, and all you see is everyone engaging in violence.

01:35:53.110 --> 01:35:56.150
How do you parse the motivational systems of those different individuals?

01:35:56.310 --> 01:36:00.070
And how can you ever address how to prevent the violence if you're just kind of saying, oh,

01:36:00.150 --> 01:36:02.230
that clearly like this is all the same?

01:36:02.390 --> 01:36:08.230
Um, and we have that even within the uh more localized setting like terrorism in a domestic

01:36:08.390 --> 01:36:13.270
uh setting, where again, like those actors that are part of terrorist organizations, and

01:36:13.270 --> 01:36:15.990
we're starting to get uh better better uh data here.

01:36:16.150 --> 01:36:19.760
Um, and some folks in the Netherlands are doing really good work here to look at what's the

01:36:19.760 --> 01:36:24.400
difference between those that are engaged in terrorist organizations that commit violence

01:36:24.400 --> 01:36:25.920
versus those that don't.

01:36:26.560 --> 01:36:31.920
And so I think we're starting with the EP perspective is really, really important because

01:36:31.920 --> 01:36:36.960
we're starting, then we can start to get to the level of granularity that we need where

01:36:36.960 --> 01:36:40.960
it's like, why are these different actors acting this way?

01:36:41.120 --> 01:36:43.710
And they might be quite radically different.

01:36:43.870 --> 01:36:49.230
And then, you know, into this, I I I um I'm still, you know, I love uh Nancy

01:36:49.230 --> 01:36:51.870
Cartwright's work on philosophy of science.

01:36:51.950 --> 01:36:54.030
And she talks a lot about inus conditions.

01:36:54.110 --> 01:36:59.550
I don't know if you all have ever um, but um essentially I'll I won't try to to repeat it,

01:36:59.630 --> 01:37:04.990
but it's it's a great example of of conditions of causality where, for instance, you can

01:37:04.990 --> 01:37:09.550
have a condition, but unless it has some other supporting thing, it will never happen.

01:37:09.720 --> 01:37:14.600
Um, and so it's trying to bring complexity and the complex systems idea back into causality

01:37:14.600 --> 01:37:14.760
here.

01:37:14.840 --> 01:37:18.360
So you might have someone that's radicalized to the point of to violence, but there's

01:37:18.360 --> 01:37:22.200
something just the opportunity is not there, or there's some missing piece.

01:37:22.360 --> 01:37:26.680
So again, that's even a comp more complicating factor of how do you parse that psychology?

01:37:26.840 --> 01:37:30.200
Because that person might never act, even though they are true, you know, truly

01:37:30.200 --> 01:37:32.680
radicalized, whatever that might mean in this sense.

01:37:33.030 --> 01:37:33.510
Yeah.

01:37:33.830 --> 01:37:39.590
Um to to kind of uh to uh turn this around, is there

01:37:39.590 --> 01:37:45.350
anything that um kind of universally undoes

01:37:45.350 --> 01:37:45.750
violence?

01:37:45.910 --> 01:37:51.030
Like I know you told me uh anecdotes about, you know, sort of people in some sense or one

01:37:51.030 --> 01:37:56.630
way or another sort of reminding them of of of their humanity um and that occasionally

01:37:56.630 --> 01:37:56.950
works.

01:37:57.190 --> 01:38:02.980
Is that too sort of um glib and trite and you know I think people have this intuitive

01:38:02.980 --> 01:38:07.220
idea right uh to just sort of turn this around from like we're talking about violence is

01:38:07.220 --> 01:38:10.420
there is there at least some hope or like how do you think about that?

01:38:10.580 --> 01:38:14.340
Yeah no I mean I I clearly see it.

01:38:14.500 --> 01:38:19.780
I mean you know a lot of people say um there's this issue of low numbers in

01:38:19.780 --> 01:38:24.390
radicalization where it's like for they're so disproportional.

01:38:24.550 --> 01:38:28.790
And I the number of people that radicalize compared to those that could radicalize but

01:38:28.790 --> 01:38:29.270
don't.

