DarkHorse Podcast #311: "Rorschach Trap: The Evolutionary Lens"

Hosts: Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
Date: January 28, 2026

Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging episode, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying use their evolutionary toolkit to break down a recent fatal police shooting in Minneapolis, exploring how empathy, justice, and media narratives intersect in the modern world. The episode opens with a discussion of sex differences in empathy (rooted in an overlooked scientific paper) and segues into a critical analysis of how polarization is cultivated and exploited after public tragedies. Throughout, Bret and Heather challenge listeners to reflect on how modern media, instant emotional reactions, and societal changes in gender roles impact our ability to perceive truth and justice.

1. Evolutionary Lens on Empathy: Paper Review

Timestamps: 14:30–34:59

Key Points & Insights

• Heather introduces a 2006 Nature paper: "Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others", which found stark sex differences in empathic responses to perceived fairness.
• Summary of Study:
  • Participants watched confederates play a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, acting fairly or unfairly.
  • Subjects reliably attributed positive traits to fair players.
  • When watching fair or unfair players experience pain, women showed empathy regardless of fairness, while men only had increased empathy toward fair individuals; men’s empathy vanished for those deemed unfair.
  • The paper hypothesized men may play a primary evolutionary role in justice/punishment, while women’s empathy may be more unconditional.

Notable Quotes

• [23:09] Heather: “Women respond to people experiencing pain or punishment with an empathetic response, regardless... where as men... don’t tend to have a sense of empathy towards him because it feels justified.”
• [28:02] Bret: “If you set up a system... where you simply sympathize with victims, then you incentivize being victimized.”
• [28:55] Heather: “It’s not justice. It’s quite the opposite of justice... and if you don’t agree then you’re against justice — like, no, I’m against instantaneous reads and blanket empathy where it shouldn’t apply.”

2. Cultural Consequences: Empathy, Justice, and Social Movements

Timestamps: 34:59–54:44

Key Points & Insights

• The discussion connects the study’s findings to broader phenomena: social justice culture, DEI initiatives, and “oppression Olympics.”
• Bret and Heather argue that the “feminization” of society, including science and public life, shifts rules from adversarial/merit-based (“toxic masculinity,” public, overt, regulated) to covert, cryptic manipulation (“toxic femininity,” emotional, socially manipulative).
• The consequences include easy gaming of empathy systems and creation of "cry-bullies."

Notable Moments

• [47:56] Heather (on Portland’s 2020 protests): “The media representation and what was happening on the ground bore so little resemblance to one another... why anyone trusts that what they were seeing through their screens is true, I do not know.”
• [49:21] Bret (on Minneapolis’ Governor): “Tim Walz is beyond my limit. I cannot stomach this guy because he is so clearly playing the cry bully role... pouring gasoline on Minneapolis.”

3. The Minneapolis Shooting: A Rorschach Trap

Timestamps: 54:44–106:51

Key Points & Insights

• Event Overview: Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse, was shot by ICE officers during a chaotic protest in Minneapolis. Rumors, partial videos, and partisan narratives dominate public understanding.
• Bret stresses that key facts remain unknown: Did Preddy’s gun fire while being removed from his possession? Did officers know he was disarmed? Was there reasonable fear justifying deadly force?
• Comparisons are drawn to Portland’s 2020 protests, with organized protesters (Antifa reference), escalating standoffs, media distortions, and political actors exploiting trauma.

Analysis of Media Narratives

• Bret and Heather play news clips from Fox News and CNN, noting both are less polarized than expected but still focus on different aspects (weapon legality, protest context, police training).
• “Rorschach Trap” described: An event becomes a canvas onto which individuals project pre-existing beliefs; opposing sides find in it whatever confirms their worldview.
• The hosts analyze technological and psychological reasons why bystander video and media allow for manipulation and division.

