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Kurt Gray is a social psychologist and professor who received his PhD from Harvard. I loved his book, Outraged, which is essentially about why we disagree with one another, and how we can actually do it better.

We cover a lot of ground in today’s conversation. We talk about a few funny things that we got wrong about human evolution, and why they matter. Kurt explains what “concept creep” and “the creep of harm” mean—and why we’re generally much safer than we think, but hardwired to see threats where they do not exist.

He shares some very compelling data. For example, on how we say we just want straight facts, but tend to be most compelled by personal, true stories and experiences. We talk about what tends to give birth to polarization, why we behave the way we do on social media, and why we often forget the complexity within our own perspectives.

I’ve found Kurt’s work to be so helpful for understanding how I’m wired, how other people are wired, and what actually motivates us all. I also think his approach is quite calming.

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground

Kurt Gray’s Website

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The Deepest Beliefs Lab

ELISE:

We could really tangent out, and I have 30 pages of notes, Kurt. I loved your book. I feel like it needs to be a much bigger book in the culture. Anything I can do to help make that happen. And for context, I loved The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haight, but I stumbled when I got to the part where he starts breaking it down into the way liberals and conservatives are different in how they conceive of harm. And so I loved seeing you evolve that challenge and evolve it into something that's ultimately simpler, but feels far more true

KURT:

And I think more hopeful because I think the idea that there are these different foundations and liberals and conservatives can never understand each other, I think is a terrible admission of defeat in a sense that we never reconnect.

ELISE:

And it suggests somehow that there's some composite way of being that's never going to change and that our limited ground is limited. Anyway, that part for me, before I even really knew that it was somewhat contested, I was like, this doesn't track for me with my experience. Also, I'm originally from Montana, so I know a fair number of conservatives, and I wouldn't say that we have wildly different ways of assessing or caring about the world. We have sometimes different politics and sometimes not, and it's this very simple and elegant thesis, which is sometimes the hardest thing to arrive at, which is that essentially we all are perceiving harm when we look at a situation and our perception of harm is different. Is that fair?

KURT:

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

ELISE:

Right. End of podcast.

KURT:

There we go. We finished it. We did it. Exactly.

ELISE:

But that's it ultimately,

KURT:

Right? I mean, we're all motivated to protect ourselves from harm, to protect our family and protect the vulnerable. That's been a human constant for millennia. But I think the key issue today is that there's so much complexity in these moral issues that each of us sees harm differently. Each of us focuses on the vulnerability of different people and different situations, and that really drives a lot of political disagreement today.

ELISE:

And we can get into specific examples, but at the heart of it too is sensitivity to threat, which is hardwired into us. I loved this part of the book, which is an excavation of a retelling of our pre-history, which would suggest that we love to think of ourselves as what? Like apex predators not true.

KURT:

Exactly.

ELISE:

Can you tell us a bit about this? As I was reading it, I was like, oh yeah, of course, of course.

KURT:

Right. It didn't really track for me that if you look at all the other species on planet earth that are actually predators, lines, tigers, even other primates like chimpanzees, orangutans who actually are often preyed upon, there's so much stronger. We're so weak, our skin tears so easily, so easily frightened. And to think that we are masters of the animal kingdom and we are today, we can shoot wolves from because we're super smart, but for so long we were afraid, I would say, go naked into the forest as dusk falls and see how you feel. Do you feel like, oh my goodness, I can't wait to eat something counts on whatever walks by. No, you're like Blair witch. You're afraid something's coming to get you. Right. So I think it resonates with people's experience if they've actually been stuck in a wilderness.

ELISE:

And what do you think, where does that come from culturally, this idea of this impenetrable strength of humans and that we are so dominant and it's still such a huge part of culture, right?

KURT:

It is. And today we really are dominant. We're on every ecosystem on the planet. And so I think it is fair to think that we are apex predators today. We have so much technology that allows us to hunt. And in fact, ever since we developed stone tips spears, we've been pretty fierce. But I also think when you think of human evolution, who was writing about it and folks like Darwin, they used to sit on horseback with guns and have dogs flush out foxes and then have servants clean their gun. They kind of masters of the universe, the human universe, and I think they projected their feelings of at the top of the pyramid socially into our position in the animal kingdom for sure.