01:38:29.510 --> 01:38:34.870
And I think there you're just you're looking at all of you know, we don't really we live in

01:38:34.950 --> 01:38:38.310
c in in a social world that's very non zero sum.

01:38:38.790 --> 01:38:43.910
And I think that's a really good thing because it helps constrain, you know, violent

01:38:43.910 --> 01:38:44.310
action.

01:38:44.550 --> 01:38:50.380
Um indeed, like um uh you know, the the other work on

01:38:50.380 --> 01:38:55.180
institutionalism and how that can support peace is also another great piece of this that I

01:38:55.180 --> 01:38:56.780
think is really important to consider.

01:38:57.260 --> 01:38:59.180
Um, but dang, there was something else that is.

01:38:59.660 --> 01:39:03.100
Well I was just asking, I'm like even even I mean the anecdote you told me about Croatia,

01:39:03.180 --> 01:39:04.860
like Oh, that's the one I was getting to.

01:39:05.020 --> 01:39:05.420
Yeah, yes.

01:39:06.140 --> 01:39:07.900
So this is the one that still sticks with me.

01:39:07.980 --> 01:39:08.300
Yeah.

01:39:08.460 --> 01:39:11.830
Um among so so many of these things.

01:39:11.990 --> 01:39:17.430
Um but this one uh was was a victim of violence and um

01:39:18.710 --> 01:39:24.630
she was essentially she was with her family, her family was murdered in front of her.

01:39:24.950 --> 01:39:30.950
She was laying on the ground um for uh in a they were trying to flee a

01:39:30.950 --> 01:39:32.550
wars war zone area.

01:39:32.630 --> 01:39:37.190
Uh they didn't quite make it, they were intercepted um by the by military.

01:39:37.590 --> 01:39:42.780
And um she was laying on the ground and one of the

01:39:43.900 --> 01:39:47.340
she was laying there for hours and and she thought they were gonna leave her for dead.

01:39:47.420 --> 01:39:52.140
And one of the the soldiers came over and said to her, How do you wanna die?

01:39:52.380 --> 01:39:56.780
And he he had a bunch of knives and he was like, Do you want to die by and she looked at

01:39:56.780 --> 01:40:02.140
him and she said, Well, I hope that your mother has the same option or something along

01:40:02.140 --> 01:40:02.860
those lines.

01:40:03.100 --> 01:40:05.740
And he he kind of dropped and and left.

01:40:05.900 --> 01:40:10.630
And that's how eventually they left her behind and she was able to get help and and get out

01:40:10.630 --> 01:40:10.790
of there.

01:40:11.110 --> 01:40:14.230
And she told you this, like, this is a person you met, told you this story.

01:40:14.710 --> 01:40:14.950
Yes.

01:40:15.590 --> 01:40:19.590
And and and so so w what's happening there?

01:40:19.750 --> 01:40:25.110
That's a really fascinating uh there's something really uh quite profound that's

01:40:25.110 --> 01:40:26.150
happening there.

01:40:26.310 --> 01:40:31.910
Um as far as you know, uh kind of appealing to the better better angels of uh of our

01:40:31.910 --> 01:40:32.550
nature.

01:40:32.790 --> 01:40:38.700
Um, but I think there's so many things that we don't know yet as far as how

01:40:38.700 --> 01:40:41.340
can we short circuit uh violent actors?

01:40:41.420 --> 01:40:47.180
Like how how can we think in more um more intuitive ways, better

01:40:47.180 --> 01:40:52.220
ways of of of doing so it with radicalization stuff, for instance, if it is envy, one of

01:40:52.220 --> 01:40:56.860
the things that the envy system likes to do is put off its um it put its blame on other

01:40:56.860 --> 01:40:57.100
people.

01:40:57.310 --> 01:41:01.470
And what you see is in that literature, the folks that have been dealing with radicalized

01:41:01.710 --> 01:41:07.070
individuals trying to get them to de-radicalize, is uh one of the core focuses is cognitive

01:41:07.070 --> 01:41:12.430
behavioral therapy, which is getting the person to take responsibility for their position

01:41:12.430 --> 01:41:13.710
in the social world and that.

