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You Are Not So Smart
327 - The Trolley Solution - Joshua Greene
01:19:19
Joshua Greene tells us how the brain generates morality, and how his research may have solved the infamous trolley problem and in so doing created a way to encourage people to contribute to charities that do the most good.
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They say if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. At Amica Insurance, we're built for our customers and prioritize your needs. Amica empathy is our best policy. Visit amica.com and get a quote. Today you can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code Smart50Smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the show. Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast, episode 327.
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When you have an intuition about what's right or wrong, you are going from a psychological is your own feeling to at least a tentative moral conclusion. So anytime we're using our minds to try to figure out what's going on with the world, we have to acknowledge the possibility that we could be looking at things in a distorted kind of way. We have the incredible power to help people or hurt people on a massive scale from a distance. And that is the scariest thing about where we are kind of in our cultural and technological history. And it's also the greatest opportunity, right? And it's not just an opportunity for presidents and people with their finger literal and metaphorical buttons. It's ordinary people as well. The positive power that ordinary people have is stunning and something that we don't fully appreciate.
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That was the voice of Dr. Josh Green, an experimental psychologist, a neuroscientist, and a philosopher. He teaches at Harvard and he runs a lab there. He wrote the book titled Moral Tribes and has been involved in all manner of incredible research into how brains generate minds that experience, behave and make judgments and decisions influenced by a phenomenon we commonly refer to as morality. Morality? Yeah, you can study that scientifically. I met Josh Green earlier this year at a conference on pedagogical innovation. And that innovation was all related to things like arguing and debating and having different opinions and attitudes and political ideologies and all the rest. This conference was held at the Lidowitz center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. The center for Enlightened Disagreements. Super cool. The directors, Eli Finkel and Nour Katali, they gathered a bunch of people like Josh and myself together to get the center going and help plan out what they're going to be doing there. We all gave lectures and demonstrations and traded ideas about how to improve discourse and reduce polarization and head off AI powered bots and, you know, save the world through creating better systems for argumentation and Conversation and then teaching people how to apply those things. We will talk about all about that in many more upcoming episodes, and we'll have other guests come on the show who are involved in all of that to talk about what they're doing in this episode. That guest is Josh Green, and he is our guest for several reasons, all of which relate back to the trolley problem. And they relate back to it because Green is actively attempting to generate solutions to the trolley problem. And he's doing that using neuroscience to make sense of cognitive psychology, that is making sense of philosophical quandaries. And here's the thing. I think he's actually onto something because there's evidence that he's getting results. And I think he's onto something in several ways. I mean, he may have solved the trolley problem, and we will get into all of that in just a second. But first, we should probably briefly explain what the trolley problem is. And even if you're familiar with this old philosophical thought experiment and moral dilemma, you're going to learn something new, most likely. Here we go. Okay, here's a very simple version of the trolley problem. There are five people tied to a trolley track or a train track or something like that, and a runaway trolley or train is headed straight for them. However, you are standing in front of a lever that could divert its course onto a separate track where one person is tied down. So you have no other options available, just the lever. And the question here, the moral dilemma is, do you choose to do nothing which will definitely lead to five people dying, or do you choose to pull the lever which will definitely prevent those people from dying, but also definitely kill the one person on the other track? That's the original trolley problem, which, shockingly, isn't all that old, philosophically speaking. It came from an academic paper written in 1967 by the British philosopher Philippa Foote, who in that paper was exploring the ethical issues surrounding abortion. That's not to say the overarching idea here isn't very, very old. It's something in philosophy they call the principle of double effect, which is the proposition that states an action causing both good and bad outcomes can be morally permissible if the bad effect is not intended, only foreseen, and the good effect outweighs it. But then in the 1970s and 1980s, the trolley problem gained fame and it went pre Internet viral, thanks to another philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thompson, who wrote some papers imagining two other variations. What if that one person on the other sidetrack is your child or your mother or husband or wife? And what if there isn't a lever but a footbridge over the track, and a very overweight man is standing at the railing just above the track, far enough ahead of the trolley that if you were to push him over, he would land just right and thus stop it from killing the five people down the line. But kill him? Would you push him over? I mean, it would save five people's lives. Take a second and notice the way you feel in that second scenario versus the first. It's different. It's different for most people. In the first scenario, you save five people by pulling a lever, and that will kill one person. And in the other, you save five people by physically pushing a single person to their death, and it feels different. Would you save five people by sacrificing one person? It seems like they're the same, but they. The answer changes depending on whether you actively physically do the sacrificing and furthermore, whether the one person is already part of a scenario you've become part of, or they become part of it through your actions. When researchers have put these questions in front of people, they have found that, yeah, people do seem to answer it differently, and they answer differently depending on whether they're using a switch or pushing a person. And for the most part, people are hesitant to push the person while not so hesitant to pull the lever. But those answers can change. People can become a lot more okay with pushing the person onto the tracks depending on whether or not their brains have been damaged in certain regions. They also will become much more likely to be okay with it if they are what we used to refer to as psychopaths, if they have a certain antisocial personality disorder that reduces their sense of empathy and increases their sense of sort of utilitarianism. And perhaps most surprisingly, people's answers differ whether or not they're skilled meditators, people who are very skilled at meditation and have been practicing meditation for a long time, they're much more okay with pushing the man off the bridge and onto the tracks to save the five people, even though it will kill the man. A number of insights all started to bubble up thanks to all this research that made their way to psychology and neuroscience. And those insights pretty much amounted to, oh, wait, it seems as though morality, moral judgments, moral decisions. These aren't just affected by the wording of the question, by context, by framing. They seem to be affected by whatever is going on in our brains when we think about that stuff. They're deeply affected by the conditions of our brains, down to whether they're damaged or have been shaped by intense training or experience. And that suggests that morality is something that can definitely be studied scientifically, that morality as a religious idea or a philosophical conundrum is in essence something biological shaped by evolution. Morality is something that brains generate, which means we can research it like anything else the brains do. And that's where our guest enters the story, because Josh Green did that research and found out some very, very fascinating things. And he wrote a book about all of that titled Moral Tribes. But that was a while back. We're going to talk about that a little bit in this episode, but what we're going to focus on is what he did afterward because he went way further with this whole moral psychology neuroscience. Oh, I think it may have figured out the whole source of the trolley problem stuff. He and his lab at Harvard created two ways to apply all of this to make the world a much better place. One involves helping people, encouraging them, nudging them to give to charities that are way more effective than the charities that they would prefer to give their money to, while also allowing them to give money to those charities. It's super fascinating. You can get right in on this. Right now. You can go ahead and give to the charities you care about and the charities that are extremely effective at the same time by going to GiveDirectly.org smart. And if you do it through that URL, which is through this podcast, then his organization will match your donation. This is all part of something called Pods Fight Poverty, which I'm very happy to be a part of, along with all these other podcasts, Ologies and the Happiness Lab and all these things. You will hear all about that in the interview. And the other thing that he's doing, the other thing that we'll talk about in the interview is he has created through the lab, through his team, through his research, through the research of others, a very effective game called Tango, which you can play over an app or over a website. And you and another person who is politically different than you will be able to bypass polarization and arguing and debate that goes nowhere and encourage each other to cooperate and avoid political extremism and get along in a way that might save democracy, save the world. We'll discuss that. Well, discuss everything that I've just mentioned, all sorts of other stuff related to the brain and the trolley problem and more, all after this. Commercial break.
