Politics with Antoine Marie
2026-09-15 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. I'm David Pinsov. I am David Dave Petrozzewski. Uh, and this is actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. All right, David, I have two words for you. Jury duty. Yes, I I served on a trial, and because the trial's over, I can actually talk about it. It was a really interesting experience. Uh I served on a trial uh where the charge was assault with a deadly weapon. Yikes. Yeah. Uh in addition to uh criminal threats. So yeah, it was it was kind of intense, kind of stressful, honestly. And I actually I volunteered to be the foreman uh stupidly because it ended up just stressing me out a lot. But yeah. Well, thank you for your service.

Um one of the reasons to bring it up. Um I don't think this is an all is well ends well situation for the accused or you, but uh but the reason to bring it up, I mean you can let us know uh if it if it ended well. I don't know what that would mean in this context. But um but in any case, the reason we're bringing it up is because we were gonna have some more episodes and recordings this summer. But jury duty got in the way. It did, yes. It resulted in a lot of scheduling snafus. Uh which led to me interviewing Antoine Marie uh by myself, actually, because I I kept canceling our our podcast because of jury duty and it kept the trial kept going on for longer than I expected. And then Dave assumed that I was still on jury duty.

And so it just things got kind of confused. And so uh that's very kind. I think it was my scheduling mix up, but uh but yeah, I assumed you were like in on jury duty uh for perpetuity essentially. So um but on that so um so on that note, um sh let's talk about the Antoine episode that I was not there for. Yeah. So this was a really fun conversation about uh the evolutionary psychology and sociology of politics, you know, both studying politics and the politics of studying politics. Uh it's you know, politics all the way down. Like how do you um approach this topic with a clear head? Um how do you interface with people who might not share your perspective? Um, what what it even means to believe, say, in an in a political ideology.

Is it the same kind of belief as you know beliefs about a coffee mug being on the table or having two hands? And so we talk a lot about this distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs. four or five occasions thinking, oh, I'd like to say something, which as I was just saying before we started recording means I should be a co-host of a podcast. So that's good. Um, but I want to poke on here in the preface. You guys talked about um if you actually believe something, you would behave differently. Yeah. Uh and I generally agree with that, but I also would not underestimate how much people don't know what to do, even when they think something is true. So, like if I knew an asteroid was going to like hit the earth in like two years,

I'm not sure how differently people would behave. Maybe they would, but I want to just put that out there as a devil's advocate for even if you actually believe something that's pretty radical, uh, or you would think people would behave differently. I think sometimes people behave weirdly because they, unless they are trained to know what to do, contingent on weird situations, they sort of act normally to a surprising degree. Anyway, that's my two cents. Yeah. Use useful caveat. Yeah. It's you know, it it continues to be an interesting and controversial topic to what extent we quote unquote truly believe what we think we believe. I I tend to um be sympathetic with the side that actually a lot of what we think we

believe, we actually don't believe deep down in the sense of, you know, I have two hands, there's a coffee cup on the table. I think that a lot of our beliefs um serve social signaling functions and aren't sort of operating the machinery of our bodies and helping us navigate space and time. Um but that you know that's um a controversial position, and and there's still a lot of uncertainty, and we're still studying um how this belief thing works. So if you're interested in that debate, um this is a really fun and fascinating conversation on politics, belief, and political belief. Sounds good. And I'll just edit myself in on occasion. No, I'm kidding. I won't do that. And I'm not sure I believe even what I said earlier, but uh look forward to uh um uh uh

enjoy this episode with uh David and Antoine and not myself, and I hope you don't enjoy it too much for that reason. Yeah. Please feel very dissatisfied and make sure you really miss Dave. It was, it was, I was honestly a David. I was like, oh man, he doesn't need me. This was great. David's pulling it off. So I'm just going to do that. Oh no. The whole time I was like, oh, where's Dave when I need him? Dave would have come in with the perfect response here. Here I am running my mouth. Yes. Okay, good. Well, uh, here is uh David and Antoine, and we'll see you either next week or or in a couple weeks. and just blame jury duty as we get back on our feet. Blame our trial by jury system. Exactly.

Okay, here we go. Antoine, you are a scholar of politics, um specializing in um evolutionary approaches toward politics, coalitions, ideologies. We've had a lot of guests on the podcast on topics related to politics. So belief, misinformation. We had that episode with Dan Williams. We've talked we've dabbled in, you know, disgust, coalitions, morality, areas around this topic, but we haven't right confront we haven't confronted it head on. Um and so um I'm curious, you know, as as a scholar of politics, um if if there's something that you think is Like what what do you think is is is one of the most elementary mistakes that people make when approaching this topic? I because it's it's an incredibly difficult topic to approach just because you know all of

us are political animals. We all have opinions and and and stakes and various issue issues. So I'd imagine it's it's difficult to get your head on straight with this topic. So what do you see as the most as like the biggest pitfalls and the biggest things to avoid when approaching politics scientifically? Yeah. Thanks a lot, Dave, for the uh for the invite. To that big question, I think I would say that um the main problem is like cognitive blindness. And that's a problem that people you know have throughout the social sciences. They don't pay enough attention to how the mind works. They don't have enough interest in the computational steps that bring us um uh to be able to form you know concepts about how we form groups and mass modern societies and mass

politics and how how democracy works or any area of human behavior, actually. Most people who study politics are in political science departments, sociology departments, communication science departments, and they they they don't have a lot of interest in psychology and cognitive science. They like to say that we are social animals and that uh our behavior is uh is shaped by a whole lot of um socialization forces, etc. but they really kind of like look under the hood or investigate how all this is supposed to be implemented at the computational level of the individual mind. So I think if anything, that could be, I hope, one of my contributions. Um, you know, along the lines of the work that you have been doing with the um alignment

theory of ideology, uh, along the lines of uh, you know, of course, um classical social psychological work like Jonathan Haidt on you know the intuitive foundations of ideologies and and more foundations and Sarah, and of course, uh Dan Williams, uh, whom I really hear, and I and I feel like sometimes I agree with everything he says. Um, I think all of us try to take a cognitive dive into uh politics, political behavior, and how the mind represents uh mass politics, In particular, how are evolved minds which evolve by natural selection to live in small groups and engage in competition with other small groups in the savannah of the Pleistocene, how all those how those minds work in mass modern societies, which are massively different in some in terms of

geographical scale, population size, the degree to which we can polarize into sub-identities and you know very uh extensively distributed networks of uh interconnections and um and yeah, political parties, political identities, etc. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Um looking under the hood and understanding how the mind, how the inferences of the mind make possible to be political animals. Interesting. So um you're at the the Center for Political Research in Oscar, yeah, in Paris, yeah. In Paris. Um you know, we've had you know different levels of professional status among all the all of our guests, uh, and different levels of you know uh evolutionarily uh evolutionary integration in terms of people's um departments.

So where do you sit in that spectrum? Are you sort of the lone evolutionary guy in the room or are there uh other people who share your perspective? Um uh w what's it like being in that environment? Yeah, that's a great question. So it it might be useful for your audience to know that in France there are basically two main research centers that do evolutionary stuff. Institut Jean Nico at the Economal Supérieur, that's where Hugo Mercier, Nicolas Beaumont, Dance Berber work or used to work. And AST in Toulouse, that's where you have I don't know what active researchers are working nowadays there, but at least it's also a pretty active research center for evolutionary stuff. So once you have graduated your PhD at Jean-Nico IEST, you need to be placed somewhere

professionally. So you need to kind of like radiate out of those two main research centers. And I guess I'm sort of like trying my luck at Science Po, I would say. I'm not the only person who comes from Institute Jean-Nico who's working there. Melusine Bunfaller is also like a junior assistant professor who was hired there recently at Athens Po. Uh Lou Safra is also a relatively junior assistant professor who was hired there recently, and she also did her PhD at Jean Nico. I think we're pretty much the three main people who are really interested in evolutionary things. I know one guy, Hugo Meyer, who does evolutionary approaches to diplomacy and war, but he's at the SERI, which is an international relations center at Sciences Po.