01:41:13.870 --> 01:41:19.060
So it's it's like disrupting the natural tendency of those systems to

01:41:19.060 --> 01:41:23.540
operate, it might be as simple as that in order to revert.

01:41:23.780 --> 01:41:26.820
So it's not about, you know, it's not about education, it's not about these other things,

01:41:26.900 --> 01:41:32.820
but really having actual effects on on these cognitive systems that

01:41:32.820 --> 01:41:37.060
are, you know, raising the costs, you know, lowering the benefits, all these different

01:41:37.060 --> 01:41:41.780
things that I think are, you know, have really profound effects, and sometimes for very low

01:41:41.780 --> 01:41:42.100
cost.

01:41:42.340 --> 01:41:46.420
So um so yeah, I think that that that's a really optimistic uh thing.

01:41:46.850 --> 01:41:51.250
That that particular event, I mean, you've you I mean uh since you told me that I've

01:41:51.250 --> 01:41:53.410
thought about it often and you clearly do too.

01:41:53.730 --> 01:41:55.970
Is that what is your take on what happened there?

01:41:56.130 --> 01:42:00.290
Is it that the person it it sort of shifted them out of group-based thinking and I'm just

01:42:00.290 --> 01:42:04.850
like, I am it just made it, I'm an individual doing this thing to this person.

01:42:05.250 --> 01:42:06.930
Is that yeah?

01:42:07.090 --> 01:42:10.130
I mean, I I I you know I thought about it a lot.

01:42:10.210 --> 01:42:14.300
Yeah, and it's hard to say exactly, but it's something along those lines.

01:42:14.460 --> 01:42:19.980
It's something it's something about reorienting, um kind of

01:42:19.980 --> 01:42:21.420
disrupting the play.

01:42:21.900 --> 01:42:25.420
Play for for technical term.

01:42:25.500 --> 01:42:26.300
No, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:42:26.700 --> 01:42:30.860
Yeah, uh disrupting the narrative or the the the script that's being run.

01:42:31.100 --> 01:42:31.260
Yeah.

01:42:31.580 --> 01:42:36.690
Um and you know, and a lot of these things, the one thing that a lot of the uh very rarely

01:42:36.690 --> 01:42:39.090
saw it spoken about in the text.

01:42:39.330 --> 01:42:41.810
Most of these people that are doing these things are drunk.

01:42:41.970 --> 01:42:47.890
Um most of them are so it takes a lot uh for a lot of these people to do these

01:42:47.890 --> 01:42:49.170
really violent things.

01:42:49.410 --> 01:42:53.570
Um and so one of the things I kept hearing over and over is every time these this group of

01:42:53.570 --> 01:42:57.730
guys came around, they you know, they would get drunk first, and then they would do these

01:42:57.730 --> 01:42:59.010
really horrible things.

01:42:59.250 --> 01:43:05.000
Um so yeah, so I think even in the even in that circumstance, there's still like there's

01:43:05.000 --> 01:43:09.720
this, you know, the different parts of our cognition that if you can find a way to appeal

01:43:09.720 --> 01:43:15.640
to those, um you know, uh I'm I'm thinking of other examples from areas

01:43:15.720 --> 01:43:18.040
um, but they're all really in poor taste.

01:43:18.200 --> 01:43:23.240
But I think like, you know, uh, you know, if if you're it's the same idea like if you've

01:43:23.240 --> 01:43:29.210
you know if uh you you're having sex and and your family walks in, suddenly that system

01:43:29.210 --> 01:43:30.890
is is interrupted very quickly.

01:43:31.130 --> 01:43:31.290
Right.

01:43:31.370 --> 01:43:33.210
Um, and this other I mean that's a very poor.

01:43:33.610 --> 01:43:36.810
Yeah, no, but it's a it's a good no, no, no, but no, but it's a very, it's very clear

01:43:36.810 --> 01:43:37.530
example, right?