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Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See exclusions and details@t mobile.com hey crafters, you're invited to visit the new Knit and Sew shop at Michael's. Find hundreds of fabrics in over 800 stores and over 100,000 styles on Michael's Shop your favorite yarn brands including Big Twist, Caron Cakes and Bernat in multiple styles and colors. You'll also find all the machines, tools and notions you need with top brands like Singer Brother and Pellon, plus Essential Thread and Floss. It's all new at Michael's. Okay, that thing I said I would talk about in the middle of the show. It's not quite the middle of the show, but here's the thing. So curiosity is this unusually common trait of people who listen to this podcast. You may have noticed that about yourself. And if you're the kind of person who wants to understand how minds work and sometimes don't work, which is clearly who you are because you listen to the show, you are probably super interested in critical thinking. If you are the kind of person who is right now listening to this podcast, then you might also be curious to find out about the Higher Order Thinking Skills course that I am co presenting at the Executive Thinking Academy. The Executive Thinking Academy. It's about executive thinking like the executive centers of your brain, but also executive thinking too, if that's what you want to do with it. It's a four week course to level up your strategic, creative, critical and executive thinking skills. But it's a bit different because first it's not a passive exercise in watching a video and then filling out some multiple choice questions. Instead, you you will be actively participating in hands on activities using templates and frameworks that you can use well beyond the course itself. It's a genuinely interactive experience that will help you to think in new ways. You also get the full set of kitted thinking tools with more than 200 beautifully designed physical cards in these fancy magnetic boxes that you can use to plan and facilitate workshops, elevate brainstorming sessions, supercharge strategy planning, and much more. These cards, they. They have digital versions, they have QR codes on them, they have a whole like thing that you can use on a website to make them Cool. The course is incredible and it shows you a bunch of ways to use those cards at your workplace or anywhere else. And you'll have the option to learn collaboratively with a small group of like minded peers so that you're holding each other accountable and encouraging each other to push your thinking boundaries. Plus, you don't just get access to this one course. You get 12 months of membership to the Executive Thinking Academy itself. And that includes webinars and Q and A sessions with global thought leaders, with authors, with academics. It's a whole lot of stuff. And you get 50% off if you use the code smart50 at checkout when you visit kitted shop, half off smart50 kitted shop. If you are curious to learn more and to join me for next month's higher order thinking skills course, head over there right now, click on the link in the show notes and lock in your place. And now we return to our program. I'm David McCraney. This is the you are not so smart podcast. And this is my interview with Dr. Josh Green, an experimental psychologist, a neuroscientist and a philosopher who teaches at Harvard and studies how the brain generates morality and how that affects our behavior, our experiences, our judgments, and our decisions. Meeting you was great in the sense we met in the Chicago area doing a thing for the center for Enlightened Disagreement. That is just getting up and running. We were able to have a couple of coffee walks and I was like, man, this guy's cool.
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B
Well, likewise. That was so much fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed taking those walks with you.
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It was the best. We both have a lot of overlapping obsessions and I'm. I love your life story is so interesting to me. I want to kind of start there just for a second. And you're a philosopher. The philosopher by training and a psychologist and neuroscientist. And all that mushed together into one. How did that happen to you? How did this become the person you are?
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B
You know, I was, I was a weird kid. That's where it always starts, right? I mean, I remember thinking like when I was in, I did debate because I was like argumentative and people were like, well, we gotta put that to some kind of constructive use. So I started doing debate and that kind of got me into philosophy. And I remember. So someone gave me, or I found this philosophy cartoon philosophy book called Looking at Philosophy. And I read this and I loved it. And I was just like, oh, man, it's too bad you can't be a philosopher for your job these days, because I Would have loved this, right? And so I ended up. I went to, actually a business school for undergrad for my first year. And then I realized that was not for me, and I transferred out and I was like, all right, I'm going to be a philosophy major. And so I became a philosophy major and got really, really into it, like, obsessed. And then the first semester I was at school, so this was. I transferred to Harvard as an undergrad and I took this course called Thinking About Thinking, which very much up your alley. You would have loved it. It was this wild course, and it was co taught by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Robert Nozick, and the law professor Alan Dershowitz. And it was a lot of, like, they literally got him on the first day and described to the class, like, this is three old Jews from Brooklyn. And a lot of it was just them going off on tangents. But it was fun to watch. But it introduced me to this. This paper called the Trolley Problem. And I found that thing fascinating. And this was at a time when, you know, it wasn't a meme. There was no Internet, and, like. And I just got really obsessed with these moral dilemmas. And I'm guessing your audience is at least somewhat familiar with this. You know, trolley headed towards five people kill one. You know, can you. Can you turn it away from the five, but you'll run over one, or can you push somebody in front of the trolley to save the five? And I got really just stuck on this because I was like, why does it seem okay to hit the switch but not okay to push the guy? Which was the standard intuitions. And I got really into this. And then I read this book called Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio, which came out in the mid-90s, which was about the famous cases of people like Phineas Gage. So these are people who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. If Gage got an iron spike through his skull working on the railroad, and. And it was one of this first clue that we really have these very distinct systems in the brain where what happened to him was after his accident. He could read, he could do math, he could have conversations with him, but his decision making and his character had changed. And so there was something about the emotional side of his life that was completely disrupted, but what you might call the cognitive or rational side remained intact. And I read that as a side project in this neuroscience class that I was taking the year after. I took the class with the moral dilemmas with the Trolley Problem and the Three famous professors. And I had this kind of, I guess I'd call it an epiphany where I was like, wait a second, what's going on in the footbridge case? So this is push the guy off the footbridge, use him as a trolley stopper to save the five people that. What's going on there? When we say no, even though you can save more lives, that's wrong. That's the thing that Phineas Gage is missing. So I had this hypothesis that what makes a dilemma, like specifically the footbridge version of the trolley problem, a dilemma, is that there's this fight between this response that we have and that Phineas Gage doesn't, and then this general reasoning ability. So I like, kind of filed that away. And then I got into grad school and philosophy, and I was doing philosophy grad school and was decided I wanted to do, for various reasons, to get into science. And I kind of pulled that back up and I went. This was at Princeton. I went to this guy named Jonathan Cohen, had just arrived at Princeton to set up this new center for the study of brain, mind and behavior. And I, like, made an appointment and went into his office and he still got like all of his books and boxes everywhere where he just got in there. And I explained, you know, he's. He's a neuroscientist who was a pioneer in using brain imaging. You know, now you see brain imaging studies all the time. But this was really new in the late 90s. And I came to him and I was like, I'm a philosopher and I have a moral dilemma. And I want to give dilemmas like this to people in brain scanners. And here's my hypothesis about what's going to happen when they get the footbridge case or the switch case. And he thought about it for a second and he's like, you know, normally I say no, but I think I'm going to say yes. And he got me going right away on learning how to do brain imaging research. And then two years later, we had our trolley problem paper published in Science. And I was just like, hey, this science gig is pretty good. This is how. And since then I've had tons of paper papers rejected. But, like, I got this, like, not only taste of having an exciting problem, but having, like, a frictionless path to, like, you know, the top journal. And I was like, soul. And so, you know, I was like, how do I do more of this? So he kept me on as a postdoc for another 4 years after I finished my philosophy degree. And then that was basically like a second PhD where I learned how to do psychology and cognitive neuroscience. And then, you know, I applied for a bunch of jobs in, to be, you know, in, in psychology, neuroscience. Got a lot of rejections, but I got one job that was here where I'm sitting at Harvard, where they were like, well, we don't have to tenure him, so what the hell, we'll take a chance. And then, you know, managed to stick around. So that's the, the, the, the, the short, long version or the long.