ELISE:

And we got some science, some basic science wrong or some science was popularized that was wrong, which is very common. A lot of my work is about reexamining the stories that we tell about women and that women were sort of this passive caved dwelling gatherer, which is far from the reality. It's much more complex and creative and interesting when scientists have looked at the data now. But it was the sort of man, the hunter, I think it was in the sixties, the symposium that took off, that really captured people's imagination and sometimes it just requires a reassessment. So can you talk about, for example, I can't remember the name, but the cave where they found, where they assumed that humans were all cannibals?

KURT:

That's right. This is the Tong child. There's a limestone quarry right outside of to South Africa, and they discovered a bunch of bones there, and a lot of the bones were kind of baboon bones, other primates, other apes. But this one bone that they shipped to Raymond Dart, an anthropologist at the time was a skull of some hominid that walked upright. And you could tell because the spine came out of the bottom of the skull instead of the back, which I think is interesting just to think about how upright versus on all fours. And when he looked at it, he saw all these kind of marks scraping the skin, and he inferred that this skull of a child, it's called the Tong child. Now, those marks were made by tools and other bones basically. So the idea is that humans were sitting in a cave scraping the flesh off of the bones, off of the face, really, of this child and eating it, which is such a dark picture.

Some uncle was eating his nephew or niece in this cave. And so Raymond Dart said that this is evidence of our predatory transition from eating fruit to eating meat and using tools to eat meat and not just any meat, other humans. So we're cannibal killers. And wow, did this kick off a new understanding of who we are, A darker version, Lord of the Flies, 2001 Space Odyssey, heart of darkness, all these things connect really tightly to this idea that we are killers and you say, man, the hunter, but man, the hunted than men and women are more hunted. And we used to actually, when scientists reevaluated this skull, they found lots of different things. They didn't expect one next to the skull. They found eagle eggshells. So weird. Why would the most incredible hunters climb up to mountains and get little eagle shells to eat little eagle eggs?

It just seems crazy. We could just kill a mammoth or whatever we ate at the time. And also if you look at the skulls more closely, you realize that the marks are not made by other bones, but consistent with an eagle's beak. And so what they found was really just an eagle's nest, and that explains the eagle eggshells. But also what happened then was eagles would pick up kids back in the day and eat them in their nests. They'd carry them off and they can carry goats away even today, and we used to be smaller then, so it's a totally different picture. You're out in the fields, you're like, I dunno, picking berries. And then you look over and the eagle picks up your kid and they fly silently, and then that's a bad day for your tribe, and then it eats the eagle. So I think it's much more a story in real life of fear, of worrying about threats constantly because we were preyed upon.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I loved that story because it was such a reset. And there's some statistic in the book too about the percentage, was it 10%? The survival rates in these tribes from both violence from creatures and other people was not good,

KURT:

Right? So 10% is kind of the rate of predation in a lot of herd animals like deer, chimpanzees, even today, not in sanctuaries protected by armed guards, but out in the wild you got a one in 10 chance of being eaten any given year, and that was true of people. And then the story of morality is that we moved into groups like any herd organism to protect ourselves from predators. But now that we're in groups of people, well those people can harm us. And that's the 2% rate. Every year there's a one in 50 chance that you're going to get murdered within your tribe, which is a little intense, a little too much of a threat. And so we developed all these moral norms to protect ourselves so that we can enjoy group living without getting murdered by our tribes. People.

ELISE:

Yeah.

KURT:

We are so much safer.

ELISE:

We are so much safer, but we're still hardwired with this threat perception and hypervigilance and fear, and we are constantly surveilling our surroundings for who is being harmed and what harm might be coming our way. Is that a fair assessment?

KURT:

Exactly right. We're hardwired because think of our ancestors. Our ancestors was like, I'm not worried about threats, I'm not worried about harms. They were the ones who didn't take precautions and they got eaten, they got butchered, and they got murdered. And so we're really deeply hardwired to worry about threats in the environment and threats from other people. Exactly right.

ELISE:

Yeah, I mean, this chart too in this book is, and it's interesting, I live in Los Angeles, so I just went through the fires and massive amount of economic devastation. We don't even quite know what we're dealing with here. However, the number of people who died is just staggeringly low. It's shockingly low considering how intense and fast the fires were. And so this chart that you have shows the global averages of annual death rates from natural disasters from each decade between 1920 and 2020. And for people who obviously can't see it, it's a reverse hockey stick. And in 1920, we're talking about north of 500,000 deaths to now. I mean, it's 2020, barely, barely visible. The deaths relatively are so low, and yet obviously, I mean there was just a horrible storm across the southwest. These storms are lashing us with more intensity, but with less death. But the threat is still paramount. We can't reconcile that. Right. It's confusing.