01:43:37.610 --> 01:43:42.810
Of just and we and David and I talked about this in a previous episode of there's sometimes

01:43:42.810 --> 01:43:48.170
uh an uh uh an attempt to sort of essentialize the inevitability of any outcome.

01:43:48.410 --> 01:43:52.780
This is often, you know, just this is what came up in the context of sort of straw man

01:43:52.940 --> 01:43:56.620
arguments against an evolutionary approach, where it's sort of it justifies like, you know,

01:43:56.940 --> 01:43:58.620
infidelity in men or something, right?

01:43:58.780 --> 01:44:03.340
And the idea, like what we talked about, is, you know, even if sexual variety is more about

01:44:03.340 --> 01:44:07.100
positively valued in a male phenotype, there's other adaptations that play too.

01:44:07.260 --> 01:44:10.060
And the thing that you just talked about is another example of that, right?

01:44:10.140 --> 01:44:15.900
That there's there are other adaptations guiding other kinds of motivations and this

01:44:15.900 --> 01:44:21.370
anecdote with this, you know, this this extremely I don't even know how to describe it.

01:44:21.450 --> 01:44:25.210
I think it's stupid to try, I mean, to or to to to provide an adjective to it.

01:44:25.370 --> 01:44:31.370
This anecdote um it it it shows the power of uh there are

01:44:31.370 --> 01:44:37.130
multiple adaptations in this soldier, and she engaged another one and it changed what he

01:44:37.130 --> 01:44:37.290
did.

01:44:37.450 --> 01:44:37.770
Yeah.

01:44:38.170 --> 01:44:38.490
Yeah.

01:44:38.650 --> 01:44:38.890
Yeah.

01:44:39.060 --> 01:44:42.660
And and you know, and we always think yeah, we always think it takes so much.

01:44:42.900 --> 01:44:48.580
But maybe if we do uh maybe if we can figure this out more, then we can we can find these

01:44:48.580 --> 01:44:53.300
lower cost uh solutions to to these really grand problems that we know that we face with

01:44:53.300 --> 01:44:55.060
violence and and global conflict.

01:44:55.380 --> 01:44:55.620
Yeah.

01:44:55.860 --> 01:45:01.620
Um one question we often ask guests is is I think we've done it for everyone, is uh is

01:45:01.620 --> 01:45:03.620
there something we should have asked you?

01:45:05.810 --> 01:45:11.650
and then there's and I really and then it gets people uh uh um I I yeah people are

01:45:11.810 --> 01:45:17.490
s don't know what to say and so I I usually fill the the time for a moment but David and I

01:45:17.490 --> 01:45:18.930
need to work on our banter too.

01:45:19.010 --> 01:45:22.610
Um we haven't yet this is not a good episode well also too when you're talking about

01:45:22.610 --> 01:45:27.250
violence and conflict it's hard to have like silly banter on the side yeah yeah yeah um I

01:45:27.250 --> 01:45:31.640
actually I face this a lot with presentations I give because back in the day when I was

01:45:31.640 --> 01:45:36.360
working on morality and that it you know, you can put silly cartoons and you can put images

01:45:36.360 --> 01:45:36.760
and things.

01:45:36.840 --> 01:45:37.000
Right.

01:45:37.160 --> 01:45:39.160
And now it just feels, you know, it feels so wrong.

01:45:39.320 --> 01:45:43.480
And to so, you know, t to to make light of it that you try to steer completely away from

01:45:43.480 --> 01:45:43.640
it.

01:45:43.720 --> 01:45:48.280
But then you know those meetings where you're only like a conflict research meeting is can

01:45:48.280 --> 01:45:49.000
be very dark.

01:45:49.080 --> 01:45:49.720
Uh yeah.

01:45:49.960 --> 01:45:53.960
But I would uh I think the only, you know, the only other thing that the other area of my

01:45:53.960 --> 01:45:58.280
research that I've been working on is really like the more the policy stuff.