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A
No, that's good. It really, he really stuck the landing as a person, like, yeah, I ended up at Harvard.
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B
I got incredibly, I got incredibly lucky. I mean, I think, you know, luck favors those who were prepared. And I had been thinking about this stuff and I was like a serious little nerd. But I also got incredibly lucky to just hit all that stuff at just, just the right time.
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A
The thing that excites me most about getting a chance to talk to you about this very particular thing is so you've got this whole background. You've got, it's, it's, it's philosophy, psychology, neuroscience. You've got these thinking about thinking, and then we've got the mind and then we've got the brain and we've got biology, there's materialism in here and all these other things. All the great questions that I'll be obsessed with until I am no longer able to ask questions properly are all in there. And we've got this trolley problem thing. I think what I love most about what you're up to is when a philosophical argument becomes a scientific investigation. And so there's an opportunity sometimes, to the great chagrin of philosophy lovers, that, hey, we might actually just get to the bottom of that.
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B
No. And I've had a lot of friction with this because the rule in philosophy going back to ge, Moore and Hume, is the is and the ought are completely separate, right? Nothing you could learn from science can never tell you what's right or what's wrong. And I get this response all the time. And what I've tried to do, mostly unsuccessfully on the philosophy side is convince people to say, well, it's true. The science can't solve the problem for you by itself, right? The science is not going to tell you what's right or what's wrong. And that's where Hume and others were right. When you say, roughly, you can't derive an ought from an is, but we're using our minds to try to figure this stuff out. When you have an intuition about what's right or wrong. You are going from a psychological is your own feeling to at least a tentative moral conclusion. So anytime we're using our minds to try to figure out what's going on with the world, we have to acknowledge the possibility that we could be looking at things in a distorted kind of way. And I actually think more generally, and this may relate to some of your current projects, is that a lot of philosophical problems are what you could very loosely call the front of the brain arguing with the back of the brain. So to take for example, epistemology. Now it's been a while since I thought about this. I'm going to have to try to reconstruct this argument. But the a, if not the big problem in epistemology, this is understanding and knowledge, is that we want to be able to say that there are all these kinds of common things that we know. I know there's a coffee mug on the desk where I'm sitting here talking to you. But then there's always the possibility of questioning. It famously Descartes, how do you know that you're not asleep? Or how do you know that there isn't some hologram there? Or how do you know that when you, you know, you just misremembered when you looked away or whatever it is? There's always some sort of possibility. And you could say, well, as long as there's some possibility, there's a world in which things look the way they look to you, but you're wrong, then you don't really know. Because knowledge is supposed to not just be, I believe, with high confidence, it's supposed to be knowledge. And I think what's going on there is that the back of your brain sort of believes things automatically based on reasonable evidence. This is what Tamar Gendler calls a leaf, like as opposed to belief. But then the front of your brain can always come up with crazy arguments about how what seems to be the case might not. And sometimes the front of your brain is right, right. And so what is knowledge? Does knowledge require ruling out all possibilities that would be inconsistent with your belief? If that's right, then we don't know anything. But if knowledge can be just anything that seems right to you, then that means that you could know something and it could be false. But what we mean by know is that as among other things, that it's true. So this is just another domain of philosophy where I feel like what looks like metaphysics, like I feel like there's a way to describe kind of my experience in grad school is all the people around me were seeing metaphysics and I was seeing psychology. They were seeing impossible conundrum about the way the world is and trusting their perceptions about the world. And, and I wanted to ask where are those perceptions coming from? And if we could understand those intuitions, could we, to borrow Wittgenstein's phrase, show the fly the way out of the bottle?
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Yes, I'm with you so much. Isn't all of science a metaphysical question at first, like, what is life, what is time, what is matter? And then, and then, and then eventually we start going, well, this evidence suggests this and that and it's like, it's not so bad to wonder what is life? Because we have biology now to investigate it.
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Yeah.
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A
And I love that in your work there is this age old philosophical conundrum of what is morality, what is ethics? And then you're like, oh, maybe something's going on in the brain there and there's still friction about it. Like, I love that.
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B
Yeah, yeah. We can know a lot of small things and think that therefore we've understood the big things that are hiding behind them.
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A
Foreign. When it comes to morality, in the trolley problem research that you did, what seems to be going on when somebody says, I, I wouldn't, I would, I totally would pull the lever, that's no big deal. But pushing a person off, no, no, go. Like what seems to be the, the.