KURT:

That's right. It's really hard for our brains, I think, right? Because we're constantly worried about threats, and yet our environment around us is safer than ever. And so you might think, well, we can just chill. We can chill because we're safer, and so we could just relax and enjoy the relative safety that we have. But of course, we're not wired that way. We're wired to still, well, there must be threats out there and doggone it, I'm going to find them. And so you do find them, right? Because many things are subjective, many things are perceived. So I think about, imagine your kids are playing outside in the front lawn and you see a white panel van drive up and then drive back, and you don't think, oh, it's like a lost locksmith. I hope they find where they're going. You are like, those are kidnappers and they're going to get my kids. So we still see it. Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, anyone on next door or citizen or a WhatsApp chain with their neighbors knows that there's just this surveillance of, there's a weird dog walker. It's just so intense what people perceive as threatening versus what actually happens in most neighborhoods across the country. And this is this idea of concept creep, which I think was such an unlock for me. Can you talk a little bit about

KURT:

Sure. Yeah. So the backstory of concept creep is what we think counts as a concept is kind of ambiguous. It's in the eye of the beholder. And so anytime that we're motivated to find something and that thing can become rarer, then that concept creeps. And I know that's hard to hear in the abstract, so let's make it concrete food to find food. We need food, otherwise you die. You need to eat food. And if I say, Hey, I have a tint of cat food, is that human food? And you're like, that's gross. Why would I eat cat food when I can go to the grocery store and eat any number of amazing things that I could eat Fine, cat food is not food. But now let's assume that the post-apocalyptic, there's no more grocery stores, and now you're scrounging in alleys and you come across a tin of friskies, then you're like, oh my goodness, delicious.

This is human food because it's so much rarer. And so the concept of what counts as food creeps to include new things that never counted before, and the creep of harm is the same way. We're motivated to find harm, we're on the lookout, but there's many fewer harms than there used to be. There's no saber tooth cats eating us. There's fewer murders, there's fewer kidnappings and assaults, and so harm creeps. And now we think that dirty looks count as kind of harm or too much screens count as harm or overprotecting counts as harm. And we can have valid arguments about whether these count as harm. But I think if we went back three generations where kids were dying much more frequently and saying, well, the real harm to kids is not letting them play outside enough or something, they'd be like, well, I'd rather not have them dismembered when they work in the factory, if that's the harm that I'm worried about.

ELISE:

I think anyone who's listening understands how that's expanded. So yes, before your child is at a factory and you're like, please let them not be dismembered, and you weren't necessarily concerned about the route that they took home or the company they were keeping or whether everyone was nice to them. And now I can say from my own personal experience, the number of things that I'm concerned about from mean words, bullying, social exclusion, too much screen time, it's vast. And as we've seen wildly consuming, it's almost like as the aperture has shifted from what do we need to do to stay alive? We're all drowning in what could bes and potential harms in a way that I think we recognize this is crazy. And yet at the same time, to go against that culture is very difficult. And it's hard, I think to reconcile it. I think about my childhood, and I grew up in Montana as mentioned and out in the woods, and we roamed free, and you could call it benign neglect. You could call it the best childhood ever, you could call it definitely dangerous, theoretically. And by today's standards, everyone would've been locked up by protective services in the sense that there were mound lions and we were up trees, and I'm glad I'm alive. I mean, I'm kidding, but it's great that we're alive, but that contemplating that now and having my mom insert into our to be like, is it safe for them to be out on the street on a bike is funny.

KURT:

Totally

ELISE:

Right.

KURT:

Totally.

ELISE:

And it's not just her psychology that's changed. It's the whole culture that's shifted even though there really aren't that many kids on the side of milk cartons.

KURT:

Yeah, exactly. And I love bringing your mom into this, right? Because my mom also just let me fine, get on your bike. Helmets weren't a thing, just be back before dark. I came back bloodied and running away from bullies. And right today she's like, are you sure? Right. Are you sure this is okay? And you're right, it's the culture. The culture shifted.

ELISE:

The culture shifted. At the beginning of my parenting journey as an adult, I was like, what happened to my mom where she's suddenly so much more anxious, I don't recall this. And now I'm like, oh, she's just participating. And also there are parents who do get arrested because they let their kids walk to school and chaperoned. There are that handful of, we've gone so far, but you also can start to understand why we fill our screens with threats when there aren't any real ones to worry about.