At CEVIPOF, we're basically just two political psychologists with an evolutionary mindset, Lusafrain and I. You might want to uh interview Lou Safra. I think she could she could make for a good guest. Um at Sevipuff, we we all do we all do like experimental or quantitative approaches to politics for the most part, but only a minority of us really try to take care of focus on the mechanisms of how the mind works. And even fewer of us have an evolutionary understanding. I think most people are sympathetic towards evolutionary approaches when they do experimental stuff. Uh, but very few of us are really kind of like explicit about, you know, linking ancestral section pressures to contemporary behaviors, I I would say.

Interesting. I mean, so it's interesting that you mentioned cognitive blindness as as is one of the pitfalls to approaching um psychology. And and and you brought it up again just now, the sort of getting really concrete and uh precise about how the mind works, about what the mechanisms are, what the information processing structure is like. Do you see this as a problem of instinct blindness, where um it just seems so easy and fluid and natural for us to form political judgments, to f to figure out who's on who's who's on which side of the political spectrum. And these uh instincts just sort of sort of happen so quickly and automatically that we lose sight of how complicated they are and how many um different variables are are

processed by the mind to give us these judgments of who's on which side of the political spectrum and how you know intensely loyal or or or um or moderate they are, for example, or how radicalized they are. It's partly that for sure. It's partly that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um is the other part of it just um a lack of computationalism that uh people might be thinking, you know, sort of loosely about feelings and and beliefs inside of the head, but um the way in which they're approaching is not sufficiently mechanistic and precise. Uh is that is that part of the issue as well? Yeah. Um So, yeah, I guess our fork psychology is not very computational. Yeah. Uh, we probably underestimate the extent to which most of our cognitive processes fulfill

you know evolutionary adaptive functions are pretty specific and that can be identified. Uh, we are not super used to thinking of ourselves as being sophisticated computers that basically you know draw inferences from input information, etc. Yeah. Um in the in the quantitative social sciences, I don't think people are too wedded with the ghost in the machine view of psychology that you know Pinker denounces in a blank slate, etc. I think people are not too dualistic, but they're still a bit too too dualistic in the sense that they might not not fully, you know, uh realize or take into account or assume the fact that basically we're computers. Um I don't think they would defend that there's a soul or whatever, but um but they they're

often a bit uncomforta uncomfortable with reductionism and uh materialistic descriptions of uh thought processes. Uh I think also people tend to maybe make the inference that if you describe thought and political intuitions and political uh reasoning, etc., in terms of inferences, it means you're reductionist and it means that you're denying the social influence of other people or your cultural um setup or your historical epoch or whatever on how you think at the individual level. You know what I mean? People have difficulty recovering a computational understanding of how the mind works and the notion that there's cultural variation and that you know um political cognition is historically situated.

I feel like. Yeah, it's interesting. Because like no one really is bothered by taking a computational approach to like visual perception or like, you know, uh cognition, uh or you know, standard topics in cognitive psychology like problem solving, logical reasoning, you know, stuff like that. It seems very natural and intuitive to take a more computational approach. But it's interesting that when you move into the social side of things, our relationships with people, our loyalties, um, that that that all of a sudden, um, once we move into that area, this computational way of thinking becomes more alien or it doesn't seem like it fits as well uh on that side of things. I have no idea why that is.

Um it probably has something to do with our our our folk psychology that you know we we we have this intuitive set of systems for understanding other people um that we apply in that context and we we've are reluctant to let go of that intuitive psychology. But when we're um focusing on non-social or asocial processes, there's no temptation to bring in our folk psychology and it's easier to just think about the the mechanistic uh workings. The the the hypothesis I would maybe make for this is that uh the more cultural variation you have with the behavior, the more counterintuitive it is for people to understand that it might be relying on basic computational building blocks. You know what I mean?

Yeah. For instance, I feel like Nicolas Bomart has had quite a bit of trouble explaining to anthropologists that fairness might be a module that may have evolved because people have the strong intuition that, oh, there are so many different things to which we apply intuitions of fairness, you know, obligations towards gods, obligations towards other groups, um, and their and their cultures where we don't feel any obligations towards uh gods, for instance. So there's so much cultural variation in how the fairness, costs, and benefits algorithm um operates and relates to. And because people have that sense that there's a lot of cultural variation, they become reluctant to see the diversity of behaviors as being underlined by like some just basic

mathematical functions that might be universal in the human mind. Yeah, for sure. Um so we're talking about the more sort of um intellectual barriers to taking an evolutionary psychological approach to politics, but there are um other barriers that are probably even more formidable. So I w I what I what I see you I see you're you're you in a in a sort of twofold problem. Uh the first problem is is just you know, being in evolutionary psychology at all, which is sort of an inherently controversial discipline. It has it has had a long history of controversy. Um so right off the bat, there's some difficulty there. But in addition to that, um you are studying uh literally the most controversial and heated

topic in existence, um the the topic of controversy itself, uh which is politics. And so you're taking a controversial approach to controversy itself. And I am in trance. And and you aren't the country of Marxism, social constructionism, Bourdiasian sociology, and postmodernism. Yes, I I th throw the the the French cheese on there as well, and we'll have a a lovely uh lovely meal here of controversy. Um yeah, so uh how do you deal with with with that side have you uh encountered any difficulties with that side of things the political nature of your work um both literally in terms of you studying politics and also in a broader sense of of you know being in a politically controversial topic politically controversial framework um

have you experienced any backlash in in in doing this stuff uh and what has that if so what has that backlash looked like there are there are difficulties at all levels, my poor David. Life is hard. No, I mean no, to start with the positive. Um, I think on the whole, if you if you communicate to people that you're of intellectual good faith, if you're a good pedagogue, if you don't interrupt people when you have a heated conversation with them about human behavior or morally charged topics, etc., that space bien. It goes well. Okay. On the whole, if you're a good communicator of your of your knowledge, if you don't come across as a provocator, it goes quite well with the students. It can go well with the more standard social scientists.

It can go well with most people. Also with political activists, you know, anti-racist activists, feminist activists who don't like to be told that there are psychological sex differences, et cetera. On the whole, it works really well if you have the right ethos and and you and you show good faith and you listen to people and you're and you're a good pedagogue. That said, um, and I feel like I've performed decently at those skills, so I've had mostly good experiences. Uh, and my and my students respect me, and they're not like constantly you know raising super woke objections to uh the innatism that I sometimes defend with respect to tribalism or sex differences. And if you manage to kind of like instill a little bit of a sense of authority, and I know

I know my onions, I know what I'm talking about. They they listen. And you can also socialize them to the evolutionary style of thinking quite early on. For instance, if you have them as undergrads or even master students, you can really, if you're good enough, you can really transmit all those axioms of evolutionary reasoning that we find so counter counterintuitive to a lot of people. If you have the right students and they're smart and they've been selected and they're and they're and they're doing the homework, you can really transmit and teach EvoSyc relatively early on successfully. Yeah. That said, um, yes, of course. I mean, the mind is wired to have difficulty distinguishing facts from moral implications,

etc. So in any audience in which you make claims about, you know, we evolve to be tribal or we evolve to be uh slightly different on average men and women on this or that trait, you always have to repeat the fact that those statements of fact have no ideological or moral implications, that you can very well be a progressist and a feminist and be uh all in favor of like women in politics and in science, all the while recognizing that there are average differences in ability and interest, for instance. Um, basically, you just have to always repeat the same basic um axiom of evolutionary reasoning. And if you do that well, I think people can listen. Um, as far as France is concerned, as such, um, yeah, France is a difficult

national environment to do all this because the dominant software is really like Borduosian sociology, pre-social constructionist approaches to human behavior. Uh, it's only recently that the cognitive sciences have spread in the social sciences a little bit. The evolutionary influences are even more recent and very, very, very, very minority. Basically, it's mostly at Ecole Normale Superior Institute Nico that people are trained in evolutionary social science. Outside of it, it's not really seen all that much. And it's um and people who do that tend to hide a little bit, I would say. One problem we have, I think, with the French public debate about politics and social science is that the heterodox academic revolution that took place in the US

really hasn't been integrated in France. Like most people who study human behavior and politics are quite leftist. And there's not much acknowledgement of the importance of viewpoint diversity in studying those topics, political viewpoint diversity, epistemological, methodological viewpoint diversity. Um, and so yeah, and so if you're an evolutionary minded centrist like me and you're facing like a like a like a like an array of uh super strong leftists who are all social constructionists in anthropology or sociology, you're gonna have difficulty communicating because those people are not necessarily aware of of the benefits of everything there is to gain from allowing more viewpoint diversity in academia.