01:45:58.520 --> 01:46:03.930
Um, you know, which which uh we've had a lot of luck working with uh international

01:46:03.930 --> 01:46:04.570
lawyers.

01:46:04.730 --> 01:46:08.650
Uh we've dabbled a bit on this with you know the ICRC and the UN.

01:46:08.890 --> 01:46:13.770
And um, but I think that there's there's some really interesting stuff there that that is

01:46:14.090 --> 01:46:18.010
um that social scientists are not really yet involved with.

01:46:18.170 --> 01:46:23.640
Like, so for instance, um there's a lot of social scientists that are studying how

01:46:24.600 --> 01:46:28.040
courtroom biases appear and what those look like.

01:46:28.360 --> 01:46:33.480
So there's this whole literature, like which is a legal empirical literature that's based

01:46:33.480 --> 01:46:34.520
out of Cornell.

01:46:35.000 --> 01:46:40.440
However, there's not really social scientists looking at theorizing and

01:46:40.440 --> 01:46:46.440
applying that to or running experiments that would be applicable

01:46:46.440 --> 01:46:50.600
to legal issues outside of these very kind of constrained areas.

01:46:50.760 --> 01:46:55.810
So I think that there's like so much ripe fruit there for social scientists to explore.

01:46:55.890 --> 01:47:00.690
And a lot of lawyers that are very, very keen, uh, particularly a lot of them come from a

01:47:00.690 --> 01:47:06.210
background in philosophy or social science, uh, or they they they many of the ones that

01:47:06.210 --> 01:47:10.690
I've met love love learning and love talking about the social sciences.

01:47:10.770 --> 01:47:16.530
So I think for social scientists um and in policy as well, um, we were I was just talking

01:47:16.530 --> 01:47:22.280
with some colleagues um up at uh in Liverpool about this disconnect

01:47:22.360 --> 01:47:27.880
also between what policymakers on that side, what they want, and what social scientists

01:47:27.880 --> 01:47:28.360
provide.

01:47:28.520 --> 01:47:31.640
And we're kind of we're we're both working in the dark.

01:47:31.800 --> 01:47:35.960
So we do as social scientists, we research what we're passionate about oftentimes, and then

01:47:35.960 --> 01:47:39.800
sometimes what our grant money comes from, which we may have differing levels of passion

01:47:39.800 --> 01:47:40.120
about.

01:47:40.520 --> 01:47:46.510
But on the policy side, a lot of times they have um you know questions that they want

01:47:46.510 --> 01:47:49.150
answered, which we're kind of working in two different realms.

01:47:49.230 --> 01:47:53.550
And besides like the occasional thing, like uh the EU might put up funding for certain

01:47:53.550 --> 01:47:55.150
projects that are of policy relevance.

01:47:55.310 --> 01:48:00.910
But besides that, there's very little connection between um practitioners, policymakers,

01:48:01.070 --> 01:48:02.670
lawyers, and the social sciences.

01:48:02.830 --> 01:48:08.240
And so I think um, you know, we we just started talking recently about how can we how can

01:48:08.240 --> 01:48:11.840
we start thinking about solutions where it's like hey we really need answers in this

01:48:11.840 --> 01:48:15.760
particular question or this thing that we're really dealing with um so that social

01:48:15.760 --> 01:48:21.520
scientists can be more um that the relevance of the research is is more aligned with what's

01:48:21.600 --> 01:48:22.960
what you know what's needed out there.

01:48:23.280 --> 01:48:28.880
So is what you're saying that the this the connection between basic research

01:48:29.370 --> 01:48:34.730
and the applied part, where there are people literally doing things like sentencing people

01:48:34.730 --> 01:48:39.450
to death, making decisions about life and death, or just legal policy in general, that has

01:48:39.450 --> 01:48:40.570
huge impacts.

01:48:40.890 --> 01:48:46.330
The people who are doing the practical work are ready and willing and able and want

01:48:46.650 --> 01:48:52.330
scientific input, but there's not currently enough dialogue or connection

01:48:52.330 --> 01:48:55.530
between scientists and these applied people.

