Joshua Green (1:41)

Oh, hi, Robert. How you doing?

Robert Krulwich (1:43)

Can you just tell me who you are? Just say, I'm Josh and where you are and what you do and stuff.

Joshua Green (1:47)

I'm Joshua Green. I'm an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Robert Krulwich (1:53)

And you may remember.

Jad Abumrad (1:54)

Wait a second. Crowich, do you remember this?

Robert Krulwich (1:56)

Like in the morality show?

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Sure.

Jad Abumrad (1:58)

I mean, Josh was the guy with the moral puzzles.

Joshua Green (1:59)

I study moral judgment and decision making.

Jad Abumrad (2:02)

Are you gonna get into the whole baby? Would you kill your baby Question?

Robert Krulwich (2:05)

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So for those of you who need to follow this, in that earlier Radio Lab, we described the last episode of the TV show mash.

Joshua Green (2:15)

It's wartime. There's an enemy patrol coming down the road. You are hiding in the basement with some of your fellow villagers. Let's kill those lights. And the enemy soldiers are outside. They have orders to kill anyone that they find.

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Quiet.

Jad Abumrad (2:29)

Nobody make a sound until they've passed us.

Robert Krulwich (2:32)

So there you are. You're huddled in the basement. All around you are Enemy troops. And you're holding your baby in your.

Jad Abumrad (2:39)

Arms.

Robert Krulwich (2:41)

Your baby with a cold, a bit of a sniffle, and you know that your baby could cough at any moment.

Joshua Green (2:49)

If they hear your baby, they're gonna find you and the baby and everyone else, and they're gonna kill everybody. And the only way you can stop this from happening is cover the baby's mouth. But if you do that, the baby's going to smother and die. If you don't cover the baby's mouth, soldiers are going to find everybody and everybody's going to be killed, including you. Including your baby.

Robert Krulwich (3:08)

Then you have the choice. Would you smother your own baby to save the village, or would you let your baby cough, knowing the consequences?

Jad Abumrad (3:21)

And make clear for me where we're going with this, Robert, Like, I don't know.

Robert Krulwich (3:27)

You asked me a question at the time.

Jad Abumrad (3:30)

And how many people chose to kill their baby?

Robert Krulwich (3:34)

About half.

Jad Abumrad (3:36)

Wow. That's not bad.

Robert Krulwich (3:38)

What do you mean it's not bad? You're in favor of killing the baby?

Jad Abumrad (3:41)

Well, what would you do?

Robert Krulwich (3:42)

Me? I would never. I would. I wouldn't even consider.

Jad Abumrad (3:46)

I would kill the baby.

Robert Krulwich (3:47)

You would.

Jad Abumrad (3:48)

The village will go on to have 100 babies. Your baby is just one.

Robert Krulwich (3:53)

My baby is my world. My baby is my universe. So I don't.

Jad Abumrad (3:55)

You're going to erase all those people based on your one child?

Robert Krulwich (4:00)

Well, wait. First of all, the audience should know that Jet Ebomra does not have a child of his own.

Jad Abumrad (4:04)

Yet.

Robert Krulwich (4:05)

Okay, now we have the benefit of time passing. Just out of sheer curiosity, now that you have a child and you looked into that child's face over and over and over again, I'm just curious. Would you.

Jad Abumrad (4:19)

Is this the whole reason we are doing this? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Robert Krulwich (4:22)

I'm gonna. No. You know, people shouldn't worry. But just out of curiosity, what would you do?

Jad Abumrad (4:28)

Would I kill the baby when I.

Robert Krulwich (4:29)

Your baby. Not a baby. Your baby.

Baba Shiv (4:35)

Would you like to see a little.

Jad Abumrad (4:36)

Picture of him while you do that? No, I don't want to see a photo. I know what Emil looks like. Crying OUT LOUD no, see, here's. I have thought about this, actually, because people send us emails about this for some reason. I don't really know. I mean, the thing is, though, I mean, now this is not just like an abstract baby, but it's my baby. Well, that does change everything, obviously. So I'm kind of in a place where I don't really know. I frankly don't know. Wait, let me just Think about this. I don't know, it's kind of an impossible question because, like, in order to answer it truthfully, which is, I would not kill my baby, I'd have to sacrifice a principle which is, like, not as important to me as my baby, but almost. That principle being, well, that sometimes you have to sacrifice something very dear for the greater good. I just think that that's a really. I mean, not to get all communistic on you, but that's a really important idea to me.

Robert Krulwich (5:37)

And in this case, by the way, the calculus of what is about to happen if the baby coughs is really known to you.