They're not really reflective about it. We don't talk about it enough. And so it doesn't raise a little a lamb bell in people's brains. And so there's more space for political intolerance and dogmatism. And I feel like in France it's a bit difficult in this respect. But it's getting better. It's getting better. I don't want to be a catastrophist. It's getting better. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if if there's anyone who uh has expertise about um the benefits of viewpoint diversity and the costs of having um epistemic um homogeneity or uh insularity. It's it's you because that's one of the main things you study, which is um ideological orthodoxy, dogmatism when people bind themselves into groups where alternative viewpoints

are taboo and get punished and censured. Um so you're at the forefront of studying this very phenomenon of what happens to a group of politically like minded people when they organize and coordinate and punish alternative ways of thinking. And um so you so you you know what the downsides of that are and and uh and obviously that um has damaging effects um on the pursuit of truth, um given uh you know uh these these processes. Um and so I I'm curious, you know, what you see as the causes of ideological orthodoxy um uh suppression of ideas of speech of alternative viewpoints. Um on the one hand, it's kind of confusing from an evolutionary perspective, because you you might naively think that you we'd want to get at the truth.

And truth is good for our biological fitness. It's good to know where the rocks and trees are and where the predators and prey are. And if we get into a group of people and we're all very confused about how the world works, you might naively think that that would be bad for us as a group. And we might want to organize in such a way that we could be more well informed about the world and have more accurate beliefs about where the goodies are and where the threats are. And yet, what we find just repeatedly throughout human history and across cultures is that when people organize into competitive coalitions, the opposite happens. They sort of lose their minds a bit. They sort of get detached from reality and they and they go into these zones of orthodoxy

and dogmatism and sacredness of certain values and beliefs. uh I'm curious how you would um counter the sort of naive evolutionary prediction that that we we should not expect this, that we should expect you know good epistemics coming out of of human groups. Um and I'm curious w uh why why you think this phenomenon happens and how we can uh reconcile it with you know a more evolutionary functionalist approach. Yeah. Well, I guess one element of answer I think is uh, and I'm sure you will agree with it, I mean, it's become pretty standard in Evo Psych. It's the notion, you know, uh disseminated by uh John Tuby, for instance, that um anything is better than being left without a coalition, right?

Uh that the what is really, really essential for human uh fitness is to have social support, to be integrated in a group, pretty much whatever the group is. So there has been very strong selection pressures for wanting to create communities, orthodoxies, to fit in, to satisfy our homophily bias, you know, a preference for people who by and large agree with us and who seem to be sharing a worldview and long-term goals, and with whom like coordination and cooperation will be mutually beneficial, etc. etc. So it's incredibly surprising that on abstract questions of politics, on which being wrong doesn't really affect the fitness and the welfare of individuals. It's not really surprising that on those abstract questions of politics or science, people

will prioritize aligning with the group, aligning with what they perceive to be the majority, the vox popularly at the given time in which they live and at the given place in which they live. If I'm wrong about the reality or the um, you know, human made character of climate change, it's not going to concretely affect my welfare. If I'm wrong about the question of whether or not there is a mass replacement at the you know in the domain of like uh immigration policy, it's not going to affect my my welfare. If I'm if I'm if I'm hopefully wrong in believing, if I'm uh hopelessly wrong in believing that there are no innate psychological differences between the sexes, it's also unlikely to affect my my fitness concretely, right?

Those are relatively abstract questions of knowledge and public policy that um that are hard to test that are hard to falsify and and and and being wrong about them doesn't really affect the individual um interest so so if the social vibe in which you are has a very is very opinionated on those questions and has and has like a dominant opinion you better go along for if you want to maintain your connections if you want to you know if you want to find a partner if you want to find friends if you want to preserve followers if you want to preserve subscriptions and so there's a risk of uh audience capture um you know in that uh within that community be it a political party a political identity a neighborhood

or an academic community potentially I think that's one element of answer uh would you see other aspects to it your question was why are people behaving orthodox um so so yeah so what one aspect is is is just the low cost of of a lot of these beliefs is that they're they're so distant and abstract um uh and so f far from one's concrete everyday decisions that th there's just little cost to having false beliefs about them. And even if, you know, uh uh you know, if if I had the true beliefs, like yeah, I wouldn't be able to act on it. Like I maybe I could vote, but like m the chance that I'm gonna sway an election and actually change the world with my vote is, you know, you know, one in sixty million or

something like that. So these beliefs are so distant and hard for me to um affect and have few implications for my decisions that it's just the the costs of me being wrong are just so low relative to the the social benefits being so large. In the meantime there are very high social benefits in aligning with the group, inclusion, protection, friendships, blah blah blah, and status acquisition, right? If you can um compete against your comrades within the group in terms of like how dogmatically or orthodox um you can be at kind of like embodying the ideology of the group. You have avenues for status acquisition. You have ways of attracting attention towards you. You have um ways of potentially becoming a leader of that coalition of that group, of that

political vibe, etc. Yeah. And so it's uh it's it's good in many respects. In very in in in many concrete social respects, it's um that's what the um individual that is adapted to his social environment should be prior prioritizing. Yeah. No, yeah, that that that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious what your take is on this distinction between um intuitive and reflective beliefs that has been proposed by um people like Dance Berber and Hugo Mercier, where um there are some beliefs that are sort of um isolated or cut off from practical behavioral effects. That they're kind of analogous to pretending or to hypotheticals, you know, where we can I can hypothetically imagine that um you know there's a there's a coffee table sorry there's

there's a coffee table right there um but that's not gonna affect my behavior. I'm not gonna like move my body around it the hypothetical coffee table. It's just it's not gonna actually um impinge on the on the on the way I act in the world. Um or I can consider a proposal that you're saying, you know, I I can I can think to myself, Antoine believes it's gonna rain tomorrow, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to, you know, bring an umbrella tomorrow, because you could be wrong. And if I don't trust you, then it's just gonna remain a hypothetical uh uh uh possibility and it's not gonna affect my behavior. And so the idea is that a lot of our beliefs are sort of um cut off from their pr practical

behavioral implications. And these are called reflective beliefs. We don't truly believe them on a deep level in a way that actually guides our behavior. We just sort of um uh we we verbally believe them, we say we believe them, we say them for social purposes to fit in or to gain status. Um we might even believe that we believe them, but but deep down they're not actually regulating our behavior on a day-to-day basis. And I'm curious, uh number one, if you if you buy that distinction. And number two, where um ideologies fit on that continuum. Do you see ideologies as largely being composed of reflective beliefs, or do you view them as as uh being composed of intuitive beliefs that actually guide concrete behavior?

Yeah. No, it's great that you're asking me that question because I actually wanted to ask it to you, David. Oh okay. In relationship to the Allayan theory of ideology, uh in particular. I'm I'm a huge fan of of the distinction. I think it's extremely uh insightful. Um it's been you know walking around in my head for the last uh eight years. I think it's one of the major conceptual innovations in the human sciences in in the recent uh in the recent decade. Um yeah, a good illustration is for instance people's relationship to those to the notion of uh post-truth or relativism or alternative facts, right? At an implicit level, it is impossible for organisms to not assume a concept of the truth, of there being external facts that constrain our will and constrain our movements, etc.