KURT:

Right? Fair. Yeah, that's fair. And I think it is important to say that this is actually a mark of moral progress. We still worry, but I think the fact that we're worried about more and more minor things demonstrates that we are safer. So I wish that we weren't so worried and so threatened. It's baked in, but I think it is good that we're concerned about are our kids walking home alone? Is my dog cold? Should it have a sweater? We only worry about those things because we have the material resources and the time and the safety to worry about those things.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it's true. And it is a sign of more equality, even though it doesn't always feel this way, that we have the capacity to worry about microaggressions and any other form of racism or abuse. I recognize we're not great at addressing it, particularly at this moment in time, but it is a symptom of progress that these things are under consideration and we are making progress. It's hard to feel like that at times. I will say, recognize that and thinking about these perceptions of harm in terms of our political polarization right now, I guess this is where we really go awry. One person sees an instance of what would be a good concrete example of two completely different, I guess immigration or abortion gun control, where you get two wildly different perceptions of harm. Can you throw up some easy examples?

KURT:

Yeah, I think immigration is a great one, and oftentimes these different perceptions happen because we inhabit totally different media bubbles and because we sometimes do have personal experience with them, but oftentimes we don't have a lot of personal experience. And so that makes it easy for these stories and these narratives to kind of take root in our mind. So the actual, this is real, but rare. A drug cartel member comes up, I think it was in New Jersey, and kills a teen as part of a gang initiation ceremony. And so there you have an illegal immigrant, an actual criminal, murdering a US citizen in something gang related. And I think you can capitalize on that, especially if you live somewhere where there's not a lot of immigrants and you're like, well, this is what immigration is in America and this is a destroying America. But then you're more progressive and you see, well, here are some folks detained at the border, they're fleeing violence in their home country and the kids are separated and it's causing a lot of grief, a lot of trauma for those families.

And you focus on that. And so those are different stories and different ends of a spectrum on immigration and whose harm we should be worried about and who's vulnerable to suffering, totally opposite. And so I think that's a really good example, abortion as well. On one hand, progressives are like, here's a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and she can't get an abortion in Iowa. On the other hand, pro-life folks point of, well, you just use the morning after pill every time and you don't think about contraceptive, or maybe you get an abortion in the second trimester and it's an elective abortion because you don't want a kid anymore, you change your mind. Those are things that people anchor on. And the harm is easy to see in both those cases and it leads to really different political views.

ELISE:

And I think that you mentioned often the polarization happens, and I don't have easy stats and I'm not an expert at this, but around something like immigration where you see most polarization against it in places that don't have a lot of immigration and therefore don't have an experience of a lot of stories of immigrants in which to anchor their perceptions of harm. So living in Los Angeles, tons and tons and tons and tons of immigrants, our whole economy is dependent on immigrants. And we would, I don't even know what the city would be without them. It would cause a lot of harm, not just to immigrants, but to all of our lives without these people who are working in the farms and feeding and so on and so forth. So it's easy for us to anchor into stories. Can you talk about story as the mechanism for broadening?

KURT:

We have a study where we ask people, imagine you're having a conversation about politics with someone who disagrees with you. And we ask them, what should the other person talk about to make you respect them? And the majority of people say facts, I want facts. I want the raw stats don't editorialize. And I mean it makes sense that society's built on facts. Science is an important thing.

ELISE:

We think we like it.

KURT:

And so we say, great, here's some facts from the other side. And people say, those are not facts. Those are not the right facts or they're not relevant facts. It doesn't matter how many times people use guns to defend themselves. Let's put that aside. The real issue here is how many times kids hurt themselves with unlocked handguns or whatever. And so we inhabit kind of different fact universes because our moral convictions are not really about facts. We use facts to kind of support our moral convictions, but they're, they're not based on those facts in the same way that, I don't know, you might buy a car based on its reliability and consumer report. There's no consumer reports for abortion or immigration. It's not that thing.

And so instead, what we found is really is more effective at bridging divides or telling personal stories about issues, especially stories that connect to harm, right? Because that's ultimately what all our moral judgments are about. So if instead you're having a conversation about guns and I say, look, I'm pro-gun rights because here's some stats about how many times guns are used in self-defense, you might ignore that. But if I say I'm pro-gun rights because when I was a kid, my mom used a handgun to defend our family from a home invader. Now you understand where I'm coming from, right? It's not a talking point I'm repeating, and I'm not even trying to persuade you in the same way. I'm just telling you where I'm coming from. It's like giving you an understanding of my roots and the basis of my moral judgments and our data show that that enables a lot more respect because now I'm trying to understand who you are and we're connecting these individuals and not just repeating talking points on cable news. And so our minds are really wired to think about stories and not statistics. And so if we use those, and of course facts are still important. I'm a scientist, but stories are a good way to start conversations where we politically or morally disagree.