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B
Biological thing happening here, Right, So what seems to be going on is when you think about pushing somebody off of the footbridge first, there are certain features of that action that are triggering an emotional response. And I did some early studies on this. And then recently Ben Spago and colleagues tested thousands of people of countries all around the world and got more or less the same results, which is if the harm that you're performing is active rather than passive, if you're actively pushing somebody in a harmful way versus, let's say you refrain from pulling them back from the precipice. Right. That's a big difference. But that's in the background. The other piece of it is one is, is it intentional in the sense that you're using the person as a means? So in the footbridge case you are using that person as a trolley stopper. Right. You need them to complete your plan. Whereas in the switch case you turn the trolley away from the five and then it's a side effect that other person gets run over. If they were to magically disappear, you'd say, great, you don't need them for what you're trying to do so that means side effect distinction is one thing that does it. Active versus passive, that does it. And then the most interesting, I think an elusive one is the physical directness of the harm. So if you are pushing somebody with your hands or even pushing somebody with a stick, that makes it feel wrong. If it's interacting with the right factors in the right way. And as opposed to hitting a switch, even if you were like hitting a switch that opens a trap door on the footbridge, that would drop somebody on the track that doesn't feel as bad. So people all over the world cross culturally have the same, are sensitive to these three factors which interact and combine basically to give us our sense of violence. Like if you'd say, like, define what a violent act is, I think our best approximation of it would say it is causing harm and in a way that is active, intentional in the sense that it's not a side effect. And direct, okay, that's the action, then what does that do to us? We see increased activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala when people contemplate performing basically what I'll now just call a violent action. And then that response feeds into the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part that's damaged in Phineas Gage. And there it sort of adds some decision weight to the like, what should you do? If you're also thinking, well, if I push this guy off the footbridge, I'll save more lives, then that also adds some decision weight. And then when people have to think about, all things considered, what should I do? You see more activity in that Phineas Gage region. This is like on your forehead, right between your eyes. And that's like your brain weighing those factors. Right. But if you just give people a case like the switch case, where there's not much of an emotional response to the action, you're just hitting the switch and harming the person as a side effect, then you don't have that kind of emotional response. We know this from brain imaging studies. We know this from some behavioral studies. Although the research there has gotten more complicated and interesting lately. I think sort of the clearest effects are if you look at modern day patients like Phineas Gage, they're much more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge. If you look at psychopaths, they're more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge. But interestingly, this is unpublished, but I think pretty good data if you look at Buddhist monks. So I had an undergrad a few years ago named Shin Shang. For her undergrad thesis, went to Tibet and tested like 50 Buddhist monks on the footbridge dilemma. And 80% of them said it was okay to push the guy off the footbridge. Which is like, what's going on? These are not psychopaths. And what we think is going on, you know, we don't have, we have to speculate and we can go by their comments is the psychopaths don't have the emotional response that says don't do that, that's violence. They have that emotional response, but they can detach themselves from it and say, okay, but does this make sense in this context? What about the well being of the five people on the tracks? And many of them will say, okay, it feels wrong, but don't trust all your feelings. As long as it's for the noble intention of saving more lives, then it's okay, but be careful. And many of them that are pointed to this famous sutra where there was this ship captain who there was a bad guy on the ship who was going to kill a bunch of other people. And he knew that if he told the crew about the bad guy, they'd kill him. And he didn't want that to be bad for them. But if he didn't do anything, then the bad guy would do bad things. So he decided to kill the bad guy thinking that this would be kind of, you know, karmically bad for him. But it ended up being okay. And he was reborn as a bodhisattva because he wasn't performing this violent act out of self interest or even for the interest of his family, but with the noble intention of saving the crew. So all this is to say we have this duking it out between an emotional response that says, ah, don't do stuff like that when you're thinking about pushing the guy off the footbridge. But then you can also do the cost benefit calculation and those things fight it out in your brain. And that's what makes it a moral dilemma.
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A
I love all of it so much. I love just the idea of like, I can, I can get better at that. It didn't necessarily have to get a, I don't need a rod shot through my head or to be psychopathic. I can become very good at these emotions aren't me. These emotions are happening in my organism. And this gives me a greater metacognitive ability to then decide what to do with those emotions. And that is, that's amazing, right?
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B
And this can really matter. Like, you know, the American Medical association either has or had a rule against physician assisted suicide. And I think that what's, you know, what's going on there is there's a kind of emotional response to especially a doctor causing someone to die. Right. But if really all that's happening is you're prolonging someone's suffering, right. You know, this person's terminally ill, there's no way to save them. They're just there in pain, possibly for months. I think that that's the case. Whereas, you know, in other countries. So like in the Netherlands, for example, I believe, like physician assisted suicide is allowed under the right circumstances or death with dignity processes and that this is a real life case where those kinds of things can play out. And in those cases, I would say, yeah, you want to pull back from that emotion and say, does that really make sense in this case? There are other cases, of course, where we want to really take those emotions seriously. So I don't want to say, like, when your brain is telling you you're committing a horrible violent act, don't ignore that. But you don't have to necessarily take it as the last word, especially if you have time to really think and deliberate.
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A
Okay. So some of these are going to be probably evolved mechanisms. Some of these will be learned in group coordination and everything. We're talking about brain stuff, creating perception and cognition and, and behavior and everything. We are in an interesting time in our history where we've scaled up to institutions and nations and such. I think about things like dropping the atomic bomb. Places where the great wealth of one nation could impact the great poverty of another nation. Billionaires, we have the. Suddenly we have the surge of billionaires who could, in one fell swoop, do a lot of good. And by not doing the good, are they doing bad? From your areas of expertise, what happens when you try to scale this up? It feels kind of trolley problem. Ish, in a way.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, I think what you pointed to, a kind of horrifying and fascinating feature of the modern world is the ability for some people to dramatically impact the lives of other people, A, far away and B, in huge numbers. Right. So rewind 10,000 years. There was nothing that one person 100 miles away from another human could do to destroy or improve their life. Whereas now, like, one person could start a nuclear war that ends human life on earth or sets it back thousands of years. Right. One person can also do damage in other ways. So Donald Trump got rid of US aid, and some people estimate that over a million lives have been or will be lost because we're no longer providing life saving treatments to people that we were providing not long ago. Right. We have the incredible power to help people or hurt people on a massive scale from a distance. And that is the scariest thing about where we are kind of in our cultural and technological history. And it's also the greatest opportunity. Right. And it's not just an opportunity for presidents and people with their finger, literal and metaphorical buttons. It's ordinary people as well. The positive power that ordinary people have is stunning and something that we don't fully appreciate.
- [39:02]
A
You talk about something in your book on moral tribes. You have this great phrase, the. The tragedy of common sense morality. I would love to just hear what that is and how that impacts everything we're talking about.