01:48:55.930 --> 01:49:01.620
And therefore, even the questions that scientists are asking are not informed

01:49:01.860 --> 01:49:05.700
by that there's this need, for example.

01:49:05.860 --> 01:49:09.220
Um, and maybe also is that a fair characterization?

01:49:09.780 --> 01:49:13.940
Yeah, I mean I just I just saw a colleague in the Netherlands the other day, and he said it

01:49:13.940 --> 01:49:19.150
perfectly when he he works a lot with policymakers, and he said, uh, you know, I always

01:49:19.150 --> 01:49:24.350
feel a bit half-hearted when I end my article and I try to draw policy conclusions from it.

01:49:24.590 --> 01:49:29.630
Because if unless you're doing the research with the policy goal in mind, uh, then you're

01:49:29.630 --> 01:49:32.830
just kind of saying, oh, this could apply in this way or that way.

01:49:32.990 --> 01:49:36.750
Uh so so yeah, so the the the alignment doesn't really exist.

01:49:36.830 --> 01:49:38.910
And it's a very p p peculiar thing.

01:49:39.070 --> 01:49:42.750
I mean, granted, I don't want to give up all my freedom on research, but it's it's a

01:49:42.750 --> 01:49:47.060
peculiar thing that there isn't much you know more of an alignment when most social

01:49:47.140 --> 01:49:48.820
scientists are working for the public good.

01:49:48.980 --> 01:49:54.580
And so so I think that there's something to be hopefully in the future to be uh

01:49:54.820 --> 01:49:55.620
improved there.

01:49:56.100 --> 01:49:57.060
Yeah, that that's right.

01:49:57.140 --> 01:50:03.140
And and even I mean I I have met behavioral scientists who

01:50:03.140 --> 01:50:05.860
are basically like, I don't know what to study.

01:50:06.260 --> 01:50:06.500
Yeah.

01:50:06.660 --> 01:50:06.820
Yeah.

01:50:07.060 --> 01:50:07.700
No, that's true.

01:50:07.940 --> 01:50:13.670
So I mean really it's it's really a tragedy in that respect of you've got really people

01:50:13.670 --> 01:50:19.430
who really are doing real things that need answers to questions and they're not coordinated

01:50:19.430 --> 01:50:23.030
or hooked up to people who have the means to answer those questions.

01:50:23.350 --> 01:50:27.910
Um, and there's no there's nobody sort of like with the job.

01:50:27.990 --> 01:50:29.670
It's like there's like a matchmaking problem.

01:50:29.830 --> 01:50:35.640
We need like something like a matchmaking service that is hooking up applied and

01:50:35.640 --> 01:50:40.520
basically we need a we need a tinder where you just say exactly swiping science tinder

01:50:41.800 --> 01:50:46.920
uh um but but we come full circle to coordination issues and miscoordination in this regard

01:50:48.440 --> 01:50:54.200
it's a queens exactly yes exactly um uh Michael where

01:50:54.200 --> 01:50:57.210
can people find you right now Oh gosh.

01:50:57.370 --> 01:51:02.650
Well, um I just started uh recently having my own website, so michaelmontgrief.com.

01:51:02.730 --> 01:51:07.290
Uh so that links to all my other pages and profiles and that it's under construction, but

01:51:07.290 --> 01:51:08.730
hopefully it will be improving.

01:51:08.970 --> 01:51:10.970
Um yeah, so that's probably the best way at this point.

01:51:11.370 --> 01:51:11.770
Okay, great.

01:51:11.930 --> 01:51:16.970
And uh we don't usually do plugs on this, but I will say, like, if you are if what Michael

01:51:16.970 --> 01:51:22.440
is saying uh whenever we post this publicly, um if if this interest this

01:51:22.440 --> 01:51:27.480
research seems interesting or important to you, please also reach out to Michael if you're

01:51:27.480 --> 01:51:30.280
interested in supporting this research.

01:51:30.840 --> 01:51:36.120
Because like anything else, that doesn't fit squarely in a

01:51:36.120 --> 01:51:38.280
pre-existing institutional structure.