ELISE:

What about when you're talking to someone where there is no story necessarily, there's no direct relationship, but they have a feeling about it and it's probably based on fear for gun owners, a fear, I don't think this is valid, however, that their guns are going to be taken away from them or I don't know. So what do you do when you're talking to someone who's just like, this is my feeling about this and I don't know any immigrants or I don't know any trans people, but this is what I see happening around women's sports or whatever it is. How do you recommend that approach?

KURT:

Yeah, it's a great question. And the questions ultimately, well, what happens if the facts that are out there don't support someone who you are disagreeing with? And again, we could talk about which facts are most relevant, and I think people disagree about that, but I think even if you think the facts are on your side, it almost doesn't matter for those initial conversations because if that fear is so visceral, thinking back of how we evolve, you're convinced that there's a saber-tooth cat out there. And I'm like, no, there isn't there. We haven't seen a saber-tooth cat in this area for years, but you can't shake it. And so you can't just deny someone's experience. You can't just be like you're not afraid or that's ridiculous because it's still there. You have to meet people where they're at, at least initially. You need to engage with someone as if their fear is genuine, and it's a real powerful truth for them, even if you think it doesn't reflect the kind of broader universe of facts.

ELISE:

What happens if they can't identify a fear, but they feel like it is unfair or wrong? I think what's also happening politically is it feels like our government has lost the ability to maneuver as a cohesive, not necessarily everyone on the same page, but that there's any collaborative effort towards something that is mutually satisfying in some way, doesn't seem to be a priority. And so is the way that we are polarized around these issues also, partly because we just fear giving the other side any power because we feel like then they are going to wreak havoc on whole groups. We've lost the ability to be really nuanced about complex issues. Is that what's happening? It feels scary because it feels so wholesale and we give an inch on this, then suddenly gay marriage is out the window and we're going to have an abortion ban. Is that what's happening?

KURT:

These threats seem existential, right?

If we allow them to power, they're going to destroy me and my people or they hate who I am. And I think those fears are often exaggerated. I mean, they're certainly valid in some cases, but they're often exaggerated. The average everyday voter isn't motivated by destruction. This is the big point of the book. No one gets up and says, I want to destroy America, or these people necessarily. And even if they do in extreme cases, and you can point stories of people who do, the best way forward is still to try to understand them because that's the way that you can bring them on board, you can change them, you can turn them into allies. And the example I always like to give is Daryl Davis, he's a black blues musician and he's committed his life to talking to KKK members. These are a group of people who are literally against who he is as a person and are an existential threat, especially historically against black people.

And he makes it his work to sit down and have lunch with these folks. And over the course of hundreds of conversations, he's managed to deradicalize hundreds of these folks and not by arguing facts right away, but by listening to them and trying to understand their threats. So a KKK member might say, well, the reason that I'm against black men is because I think they're genetically more violent, and that's why there's more black men in prison. They're putting the facts together, I think, not in a way that's correct, obviously, but in their mind it's consistent. And he will listen to them, understand them, and then come from personal experience. He's like, well, do I seem violent? Do I seem aggressive? Clearly? And he works on this narrative journey with them together that really affects change rather than just throwing statistics at them. So again, even if the other side seems to be wrong about something, just arguing that they're wrong is not the way to do it effectively, even if you're feeling existential threat. So more important to bring them on your side there. But again, the way to do it is by understanding.

ELISE:

And you mentioned something that's really critical, which is that often we see the other side, the not us as destructive agents of chaos, mayhem and Tate. It's very human to personalize everything that's happening. That's not what we want as a personal afront. They must be misogynist, they must be. All of these fill in the blanks. And the reality is, in the same way that there's different perceptions of harm, typically people are trying to avoid destruction. And there's a perception rightly or wrongly that the other side is trying to destroy. So we all want the same things, perversely, even if it might feel like we have very opposite ways of achieving it.