- [39:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. So the classic. This begins with the, the classic tragedy of the commons, right? So this, the term tragedy of the commons comes from the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who was concerned with overpopulation. And his concerns turned out to be not well founded, but he gave a beautiful metaphor for thinking about collective action problems. So in his sort of allegory of the commons, you have these herders that share this common pasture. And each of the herders, you know, thinks, well, if I add another animal to my herd, then more money for me when I go to market and it's just grazing on this common pasture. So sure. But every herder thinks the same thing and so they all grow their herds and then at one point there are so many animals on the pasture that they eat up all of the grass and there's. And there's nothing left and they. And they all die. Right. And that is the tragedy of the commons. And it's basically the tension between me and us that if everyone does what's individually rational in certain circumstances, then everybody ends up being collectively worse off. Right. And this comes up in pollution and overfishing. In a lot of these sort of any cases where there's a tension between individual greed or well being and the public good, that's the original tragedy. In situations where people have the same status, they have the same understanding, these problems are solvable. So the great economist Eleanor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner for her work on how small scale societies manage resources like water and things like that, that they solve those commons problems, but on a global scale and on a more national scale, and when we view ourselves as members of different groups, then things become more complicated. So my little sort of sequel to the tragedy of the commons is what I call as you said, the tragedy of common sense morality. And my little allegory goes like this. You have a bunch of different tribes living around a forest. And you have one tribe that's very collectivist. They have their herd all shared in common, one for all, all for one. You have another tribe that's very individualist. Not only do they not have a common herd, they don't have a common pastor. So they've privatized the pastor. And everybody's got their little plots with their people and they cooperate by just staying out of each other's way and having good fences and good rules, right? And you can have tribes vary in other ways about the relationships within the tribe. Can you be a woman in charge? Can you be a trans member of this tribe? Are we going to have health care for humans and for sheep? And can you protect your sheep with an assault weapon? And any number of questions about the rules for coexistence, and those can vary from tribe to tribe. And then in my little story, imagine the forest that separates these tribes in one hot, dry summer, it burns down and the rains come and there's this new pasture and all the tribes move in and the question is, what's going to happen? One possibility is they just fight. And the collectivist communists say we're right and they're wrong and all other ways are evil and, and try to destroy or assimilate anyone else. Or the individualists do that. Or you can try to have some kind of modern world where the tribes find a way to live together that's not exactly anyone's way in prior history, but that follows a higher order set of rules that make sense for everybody. And so I think of morality as the basic sort of psychological equipment that we have for managing the original moral problem, the life within a tribe, me versus us, the modern problem is you've got this multiplicity of us's right? And so it becomes a problem of us versus them. And what you need is something like a metamorality to help a bunch of different tribes get along in the same way that within a tribe you need a morality to help a bunch of individuals get along. Right? And so the question is, what is a metamorality and what does it look like? Right? And this is where my psychological research and my philosophical interests come together. Because what I argue in my book is that John Stuart Mill had the right idea about metamorality, that what's really common to all of us humans is our concern for consequences. We want to be happy, we don't want to be we don't want to be miserable and suffer. And, you know, more people being happy is better than fewer. Less suffering is better than more suffering. And that's the right idea. And then there are objections to this idea, like, well, what if you could produce less suffering by throwing somebody off of a footbridge? And that was kind of how I got into the moral psychology. I've had a sort of shift in my approach to work in the last 10 years. I want to think about, instead of trying to solve our problems by going up into the clouds of philosophy and then back down to earth, just drive straight along the ground and take what do we know or think we know about human nature that we can put directly to work to build that bigger us, that metamoral world. And then I've had two projects along this line. One about charitable giving and expanding the circle of altruism and cooperation, and. And then the other is about intergroup conflict.
- [44:23]
A
Yeah, well, let's talk about both. I just love the. I love our moral judgments feel like perceptions. Right. And so you. If you. As long as you can't take a, you know, cognitive step back from that, then the other people who don't share your moral perceptions are insane or evil or, or disgusting.
- [44:48]
B
Right.
- [44:49]
A
In any manner, they make you very angry. And I don't know how long this marketplace will last, but we have a pretty robust marketplace for gaming. That aspect.
- [44:59]
B
Yeah, that's right. That's what the Internet and social media is just a bonanza for people who want to push your buttons. It is just open season on our. On our intuitions.
- [45:29]
A
So you're trying to, like, actually save the world, which is a great application of your presumed free will and all of your expertise. And you have this awesome research. The name of this paper is Boosting the Impact of Charitable Giving with Donation Bundling and Micro Matching. What is this paper all about? What was the research about? What did you find?
- [45:48]
B
Yeah, so this was work done, I should say, with Lucius Caviola, who's awesome and who I'm delighted. Just started as a professor at Cambridge in the uk, and so he's really the driving force here. But I'll describe it. For years I was interested in what can we as individuals do to make the world better. Right. There are a lot of systems that are hard to fix and hard to solve. And the number one thing is, well, if you have money, if you have some resources, what can you do with that? And the good news is we can do an enormous amount of good if we have some disposable Income first. Sort of like effective giving 101. Most people think, yeah, of course, charities vary in how much impact they have. But you might think it's something like charities vary the way people vary in height. So like a really tall person might be 50% taller than someone who's pretty short. But in fact it's more like redwoods and shrubs. The most impactful charities can have 100 or even close to a thousand times the impact of a typical charity. I'll give you an example of what I mean. So in the US if you're going to try to, let's say, do something to improve the well being of people who are blind, you could pay $50,000 to train a seeing eye dog for someone. That's about what it costs. It's very labor intensive. Right. In other parts of the world, people go blind due to a disease called trachoma trombone, which is an infection in the eye. And there's a surgery that can prevent this in people and it can cost less than $100. So for the amount of money that you could spend helping one blind person in the U.S. you could prevent over 100, maybe close to 1,000 people from going blind in the first place elsewhere, which is just mind blowing to get your head around that. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that we should therefore ignore the interest of blind people in the United States, but I also think that we should not just ignore the fact that we have this enormous opportunity to make our money go really far when it comes to helping people who are farther away. So, okay, so you know, people have been saying for many years now, hey, we should be giving more impactful. And most people I find have, I think others have mixed feelings about this. Some people react very negatively, but a lot of people, it's kind of like, yeah, I get that, but. And Lucius and I sort of had the thought that what if we asked people to do both? The standard sort of charity wonks approach is to say, don't do that, do this instead. That's irrational. You're doing this thing that's much less impactful. Do this thing that's much better. And there's a case to be made for making that argument. And some people really respond to it. But our thought was maybe that's not the right argument for most people. So we've started running these experiments where in the control condition we give people a forced choice. We say, okay, pick your favorite charity. Maybe it's cancer research because your aunt died of breast cancer. And that's where you Want to give your money? And then we say, look, there's this charity that provides deworming treatments for children in parts of Africa where for less than a dollar you can rid a child of intestinal worms and it helps them go to school. And then A, not be in pain, and B, go on to get educated and earn a better living, which we describe both and say, which do you want to do? And we found that 80% of people still prefer to take the 10 bucks that we're giving them and give it towards the charity that they chose. 