Cat: 0:00

you see the evil empire wanting to paint rebels as people who don't care about order the empirical evidence is that these are the people with the most conscience in our society.

Ashley: 0:09

What I hear you saying is that change is possible with one or two dissenters. A few dissenters can change the tide within a group.

Cat: 0:28

Let's take Andor away too seriously.

Ashley: 0:30

we're really excited to talk about one of our favorite TV shows today. Cat is going to be on the San Diego Comic-Con panel about Andor and resistance. We're excited to talk about group think and how we build rebellion

Cat: 0:45

I am stepping into my destiny as a public psychologist at large for this Andor panel. If you're gonna be at Comic-Con, it's on Thursday, July 24th, it's at noon. And the panel is called Star Wars Andor from Resistance to Rebellion, gonna represent psychology on that panel.

Ashley: 1:03

This is honestly like peak, I don't know, career moment. Like, I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like getting to be on a Comic-Con panel, talking about an amazing TV show, and giving your psychology lens to it like that is incredible.

Cat: 1:19

Talking about the psychology of authoritarianism, it is peak Cat behavior. I can say that.

Ashley: 1:29

When we finished Andor pretty recently, our immediate synthesis of, Andor was, this is a show about sacrifice. It is a show about what it takes on the individual and then the group level. What needs to be sacrificed in order to get to change, in order to actually build a rebellion. And that, oh God, it gives me chills, just like immediately talking about it.

Cat: 1:54

I find it a very unsentimental show, but a deeply emotional show. It's not soppy. It's not like, oh, you're always gonna feel good, you know? It's a really mature and sophisticated show in that there are these very challenging conversations between people. I saw this joke about Andor that I thought was really funny, which is, you're not gonna get, Andor if you can't watch a show that's just about meetings.

Ashley: 2:19

Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, I, we've talked to people who. Didn't like Andor, and they're like, oh, it doesn't have lightsabers. It's not Star Wars or something. And like I think it's actually deeper than that. I think there's not a hero with a lightsaber going in and destroying people. Right. It's not the cheer for the individual show. It's not the cheer for like the hero show. It's the cheer for the meetings in which we all decide work through our own issues and get to a point where we say, yes, we need to do this, we need to do this now. And you're totally right. It is kind of a show that's like. Ambiance of meetings and discussion and strife.

Cat: 2:57

yeah. And the inner conflict that people have, you know, Andor way of storytelling where they really dial in, in my opinion, to these character moments of decision making. And so you see these narrative arcs, you know, about Cassian deciding who he's gonna align with, deciding what he's gonna work towards with doubt at every step, with doubt in every quiet corner where two strangers meet each other and they kind of look at each other and say, are we really doing, this? Is what we're doing even possible? And I think that. One of the fascinating things about, Andor to me is it's dealing with the formation of a novel group. And in a lot of classic Star Wars, we already have the group, the rebels exist and they have a strong identity. And the journey is for someone like, you know, Luke, which I loved as a kid. I loved that journey. The journey is realizing there even is this group stepping into your own heroism, but it's very much. Choosing a side that exists already. In Andor it is the really messy, violent, and difficult place where we're asking, we live in this system that is so pervasive, we almost, we can't even see it. How can we create an alternative where the spaces where we can carve out even our imagination for a different group and how a different group would act? We make groups real when we decide we're gonna behave in the ways that make them real. And there is this function of our social cognition that lets us incorporate aspects of other people into our identity, I think, and that is terrifying when it means we're not thinking for ourselves. We have group think, you know, we have the violence that groups can create. People are more violent and aggressive in groups than they are individually. But it also means we have the possibility of change and advocacy and thinking beyond our own individual lifespans, which is of course, what some people consider to be the most meaningful stuff. When you take care of your children or your neighbor's children, and people do this all the time, you know? And this is one reason that the sort of rational economic model is not accurate to how humans behave in the world because we do think beyond our own individual isolated units and getting the most for our lifetime.

Ashley: 5:25

I think that's the huge difference between the kind of coalitional altruism that you see in Andor versus this sort of effective altruism that has like taken over some people in tech. And the difference is the willingness to self-sacrifice.

Cat: 5:42

And I think you see the individual people challenging themselves in conversations all the time saying. You know, do you think you really get a choice in this version of the galaxy that exists right now? And there's a lot of questions about, yes, you could go live a more comfortable life than being out camping in a tent with these kind of desperate people that you don't even like very much. But that world will never be a world where your children will have choice.