KURT:

That's right. And I want to kind of put a pin, and there are 1% of folks in the world are psychopaths, and there are political elites and media elites who are motivated to sow division for their own nefarious goals. I'm not an apologist for political elites or leaders that you think are evil. I'm talking about the a hundred million people who vote differently to you, right? In America, those people do not get up and just think, I want to watch the world burn. They were like, I want gas to be cheaper. I want my kids to be happy. I want to keep my job and I want a country to be proud of. And I think liberals can sort of think the same thing, but as you mentioned, the kind of media environment makes us think that, well, those folks, they want to destroy me. If you vote for DEI policies, well then you think that we should kill all white males or whatever. Or if you vote for Republican policies, then you just hate black people. And it's not the case. I mean, there's obviously political biases each way, but it's way less extreme than we think, and they're not motivated by hate.

ELISE:

There's another fascinating part too. You talk about also when we get into the social world, how a massive percentage of people, and I'm sure people who are listening to this podcast are also part of this, are just exhausted and want to not talk about any of it.

KURT:

65%,

ELISE:

65%. People are like, can't we just all get along and how do we take the steam out of this? But then there's that certain percentage of people who are obsessed and who are busy, not necessarily sowing outrage and not necessarily conflict entrepreneurs, but can you talk about some of the statistics about people who are grandstanding all the time about their own morality and what that suggests? Do you remember this part of your book?

KURT:

Yeah. So there is a narrative, and again, I think it's like this general narrative. The other side is somehow disingenuous. They're disingenuous about their concerns about harm. They're disingenuous about protecting themselves. And when they're on social media, the narrative goes, most folks are also disingenuous. They're morally grandstanding. The reason they make comments is because they're just trying to look good to other members of their party. And I will say there again are a few folks like that who are just trying to win internet points or get followers. But most people on social media when they get outraged, are not doing it because they're saying, look at me. They're not peacocks, strutting around saying, look at my tweets. Most people are afraid. Social media is such a terrible place to be for the most part. You're just sitting there, there's all this anger, there's all these threats because the social media companies know that threats make you pay attention. And they know that virality metrics, which are people screaming and running on the street to our minds, capture attention. So you're just always, when you look at a post, you're like, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, these terrible things are happening. That is not a great place to be psychologically. We have some data that show that. It's in one of our studies that people who use social media to learn about politics and pay attention to virality metrics, they have PTSD symptoms above clinical threshold.

And so the argument we make is that when people express outrage on social media, it is genuine. These people are caught up in moral panics and they're worried about threats. And certainly people listening, if you comment on something and you get upset about something, it's not because you're like, look at how good I look. You're thinking, oh, I need to stop this threat and I need to express my voice about it. So again, I think there are people who are loud and who are aggressive and who are trying to look good, but for most people, most places they're genuine and they're just feeling threatened.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know what the percentage of this is, because some research to suggest too that there's sort of this dark triad personality type in terms of, I don't know if those are the conflict entrepreneurs or the people who are really winning from sowing some of this discontent, but you write, moral grandstanding suggests a moral outrage is like a peacocks tale, less about expressing deep moral convictions and more about looking nice. There is some evidence from moral grandstanding. In one study, researchers measured people's tendency to express moral outrage online and also how much they thirsted for fame and power. The study showed that the more people reported a strong desire to lead, dominate, or be respected, the more they admitted to getting into online fights about morality. It's kind of funny,

KURT:

Those people and those people definitely exist, but that doesn't mean that

ELISE:

Every

KURT:

Person is those people.

ELISE:

Yeah, a hundred percent. But it does, I think I feel this way, and I'm sure everyone listening feels this way too, that there's a lot of pressure, and maybe we're starting to take it down, but if you see something, say something, and if you're not incessantly posting or panicking or inciting moral panic that somehow you're deleterious or you're oblivious. So there's that

KURT:

Too. Yeah, right. If you don't do something, you're complicit, right? I mean, even I get this a lot. I do a fair amount of these shows, and there are some where people say, well, you're just being complicit. If you're trying to make sense of the other side, you're enabling their harmful political agenda. And again, I think it's important to say, well, one, understanding where the other side's coming from is crucial to getting social change to occur. If you don't understand how people are actually wired and what motivates them, you can't convince them to vote for the things that you want them to vote for. You can't understand them. And two, again, we can put aside what's happening in the government. I'm not trying to say, look, we should all just talk to Elon Musk. I'm saying we should talk to our coworkers or our family members who we want to have a relationship with and have fallen apart from. Those are the folks, the well-meaning folks that I think we could dial down the outrage to connect better with.