Jad Abumrad (5:43)

Well, I mean, if you, you know, if you're the philosopher king and you give me two options. One is to kill my baby to save the village or to allow my baby to live, in which case everybody dies. If those are the only two options, then I still feel like you kind of have to kill the baby. But I don't think I could do that. I don't think any father could do that. So my sort of pathetic answer at this point is, I can't kill my baby, but then I can't sacrifice the village. So I think I would just, like, close my eyes and wish I was somewhere else.

Joshua Green (6:17)

So the idea is that, you know, when you think about this case, on the one hand, you have an intuitive emotional response that says, no, this is terrible. Killing a baby or killing my own baby, even worse. At the same time, a different system within your brain is saying, look, this is as horrible as this is. This is a sensible thing to do. It's the only sensible thing to do, because if you do nothing, everyone will die. Whereas if you kill the baby, then at least you and the other people can live. And what the evidence suggests is that these two compete. Competing moral perspectives are really grounded in different parts of the brain, and the competition has not been resolved.

Robert Krulwich (6:48)

So that's where we were the last time. Now, I want to step forward for a second and think about it a little more deeply. If our sense of right and wrong comes from, like, these competing brain systems, let me revisit the question. Are our brains built to favor certain outcomes? Let's suppose that you are walking alongside a lake and you see a girl drowning right in front of you, and she's screaming for help, but you're wearing a very expensive suit. Should you jump into the lake and save her?

Jad Abumrad (7:20)

No, no, of course. Of course you should. Yes. You mean, like, the suit is the only thing that's preventing me from doing that?

Robert Krulwich (7:26)

Yeah, yeah, jump in but now suppose you're walking down past your mailbox and there's a letter in the mailbox which says, please give us $1,000 so we can help save girls on the other side of the globe. Girls you'll never meet, girls whose screams you'll never hear, but there are girls in trouble on the other side of the world. Go help them.

Jad Abumrad (7:43)

So wait, so the equivalence is that you jump into the lake, you save the girl who's drown one on one, or you send the check and you save the girl who is in peril.

Robert Krulwich (7:53)

A girl? Not that girl. A girl somewhere on the other side of the globe.

Jad Abumrad (7:57)

I see.

Robert Krulwich (7:57)

So the question to go to, Josh, is if you didn't give the thousand dollars, would that make you a bad guy?

Joshua Green (8:03)

Right. Well, there is something funny about these cases, right, that most of us say that of course you have to rescue the drowning child, but, you know, you're not a saint if you don't give your money over to save the children on the other side of the world. But you're certainly not a terrible. Or so it seems to us. And so, yes, there's this putting aside.

Robert Krulwich (8:23)

Whether it's a good or bad, whether you're a good or bad person.

Joshua Green (8:26)

Sure.

Robert Krulwich (8:26)

How do you explain the difference?

Joshua Green (8:28)

Well, I think it makes a lot of evolutionary sense. That is, a lot of our social emotional responses are geared towards life in the kind of environment in which our ancestors evolved. And it makes sense that we would have moral buttons, so to speak, that get pushed by the kinds of things that our ancestors might have encountered because.

Robert Krulwich (8:48)

Tens of thousands of years of evolution have essentially be quietly tugging at your heart in those kinds of situations.

Joshua Green (8:53)

Exactly, exactly. Whereas the idea of spending a minimal amount of money to save the life of some stranger on the other side of the world that you're never going to meet, that's a totally new modern phenomenon. It's not something that our emotions are prepared for.

Robert Krulwich (9:11)

Well, now, doesn't that leave us in a funny place?

Joshua Green (9:14)

Because I think it does.

Robert Krulwich (9:16)

What happens if the most important questions that we face as a species or as a group involve thinking abstractly? Those problems, pollution, global warming and things like that, those aren't really local problems, they're global problems.

Joshua Green (9:31)

Exactly. This is, I think, gets right at the heart of the matter, and this is why I do this research. I think that the kind of thinking that we apply to those problems, what we call common sense, is really hunter gatherer common sense, or at least a lot of it is. And if we're going to face these big Problems that our minds were not designed by evolution to handle. Then we have to learn to turn off parts of our brain that are getting in the way and turn on other parts that may seem like the wrong parts to be using.

Jad Abumrad (9:59)

So he's saying that we should tamp down our primitive emotional instincts that are in our reptile brain. Those instincts that say, don't kill your baby, like that stuff. And then we should amp up somehow the part of us that thinks more abstractly about the greater good and about people that aren't right in front of us.

Robert Krulwich (10:18)

Yeah. So if you're sitting there with a soda can in your hand and you think, I guess I can just throw this on the street, and you go, your primitive part is saying, well, I can get away with that because no one's seeing it. But of course the calculating part would say, well, if we all do this, then the world will be full of trash. And it's problems like that that in order to solve them, you have to think abstractly.