Ashley: 6:09

Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I wanna dig into this point that you're making about the fact that like in the world of Andor, the Rebellion is really just starting to exist, it is this like patchwork of these different groups, some of which really. Dislike each other. Right. And you made a point earlier that groups are sort of fake. Like they're this, like they're this thing that we make up. And I think that, you know, we would be willing to admit this about something like sports teams. Like we, we acknowledge, or, or some people let's say, are willing to acknowledge that you feel. Deeply dedicated to a particular sports team because you grew up in that area and that's to some degree, arbitrary. Right. And like we would maybe admit that, but I think there's like other kinds of groups within society that we would be like less willing to admit our arbitrary in this way. And so, I don't know. Can you speak more about like, like what do you mean when you say groups are made up?

Cat: 7:07

So, I mean, look around you, can you, can you point to a group right now? Like, can you touch it? Can you feel it? You know, but they're, they're exactly as real as, as you know, social constructs are, which is to say very real. They're just real in a, in a different way. Right. And I think you had this idea of us, um, naming some of the groups we're part of sports teams is a good one. Whoa. We have a soccer team, the wave in San Diego that we feel very attached to and we've been supporting since it formed and. That didn't exist. You know, that sports team didn't exist. We were there at the founding, but now it's, it is kind of an identity, right? And it changes. You go and you sit in a stadium and you watch the ref make a call, right? And you just, you're in the middle of thousands of people all roaring. That was unfair. We saw it differently, right?

Ashley: 8:00

Yeah, it's incredible how the ref is always against you, like no matter what, like the ref is always playing for the other team.

Cat: 8:07

Exactly, and there's this wonderful anecdote in, um, the Power of Us, which was by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer two social psychologists who study group stuff and they talk about this, um, football, I think it was like a really contentious football match. And it was at a time where people were sending video tapes around and people on opposing sides were arguing about what happened in this play. And they were just watching the same tape back and coming. Coming on down to, on completely different sides of the issue. One person was saying, how, how could you possibly watch this and see a foul here? You know? And then I, like one person even wrote to his friend who was like a fan of the other team and said, I know you're pranking me. You just sent me a tape with nothing on it. Like nothing happens. And the other person was like, clear as day. This is a terrible foul. This is an injustice. So it's strong groups directly

Ashley: 8:59

Yeah. It's really

Cat: 9:00

change our perception.

Ashley: 9:01

And so what you're describing is ingroup bias, right? I mean, is that what this is? This is the idea that like you will always, and it can, it can directly even change your perception, like, and you will always see the world in favor of your ingroup. Is

Cat: 9:17

Well, I wouldn't say always. I wouldn't say always. You know, effects in psychology are probabilistic, so I would say. We robustly consistently. Often, it's one of the most famous effects in social psychology, this idea that people have in-group bias. It is not destiny, you know, it's so, and I think one of the things we wanna talk about is actually how it can change, but. A great way to to think about this is something that we call the minimal groups paradigm in Psychology. So famous, many sets of experiments. They bring people into the lab who don't have any history of knowing each other in some cases, don't even see each other face to face. They bring these collections of people and divide them into two groups and over and over again. Just being assigned to a group based on some characteristic you never even thought about before. It's often something that's made up in the experiment, um, elicits this in group bias from people so. Oh, one scenario that I really like is, um, this classic example where they said, well, you're in a group of people who prefer Klee paintings and you are, and to half of the other people, they just, and this is just random assignment, I think they were saying you guys all prefer Kandinsky. You know, they had them answer maybe a series of art questions. And people get biased against, they say, my group is best, my group deserves more money. Um, they have them play these. These games where they assign money and they try to maximize their own group's profit and, and really interesting too. They try to actually make their ingroup, which again was just created like five minutes ago. They try to make their own group actually have a bigger differential from the outgroup. So you would prefer if you were the arbiter of this and you had the choice. Most people choose a split, for instance, where their group gets nine and the other groups gets seven versus a split where their group gets 10 and the other group gets nine. So people will even choose for their group to get less as long as they can maximize the differential between groups. So, I'm sorry, this is a little nerdy, but like this, this tells you something really fascinating. Like when social psych people found this. We really realized we don't just think about our group, we think about our group in relation to other groups. We have this kind of view of the landscape of groups, and that's really key to understanding kind of some of the biases people have about this.

Ashley: 11:43

Uhhuh. So we actually have like some sort of group level cognition where we're not only thinking about like where we stand, but we also think about like where the group that we're maybe most predominantly identifying with where that group stands. And that's, yeah, that's really interesting. It's like I can see how this would be. You know, thinking back to Andor, or our ability to build coalitions and form groups around values and goals. I wonder if there's a part of this that's helpful, right? As soon as we say we're banded together around this like value system, then we're all like willing to go to bat for it and that's a really good thing. But obviously I think we can play out a lot of reasons in which this is really negative, especially when it is extremely arbitrary and we immediately start defending our group to no end, you know, for no real good reason.