ELISE:

And I think it is a practice for one, bringing down the temperature across the board, which we can do person to person, but I find it to be much more self-soothing, to be able to text a Republican friend and say, please explain this to me. I don't understand this. What's the vision to you and what do you think is happening? And to even hear that perspective, even if I don't agree with it, is quite calming because it reminds me of a different vision for America. But again, not one intent on just wrecking ball. It might be what's happening or that's the perception of what's happening, but that's not necessarily what people want or see.

KURT:

Yeah, no, you're exactly right. And I guess there's two points that makes me think of one, you're doing exactly right. You're inviting someone to give you their perspective. It's not a justify. How could you do this, right? You're like,

You're genuinely trying to understand, and I think that's how we do it. Please tell me where you're coming from and your perspective and the threats you're worried about. And two, I think because it's so red team versus blue team right now, I think we forget that even within us there's conflict. And within us, there's kind of disagreement about policies. Any issue you think about, you can bring up examples that even a progressive person would maybe be like, well, I don't know if I'm that pro-choice or, look, I grew up in Canada and I'm an immigrant, and there's single healthcare. There's lots of taxes in Canada, and one reason I like America is because there's a more entrepreneurial spirit. Part of that is maybe lower taxes, but there's the ethos of the make it for yourself and you enjoy the fruits of your labor. And yet at the same time, I think I vote for higher taxes and more of a social safety net and large part because I'm Canadian. But also, I don't know, there's a tension within me about how we should structure society. And I think people forget that they contain multitudes as well when they attack others. So I think it's also useful for people to pull at their own beliefs a little bit and realize that there's complexity within us all.

ELISE:

I recommend anyone who's listening on either side, it is calming to just ask, are you concerned? What would you be concerned about? What is too much for you? Really wanting to understand because it allows you to also find places to agree. I feel like one of the things that, again, this isn't a political podcast, but when I think about Trump's first term, what makes me sad or feel like what the Democrats did to impart inflame this is to not be able to give any credit, right? Nothing was acceptable, nothing was good. And it goes to this point. You write about how we tend to think our political opponents as stupid, but there's no consistent evidence of an association between political ideology and cognitive ability. Liberals and conservatives generally score pretty similarly on the SAT and a CT and have similar college GPAs. I loved this because I think that's the other thing that happens on both sides. It's assumption of, one, a desire to harm, and two, a desire to destroy. And three, they must be idiots,

KURT:

Right? Because if they're not evil, but they don't believe the same things you believe and you believe the truth, then they must be too stupid to recognize the truth rather than just saying, well, they could still be good people and have a legitimately different moral opinion. This is one of my favorite studies where people do get stupid, is when the data support the different position. If you give liberals or conservatives a math problem, a word problem, which we're all rusty at, I know that supports the other side, people all of a sudden are like, well, it's too complicated to answer, right? It's too hard. But if you give them the problem, and it's not about politics at all, they can figure it out. So we all get stupid when it comes to trying to support her own convictions. And I think we need some humility here because sometimes the other side messes up, but we're not saints either, and we're not mathematicians either.

ELISE:

That psychological process is called motivated reasoning, where also you will work really hard to make something true as long as it benefits your point of view.

KURT:

But I mean, even not at politics, if you're arguing with your spouse or with your coworker about, well, who deserves credit or the blame for something motivated reason comes into that, and you see the other side as a villain and you're a victim and your mind kind of splits things into black and white. And so politics, I think is the most obvious, glaring example of the elephant and the donkey in the room. But this kind of motivated reasoning happens with all sorts of moral arguments. Two kids are arguing about who broke the vase. And you're like, well, you started it. Well, you started the first push. Well, you insulted me. You can always find something to support your view. And it's all motivated reasoning, every example of this.

ELISE:

So just connecting, I think that you asked the most elegant question that we can all take away at the beginning of the book, which is when you're examining any situation and there's polarization, the question is what harm are they seeing? Because it, I think, reframes this in a really elegant and beautiful way, particularly if you intend to have any understanding or have a conversation where you try and get deeper with someone.

Do you ever think it's worth asking people about fear? Or do you think that our fear and anxiety is so deep and runs us in such a subconscious level that people wouldn't even know how to answer that question?

KURT:

I think they could answer it. I think there's a narrative today that, well, they're motivated by fears. Their media pumps their fear, and they're not rational. They're afraid like an animal's afraid of a looming shadow. And so I think you can get to questions of fear or threats, and I think that's the right thing to do, but I wouldn't use that kind of fear idea because I think it's so pejorative in discourse today.

