[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and for more conversations including videos
transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com my guest today is Jonathan height Jonathan is one of the world's leading thinkers on the political views of individuals and where those views come from most recently he's been involved in
a crusade to make the campus environment more intellectually diverse he's one of the world's leading psychologists has a strong background in cultural anthropology and economics and basically is known to us all if you're familiar
with how the conversations with Tyler series works I'll just point it out again this is the conversation I wanted to have with Jonathan not the conversation you want to have now here's a disclaimer unfortunately the audio quality of our conversation suffered due
to some misbehaving equipment we've cleaned up the audio as best we could but if you prefer there is as always a full transcript available at conversations withth tyler.com so just to start off with a question so Jonathan you think of people's political
views as stemming from these social intuitions which are fairly strongly hardwired into them if I look at politics this year what I see is we had almost all the pundits thinking about Republican values the Republican past
and seeing Scott Walker Marco Rubio Jeb Bush and thinking some mix of those people would be the leaders because they matched Republican values and they all have failed basically H how do we think about this using your construct so you
have to see Politics as occurring at multiple levels simultaneously and just as in you know at a university we've got psychologists studying individual experiences we've got neurologists studying neurons we've got political scientists and sociologist studying
emergent phenomena um so that's what you have to do to study politics and um if you look at the history if you if you look at the sort of the higher level constructs yeah it's bizarre what's happening it's unprecedented and people expected the past to predict the future
but what if the emerging um the emerging social constructs of the Republican Party been getting progressively Out Of Tune with the moral intuitions and the psychology of the voters I think that's what we have seen happening but here's
what I I worry about with that explanation if I look at local government state legislators Governors the Congress for that matter the Republicans seem pretty much in tune with people's intuitions because they control all those branches sometimes
pretty solidly especially at the state and local level and then at the national level there's this huge disconnect so all the repblic Republicans were losing it would be easier to see National politics is different from local
National politics I believe is is much more like religion than local politics is so if you take it all the way down to the very local level who the dog catcher is who the treasurer is of the Town that's all very practical stuff people are very worried about their property
values and things like that it's not very ideological National politics is much more like a religion is the is the high priest of the American Civil religion I think that's what Robert called it um and so at the national level it's just it's
often unrelated to what happens at the local level um and uh so I think this is something that Ronald Reagan really understood uh much better than his Challengers he was able to appeal to the moral intuitions of people about America
making America great so I think it's very different from what happens at the state level so your core categories for understanding how values map into politics in a second I'll ask you to explain those but do you see room for any new categories so a lot of people
are saying this year well there's a new category of populism like my Thomas readman like Taxi Driver experiences I've spoken to taxi drivers they say well I'd like to support either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders maybe that's populism a kind of
new category but tell us briefly what your categories are and how fixed you think they are so my early research uh done with a lot of other social psychologists is uh what we call moral foundations Theory and this grows out of my frustration as a graduate student at
the University of Pennsylvania uh in the early 1990s trying to make sense of of of two things that seem so obviously true to me one was that um wherever you look people are the same in many ways we're obviously products of evolution um
obviously there's a human nature and so evolutionary psychology has to be right to some extent the other is that people are so variable our cultures are so variable and anthropology cultural psychology is deeply right and the basic meanings of moral terms varies a lot
around the world so cultural psychology has to be right and how do you put these together but the people who love cultural psychology often are critical they don't they feel threatened by Evolution and the people who do Evolution often will dismiss dismiss
cultural variation so what I tried to do U I was working with Richard Scher an anthropologist at the time what I tried to do is um look around the world and say what are the things that everyone seems to care about um is there
something innate about say reciprocity and the answer has to be yes everywhere you go in every society people have something that involves reciprocity sense if I've done something for you you need to do something for me and that might be that you know you uh uh uh i'
I've killed somebody in your clan well you have to kill somebody in my clan or we might disagree with that but we see The Logical reciprocity um and at the same time there's all these evolutionary theorists um like Robert Trier is
writing about the evolution of reciprocity so at a time time when there were a lot of people in the academy who believed in sort of blank slate Notions everything is social construction everything could be taught by your Society fairness as reciprocity just
stands out it's got to be innate but then it gets built on in very culturally variable ways so that's one Foundation much more briefly then care and uh uh care versus harm is another we're mammals we evolve an attachment system another is loyalty versus betrayal we