Cat: 12:32

it's really interesting and, it's important to not just say, this is bad and we're evil. You know, these, these functions I think in our minds and in our psychology, make us capable of working together. Help us coordinate. For instance, we have this ability to have collective memory with our group. Sometimes researchers call this memory convergence, which I think is just fascinating. So, so for instance, the groups we are inside basically can start to determine. What we remember, how we retrieve information about certain events. And so this is one reason, like you might go to a really contentious sports game, go back and talk about it with fans, get a version of events cemented in your mind, you know, and then that's kind of all you remember. And five years later you're like, oh yeah, that thing, you know, the accounting of events becomes exaggerated. This can have a beautiful side to it, like collective memory and cultures, and it can have a really negative side to it, like propaganda machines, you know, so I think about, Andor, and the propaganda machine where they're saying, we are gonna put out these messages that say, don't we all remember feeling uncomfortable about the Ghor? Don't we all remember

Ashley: 13:44

God, that's so right.

Cat: 13:46

acting a little bit of above

Ashley: 13:47

They've been a little, a little off. Right.

Cat: 13:49

I, I know you remember it. I remember it

Ashley: 13:52

Yeah. Didn't you just feel like you got the cold shoulder from the Ghormans?

Cat: 13:55

So the jargon term for this is called socially shared retrieval induced forgetting.

Ashley: 14:02

Sorry, say that one more time.

Cat: 14:04

I'm sorry about this. This is my absolute nerd hat on for this episode.

Ashley: 14:09

I thought neuroscience was bad in terms of like long terms and

Cat: 14:12

absolutely not. Every human group is capable of creating incredible in-group jargon. Okay? You, but you, if you wanna, if you wanna pull it out a party, you can call it the S-S-R-I-F socially

Ashley: 14:23

Oh my God.

Cat: 14:24

Retrieval induced forgetting. So like, let's pull it apart because socially shared is it's happening across people. Um, retrieval induced means you're hearing a story from somebody else and it's changing how you retrieve and retrieval. Right. You know, this babe in neuroscience retrieval is actually an much more active process than we

Ashley: 14:47

process. Yeah, Yeah. Changes your memories as you retrieve them. Yeah.

Cat: 14:52

Exactly retrieval changes our memory. How in the future going forward, we decide kind of sometimes unconsciously to retrieve things will shape that memory in the future. So an example, and the forgetting part is, you know, it's a phenomenon that can cause people to forget things.

Ashley: 15:09

So not only to reinforce things, but actually to forget some elements of the memory.

Cat: 15:15

There's a fun study on this, um, that I'll link in the show notes. A couple of psychologists had students listen to another student, and they either had a student who was part of your university, I think it was Princeton in this case or part of a different university. For the people who listened to someone who they thought was part of the same college, they all studied material before they did this, and then they listened to somebody selectively recount the previously studied material. And if the person came from your same college, oh, this is a fellow Princeton student, then the participant was more likely to retrieve the information that that. That conspirator in the experiment made salient. This did not happen as much. I think, um, if, if, or maybe at all, I'd have to look at the paper. Um, if someone was from a different college and you had no reason to kind of feel in an ingroup with this person.

Ashley: 16:12

Yeah. Wow, that's really interesting. And like, do you think it's. Trust like, like what is the sort of mediator here? Is it like that We trust information from people from our in-group.

Cat: 16:25

I mean, like with every complicated effect, there's probably multiple things going on. I think trust is a big one. We trust our groups. We are in some ways sharing cognition together so that we can accomplish more things. I. Together in a, in a big collaborative way more than isolated individuals can, um, can do together. But there's a, there's an example, a neuroimaging study, I think it's Frith Frith, um, recently where they brought participants in and they were given kind of a preset belief, like the experimenters said, oh, this person's really trustworthy. Um, or, or showed them, you know, that the person was more or less trustworthy. And the people who were kind of told. This person who you're gonna evaluate while you're in this neuroimaging is trustworthy. Um, they dial, they, they documented less monitoring of the other person, less monitoring. Now we could, we could probably dive into this neuroscience evidence a little bit. You know, it's complicated, but we see. I think pretty consistently that there are differences in the attention that we bring to bear on information. The scrutiny, like when it is coming from an in-group member, we just kind of accept it much more readily.