20% will switch, right? So it's not nothing. And then that's the control condition. In the treatment condition. What we're doing is they have the same two choices. But we also say, how about a 50, 50 split? Give half the money to the charity that you chose, the local animal shelter or cancer research, and half to this deworming charity. That's super duper effective, right? You can deworm 100 children for $100 or less. And what we found there is that a little over half of people chose the 50, 50 split. And we did other studies to kind of figure out what's going on. But the gist of it is that people want to give from the heart, and they want to do it in a way that's smart and impactful, and they don't want to do one at the expense of the other, or I should say, in the absence of the other. So when you give people the 50, 50 split, they get the feeling of supporting that thing that they really care about in a. In an emotionally connected way. But then they have this other money left over where they can say, and I did this really smart thing, you know, and really impactful thing, and you kind of get both kinds of satisfaction, kind of the heart satisfaction and the brainy head satisfaction, and people like that. So then we thought, okay, well, we could just leave it at that and write a paper saying, hey, everybody, make split donations. You'll like it. But then no one would read that journal and, you know, where would it go? So we thought, okay, well, maybe we need, like, a promotion. And we said, well, what if we say we'll add money on top to your donations if you do this splitting thing? And we found that people really liked that, it added like another 70% more went to the super effective charity if we added money on top. But then, of course, there's a question of where does that money come from? And then we thought, well, what if we ask the people who are donating to partly to this highly effective charity that they didn't hear of five minutes ago, would you instead put that into a fund that will pay for the matches for future people making these kinds of donations? And some people say yeah, other people say no. And what we found is that on balance, the people who are willing to support the matching fund supported it enough to pay for the matches for the people who didn't. So we were like, this seems kind of like amazing that this could be like a self sustaining thing. So Lucius and his techie friends built this website called Giving Multiplier, which basically implements what we did in those experiments. And I should say this is Fabio Kuhn did an incredible job designing this stuff and he's our lead sort of tech guy. So the way it works is you go onto our website. So giving multiplier.org, you choose any charity you want from the U.S. so there's a little field where you can enter Doctors Without Borders or whatever it is that you like and you can pick that. And then we have a list of currently 10 super effective charities. A lot of them are global health and poverty. So I mentioned, you know, deworming also like vaccinating children and, and give directly, which we'll talk about in a bit, which gives just direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty in ways that have these amazing economic multiplier effects when, when, when they're able to spend the money on things that they know are going to help them. And then also things related to climate change and preventing the next pandemic and preventing animals suffering from factory farming and things like that. So we have our list of super effective charities that have been vetted by other organizations. That's not what we do. And then you say, how much do you want to donate total? So, you know, it might be $100, let's say. And then we have our little nifty slider where you decide how much do you want to give to the charity that you chose and how much you want to give to the charity that you picked for from our list of super effective charities. And then the way we set it up, the more you give to the highly effective stuff, the more we add on top. But we'll add something to both donations no matter what, whether you do 10, 90 or 90, 10 or a 50, 50 split or whatever. So we started this five years ago and it's been successful and it's been growing. So we've, we've now raised like $5 million total. We're getting close to $3 million going just to our super duper effective charities that we're specifically raising for, and then like over 2,500 other charities that people chose, which are typically great charities, even if by the numbers they're not as impactful as the super duper effective ones. Also doing great work. What I like about this is in Trolley World, like the footbridge case, there's no way out, there's no solution. If you say, push the guy off the footbridge, yeah, you'll save more lives. But you have this terrible feeling that you endorse this act of violence. If you refrain and say, no, you can't push that guy off the footbridge, then you say, well, my hands are clean, but four people are unnecessarily dead. And no matter what it feels like unsatisfactory giving Multiplier is taking the charity dilemma, the heart head tension there, and saying there's a middle way. And so this was a really gratifying way to put the psychology to work. And then delighted, David, that you chose to join our pods Fight Poverty promotion, specifically with GiveDirectly. And happy to say more about that. But let me pause there.
- [54:11]
A
As you were telling me about this, I was thinking, oh, wow, he reverse engineered the trolley problem. He took all of his work and the people that you've collaborated with and all these disciplines from philosophical questions about morality, what's going on in the brain actually to produce these psychological effects, and then did something with it. This is the front of the brain and the back of the brain. All of this is converging on something that's actually working and I dig it. That's great. This is, oh, well, you actually did it. That's got to feel great. I'm personally overjoyed, even though I didn't get to participate in the first part, but I can help in this next part.
- [54:51]
B
So for the campaign. So I should say, David, you're doing a great service here. So you're. You. You've joined the Pods Fight Poverty campaign. This was originally started with the amazing Lori Santos, who does the Happiness Lab podcast. What we're really looking for here is our campaign with GiveDirectly. So GiveDirectly started. It was really an interesting sort of way that it started. So there were economists who were studying how to. How to help people most effectively, and they wanted to run experiments comparing different ways of doing this. And they were like, what's our control condition? What's our baseline? Because of course it's going to do something, but we want to know, like what's standard of care for using money to support people and improve their lives? And they discovered is that there is no, like, standard of care. And so they said, well, what if instead of spending the money on this program that we want to evaluate, what if we the alternative, the baseline, is just giving money directly to people. And what they found was that, like, that was actually really good, you know, and people kind of have a bias against giving people money directly because they say, oh, if you give people more poor people money, they'll spend it on booze or other things. And what they found was that that's not what people did. They took care of their basic needs, like food and health care and medical treatment for emergencies. And then once those basic needs are taken care of, repairing the leak in the tin roof, they would invest in themselves. They would invest in their education for themselves and for their children. They would buy things that would enable them to have a more sustainable income. So, you know, let's say you live in a small village and you could have a business selling things from villages to village around you, but you need transportation, you could buy a little motorcycle. Then, you know, you could get around and have a business and support yourself, right? And, you know, so people would spend money on their basic needs, on investing in themselves and on economic development. And a recent study with GiveDirectly has found that for every dollar you put into this, like, not only is it alleviating immediate suffering when it comes to people being hungry, the money cuts infant mortality rates in half when a whole village gets this, but it also, for every dollar, there's a 2.5x multiplier for the local economy. So that when people have money to spend and invest, it brings up everybody around them. So it's an amazing thing and something that points towards real sort of long term solutions and not just providing for people's immediate needs, which of course is really important. So GiveDirectly is an incredible charity that works sort of much better than its creators thought it would at the outset. Our goal is to raise a million dollars with this Pods Fight Poverty program that we're part of now. We've got three villages in Rwanda with over 700 families. And our goal, giving about $1,000 per family, is to lift these three villages out of poverty and in a way that we hope will be sustainable because people can really invest in their future. And then where giving multiplier comes into this is we're putting up matching funds. So for every dollar that your fans donate to this giving multiplier we'll add 50% on top. And the code for this is for you are not so smart fans is it's GiveDirectly.org smart. So if you want to participate in that campaign, we'll add 50% on top. And we're going to see can we get to a million dollars and three villages lifted out of poverty. I'm really excited to see what we can all, what we can all do together.
- [58:16]
A
This is fantastic. I love it. So, yes. GiveDirectly.org smart. There are other podcasts involved in doing this. You actually will be impacting the world with a actual multiplication effect that will do things that will matter. You can actually do that, and you can do it very simply. I'm going to release this right before Thanksgiving in the United States, which is typically the holiday people like to talk about on shows like mine, where they're like, oh, boy, here we go. You're going to have to actually interact with people who are on a different Internet than you and a different moral tribe than you. Here's something you could talk about. I think that's really neat. And you have this other thing, which is the natural segue. I got to do this thing that you're describing. When we met at the center for Enlightened Disagreement, lots of different philosophers and academics brought their sort of projects in and their approaches into how do you deal with polarization and disagreement and extremism and the strange argumentative conundrum we find ourselves in in this current information ecosystem. And you brought into the room this thing called Tango, and I, instead of explaining it on your behalf, what is Tango?