It's not possible to have evolved as organisms without presupposing the existence of an external world, uh, with like constraining facts, and therefore to be exploding at an implicit level a concept of truth. But the x at the explicit verbal level, it's completely possible to be a relativistic philosopher who says that there is no truth. That person will not necessarily bump into the walls or bump into his uh you know uh desk table just because uh he or she says that there are no facts. They will keep the two the two realities separate, right? Keep assuming the existence of an external world and a concept of truth when it comes to practical affairs, all the while denying the reality of there being facts, or the reality

of any concept of truth, or the usefulness of any concept of truth. Trump knows that when he uh turns the wheel of his uh golf car to the left, he's gonna go to the left and not to the right, all the while claiming that there are alternately facts that you know don't constrain his will, etc. So there's just a mental disconnect there. Um what about algebra beliefs? Um by default, I would tend to agree with the idea that they are pretty reflective. Um I feel like political ideologies have a relatively weak relationship to behavior. Uh always a pretty strong, you know, belief action gap. Um I I I may say to whomever wants to listen to me that I care about the environment and that the the plant is warming up, etc.

etc. Uh I have a much greater propensity to say that I'm pro-environment than I have to completely stop flying, for instance. So there's always like a decalage, a gap, a disconnect between the two. Sure, or or or even just like more apocalyptic beliefs about climate change. So I think it's plausible that a lot of people who think that like the world is going to end imminently as a result of climate change, I think it's plausible that that is merely reflective belief because their behavior is not, you know, if I truly believed that climate change was going to destroy in accordance with the literal endorsement of the of the belief. Yeah. If I truly thought that climate change was going to destroy everything, or at least, you

know, make significant damage to humanity in the next 20 years, say, I would be panicking right now and figuring out how to get my family. You would go so survival mode, and you would be checking uh like a food in storage for like the next 10 years or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so the the the fact that climate catastrophists are not acting like that suggests that their belief is more reflective. At least I think that's that's plausible. Yeah, yeah. It's just that those beliefs are mostly for social consumption, that they're mostly for you know feeding and building conversations, that they have to do with signaling and uh and maybe trying to influence others. One one question there, so to the extent that those reflective political beliefs are for

social influence, micropropaganda, um mobilizing others, coordinating collective actions. An important question there is like how motivating are there on the spreaders' behavior and on the audience's behavior, right? Uh I think that's a that's a big um that's a big question. When I wrote about speech repression, for instance, I emphasized that people had motivations to control and regulate flows of information to keep other people mobilized in favors of uh in favor of causes that they care about, like anti-racism. It's enough for me if I'm uh if I'm if I'm if I'm an anti-racist canceller, it's it's enough for me to want to keep people committed to anti-racism in society, to want to regulate the dissemination of research that may be spreading racist views, for instance.

But do those efforts of speech repression and regulation, are they efficient at maintaining the mobilization? Are they efficient at reducing the spread in society of views that are demoracist? That's another question. It's enough for people to want it's enough for people who believe that their speech regulation is efficient for them to want to cancel and to regulate the speech. Does it reach its effects? It's another question. Interesting. Yeah. So are you asking the question of of whether people's belief in the um effectiveness of anti racist activism is could itself be a reflective belief that maybe Yeah. I I think that's that's plausible. Um because I mean if you look at at the evidence, um if you you know look at the rise of um

you know anti-racist rhetoric, the this the so-called Great Awokening, the rise in in in these in uh these particular sensitivities. Um, what happens directly after that? Uh well, the rise of right wing populism, Trump, uh, overt or more overt racism. It seems if anything, it has made matters worse rather than better in terms of improving race relations, um, in in America at least. Um, so the causal evidence of, you know, greater anti racist activism, less racism doesn't seem to pan out. If anything, uh what we observe suggests the opposite, that it actually uh exacerbates it. Um like a backlash and uh Yeah. Um so that's an interesting uh example of of another possible ref reflective belief. That that really the function the function of these beliefs are to mobilize a a coalition

uh rather than to uh um enact a kind of effective altruism to uh to stop the spread of of racist ideas. Yeah, yeah, it's really a complicated question. Um At the same time, I would maybe want to be a bit charitable towards those anti-racist activists and assume that they really believe that when they are trying to intervene on information flows to keep people mobilized in favor of anti-racism, they really they really believe that it's working, that it has a causal effect on people's behavior. Yeah. Um But uh but your original question was more about the link between ideological convictions and people's behavior. Um, what is your take on that? What would be like the average correlation between people's political beliefs and and their

behavior? You think it's 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, or does it make no sense to even come up with an approximation like that? Yeah, I think it's a it's a completely fascinating question. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot as well. Um where I currently am on the question is that uh yeah, I think it's it's probably almost entirely reflective beliefs. Um uh and that's not inconsistent with behaving in ways that might suggest intuitive belief. Because I think you could think of um say um not r renouncing all air travel or or or whatever. You could think of that as a as a as a kind of social signal to other people in my coalition. And that can coexist with a purely reflective belief about climate catastrophism.

Particularly if I'm not particularly attentive to whether that is actually going to be effective or not. So if I'm doing things that are probably not going to be effective, you know, let's say I'm I'm throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, I'm doing these kinds of purely symbolic acts, or maybe I'm you know a part of a protest and I'm you know vandalizing the university gymnasium. Um it's it's possible that you know those kinds of actions are not connected to an intuitive belief that that's going to improve the situation or be effectively altruistic, but that itself is a kind of signal. Um so part of um the function of of a reflective belief might be to signal to others um deceptively that one has an intuitive belief.

So that adds an additional layer of confusingness and complexity. But yeah my my intuition uh increasingly these these days is I I think that ideologies um are uh are are largely if not entirely um Composed of reflective beliefs. And I and I don't think it's purely because the beliefs themselves don't have practical effects. I think you could imagine cases where they might have practical effects. So like let's take the case of biological, um biologically organized uh psychological sex differences, let's say. Um if I think that, you know, people are purely blank slates, there are no um uh innate differences between boys and girls, um that could plausibly affect the way I parent my children, right?

If I think that, you know, my my daughter has no predisposition to, you know, be into princesses and and and and dresses and so forth. As a matter of fact, she is. Um I didn't teach that to her. I hope you're at least trying to teach her to tinker and to fix her bike, etc. Oh, I am, and she's absolutely into that stuff as well. Uh if anything, she's a little, you know, she's more into you know, sort of gender atypical stuff than the usual girl. But she but she does show the usual interest in being beautiful and put pretending to put on makeup and wearing dresses and all that stuff. Um but I didn't teach her that. Um, you know, my wife didn't teach her that. Um it just sort of happened naturally.

Uh and there are other, you know, anecdotal cases of people with boys and they're into boyish things and they didn't, you know, push them into that, that they were just sort of naturally drawn to that. But if I truly believe uh to convince me of that. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of that is endogenous and it's not really surprising from an elementary perspective. Right. Um and you know, it's possible that if I truly believed that, you know, kids were blank slates, that I might be, you know, really furious about the fact that my daughter was into princesses, right? I might, you know, talk to members of uh of her school and say who who taught her that? Where did she get this idea? You know, who who manipulated her into into having this preference, right?