Ashley: 17:44

You know, it's funny, I hadn't even thought about this until just now, like even in our prep for this conversation, but you know, my undergraduate thesis in college was about like our biases towards other races and the context of crime scenes actually. And so I did this study where I did an eye tracking study with people looking at crime scenes and you know, this is like undergraduate thesis research is not groundbreaking. However, I do recall like the sort of scholarly foundation for this was this idea that when we're looking at people that we see as an in-group member, we are less likely to feel the need to, as you said, like monitor what they're doing. You know, like we are not, for example, like. Looking at their face, and this is what I saw in my data actually was like that. You wouldn't be like scanning the person's face trying to figure out what their intention was. Like. You would more implicitly trust this person and they kind of look like you. We don't have the same stereotypes against certain groups. Right. And so you would just implicitly trust them. And so rather than scanning their face, you're paying attention to other stuff in this scene. Right. And so I feel like, yeah, the, the Frith study sounds super interesting. It sounds like, you know, there's, this is very much in line with a bigger body of research about how we treat other people and sort of assess their. Motivation, right? And decide ultimately whether we trust them or not. Which is, I think along with sacrifice, like the other major theme in Andor is like, who do you trust? And even within the different groups of the rebellion, they have to make these choices, you know, of just like, do we trust the information coming from this person, or not? And can we trust them? And that's so, so hard.

Cat: 19:26

Yeah, and I do think that the answer in Andor a lot of the time is you can't know everything. You can't vet everything. You do have to sometimes. Make a choice to be part of something where the benefit is a little unclear. The sacrifice is really great, and so again, it's coming back to this fact that joining a group is not always bad. Actually. It is necessary to accomplish somewhat overwhelming goals where you only have one little piece of the puzzle and you know, you're in this Spycraft game where you're, you know, of course we're leading up to Rogue One, which I. I know you, I remember vividly, you and I watching Rogue One for the first time and we were apart for your postdoc. And I had come to Long Island and it was snowy and cold and, and we went out to Rogue One in the theater and we came out crying, you know, and I remember saying to you what a brave choice they made with this

Ashley: 20:19

yeah.

Cat: 20:20

to have it, to have it end with death. But also with Hope, you know, the New Hope Right. Handoff. And you know, I think we are in such a difficult time in the world. Like we're in such a time where the violence is on the surface, the death is on the surface, and it's really beautiful and comforting to me to see a show that's taking that seriously, you know, what makes death worth it. Right? And that's kind of this, this statement and affirmation at the end of, Andor. Was the death worth it? Was it worth it to spend your life this way? And again, reaching beyond your life and knowing there's an outcome you will never get to live.

Ashley: 21:00

Yeah, totally. And I think throughout the series, and I'm borrowing your phrase from earlier, but throughout the series. You see multiple characters speaking beyond death, right? Like you have multiple characters who are, you know, making manifestos or you know, Maarva speech to Ferrix, right? They're giving wisdom that is going to exist way beyond their own death. And that's a really, really, I think, important motif throughout the show.

Cat: 21:28

I completely agree and I would, I would say something critical with this is not just the trust in the group, but it's the ability to extend our empathy. Make our empathy robust instead of fragile. So something that I think is really important with coalitional cognition, and I'll mention people like Mina Cikara, um, have worked on this. I really love her work on coalitional cognition. Um, they say, you know. Empathy is something that fails us. When we have intergroup conflict we have many mechanisms that dampen our empathy, and this is, this helps us understand how can normal people create such atrocious things in the world? How can normal people get pulled into. You know, genocide and conflict. I mean, the worst things that ever happen on our planet include intergroup conflict, essentially. And it's very, very difficult. Like, I don't know that we're gonna get to an answer to this in this podcast, but this is the challenge we need to take seriously. How do we undampen our empathy? I find Maarva's speech so in particular beautiful because she sort of says, you know, we have our little ingroup of Ferrix and it's beautiful and we have this culture. But I think what she points to is this idea of cross galactic empathy. You see these characters have this breakthrough that they want to pass on, like Nemic and you know, the manifesto there. And even a character like Vel, I think who's willing and able to go to Ghorman and work with these kind of incompetent people because they are kind of, you know, oracles in this sense, they're able to say. All of our different causes are not different causes at all. They're the same cause. And we need to create this cross galactic empathy and realize that all these individual struggles are are never going to work in unless we come together and realize how together we are and realize, you know, the bigger game here because the empire has got us all in this frame where every struggle is just being played out by their rules. So. I find that incredible. It's like what Mina Cikara would maybe call the activation of coalitional cognition, which is something we're capable of doing.