Notable Quotes

• [56:00] Bret: “A human being is evolved to look at a situation having incomplete information to render a judgment... We are denied all of those tools. We are looking through a keyhole at an event... ought to cause us to be incredibly skeptical...”
• [70:39] Heather (reacting to news clips): “Those two clips you showed didn’t vary nearly as much as I was expecting... They seemed measured to me.”
• [87:26] Heather (on eyewitness reliability): “Eyewitnesses aren’t reliable... All that is both true and child’s play compared to where we are now, because A) we are not eyewitnesses, but are being tricked by our technology into believing that we are, and B) your point: we are being gamed.”

4. Manipulation, Media, and Social Division

Timestamps: 94:02–107:05

Key Points & Insights

• Bret labels events like the Preddy shooting as "Rorschach traps"—events engineered or seized upon to trigger tribal reactions based on viewers’ priors.
• The conversation warns that media and political actors exploit tragedies for narrative gain, keeping the populace divided and distracted from systemic issues.
• They urge listeners to maintain “cultivated agnosticism” and resist snap judgments, recognizing manipulation at work.

Notable Quotes

• [94:05] Bret: “A Rorschach trap is going to be an event that divides a population based on its priors... it sure looks like the intent is to cause egregious behavior in front of a camera so it can be portrayed and the country’s sympathies can be swayed.”
• [106:51] Bret (on the Preddy case): “If you think you know what happened to Alex Peretti, you’re way ahead of the evidence... Your certainty is an indication that you don’t know yet what is true.”
• [117:24] Bret: “The instantaneous assessment is not a good thing... you just introduced an error into your model and you don’t know how big an effect it’s going to have.”

5. Invitation: "Covid Era" Story Project

Timestamps: 107:05–117:08

Key Points & Insights

• Heather announces a project to collect and publish personal stories from the Covid era, seeking to create a repository of primary-source testimony about the social and emotional impact of pandemic policies.
• Submissions up to 2,500 words are welcome; authors may use pseudonyms and are compensated for accepted work.

Notable Quotes

• [113:09] Heather: “While I hope that it becomes a repository for stories that act as a kind of history... the act of writing itself is also healing and cathartic... even if you don’t choose to share it, just having written it can be healing.”
• [116:59] Bret: “It’s a kind of cultivated agnosticism that one needs in order to arrive at a correct conclusion.”

Memorable Moments

• Opening Banter [00:10–02:23]: Playful mathematical aside on "permutable primes," establishing the show’s tone of curiosity and irreverence.
• [24:45] Bret formulating a hypothesis: “The female side of that result, if it is accurate, is so surprising that I think it necessitates an explanation. We don’t have it. I’m going to put a hypothesis on the table...”
• [49:21] Tim Walz & Anne Frank analogy: Intense critique of political rhetoric using WWII references to frame contemporary events, described as “pouring gasoline” on public panic.
• [105:05] Discussion on "sanctuary cities": Explores historical antecedents of current breakdowns in law enforcement and federal vs. local tensions.

Thematic Summary

• Skepticism as a Virtue: Viewers are admonished to remain skeptical of media narratives, especially those that map suspiciously well onto pre-existing partisan divides.
• Reflexive Empathy Can Hurt Justice: Universal or context-free empathy, especially when channeled through social movements or modern media, is easily gamed and can incentivize victimhood.
• Technological Novelty Outruns Human Brains: Our evolved mental architecture is out of step with the information environment shaped by social media, video streaming, and algorithmic curation.
• Political & Media Manipulation: Widespread confusion around events like police shootings in Minneapolis are seen as the result of deliberate exploitation—”Rorschach traps”—by political and media actors.

Suggested Sections for Listeners

• 16:00–34:59: Sex differences in empathy, analysis of the Nature study
• 54:44–90:00: Deep dive into the Minneapolis shooting, media coverage, and the “Rorschach trap”
• 107:05–116:59: Announcement and rationale for the “Covid Era” story project

Closing Thought

The episode concludes with a call to humility and skepticism: immediate emotional judgments are hazardous, especially in the hyper-novel conditions of the modern world. Bret and Heather urge listeners to slow down, gather evidence, and question what they think they know—because the stakes, both for individual justice and our collective sanity, are high.