Jad Abumrad (10:37)

That's interesting. You know why that's interesting? Because it might be. I mean, I think he might be wrong. I mean, because we encountered this already. He's asking us to rely on a part of our brain that, you know, is not exactly Hercules. Do you remember the thing we talked about in what show was that, Zorin? Was it the, the Choice show with Baba Shiv? Can we get that audio and throw that into the mix?

Baba Shiv (11:00)

I'm Baba Shiv. I'm a professor here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in marketing. A lot of my research, it has.

Jad Abumrad (11:07)

To do with the brain and tricking people.

Baba Shiv (11:10)

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jad Abumrad (11:13)

So, Robert, I want to tell you about one particular experiment that he did.

Baba Shiv (11:17)

So the experiment is pretty straightforward, goes like this.

Jad Abumrad (11:20)

He got a bunch of subjects together. He said, okay, I'm going to give you all a number. Give me a number on a little card. You're going to read the number and I want you to commit that number to memory.

Baba Shiv (11:27)

Take as much time as you want to memorize the number.

Jad Abumrad (11:30)

Then he says, you're now going to.

Baba Shiv (11:32)

Walk to the next room and recall the number. And that's what subjects think, test subjects think that they're going to be doing.

Jad Abumrad (11:37)

So they know they're going to be in one place getting a number, going, reciting that number.

Baba Shiv (11:41)

That's right.

Jad Abumrad (11:41)

That's all they know.

Baba Shiv (11:42)

That's all they know.

Jad Abumrad (11:43)

What they don't know is that not everybody is getting the same kind of number.

Baba Shiv (11:47)

Some people get a seven digit number, some people get a two Digit number.

Robert Krulwich (11:50)

That I can do, by the way. I think I can do two digits.

Jad Abumrad (11:52)

No, I doubt it. All the subjects have to do is they've got to memorize a number, walk out of room one, down the hall, room two, then recite their number. Now just imagine you with me.

Baba Shiv (12:02)

Mm.

Jad Abumrad (12:03)

Person with a two digit number in their head was walking out of room one. One, two is my number. I can definitely remember this. Down the hall, same time, someone with seven digits in their head, 1228936 walks down the hall. Now here's where the trickery comes in. As they're walking down the hall mid memorizing, all of a sudden, excuse me. They pass a lady in the hallway and she's holding something. Sorry to interrupt you, but would you like a snack? Sure. She says, here, have a snack. Just as our way of saying thanks for participating in the study, you can have one of two snacks. You choose.

FidelityGo Announcer (12:36)

You can choose between either A, a.

Jad Abumrad (12:38)

Big fat slice of chocolate cake or B, a nice bowl of fruit salad. Meanwhile, they've both got these numbers still in their head. Now here's the weird thing. When they finally make their choice, what would you like some yummy cake or some healthy fruit? The people, this is crazy. The people with two digits in their head, you know, I love cake, but I think I'll take the fruit, almost always choose the fruit, it's healthy. Whereas the people with seven digits in their head almost always choose the cake. You know, the cake, I want the cake. And we're talking by huge margins here.

Baba Shiv (13:09)

It was significant. I mean this was like in some cases a 20, 25, 30 point difference.

Robert Krulwich (13:15)

The lesson we took from that, which is the lesson you are not telling me now, is your rational system the hope of humankind. Part of your brain is very, very suggestible, weak, and almost barely struggling to manage the situation. Give it something too much to do and oh man, it just sweet cake.

Joshua Green (13:38)

I would take a very different lesson from that study. Imagine if you told those people who say, look, here's how your mind works. When you have to remember a long number, it's going to clog up your memory and it's going to make it harder for you to resist the temptation to have chocolate cake instead of fruit salad. But I'm telling you this now, you're armed with the truth about how your own mind works. Here's a long number. Go right. Now, how many of those people are going to be able to resist the chocolate cake? I think a lot more of them are right.

Robert Krulwich (14:06)

Has anyone done that? Has anyone said, okay, I'm sending you down and that is going to be this siren, seductive, cake handling temptress, and let's see if you can resist. Has that ever been done?

Joshua Green (14:16)

It hasn't. I don't know if it's been done, but I'm willing to place bets on how that will turn out. That is, that we can recognize the quirks and the flaws and the inconsistencies in our cognitive systems and do something better that makes more sense.

Jad Abumrad (14:32)

Is this just blind optimism or does he have evidence to support this?

Joshua Green (14:36)

Well, one thing that gives me hope is something called the Flynn Effect.

Jad Abumrad (14:40)

The Flynn effect.

Robert Krulwich (14:41)

Yes.

Joshua Green (14:41)

So the Flynn effect is something that was noticed by a philosopher and now political scientist named Jim Flynn.

Robert Krulwich (14:48)

I knew it was going to be Flynn.

Joshua Green (14:50)

Yeah.

Robert Krulwich (14:50)

Who would have been really surprising if his name was Zoransky.