Ashley: 23:51

Yeah, totally. And there's, there's actually like a line in Nemik's Manifesto. That says"Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy." Like there's this drawing attention to the fact that it is not just here. And like same thing with Maarva's speech. It is not just here. We are a coalition that exists even beyond our individual imagination and even beyond this time. And I think like the idea that this movement occurs across generations, which is like the other really amazing thing about Star Wars as an entire, you know, series, but also just looking at Andor it happens across time. It is not a week, right? It is many, many years. It is like across multiple lifetimes that this change is happening and it's like, like our ability to dream and exist in a coalition beyond ourselves and beyond our time seems to me an incredible power of the human psyche. Like something that. We can do that is uniquely human and I don't know, is the thing that makes change possible.

Cat: 24:59

Yeah. You know something? I think definitely. I think definitely. I think that there's. It's important to realize in these moments of feeling, perhaps like we have the least power and the most oppression and the most suffering that we are experiencing that oppression because of how much power we actually have, you know, as collectives that want better and and it's, it's. Brilliant writing and, Andor I think I really love this show. I'm, you know, excited to sit on a panel at Comic-Con about it, which was one inspiration for this episode because I think it's sometimes possible to send these messages through media and art that are very hard to articulate in our lives. But another thing that came up for me is thinking about these famous quotes from James Baldwin, who I think is. Perhaps one of the greatest geniuses we've ever had, you know, about empathy and the looking, the truth in the face. And, and he has this really famous quote I love, like you, you think, you go through your life and you think, no one has suffered the way that I've suffered. And then you read and you realize your suffering does not isolate you.

Ashley: 26:14

Hmm hmm That we're actually like in this coalition together as people who are united and suffering.

Cat: 26:23

I think this is a choice we see in Andor all the time, am I going to let this unbelievable suffering I've experienced isolate me and shut me down and make me stop reaching out to other people? Or am I going to choose the more difficult path of change?

Ashley: 26:42

Hmm

Cat: 26:43

Continue to believe that something better is possible from the beings around me.

Ashley: 26:52

Several things that are probably necessary for this kind of change. Hope is one of them, of course. But you know, thinking about like our sort of coalitional cognition and the psychology of groups, like what do you see as being necessary to like, I don't know, like form groups like this? Like what can we learn from Andor in terms of like what is needed either at the individual or the group level.

Cat: 27:17

Yeah, so you know, some area of psychology that I've gotten really interested in lately is the area of dissent. Like who dissents, who stands up and says enough? Who creates that ripple effect or the first. You know, stone in the avalanche or, or whatever. And I think that understanding those turning point moments is really fascinating and important, and we can think about it even. In far less charged situations like where we want to kind of improve the culture of our group or create better communication in our family. You know, and I, I've been interested in this for a long time'cause I was interested in disclosure and you've heard me on this podcast talk about moments where one person in a classroom's willing to raise their hand and say, I don't get it. And suddenly not getting it becomes more okay. There's. A lot we need to learn, I think about dissent, but there's one theory that I really like and it's Dominic Packer's normative conflict model of dissent. So I'll explain to you like why I think it's interesting because it's a kind of a wave that punctured an old narrative. And the old narrative was, you know, there are groups and they cohere around norms and they police those norms and they really don't want. People in the group to violate those norms. And we are prone to conformity. So for instance, we have this classic old studies like Ashe's studies about conformity, where they have somebody come in and they have two confederates in the lab and they're looking at a series of lines. And one line is obviously shorter than the others are different from the others. And the two confederates just act like that's absolutely not the case. These lines are all equal.

Ashley: 29:02

They're the people in the sports situation that are like, the ref was fine. That was totally fine.

Cat: 29:07

Gaslighting as a service is something that you can get from psychology experiments.

Ashley: 29:13

Professional gaslighters.

Cat: 29:14

It's the, you know, the Star Trek episode."There are four lights." So when people are subjected to this, the famous finding from this study was always, wow. People really conform. All of these people who knew the line was different would report that it was actually the same

Ashley: 29:34

Oh God. I'm like, I'm like, what would I do in this situation? Would I be a conformist? Like

Cat: 29:40

I mean, the probabilistic

Ashley: 29:42

I'm such a people pleaser. Damnit.

Cat: 29:45

so this is like classic old psychology and the story was. God damn. We're just conformist. Robots we're group thinkers. People would even do this if their confederates did not have any way of knowing what they reported. So if the experiments are said, listen, tell us about the lines. We promise we're not gonna tell these two weirdos you were sitting in the room with, you know, they're never gonna see it. They're not gonna be able to punish you. Nothing. And people would still much more than you would think, report what their confederates basically peer pressured them about.