And it might cause real damage for me if I concr if I intuitively believed that. Um so I think it's not so much that the beliefs themselves cannot have practical effects. I think it's more that um even if they did, I I don't think we intuitively believe them. Um that's sort of where I'm leaning. And and you know, I'm I'm open to being convinced, but for me, the big thing that points me in the direction that um ideologies are are largely reflective is people's reactions to the tremendous body of evidence on uh partisan-motivated reasoning. So these are so we all have we all know that there that political bias exists, that people are biased to confirm uh favored political narratives. There's a tremendous body of research in the social science, one of the most well

replicated phenomena of all time, of partisan motivated reasoning. And there are large meta-analyses showing that the degree of bias, of political bias, is roughly equal on both sides of the political spectrum. That um my political opponents, whom I despise and think are crazy, are just as biased to form their particular um uh political beliefs as I am. And uh most people, when I tell them that, they think it it makes sense. They're maybe a little troubled by it, but people buy it. Um, but it doesn't trigger the amount of panic I would expect it to trigger. Like if I truly believe that something that I that I cared about was profoundly biased. Like if I believed that I was biased to um ignore or or downplay my daughter's suffering,

let's say. You know, every time she was sick or she was hurt or she her feelings were hurt, whatever, I was biased to ignore it or to dismiss it or to not take it seriously. And I learned that there's a tremendous body of social science research that I have that bias. Um, if I learned that, that would be extremely upsetting to me. And I would take it I would I would panic and look for any kind of concrete action I could take to get rid of that bias, right? Getting rid of that bias would be my top priority, right? Why why why should it be so consequential? Because it it would be showing that people's ideological beliefs don't have a lot of normative force. Is it what you're saying? So what I'm saying is if I thought I was biased to ignore my daughter's suffering, say,

that's a belief that I really care about. I really care that my belief about my daughter's suffering or lack thereof is accurate, right? Yeah. Um and if I learned of a tremendous body of evidence to show that my belief about that was actually biased, was actually inaccurate. Um that would motivate a profound systemic ability to come up with the truth on that topic, and that would freak you out in terms of like how much intellectual confidence you can have in yourself. Exactly. And I would be extremely motivated to get rid of that bias. To do whatever it took to get rid of that bias. And people don't sound like they are trying very hard to correct the biases in their ideologies or in their political judgments.

Exactly. The motivation to overcome political bias is virtually absent. And it's even and it's especially absent in the most politically motivated people who who supposedly care most about those beliefs. Right? Which suggests that their accuracy motives, if they exist, are really, really weak and really not their priority. Exactly. Exactly. You incidentally, do you think there are accuracy motives? I remember discussing that in in in in pretty great depth with one of my friends who's uh also a scholar of political psychology. He doubts that there are anything like accuracy motives. He thinks that it's like it's like a folk theory of psychology. Well, I think that I'm that that seems crazy to me.

It's like there definitely are accuracy motives in some kind of things. Accuracy motives, accuracy motives in the domain of abstract beliefs about how society works, let's say. Because of course we have accuracy motives about not dumping into furniture in the room or whatever. But when it comes to higher order beliefs about how society works at large or microscopic facts or whatever, do you think people have an accuracy motive? You would you would think so. Hmm. That's uh that's a tough question. I'm not sure. Um I think I can imagine that the that that such motives might exist, um, insofar as those, you know, macroscopic beliefs have, you know, concrete practical implications. So like my larger abstract beliefs about how society works or how gender works, like those

I could see how those might affect my practical decisions in day-to-day life. If I have a general belief about if I have a general belief about like human nature, for example, um that could uh you know affect you know how I interact with specific humans, right? So I don't I don't think it's implausible that that those kinds of motives might exist. Yeah. There's the question of the of the practical usefulness of those beliefs being true, but there's also the psychological question of how you may develop a concept of wanting to be right in those domains by scaffolding from your concern for being right about practical affairs, right? You may imagine that we have uh, you know, we we we we make practical use of a concept of

truth. There are furniture in the room, I don't want to bump into them, I want to know they're there that they're there, etc. I need to make practical use of the concept of the truth there. I have an accuracy model for those practical affairs. I extend that concern to more abstract sense of affairs that don't that cannot affect me as concretely as the the functures I could bump into. So I think it's conceivable that there is like a psychological extension or scaffolding of that concern to other to other domains of cognition that are wider in scope or smaller. Um but okay sorry that that was an apartheid uh it's my PhD brain that won't that want to digress. I think it's plausible that you know once you get sufficiently abstract and distant

from practical conc concerns that we we sort of stop caring about whether the the thing is true or not and we sort of only care about the social implications and the reputational and coalitional implications. That seems plausible to me. One limit that I would potentially see to the theory that um most ideological beliefs are just reflective is extremists. Yeah. People on the ultra-right, on the ultra-left, uh jihadis are studied by uh people like uh Scott Aitron, Hamad Shaik, etc. Those guys are really dead sure that their ideology is true and they're willing to sacrifice the totality of their self-interest uh for abstract causes There, I feel like it's a bit harder to assume that the beliefs are held only reflectively.

Yeah. Maybe, you know, processes of competitive signaling within the group involved a little bit. Um, I seem to be remembering that suicide terrorists, you know, sometimes make the promise that they will sacrifice for the group in front of a videotape, and then they might have the feeling that it's too late to paddle back, etc. So there might be like social processes of status competition and not losing the face that play a role, but abstract ideal ideology of like I'm gonna save the caliphate, I'm gonna sacrifice for the caliphate, I'm gonna sacrifice for the communist revolution, I'm gonna sacrifice for my nation. I have difficulty believing that those are not causally efficient in motivating the

behavior. But for at least a small segment of extremists or very committed, uh devoted actors, like you know, Scott Aitwin would call them, or super courageous soldiers or whatever. Yeah, no, that that's definitely like the toughest case. For sure. But I think even there, we shouldn't rule out the possibility that even those beliefs are reflective. Um and it may be that that very impression that you have of, say, a jihadist terrorist, that they are a true believer, truly devoted, um, just the amount of awe and terror you feel at someone who has the capability to do that and is that committed to an ideology. Um it could be that the very impression you have of them as being a true believer is why

they engaged in the action. That is exactly what they wanted to make you think with the action. And it's precisely what they wanted to make their fellow group members think that they are extraordinarily devoted to this cause, right? Um and it could be that, you know, if the status benefits of behaving in such an awe-inspiring way are sufficiently large and you're in a community where status is extremely intertwined with the status of your family members. Um and you're your status prospects are quite low. Um and if by doing this thing you tremendously increase your status and thus the status of your family members, it could be that in some cases that could be a rational decision to make. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they're reflective beliefs, but they're just,

you know, really large status gambles that could make sense for, you know, a small number of individuals in some contexts where where um status and kinship are deeply intertwined and where status prospects uh otherwise are low. Or at least, you know, it's hard to know I can't get inside of a you know a a jihadist's head. I don't know what what they're what they truly believe or not. Who knows? Maybe they are true believers, but I think it's at least possible that they're not. Yeah, I think for a range of those extremists, uh your analysis is completely correct. Uh, you know, as as secular westerners, we tend to underestimate the degree to which um behaving super devoted to your face can you know accrue status uh on you and your family in

like uh Muslim communities, etc. So there's probably a lot of that involved that we fail to appreciate to its full extent. At the same time, I'm not a specialist of the literature on extremism but I I seem to really to be remembering Scott Aitran, Sam Harris, etc. repeating the point that a lot of um terrorists were especially lone wolves that were relatively disenfranchised that didn't seem to be able to derive a lot of status benefits from their extremism. the or on the other hand, they were pretty well socially integrated and they had pretty good economic prospects. Uh like for instance, the the the 15 the 19 hijackers of of 9/11, they were like relatively middle class, even somewhat upper class guys, a lot of engineers, Jordan, Egypt,

etc. Those guys had outside options. Um they had pretty good lives. I think some of them were living in the US already. Many of them, most of them were living in the US already. Um so there you would say their motivation was not economic. It was not to improve their living centers or whatever, but it would be to do with like the prestige that they would derive within their Muslim communities back home, for instance, or or maybe their families in the US or whatever. That that that's what you would retain as the as the most plausible explanation? Yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, and that's that's a good point. That if if if you know no plausible status motive exists that could cause a behavior like that, then yeah, that that challenges what I'm saying.