ELISE:

Got it. But it feels like that's really at the root of it. I mean, I can identify that in myself. Of course, I've run on fear.

KURT:

Of course, this is why we're all, if you wake up at night and you can't fall back asleep, you've got worries. You've got anxieties. I mean, those are all reasonable terms. What are you anxious about when it comes to the future of the country? But what are you anxious about? Your kids, your grandkids, people who vote, vote because they're thinking of their kids and their grandkids and they want a better country for them as well.

ELISE:

God, there are so many, we scratch the surface. I thank you for this book. It's so interesting. And they're such fascinating real world applications to in terms of how we move through the world, and it really offered some very simple unlocks for me in terms of hopefully making me a better communicator. All I really want to do is understand what motivates people and where they're coming from. And I have a foundational belief that 99.999% of us are largely good or would want good things for other people. And so it's just disheartening, obviously, to see where we are today and to feel like we're so much better than this. Right?

KURT:

Yeah. And I totally recognize that we're so divided and outrage today that people don't even want to learn why we are because they just want to kind of put their head in the sand and just so they can kind of continue hating. But I think even pragmatically, if you just want to move forward, think about how to think about this, maybe be less outrage, let's frustrated, but also just think about, well, how do I even grapple with what the other side believes? So we can try to bring people into a space of alignment. I think you need this kind of understanding, right? You need to understand how your mind works and how their mind works and how even they might be the same mind.

ELISE:

Yeah. Are you optimistic about our future as a Canadian?

KURT:

I mean, I'm always optimistic. I wouldn't have written this book if I wasn't an optimist. And I'm also an optimist because every time I talk with someone and I give someone the benefit of the doubt, I pass the kind of prickly first thing that someone might say as a defense mechanism. If I listen to folks and I try to understand and I treat them as a human being, someone with dignity, then they always repay that with respect to me and genuineness. So I am an optimist because I have a lot of these conversations. What do you believe? Why do you believe that? I had a conversation with a Christian nationalist once to the airport, and it could have gone terribly, but it didn't, and he was just thankful that someone listened. At the end of that conversation, he also respected me and my position more. I think I listened. So this is not just an exercise in Kumbaya. This is also a way so that people can respect you and your position by understanding them.

ELISE:

I think that's such an important example of the story you just told too, of going into an encounter, not with the intent of changing someone's mind. We know that doesn't work, but just broadening someone's capacity to one feel heard and then also to hear other people I think is a great mitzvah. It's a great service. And I've had similar conversations, maybe not with Christian nationalists, but with people who were shocked that I didn't jump in to light them up and then met my lack of resistance with a softening. And that I think is a win. If we can have more encounters like that and a little bit more softening towards each other, I think it brings us back from a place where it's hard to recover.

KURT:

Yeah, grace I think is the term I like Grace. Yes, I talk a lot with religious groups, with pastors, and I'm not especially religious, but I think this term of grace of just giving someone a little bit of grace and understanding the fact that we all sin and we're all imperfect, but we can all still hold each other with value and ultimately come to love each other if we understand where people are coming from. I just think grace is important.

ELISE:

Grace slack, the room to change their minds. I think we back each other into corners too, and then it becomes really hard to shift. And so yeah, giving people room space, grace, love, grace. Alright, well thank you for your book. Thank you for your time. And we'll meet again in Ohio over ice cream.

KURT:

Great. That sounds good.

ELISE:

I took 30 pages of notes on this book. I really loved it, and we'll be coming back to it frequently. I'm sure I'll write some newsletters about it too. Particularly this idea of concept creep because it explains so much including sort of this culture of optimization that we find ourselves in and sort of obsessive slash compulsive attention to things that it's like, really, that's what we're worried about. But I think it explains how we're there and on this idea of listening to each other. I just want to read to you from the final parts of his book, he writes, people easily recognize when we are not listening to them, our social minds are finely tuned to the subtlest of behavioral cues. I tell students in my classes that I can see if they're cheating, looking at each other's tests, even if they sit at the very back of the room, because humans are amazingly good at detecting what people are paying attention to.

It's obvious when a student is visibly glancing at their neighbor's exam. Likewise, it's obvious when your conversational partner isn't paying attention when their eyes are glazed over and they're distantly nodding, ruminating on their own feelings. People tell stories because they want to be heard and understood, and so you need to try to hear and under stand. If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can email me at [email protected].