Ashley: 30:16

geez.

Cat: 30:17

Okay, but we're gonna puncture this narrative. Alright, so new wave of social psychology. People went back and they analyzed these old studies and they found that a pretty significant percentage of people, a minority, but it was something like 20 to 30% of people resist the conformity actually,

Ashley: 30:36

The Andors group.

Cat: 30:38

Yeah, and this shows, I think that the way we frame science matters, the way it gets repeated, again, the convergent memory, we all as scientists like developed about these studies were God people are prone to groupthink. So now there's this wave folks like, um, I don't remember if Dominic Packer's done this. I know Jay Van Babel has on group psychology stuff. They've gone back and actually reanalyzed the data from some of these old studies. Including data that wasn't put in the studies themselves or wasn't included and found the patterns look way different if you start to ask, you know, what changes the conformity. And so one thing that they found in some of the group studies of this where they brought multiple people in is if just one person speaks out against the conformity, everybody else does too. So even though it's, yeah, it's true. A lot of people will conform if there's no alternative, but it's very powerful to, people powerfully respond to dissenters, actually.

Ashley: 31:40

man.

Cat: 31:41

Yeah. Is that not amazing? And so it's kind of the opposite of like the bystander effect, you know? It's like if one person will take action or show this different way, like other people will really quickly respond. So, lemme get back to, yeah. The normative conflict model of descent, which is part of this new model, says, you know, we used to sort of say, well, maybe the only people who can resist group norms are people who aren't really part of the group. Like, they're just, they don't care that much about the

Ashley: 32:09

Mm, they're outsiders. Yeah.

Cat: 32:10

Yeah, and you can think about, this sort of ties into these media stories that are like, if you see protestors, maybe they're just rabble rousers, like maybe they're, they're just people who like to throw things and you know, it kind of ties into this painting all people who protest as disruptive people.

Ashley: 32:28

Mm-hmm.

Cat: 32:29

But this wave of research says actually, we see that very strongly identified group members, people who really love and care about the group, but also are conscientious. They think that the norms we're falling into are bad for us, and they deeply believe that they are actually more likely to be voicing descent. They're a powerful force inside of the group pushing for change. So I think just keep this sort of thing in mind. When you see the evil empire wanting to paint rebels as people who don't care about order and as just dissidents and people without conscience, you know, some of the empirical evidence is that these are the people with the most conscience in our society.

Ashley: 33:12

Mm-hmm. And so what I hear you saying is that change is possible with one or two dissenters. You know, a few dissenters can change the tide within a group. And we can actually harness the same maybe like fallible cognitive mechanisms, which like make us wanna please people or make us wanna stand together, right? We can harness those same mechanisms to latch onto a dissenter rather than latching onto the normative like other idea that is out there.

Cat: 33:45

I think so. I think so. You know, there was a paper that I just sent a text to Danilo about, which in our ongoing, um, you know, producer podcaster conversation about whether people suck or are great, which I think is a conversation anybody should be

Ashley: 34:01

people suck or are great, like just in general,

Cat: 34:04

we

Ashley: 34:04

is this like a Black Mirror

Cat: 34:05

yeah. In general, yeah. Every conversation between Danilo and I is a Black Mirror episode, babe. We have this great conversation that is like, are we just these terrible monkeys? I just wanna beat each other over the head with

Ashley: 34:19

Right. The, the perennial question.

Cat: 34:22

My contention is that, that we're not. We're deeply social as a species, and we have these things in our minds and the way that our minds and brains and bodies work, unfortunately, that can get co-opted and exploited. And I, I fundamentally think, you know, we're all here trying to survive things like natural disasters and the weather, and unfortunately. We also have this social cognition that's beautiful and allows us to provide for our children and work beyond our lifetimes. But unfortunately, you know, we can turn it into dark ways. We can other, other people enough that we act like they are the natural disaster. We act like they are climate change. And I actually think a lot of the ways that we hate other people, I mean, I'm not a scholar of this, but my personal point of view is a lot of the ways that we hate other people. You can get into. People are failing to face some other problem. That's actually the real problem. And you know, there's this thing that Mina Cikara, again talks about is the physics of groups. These psychologically meaningful forces that are regulating how we form groups and what we decide is their purpose and what we foreground. And we can start to understand those physics, we can shape them. And you see people shape them who create change over cultures. Um, oh, but I was gonna say, I didn't even answer the, the paper thing that I sent to Danilo This paper showed that little babies like five days old, pay more attention to helping actions when you show them helping actions like on a video than they do to hindering actions.