Um I wonder what was the situation of the two guys that committed the Bond Aid Beach attacks in December 25. I went to Australia in December to study people's social perceptions of the attacks, and there are their fork theory of jihadism. I haven't published a paper yet, but I'm writing it up. And there, if I'm not wrong, those two jihadi guys, one son, one dad, operated mostly as lone wolves, and they weren't they were like relatively recent um converts to political Islam and um I'm not sure they really depended on the approval of a of a of an important you know network of uh of other Muslims over there. Uh so there are cases where I'm like tempted to imagine that it's more like you know symptoms of like extreme belief rigidity or maybe some forms of autism or psychopathy that

are that are driving the effect a bit. More also rewards and status. Yeah. But I must also admit that I'm not enough of a specialist of extremism. So details of those life trajectories, and I don't know enough about them. Yeah, no, that definitely is you're starting to convince me out of this position with those examples. I do think the evidence is a is a bit stronger for mass shootings. I think if you look at the profiles of people who commit mass shootings, it's pretty clear that these are humiliated people who who are low status and seek to and their status prospects are very low. And and through doing this act of mass violence, they can at least attain some status. And these are usually highly narcissistic status motivated people who who are hu who feel

humiliated and are are driven to commit these acts. So I think the story um is a little better with the case of of mass shooting. But yeah, with with um political violence and suicide bombings, I think yeah, it's uh it's the case might not be as strong. Um but I but I would need to confess with the mass shooters, what do you think is going on computationally? So th there's a cognitive process of status acquisition that motivates the extremism. The function of that is to uh confer status to the person which when he or she comes back to basically camp or the tribe uh and survives the action. But in the case of those mass shooters, there's a kind of like a miscalculation of the risks and they end up being uh killed by the crops or they commit suicide, and so the

function of status acquisition cannot be fulfilled, or it's just fulfilled at the at the psychological level in the moment of satisfaction when they kill everybody on the on the campus. So, like what do you think is going on? Yeah, I'm not sure. Um exactly. Yeah, i it might be that, you know, our status psychology is kind of cluey and doesn't really calculate, you know, what's gonna happen, like what whether status really matters after you're dead or not. Um that that could be part of it. Like we just we're just we wanna get status and and and like whether we're alive when that status comes to us is sort of not as relevant as it should be. Um There's no mental representation of the continuation of life and whether or not you will

reach that status goal. Yeah. Right. That that could be it. Um I'm not sure. But then again, like, you know, status effects after your death still matter for fitness. Um, in terms of, you know, if you have a reputation, if you die, say, serving your country and have a really good reputation for being a hero. Yeah. Yeah. It's that that reputation is, you know, uh is going to, you know, confer benefits on your family members, um, versus if you die as a hated villain, that's going to impose costs on your family members. Um and there's also reciprocal altruism dynamics where, you know, if you do a good deed for me, like, and I can't reciprocate the good deed to you because you're gone, I might reciprocate it to your daughter or to your family member, you know, as a surrogate for you.

Uh and so those kinds of effects exist as well. I mean, there's a whole understudied area of like the psychology of legacy and posthumous fitness effects that I think is you know really worth exploring that pretty much no one is looking at. But uh you'll be you'll be uh you'll be uh delighted to learn that my first publication ever with the um with the with a commentary article in BBS in 2018 uh on the White House, R. Whitehouse, you know, the Oxford anthropologist, he was basically proposing a um a theory of self-sacrifice in you know extreme military or terrorist behavior and he theory his theory relied only on inclusive fitness and the idea that the ideology hacks your your your family-based sense of altruism and I was like what about reciprocity models?

What about partner choice models? Maybe people who sacrifice themselves in combat, who jump on a grenade or whatever. There's a there's a mechanism in their head that misfires, that believes that the person will survive and will accrue status while coming back to camp. But something happens. Uh but the the function of it is to create like a cycle of resprovity for status, and sometimes it misfires and in in kind of like um yeah, and and the the person ends up dying for for for reason that is not really adaptive and that is not the function of the trait. Interesting. I don't know. Yeah, I agree. There's not a lot of debate on that in evolutionary social science. Uh for one good reason, which is that it's very speculative.

Yeah. People could come up with mathematical models, etc., but good luck running experiments on self-sacrifice and also good luck just approaching observationally people who are extreme enough to commit that kind of act. Scarletran did that with the jihadists of uh Syria and Iraq for a few years, yeah, but very few people do that with an evolutionary mindset. Yeah. I mean, it it it is a little more amenable in terms of studying the psychology of um the signal recipients. You know, if if extreme self sacrifices are signals, you could understand the psychology of the signal receivers and what they infer about someone who sacrificed their life for someone and their motivation to to benefit that that person or uh give them reputational

rewards or or you know confer benefits to the person's associates or family members. Like you could study that aspect of it um pretty pretty fruitfully. Um and I and so far as I'm aware there's there's nothing on that. That that's a good point. There's uh I'm considering to do a research trip to Israel in November. Yeah. Uh to get acquainted with the literature on extremism and you know depolarization techniques, etc, that the Israelis have deployed. And yeah, you're right, like the Palestinian public opinion would be ideal to study perceptions of martyrdom and and extremism among the population on the recipient side. There are polls and there are experiments to be run on Palestinians there. But here again, it's not easy to access those populations.

It's not easy to run around like a like a Quartsquis questionnaire in Arabic and to get uh five hundred Palestinians to answer it. It's possible, but it's difficult. There's an entry barrier. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But um yeah, it would be it'd be super interesting to to look at this stuff. Um well, uh evolutionary psychologists who are listening, get on get on this topic of um self-sacrifice, uh legacy, posthumous fitness effects, um totally understudied and extremely important. Yeah. I mean, the difficulty in social science is that uh of course you have way more statistical power when you can ask your questions to large nationally representative samples of people. Yeah. But then almost by definition, people will those people will not be very radical, not be

extremists. And uh and if you want to maximize chances of really accessing the perspectives and the and the and the thinking processes of extremists, it's possible. But then you have to learn like a tribal language or like a non-Western language, like Arabic or whatever, to push those people to begin with, and samples will be small. It's harder to draw inferences that are evolutionally meaningful for the species. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it it reminds me a bit of Ed Hagen's work on suicidality. Uh we we had him on the podcast, and the argument he makes is that in some extreme cases of power, social power imbalance or social conflict, um it can be rational to um send a really extreme uh uh uh injurious signal or

risky signal where you would risk death or or or severe injury to um to get oneself out of a really bad situation of of social conflict and and powerlessness. Um and that because competition did he study, do you remember? Um I forget the the population in particular that he looked at with this. But he does find empirically that people who attempt suicide do receive all sorts of benefits following the suicide attempt. You know, like women in abusive relationships, you know, they'll they'll they'll get abused less following the suicide attempt. You know, you know, a person who call for help, yeah, a person who doesn't want to, you know, marry someone in an arranged marriage, they might attempt suicide, and then the

marriage gets called off. Like those So he studied those types of effects. So there's at least some evidence that these extreme um signals can have benefits. And if you look at the actual probabilities that these suicide attempts will be completed, um, it could be that the benefits outweigh the expected costs. Um and so there might be something uh analogous to um extreme self-sacrifice, to you know suicidal uh political violence. I'm not sure you know what what the calculations are. I'm not actually not sure like you know what the actual mortality rates are for someone who you know attempts to kill themselves in an act of political violence, like how many are there a lot of failed attempts at that?