01:51:38.440 --> 01:51:44.250
I mean, the exact problem you're just described is part of uh the

01:51:44.250 --> 01:51:49.850
reason why this kind of work doesn't exist is because there's not uh you know support

01:51:50.170 --> 01:51:51.290
for this kind of work.

01:51:51.450 --> 01:51:56.170
And so if anybody who's listening thinks it's important or useful or knows somebody who can

01:51:56.170 --> 01:51:58.570
support it, um please reach out to Michael directly.

01:51:58.890 --> 01:51:59.130
Thank you.

01:51:59.210 --> 01:52:00.090
I will second that.

01:52:00.250 --> 01:52:00.570
Yeah.

01:52:01.770 --> 01:52:03.770
Um thank you so much for having me.

01:52:04.090 --> 01:52:08.650
Yeah, no, it was a pleasure um and uh really appreciate you doing this work.

01:52:08.810 --> 01:52:14.220
And I hope more um more people join you um doing this

01:52:14.220 --> 01:52:18.540
bridging sort of social science and policy and law.

01:52:18.620 --> 01:52:20.540
Um and we're actually gonna have some folks on.

01:52:20.700 --> 01:52:25.740
I think one of our next guests will be Deb Lieberman, who is I love one of the other um

01:52:26.060 --> 01:52:26.380
people.

01:52:26.540 --> 01:52:30.060
I mean, honestly of the two, I I don't know, you and Deb, can you think of anyone else

01:52:30.060 --> 01:52:31.740
who's sort of bridging EP and law?

01:52:31.820 --> 01:52:33.500
I mean, I guess there's a few other folks.

01:52:33.890 --> 01:52:35.650
Yeah, I think I think yeah, definitely.

01:52:35.730 --> 01:52:37.250
I think that there's a handful of other things.

01:52:37.490 --> 01:52:38.130
Yeah, maybe we should have to do that.

01:52:38.370 --> 01:52:38.850
Of course, Keila.

01:52:39.090 --> 01:52:39.490
Yeah, yeah.

01:52:39.650 --> 01:52:39.890
Yeah.

01:52:40.770 --> 01:52:42.050
Jamie's best friend.

01:52:42.130 --> 01:52:47.730
Um but Michael, you know, uh yeah, thank you so much.

01:52:47.810 --> 01:52:53.410
Um it was it was great to have you and uh wish you all the best luck for this um

01:52:53.730 --> 01:52:54.930
really important work.

01:52:55.240 --> 01:52:55.560
Thank you.

01:52:55.720 --> 01:52:56.360
Thank you so much.

01:53:00.920 --> 01:53:01.400
All right.

01:53:01.640 --> 01:53:04.600
David, we have completed another episode.

01:53:05.160 --> 01:53:06.040
Yes, we did.

01:53:06.120 --> 01:53:07.880
Uh it was a a really good one.

01:53:07.960 --> 01:53:11.400
Uh and if you agree that it was a good one, um, don't be shy about it.

01:53:11.560 --> 01:53:16.760
Tell people on social media, tell a friend, leave us a kind review, support us on Patreon.

01:53:17.430 --> 01:53:18.550
Um yeah.

01:53:18.870 --> 01:53:24.470
Yeah, and we uh we really appreciate people uh you know talking about us on social media.

01:53:24.710 --> 01:53:29.910
And uh please, you know, if we're if you like what we're doing, please tell a friend um

01:53:29.990 --> 01:53:34.230
who's somebody who might be interested or somebody who might hate evolutionary psychology.

01:53:34.390 --> 01:53:38.310
Um we'd love to have people listening who might be critics and we'd love to hear from

01:53:38.310 --> 01:53:39.750
people and what they think.

01:53:40.230 --> 01:53:40.950
Absolutely.

01:53:41.140 --> 01:53:42.100
We'll see you next week.

01:53:42.260 --> 01:53:42.740
Sounds good.

01:53:42.820 --> 01:53:44.180
See you next week, David.