Ashley: 35:58

Hmm.

Cat: 35:59

Maybe this is only impressive to a developmental psychologist like me, but it's actually really, really cool and impressive to study babies at this age and to say in the very beginning of our brains looking at the world, you know, we're trying to pay attention to pro-social actions and whether people are helping each other more than harming each other.

Ashley: 36:18

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is really interesting because it feels like there's been a, maybe a tide change in psychology and social psychology in particular to start actually looking for pro-social stuff a little bit more explicitly. Like you were talking about the re-analysis of this data, and I think just sort of stepping outside of the conversation about Andor and resistance You know, we talk a lot about the science process on this show and I think this is a really interesting sort of example of how science reanalyzes itself reinvents itself and that science exists in a social context. And when some of these studies happen and people will probably be very familiar with like the other sort of studies about conformist, where you know, someone tells you to shock someone else and they do write this like terrible study. I know that that's been reanalyzed too, and is problematic for other reasons. But anyway, you know, like all of those studies happened in a cultural context and now we're starting to do maybe a different set of studies where we're re-analyzing some of the same data to actually explicitly look for these pro-social ideas and to look for the dissenters in the data. And that's a very different framing and it's a more positive framing. And it's just interesting to me to think about actually the sort of science of psychology and its eye, you know, moving around, shifting to different features in the data, in our cognition.

Cat: 37:46

Absolutely. That's a important meta piece of this. I love that you called that out and, you know, without failing to acknowledge the many, many areas in which we continue to need to fight for more diversity in science and you know, the many failings of psychology on that, to me it's no surprise that psychological science has gotten better as psychologists have become more diverse as people and as we've allowed more people with diverse experiences to contribute to the scientific record and to bring in really missing perspectives and. That is really clear when we talk about the interaction between groups and we start to move away from these very simplistic and honestly kind of white colonial ideas of innate group differences and these categories that, you know, those cultures really want to be real and static. And then you bring in these scholars who are actually people maybe who come from communities that have had to actually navigate. You know, these groups who see how constructed it is and who think about different parts of the problem. Like one example I really love is this recent work from, um, people like Neil Lewis Jr. who studies interventions and, and for instance, like how do we get people to support policy change? Okay. That's a really, really big question. And there's this longstanding narrative that says. If you're trying to motivate a group of voters to support a policy change, you should avoid emphasizing whether that change will benefit specific groups. You should only stick with what they call a universalist message, like make sure you just say, this will benefit everybody, you know? Don't worry.

Ashley: 39:32

Okay. So that's the, that's the, the existing ideas that, that's how you get people to vote for policies.

Cat: 39:38

Yeah, that's a longstanding existing idea. Now, they recently did a series of studies that are really, really interesting that puncture, that idea, that say there's a couple important things we haven't been paying attention to. So if you emphasize targeted benefits, for instance, this policy will really help, um, black and Latino people in particular. Um. There are important things to happen. Black and Latino people in this study are more motivated to advocate for that policy because again, they care about their groups, right? They understand the problem of it, but also that targeted message did not actually decrease other people's support for the policy. So there's kind of just been this long standing assumption. I think that it will, like you can't, we're just zero sum thinking about all of it. But they proposed something they call the targeted universalist message where you say, this policy's gonna help everybody and it's gonna help these groups a little bit more. Let me tell you why and why that's good. And that message works. It even worked for white and Republican people in this study. So the point of that is I just think we have so many assumptions about how to talk to our groups and how to persuade people, and some of those assumptions need to be examined. So

Ashley: 40:59

hmm. So square this up for me with like how this fits into our broader understanding of in group outgroup psychology.'cause like, I would've thought that, you know, it's, it's surprising that people will sort of vote for policies that don't help them. Sure. Like if, if you go by the standard we are economic, rational beings or whatever, like, you know, then, then That's surprising. Right? So, so that, yeah, totally. But I'm like, I'm less surprised by the, you know. The sort of specificity, mattering, I guess, like, I don't know, like how do you think about this or, or what is I guess, surprising to you or

Cat: 41:37

Yeah, I think as an intervention scientist, I pay attention to stuff like this because. There's a assumption that what we need is for every minoritized person in the population to be activated in order to get change to happen. These researchers point out, I think, really beautifully in this paper, we are leaving critical pieces of the puzzle on the ground by not caring about the activation that can come from specific groups. So stop just saying all our messages need to appeal to. A mythical average voter from Indiana or something, you know, we all know what they're gonna look like, which is really just like kind of a construct and start asking these complicated questions about what building support over time really looks like and, and how powerfully important sometimes the actions from these groups can be. So that's one piece. The piece that's saying, we're not measuring things like people's willingness to advocate for policies and what motivates them to do so. But the other piece is, you know, we've just had this big assumption that the cost of activating those smaller groups is that the larger group will turn against it. And they don't find that evidence. It could be that the larger group is like, okay, makes sense.