I I have no idea. Um how how often are they are they are they truly completed? You know, how I wouldn't be able to I wouldn't be able to tell. I remember reading in Pascal Boyer's Mind May Societies, uh, you know, the the theory of the veil of ignorance about mortality from uh John Tuby and Lida Cosmidis. Like basically, if you want it to be worth it to go into battle, you want to make sure that you don't know who's going to get killed if anyone gets killed. First of all, otherwise, you know, it's not worth the risk for any individual fighter. And uh and often there's an asymmetry in so basically raids in um hunter-gatherer societies are very murderous for the group that gets attacked. Uh, it's often the case that you know 80% of the men will be murdered on the spot or

whatever. But if you if you conduct your your raid well enough, quickly enough, early enough at dawn and whatnot, the risk of being killed yourself as the assailient, as the attackant, actually quite low. And so that's probably why the whole collective behavior evolved in the first place. So I don't know, wo I wouldn't be able to come up with figures, but it's quite likely that on the attacker side, the risk of dying are low. and we worry more about the the those watching it then. And and it could be like a kind of mismatch, like we just don't know how to think about say a bomb strapped to your chest as like a you know like an intuitive cause of death. Like it could be that like physically killing yourself with a sword or or with a sharp

object, like we can understand that. Um I don't know. I mean 'cause if you look at cases of um seppuku in in Japan, um, like those fit my model actually pretty good because those are extremely um uh uh interdependent societies where kinship is hugely important. And if you suffer shame and dishonor your family, that could have devastating fitness uh impacts. And if the only way to offset those devastating fitness impacts is by killing yourself, it could be uh fitness-wise irrational calculation. Um and so it could be in cases like that. Um maybe this model applies, but with you know, modern technologies like bombs that you know we don't really understand how they work. It might not activate as powerful uh kind of like survival instincts and in in which case

people might be willing to walk the extra mile and and actually kill themselves. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Uh it's interesting. I don't know. I I don't know enough about extremism anymore to really be talking about it publicly. Uh it actually was fun. Yeah, for sure. Um I I wanna get to one last uh topic of yours that I find really interesting because it's it's paradoxical. Um, and that is that love paradoxes, don't you? I do. I do love social paradoxes. And I I cited your this paper of yours in my in my social paradoxes paper as an example of a social paradox. Um so the idea that um if I'm really committed to truth with a capital T and facts and I want to be rational and logical, and I really moralize that.

And anybody who's not committed to the truth and being rational, screw them. I hate them, let's punish them. Um the more I have that moralization of rationality and truth with a capital T, of being, you know, of seeing reality clearly, the more I hold that attitude. In fact, the less rational I am and the less connected to truth I actually am. Or at least that's that's roughly what you found in in your paper: the people who moralize rationality, who have these beliefs that I'm the one who cares about truth and facts and logic, that those types of people are in fact the the most likely to spread um inaccurate, misleading, um distorting news to sort of curry favor with with their coalition. Is that is that roughly correct or am I um uh oversimplifying?

Correct. It's roughly correct. First of all, thanks for your interest in that paper. It came out in political communication and I published it with the Michael Beng Pearson. I think the story is slightly less sexy and attention grabbing than that. But but but thanks for interest. What we show is that people who score higher in moralization of rationality, so people who elevate basing your beliefs on logic and the evidence more, that's possibly associated with more willingness to share hostile news that target the art group, and including hostile fake news. But we have no reason to be that people know that the fake news were false. It's at least hostile are cases that's so it's it's a it's got it.

So it's at least plausibly connected to motivated reasoning. Yes, yes. At least it's at least it predicts something like political hostility on the public sphere and the assumption that it's okay to insert political enemies. Okay. Yeah. And then what we show is that that relationship between moralizing rationality and sharing hostile news is largely explained, like there it has a lot of overlapping variance with the correlation between being a status seeker and sharing hostile news. When you're a status seeker, when you're higher in moral grandstanding, and when you're high when you're higher in status-driven risk taking, you're also more likely to be high in moralization or rationality. And when you're higher on those uh status seeking metrics, you're also more likely to share

hostile news. And when you when you control for the association between moralization of rationality and hostile news sharing with the status seeking metrics, the coefficient of moralization of ration moralization of rationality goes down by about two-thirds. Okay. Interesting. So it sounds like it seems like those people who claim to be rationality moralizers are in fact status seekers or people who like to engage in moral understanding. And they will try to rationalize or sublimate or cloak or hide those status seeking motives under the guise of being motivated by the truth. Maybe there's something like a self-deception process going on. They tell themselves that the true motive for their hostility is the pursuit of the truth

and being objective and being in touch with reality, etc. But it seems like actually the the the core motivation that drives them is more like partisan hostility and still seeking and the pressure to dominate opponents. Yes. Is it a bit more is it a bit more clear? Yes, so thank you. So yeah, I think it's a form of like it's it's it's a form among others of what you may call uh grandstanding, you know, what what group has called grandstanding, moral grandstanding. If you want to participate in the public debate in modern societies, uh if you want to enter the political arena and be heard, and if you don't want to immediately activate people's subs um suspicion and if you want to have a some kind of like influence and maybe

mobilize people for your cause and against your enemies, etc., you have to claim like you're on the side of the truth and rationality. You have to claim like you have data and rigorous thinking on your side. Otherwise people won't pay attention. And so I think there's a like cultural selection pressure whereby in modern environments that are so permeated by the culture of science, rationality, and the rhetoric of objectivity, people feel obligated to claim that they have objectivity and the truth on their side if you want they want to play their status games and their partisan games. And I think that's what what's happening in our US samples of basically prolific workers and one you go sample that it's naturally representative.

We manage to replicate those effects that I've described two times in three independent samples. So the effect is really there. Cool. Yeah, no, it's it's a really fascinating effect. Um I uh the way I understand it or the way I think about it is is in terms of you know my recent paper in American Psychologist, um The Evolution of Social Paradoxes, um, where uh status seeking is uh rarely overt, um, because if I come out as an overt status seeker or overtly seeking dominance and superiority, well, my status is actually going to fall rather than uh uh increase. Right. Um, and so if I'm a uh a a status seeker in a political context and really my goals are just looking morally superior, about dominating my political enemies, about gaining status

in my coalition, if those are my true goals. I cannot come out and say that those are my true goals, because those then those goals will be thwarted, right? And so I need some kind of cover story, um, some kind of explanation for my behavior that has nothing to do with status seeking and and dominance. And what I think is going on is that the sacred value or the moral, the moralized value of truth or rationality is the cover story. That the reason I'm doing this uh uh uh is not because I'm seeking status or trying to dominate people, but because I care about the truth with a capital T. Or I or I care about, you know, being in touch with reality and showing people and and and uh punishing liars and people who try to hide the truth.

And that is my sort of sacred cover story for the underlying uh uh status and dominance motive. And I think these cover stories are are are everywhere in our culture. I agree. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm pretty convinced that sacred values are also a form of moral grandstanding. You know, there's the there's the uh empirical work of Philip Tetlock on the fact that people never really for real saquarize anything. You know, they they'll find some um some some trade-off taboo and they will claim that their secret values are inviolable, etc. But when people can look the other way, or when they can reframe a trade-off with a secret value as being a trade-off between two secret values, the trade-offs become acceptable.

So it suggests that people don't really absolutice any value for real. They just claim they do to save the face for revolutional benefits. But in fact, at the at the more implicit level, they agree that you know their territory or their I don't know, nuclear program or their organ donations or whatever that they claim to be sacralizing are in fact not that sacred. Hmm. Could you actually elaborate? I I'm I don't know if I'm familiar with this um this paper. So uh so you're talking about when when the when the sacred value is traded off against something that um there are cases where they are willing to trade it off or is it it's I don't remember quite well but I think it's it's it it's in his uh trains in cognitive science

paper from 2003 and there's probably a a longer maybe gpsp paper or something like that that it's called um taboo trade-offs and heritageal counterfactuals um in which he basically says that um you know political entrepreneurs and and and citizens etc by default claim to have uh inviolable sacred values, uh, but they will consent to trading those sacred values against other values if the other values are presented as equally sacred. Like if you don't sound like you're encroaching on a core moral value, if you're only sounding like you're trying to arbitrate between two super core core moral values, it becomes a bit acceptable to desecralize the putative secret value. You know what I mean? So it's a job that implicitly people don't really believe the secret values to be fully

sacred, It's more like a posturing, a sincere posturing, probably, a reflective belief that they hold sincerely, etc. etc. But it doesn't have the behavioral traction, the motivational traction that it should have if they fully endorse the belief intuitively, uh fully, literally. Is it making sense? Yeah, so let's say I think that you know freedom is sacred and security is sacred. And there are obviously cases where those two values trade off. That in order to increase my security and safety from, say, terrorism or domestic or international threats or whatever, we need to ramp up surveillance and really get uh and really infringe upon my privacy and my freedom to, you know, say and do what I please,

right? We need to, you know, punish people who are saying damaging things out of concern for safety. So if these two values conflict, say freedom and and safety, um then uh if you offer me money to say give up my personal freedom, um I will say no, freedom is sacred to me. Right. That's gonna back fire. Likewise if you give me money to to give up on the security of of of our nation, I'm gonna say no, that's no that's insulting. How dare you, right? I'll I won't accept that money. But if you say um, well, in order to um preserve our security, we need to give up some freedom, or in order to you know preserve our freedom, we need to give up some security, then I'm much more likely to say yes. To say yes, we should do that.