- [59:26]
B
So Tango is a cooperative quiz game that you can play with someone who is different from you. So in the US that might be a Democrat and a Republican. In Israel, that might be someone who's Jewish, Israeli versus someone who's Arab, Palestinian, Northern Ireland, it could be Catholic, Protestant. And we're working on all these things. Our focus so far has been on the U.S. it's based on a lot of the principles that we were discussing in this other context. So I'll say a little bit about how I think it relates to giving multiplier and then about kind of the origin of the project. So what we're trying to do with giving multiplier is not lecture people and finger wag, but just say, look, this is, this is what we're like. We care about things that we feel personally connected to, but we also want to do things that are smart and impactful and giving multiplier that Meets people where they are and makes them a kind of win win offer, right? And you can think of it as expanding the circle. So, you know, I was once at a conference and I was asked, like, I had to put all my little name badge, like, what's your thing? In one line? And I never had to boil it down to something that small before. And I came back to Peter Singer's was one of my philosophical inspirations, his book the Expanding Circle, which is about how the moral circle of who counts has gotten bigger over time in the course of human history. And so I wrote in my little name tag, expanding the circle of human cooperation and altruism or something like that. And I think of giving multiplier as going from nation to world and even from human world to species. Like, if you want to support charities that reduce animal suffering, Tango is about going from tribe to nation. And as I said after I published Moral Tribes and I felt like, should tell you how to do conflict resolution. So I decided after that was done, I was going to say, okay, well, how do I solve this tribalism thing? No small task there. So I said, well, what do we know about this? And I look to the biology side of things, and I look to the social science side of things. And both of them were. The research was pointing in the same kind of direction. So on the biology side, thinking about this from an evolutionary perspective, everything we see around us in the living world is a product of cooperation and competition at increasing levels of complexity and cooperation. I mean, parts coming together that can do things together that they can't do separately. So molecules form cells, cells form colonies, colonies form organisms with different organs that work together. Individuals form small scale societies and tribes and chiefdoms and nations and occasionally United Nations. And there's competition at every level. That's why the world sucks in a lot of ways. But there's cooperation at every level, too. And that cooperation, where it exists, it's sustained because there's gains of trade. Because if we work together, we do better. That's the glue. So I thought, okay, that makes sense. What do the social scientists have to say? And you crack open the social psychology textbook and you'll read about Gordon Allport's contact theory, which says that, you know, if you want people of different races or religions to get along, you've got to bring them together, but not just physically together. It has to be in a context that you might describe as cooperative or conducive to cooperation, equal status and so on and so forth. The research on both the social Science side and the biology kind of said teamwork is really the thing, you know, mutually beneficial cooperation or cooperative contact. And so I thought, okay, well, no, I think these old ideas are right. But then the question is, why haven't we solved this thing? If we've known this for decades, and it's a pretty intuitive idea, why haven't we done this right? And part of the answer is, well, to some extent, we already have. That is there are success stories. The US Military is a great example of racial integration in World War II. White soldiers and black soldiers fighting together at the same time. A lot of people predicted it would never work. It would be mayhem. And it worked beautifully. And that was actually a spur afterwards towards the civil rights movement to say, look, we fought together. Now it's time to enjoy the piece together. And in sports as well. Sports were integrated long before other sectors of our world and economy. And those are places where there is a job that's got to get done. You got to win this war. You got to win this game. And we just want the best fighters. We want the best players. And that worked better than a lot of people thought it would. And really, every modern city is a testament to the possibility that people from different races, religions, backgrounds can see each other more as cooperation partners than enemies, to be feared and distrusted. So it can work, but what we don't know how to do is to deliberately engineer it when we're at each other's throats, right? So what do we need? So the basic principle is get people on the same team, have that team succeed, have the benefits shared. That's what teamwork is about, right? You need something that can scale, right? So there have been a lot of programs that bring people together and people do cooperative things. So there's this famous program in Israel, or kind of from Israel, called Seeds of Peace, where they send Jewish kids and Palestinian Arab kids to a summer camp in Maine. And they have a lot of dialogue, but they also do cooperative games and things. And by the end of the summer, they may come in skeptical. In the end, they're hugging and crying and stuff, singing together, and it really works, right? But there's a scale problem, which is the people who come to that, they're supposed to be the seeds that go out into the world, and they are. Those people do amazing things. You look at the resumes of people who've been through this program, they are doing good things, but it hasn't been enough to solve the problem. One way to think about this is during the pandemic we learned about this parameter, RR naught, which is describes the spread of the disease, right? So if R naught is for every one person who gets the thing, how many more people get it? And if the number is 1.2, that means for every one person who gets it, 1.2 people get it. As a result, even that little increment is enough to make it go viral, right? That more and more and more and more people get the thing. If it's 0.9, then more people get it, but it dies out. And what happens with a lot of these programs? They were right to think that these people can participate in these things and then spread something, but it doesn't go viral, right? It doesn't spread throughout the whole population at the same level of intensity. So you need to get people in that cooperative context. You need to do it in a way that can scale. And then there's a third problem, which is with seeds of peace. These are people who are already willing to fly across the ocean and talk to their enemies. If everyone were like that, we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in. So to reach the people who we most need to reach, there's a motivational issue, right? This needs to be something that can seem enjoyable, fun, or otherwise engaging, not just to people who want to grandstand or who want to who are already sort of bleeding heart bridge people, but to ordinary people who mostly kind of don't like those people over there and would rather have nothing to do with them. Right. Okay, so you put all that together. What do you get? How do you get people on the same team in a way that can scale in a way that's enjoyable? Our answer to that is what we now call tango. And it's this quiz game where you are paired up with someone, ideally who's different from you. So you answer some questions about yourself. Some of it's just fun stuff. You know, what's your favorite superpower that you'd like to have and stuff like that. Others is, you know, are you liberal or conservative or what's your view on this issue? You see your other person's answers, your partner's answers, you pick a team name, you chat a little bit, and then you get these questions. And the questions are designed so that there's a kind of knowledge complementarity. So now we're talking about Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. republicans, it turns out, are more likely to know the show Duck Dynasty than Democrats. And that's not just stereotypes. Like, we validated this empirically. Democrats are more likely to know about shows like Stranger Things or the Queen's Gambit. So we have questions about that where, you know, someone who's conservative is more likely to know the answer here, the Democrats more likely to know the answer there. And you know, that's cool. So we're working together and I know some things and you know some things. We're scoring points, winning money, high five, that's all good. And then the game moves into more political territory and with questions like what percentage of gun deaths in the US Involve assault weapons? If you ask Democrats, they're likely to say, I don't know, 30%, 50%. If you ask Republicans, they're likely to say 2%, 5%. And it turns out in that case the Republicans are right that assault weapons relative to handguns kill very few people. That's a surprise for most liberals. But if you ask about rates of crime among immigrants, Republicans often think it's very high. Democrats will say that it's low. And in that case, the Democrats are right. The immigrants actually commit crimes per capita at a lower rate than native born citizens. So once you've already got people in this cooperative space, you have these questions that challenge people's assumptions from both directions. And you have this experience and you might think as soon as things get political, my Republican partner or my Democrat partner is going to turn into a monster. And what people find is that is not what happens. Your quiz buddy is still your quiz buddy and people work through it. We've done this with thousands of people and we've had virtually no cases where people get nasty. People have this cooperative experience, they high five, they say, goodbye, love playing with you, man. Hope we can meet in real life sometime. And then they answer questions on the way out. And then what we're doing is we're looking to see, okay, well, what is the impact of this? So before and after we ask people questions about, you know, how warm or cold do you feel towards Republicans or Democrats? How would you divide $100 between a random Republican or random Democrat? How much do you trust them? How much do you respect them? How comfortable do you feel voicing controversial views in a context where you're both there? And what we find is that when people play this game just once, you know, for less than an hour, we see positive effects from having that out party, that cooperative experience with the other side. We see effects that last four months, it could even be longer. We haven't tested that far. And I think the reason it works is because it's a really Weird experience that most people, they're either siloed, you know, I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I mean, good luck finding a Republican. They're here, but they're not announcing themselves.