Ashley: 42:57

hmm.

Cat: 42:58

So, you know, yes we have in-group bias, but we're also not automatons. And I think the question of how we unpack and change that bias and cultivate empathy and again, un dampen the empathy. And often that comes from unpacking how these benefits really work and giving people an alternative mental model than these sort of really simplistic and destructive in group outgroup models.

Ashley: 43:24

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think for me, this is interesting. For a couple of reasons. Like one is, I see this parallel with the dissenter study you mentioned earlier, which is like, if one person dissents, you know, it can kind of have this cascade effect. And it seems like in, in some ways this is similar. It's like if, if we see the, you know, the one group speak out and say we need this thing, then I can actually like cascade through other people. And so it feels like. I dunno, it feels like just like similar in flavor to me. Just like we, we generally underweight the power of even a small group or even one person speaking out. Um.

Cat: 44:03

Mm-hmm.

Ashley: 44:03

And then the second reason this is kind of interesting to me is, you know, recently I was on this panel at the Fleet Science Museum, our science museum here in San Diego, and we were talking about how we bring science information to the public and in this age of, big misconceptions about scientific ideas. And one thing that someone said, which really stuck with me was that. There's not a general public, right, like that every person has specific needs and things that they care about. And so I see a parallel here because it's like when we're voting for policies, like it doesn't necessarily make sense to vote for policies that raise all boats, right? And it might actually be more powerful to say. Here's a specific policy for this. Here's a specific policy for this. In the same way that it might be more powerful to say, here's why your group of people should get vaccinated for this particular thing, right? And here's why this particular, you know, study about climate change impacts the pollution in your area. Like there are avenues for communication and for policy work that are more specific and maybe more powerful, and then can be the shift to move things from those small groups, bring them to the larger population, like cascading from there. So I don't know. That's really, that seems really powerful to me as a way to think about social change and maybe fundamentally, like both of these things rely on empathy, right? It's like you really have to deeply think about in terms of policy, right? How does this. Policy changed the lives of particular people. In the same way that in science communication, we have to think about what do people care about? Like we have to empathize and think about what it is like to be in their shoes. What are they gonna care about? What do they need to know in order to live their lives? And empathy is the core of each of those processes, I think.

Cat: 46:00

And I think it has to be empathy for the right thing.'cause you, you've really brought in the scicomm side and the Yes. Make it personal, you know, make it relevant. Something that a lot of this research points out that I've been inspired by is people are. Deeply wrong about where inequality comes from in our society. A lot of the time they are not just sitting there neutral and they're not wrong about what they feel. They're not wrong about how unfair things feel, but they're using the explanations that our culture's giving them. They're using the vocabulary that our culture's giving them, and that is often really loaded with bias, misperception, sometimes just straight out racism or maybe always that's in there and, and so. We have to face this challenge of saying, let me teach you actually where the inequality is coming from, then you will understand why this is a solution in a way you didn't before. And I do think that that's the challenge and I just to circle it back, I see it in Andor I see this teaching and learning and this. Don't you realize. You don't have a choice. Don't you realize they're scared? Don't you realize how much they're controlling us across all of these characters? Such a moving exchange of information and ideas and, and questions that are saying, you know, we have been living with this for so long and it feels inevitable, but, but what if it's not? You know, and what if the redistribution is possible and the change is possible? And so I think that's the future of actual policy changes, understanding how to affect that.

Ashley: 47:40

Yeah. And bringing attention to those specific things. And you know, I, what I hear you saying is validating people's experiences in the world. And I think, um, we were talking about this recently'cause we were listening to Tressie McMillan Cottom, who was like one of our. Just favorite people to read and

Cat: 47:57

The genius of our times.

Ashley: 47:58

Oh my God. Incredible. So, yeah, we were listening to her on this other podcast actually, and, and she makes this point and has made it in her writing as well, which is that like, as you said, people are having real experiences, they might misattribute the cause of their suffering, but they're very real. So it's like first step is like validation and listening, acknowledgement. The second step is okay, you know, like, what do we need? What is the specific thing that this group needs? How do we pull them out and make them realize, look, you know, like as you said, this is gonna happen. It's gonna keep happening unless we do something like there's no other possibility besides, you know, either this continues or you fight it and that's it.