Is that basically the idea? That's exactly the idea, yeah. Okay, that's exactly the idea. And I'm remembering um the preprint by Manjir Singh and Mochi Hoffman, unpublished, called Commitment and Impersonation a Repetitional Based Theory of Principal Behavior that look up that you might want to look up if you don't know it already because they came to have like offered a pretty exhaustive treatment of sacred values. And I remember them saying saying saying something about um when political actors should be most motivated to herald their values as being really sacred. And I don't quite remember what they say. But basically, if the if the goal is to maintain a good reputation, there are specific

situations where you should really broadcast the fact that you really consider the secret value as being sacred. And you should be seeming like you will never accept to treat it against something secular like money or uh economic benefit or whatever. Uh but so yeah, if you're interested in secret values, look up that paper. Did you know it? Yeah, I I I do know it. Yeah, I I am familiar with it for sure. Yeah. Yeah, no, I like that paper. I propose my beer to uh help him out uh improve and resubmit the paper and I'm not finding the time for it. Uh so it's like you know sleeping as a as a Google Docs in our computers and um and the thing has been around since 2021. I think it's a great paper. It was rejected from uh psychological reviews and BBS, and since then I don't think ManVir

has tried anything else with it. And it's sad because I think it's a it's a good analysis, it's a good theory. I I like it too. Yeah, I'll uh send them my way. Maybe I'll have time to help him out. Um, if you're listening, Manveer, um feel free to reach out. No, that I I love the paper too. Um, my only quibble with it, I mean, so their model, from what I remember, is that a lot of sacred or principled behavior is um designed to imitate extreme individuals who for whatever reason um act in that way. Maybe they're autistic, maybe they're have some kind of glitch in their brain and they just And they say nothing about those extreme individuals. They just say Exactly Let's imagine they exist and people are imitating them, but then do

they exist possibly? We don't know. And you're making no claim about this. We would like to know. I agree. Yeah, that I think is the major weakness of the paper. Um and I think you that part of the paper could totally you could just dispense with it entirely. If you just imagine that we can imagine such people, right? And we can imagine that other people can imagine such people, right? And if we imagine such people and admire them, well then I can imagine that you'll imagine them and admire them, and that will motivate me to behave to as that person and imitate that person. That's all it takes. It's just a matter of recursive mind reading, right? So you don't actually need those individuals to exist.

You just need people to be able to imagine them and imagine that other people will imagine them. And then you can get that sort of thing arising all on its own. So that's it. It makes me think of uh I agree, it makes me think of autistic people who can be very rigid and very committed and have super focused interests. Are there people in the evolutionary social sciences or psychology who defend that that could be an evolutionary sorry, an evolutionary advantage of being autistic? Yeah, that that that the um pretty intense level of commitment that some autistic people are capable of might have been favored genetically through its uh signaling benefits or its commitment benefits. I don't know. Uh are there people who pretend that?

I'm I'm asking generally. I have no idea. Oh, I I've I've I have not read anything on that. That's interesting. Um cool. I guess the default hypothesis would be that autistic people are high in systematizing intelligence, and therefore that makes them good analysts, engineers, uh problem solvers, blah, blah, blah. But it's also possible that the mental rigidity is beneficial for their reputation sometimes. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, I'll have to think about that more. Um well, uh we're approaching an hour and a half. This has been a really fun conversation. Um, I feel like it's just been a chance for us to sort of you know bounce ideas back and forth and sharpen our our thinking. You've been a bit messy, and that's mostly my fault.

I used to last night, but it was it was really funny. Yeah, for sure. Is there anything else that um you wish we would have covered? Anything you you want to uh tell our listeners about, things you're working on now that you're excited about? Um, okay, so it might it might sound surprising, but I would be happy if some people um were willing to follow me on Instagram because a few months ago I started doing some uh video scientific dissemination uh in the form of like short video capsules on Instagram. I talk about political psychology, social media, the relationship between the sexes, patriarchy, misogyny, etc. So beyond just looking up my uh my website, uh Antoine Marie SCI.com as a regular scholar and my uh Google Scholar, people can also, if they want, follow me on

Instagram. Uh where my handle is, sorry, I forgot to to specify Antoine.marae.sci. But I don't expect your listeners to be very active on Instagram. I think they're too nerdy for this. Perhaps, yes. I don't have an Instagram account myself. So but if you do have Instagram, uh follow Antoine. He's uh an excellent scholar. Um this has been a lot of fun, Antoine. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much, Dave. All right. Take care. Bye bye. So, David, you talked a lot this episode, and I was doing something completely else while this was happening. So I feel like I should carry the outro here. Um, but despite feeling that way, I never know what to say other than, you know, please

support us on Patreon, please comment on social media, let us know what guests and uh episodes and topics, debates, um uh, you know, yeah, what what I don't know what else to say. Yeah. I'm I I mean, yeah, there's there's the Patreon thing. There's uh social media kindness. There's uh sending us emails about your thoughts and suggestions. Do we have an email address yet? People have been emailing uh maybe they maybe they're just emailing our personal emails? I guess we don't have no it's ep the pod at gmail.com. I don't think I don't think literally anywhere we've ever said that. Hmm. Okay. Maybe I should put that in the show notes. Yeah, that might be a good thing to put in the show notes. Yeah, we're recording an outro right now.

As you can see, this is a really well-oiled machine here with with me and Dave. Or just now, after you're doing this, putting our email in the show notes. No, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, but you know what? It's okay, because you shouldn't expect polished uh production value from things that aren't selling you something. Maybe you could suggest commercials we can include on our our podcast. Oh, should we put some product placements uh in the episodes? Uh yeah, we got to do product placements, PSAs. Um I mean, presumably it would be for an exchange of some amount of money. Um, but then there's that whole like what are they selling to our listeners? Maybe we could drop some kombucha ads into the episode on the microbiome.

Yeah, we can't do the uh probiotics, but we can't do prebiotics because the probiotics, according to um um Katrine Whiteson are not Katrina Whitzen are not so good for you, but prebiotics that are just fiber, it was one of the two, remember? One of them was good, one was bad. Yeah. I forget. Yeah. But listen to that episode. It confuses like the distinction between proscribe and prescribe. I always mix those up. So one of those is proscribed and one of those is prescribed. The probiotic and the prebiotic. The prebiotic's okay, the probiotic's not so good. Yeah. Yeah. But only one of the off just eat some fiber. Just look for the fiber. Yeah, fiber's great. I highly recommend it. Okay. Uh this is enough.

We'll see you all next week or in a couple weeks. Um and we'll get our week. We'll get our edits together. We'll get our shit together. Okay. Uh or not. Yeah. Okay. It was good to good to good to hear good to listen to you, David. You did a great job this episode. Thank you. I appreciate it. I missed you. I'm glad to have you back. Oh thanks, David. All right.