Joshua Green (14:52)

That's right. No, they line these things up so that they make sense.

Robert Krulwich (14:57)

Okay, the Flynn effect.

Joshua Green (14:58)

The Flynn effect. What Flynn noticed is that over the course of the 20th century, IQ scores kept going up and up and up in the industrialized world. So much so that by his estimates, a person of average intelligence in 1900 would register somewhere near the line for mental retardation by present standards. How could this be?

Robert Krulwich (15:20)

Same test, by the way. Same thing.

Joshua Green (15:23)

I mean, that's why it's a bit complicated, because the tests have changed and the norms have changed. But doing your best to control for all of that. By his estimates, we have gained about 30 IQ points as a society in the last hundred years, which is enormous.

Robert Krulwich (15:37)

Now, there are a lot of people who would say, well, the IQ test really doesn't really tell you that we're getting smarter or really different. But if you ask Josh, well, why would we be getting better at the IQ test? He says that in the last hundred.

Joshua Green (15:51)

Years, people learned how to think abstractly. 78. Crude oil up 30. Things that we take for granted, like thinking about abstract things, like a market, where a market is not a particular place with fruit stands, but a more abstract space, so to speak, in which goods and services are exchanged for money. These two bit, these two minutes.

Robert Krulwich (16:16)

Are.

Joshua Green (16:17)

Two like this at 10. Things like that have become part of our cognitive backdrop.

Robert Krulwich (16:27)

Meaning, and I think this is how Josh would argue it, these are deeply abstract occupations to try to figure out patterning and numbers and future values.

Jad Abumrad (16:40)

Crude oil, natural gas.

Robert Krulwich (16:43)

And I think Josh is arguing that it can change you.

Joshua Green (16:46)

Cultural evolution essentially has given us much higher IQs when it comes to thinking about a lot of things.

Robert Krulwich (16:52)

Wow, so you're saying that we are learning to exercise our rational systems. It's not that we're growing any new brain cells or making a whole new set of connections, it's just that. But what we've got, we're just making more muscular.

Joshua Green (17:05)

Exactly. It's like learning to play an instrument. Right? I mean, when you first start playing guitar, you're totally useless. It sounds like a dying animal, but, you know, give it a couple of years and it can sound great. And basically, we're.

Robert Krulwich (17:17)

That's a very specific sort of motor skill. But being better at abstraction and thinking about right and wrong in a new way, that seems what you're saying is kind of dang. Well, you think that you can exercise yourself into being a better man and a better woman and a better speech?

Joshua Green (17:34)

I think that's right. I think that we can learn to play our dorsolateral prefrontal cortices better.

Robert Krulwich (17:39)

At the end of the day, you think that the pressure of dealing with these big abstract problems will eventually change our minds?

Joshua Green (17:46)

Well, I hope so. I mean, the problem is that as a species, we tend to learn from trial and error. The problem with issues like nuclear proliferation and global warming is that we only have one Earth. And what I hope is that if we have to learn the lesson from some kind of trial and error, the errors are not so big that we don't get another chance. But I also think that there's reason for optimism.

Robert Krulwich (18:08)

Or at least you hope.

Joshua Green (18:10)

Yeah, at least I hope. But, I mean, that may just be because I'm an optimistic person. I mean, I might just sort of throw up my hands and say, forget it. I'll go do something else, enjoy my time before we kill ourselves. But I think that it makes sense, it's worth a shot, to see if we can teach ourselves to live happily on a small planet.

Robert Krulwich (18:33)

Aren't you the teacher?

Joshua Green (18:35)

Wow. Yeah, I'm pretty. Pretty pedantic, huh? Teaching the world?

Robert Krulwich (18:41)

Well, no, I kind of. I certainly think anyone normal would be rooting for you. Absolutely.

Joshua Green (18:46)

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. There are a lot of abnormal people who root for me, but I hope there are some normal ones, too.

Robert Krulwich (18:51)

Josh Green is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. He's written these ideas in an essay in a volume called what's Next? Edited by Max Brockman.

Jad Abumrad (19:01)

And, hey, did you. When you were talking with him, did you ask him about his babies? Would he kill his babies?

Robert Krulwich (19:07)

You know, I should. I forgot.

Jad Abumrad (19:08)

Any case, we should. We should rap. We should kill this baby.

Robert Krulwich (19:11)

We have to see our funding credit, right?

Jad Abumrad (19:13)

So, radiolab is supported in part by.

Robert Krulwich (19:16)

The National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public.

Jad Abumrad (19:18)

Broadcasting, and one other the Sloan Foundation. Yeah, which, by the way, is supporting Kepler, the Philip Glass opera about the great 17th century astronomer. It's premiering November 18th right down the street from me at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich (19:33)

I'm Robert Krumlitz.

Jad Abumrad (19:34)

Thanks for listening.

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