- [69:45]
A
Right.
- [69:45]
B
You're less likely to encounter people who are different from you that way. And then you avoid politics at all costs if you want things to go well. In general, this game puts people in this context where people really have this positive teamwork experience with someone who's different from them. And when we ask them about it, four months later, they go, oh, yeah, that was interesting, right? And it shifts how they think. So we published this paper. This is originally. This work, I should have said at the outset, was started with Evan D. Philippis and now is led by the amazing Lucas Woodley. They're both fantastic researchers. And after years running these experiments, we published our paper this summer in Nature Human Behavior. And since getting that paper ready, we've been working on getting this out in the world. So we've been running these experiments at colleges, which used to be where you go to get cheap research subjects. But now universities, like where I teach at Harvard, are ground zero for a lot of, of political skirmishing. And so we've been pilot testing versions of this for polished campuses. And then a couple of weeks after I saw you at that conference in Chicago, we did tango with the whole first year class at Harvard coming in. And as we hope, we got great results on all of these measures. About how do you feel about liberals or conservatives? We didn't do political parties, but just orientations. My favorite pair of results from Harvard is this, that when liberals played with someone who was conservative, they were 7 points warmer towards conservatives as a result. And to put that, what does seven points mean? That is something like more than rolling back 10 years of increased animosity in that moment now that that fades over time. So, you know, it's not a silver bullet, but I think it's, it's real. And other studies have shown that these things can last. But then on the conservative side, conservatives who play with liberals, they said that they felt five points, which is a decent amount more comfortable voicing controversial opinions on campus. And for a place like Harvard, which is dominated by liberals, it's like 80% liberal. It was really gratifying to see conservatives say, okay, after playing this game where we're talking about things like guns and immigration with someone who's on the liberal side, and they're kind and reasonable and respectful, I feel more comfortable speaking up in class or speaking up in the dorm about what I really think that's what a college campus should be. And we need this. Right? And colleges need to earn that credibility of saying this is a place where we can be real about the ideas that divide us. And then the other thing is, the students really enjoyed it. We got high enjoyment ratings, as we've gotten in general. Usually the median rating is 10 out of 10, or the modal rating is 10 out of 10. And we did some fun stuff with this. We had the Harvard students, the top people from the top teams. About 20 of them went to a Red Sox game together, which was cool. And then we also wanted to see will people act on this. So we said, look, if you want to meet your partner, because you play the game anonymously, give your email address. And if both of you give your email address, we'll connect you. So we connected people. About 80% of the Harvard students gave their email address to meet their partners. And about 10% of students, at least this was as many as we could track, met up in the dining hall with their tango partners.
- [73:00]
A
I got to play the game. I remember with my partner, it was anonymous. And it was the. I like that you have to both. So you. You feel like that's the answer. Like, that part of it seemed important because I remember one of the questions came up is like, who wrote Friends in Low Places? And I was like, right. And I was like, yeah, yeah, this is Garth Brooks. I grew up in the Deep South. It's Garth Brooks, Right. And I remember the other person was like, I don't know. I was like, I assure you, it is Garth Brooks. And he's like, all right, we're gonna go with it. Let's see. And then it was. And that was a spark moment. I stunned so much that I remember it, I'm telling you now, all these. All these weeks later, right? And then when we had the opportunity to meet each other, we just so happened to be doing it in. In a place where we could meet each other in person right away. That was a great experience. It was like, you. And we just had that point at each other, like, ah. And we like, yeah. And from that point forward, I did have this bond with that person just from doing that game, just that one time, I see the power of this.
- [73:56]
B
Yeah. You know, we want to do this online, where it's just everyone's all over the place, and maybe we can connect people in real life, but when we do these sort of, like, for an orientation thing, you know, so people play the game, and then we're all in the same room. And it is so much fun to debrief, you know. So, you know, the way I start these conversations, I say, okay, who wants to meet your partner? Right? Because, of course, that's what people are wondering is who in this room was on the other side of that chat. So I say, you know, what's your team name? And then someone's like, well, we were the Gooby Goobers. And I. And I'm like, okay, where's the other Gooby Goober? And some, you know, someone raises their hand on the other side and they're, like, looking at each other and smiling. And I'm like, okay, Gooby Goobers. Like, what was your worst moment? What was your best moment? And people, you know, talk about that back and forth the way you did and how you nailed Garth Brooks and the other person knew that thing about immigration. And you got your points and you're going to the ball game. And yeah, it's cool. We want to get this into the workplace. We think that this can really be not only good for the sort of political climate, but also I think it's a valuable tool for employee engagement remote workers who don't really feel connected to the other people they're working with, regardless of their politics. And then the big thing we're going to be launching soon is getting this up online. So you might think, well, why isn't this already on the Internet? Why can't I play right now? The big challenge with this is simultaneity. You need to be on at the same time as a partner. And until we have thousands of people coming every few hours, you know, people aren't gonna wait more than a few seconds to get a partner. So what we're doing now is we're building like a Republican bot and a Democrat bot that is trained on the thousands of transcripts that we have from real Republicans and real Democrats playing tango. So it's not just GPT. It's like when you play with this bot, you're playing with the voice of a thousand real Democrats or a thousand real Republicans. We'll build those bots. That way anyone can go to our website, letstango.org and play right away with a semi authentic bot. And then you can wait around for a human to show up, or you could sign up for scheduled games with humans. And our goal is to have millions of people around the country have this experience of being on the same team with the other side. Doesn't mean you have to agree with them. We're not trying to change people's views or brainwash people about issues that divide people. Our view is the way we're going to make progress on guns or immigration or the war in Israel, Gaza, or whatever it is. It's not going to be just some quiz questions and then everyone's agreed. But what the cooperative experience does is it gets people in the space where they can say, okay, we may disagree, but we can see each other's humanity. We can respect each other. We can view each other as worthy of sharing control in this country that we both live in. And I think that if we can get to the point where millions more people see the other political side not as an untrustworthy enemy worthy of no respect, but as people who we might have legitimate disagreements with, but we can work together, we will get through this adolescence that we're in as a democracy.
- [77:24]
A
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