are really good at coalitions we're tribal creatures another is uh Authority versus subversion we're primates primates are are mostly hierarchical we've got a lot of innate programming that makes us differential to Authority um another one is sanctity versus
degradation this is the sort of the weirdest one for secular progressives but it's one that you see in kosher laws Hinduism and Islam you see in a lot of religions you see if you go to like a yoga store someplace where they talk
about chakras and and toxins you see it there too the idea that the body is a temple and you want to guard against impurities and the left Winger right wing has more worry about lack of Purity uh in general the right um if you look
at who moralizes sex um uh the body who would be more opposed to using the body as a way to just express your own individual values it tends to pop up more on the right but elements of the left have it again if you go look at yoga I have a uh it seems to be
migrating toward the left so GMOs when it comes to food or buying a t-shirt from the wrong country is disgusting yes but if these can migrate I have this picture of these relatively fixed modules and leftwing people have more of some and right-wing people have more of
others but we also see them migrating so sort of how flexible is this so so this this is the key idea of the of these being these sort of modules that they're not modules that are going off in your head at the moment of judgment so much
as they are modules in us from birth and they are they are what cultures can build upon as you develop so think about it as like taste buds um we have uh we have these innate taste buds because this is the way our ancestors live they
ate fruit and meat and so we have sweet and sour receptors and we have MSG detectors which guide us to meat um but we don't just have a Cuisine here I am talking to the expert on on culture variations here in cuisine in a sense we don't just have a Cuisine that's based
on sweet sour salt it's um each Cuisine is a cultural creation that has to ultimately please the same taste buds Universal taste buds so think about it for Morality we all have the same let's call them six moral taste buds the sixth
one that I didn't mention before is Liberty versus oppression um people resent being forced or told what to do if they don't perceive it as legitimate so we have these six moral taste buds uh and if you raised in a desert island with nobody maybe you'd have them but
they wouldn't be developed but whenever you have a culture emerging it's going to build on certain aspects of and not others if you have a warrior culture if you're constantly being attacked boy is it going to build on the Loyalty The
Authority the sanctity ones to create these TR this tribal Consciousness and you can see that in a kind of a joke form in fraternities fraternities even on secular campuses fraternities will build on that those sort of tribal foundations whereas if you go to say
Amsterdam uh or New York or places that are port cities with a lot of variety diversity Commerce those tend to thin down the moral domain they don't tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy they tend to focus more on
I'll tell you what you don't hurt me I won't for you you honor your contracts all honor mine and this is a more appropriate morality for diversity and for Commerce so if we get to a very fundamental question left-wing individuals and right-wing individuals
and let's take for now only America as people in other ways how different do you think they are or is it just there are these semi accidental triggers which have set off certain modules in the left Wingers in different modules and the right Wingers but otherwise they're
going to dress the same they're going to treat their spouses the same way or not are they fundamentally different not fundamentally different but different in predispositions so the most important finding in Psychology in the last 50 to
100 years I would say is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable the heritability coefficients vary between point3 and6 or 30 to 60% of the variance under some assumptions can be explained by the genes it's the largest uh the largest piece of variant
we can explain so um if you and I were twins separated at Birth and raised in different families our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue but once we're out
on our own we're going to sort of both Converge on our brain's natural level of religiosity same with politics whether you're on the right or left is not determined by your genes but you're predisposed you find you find variety and diversity and challenging Authority
really exciting well if that's the way you are as a kid even if you're raised in a conservative household once you go to college you're going to be attracted to more radical leftwing politics let's it hippie aside do leftwing people dress
differently than right-wing people adjusting for some core variables yes how do right-wing people dress well so the core pychology here is called openness to experience people on the left are higher on a variable called openness to experience people on the
right are lower on it but they're also higher on conscientiousness they're more neat orderly they make deadlines so really interesting research done by Sam Gosling uh at the University of Texas at Austin back when he was a grad student
or professor at Berkeley they went into people's dorm rooms they agreed okay you just leave your dorm room don't clean up just leave we're going to take photographs they come in they photograph everything another group of students now
has to just look at the photographs and guess what do you think liberal or conservative so if you're in a swing state you're in say proverbial Southern Ohio and in a natural setting you meet a person with what probability do you think you can guess or forecast if
they're leftwing or rightwing oh the I mean so even up would be0 five right yeah oh probably point 58.5 I mean something I mean look people are incredibly variable I'm a social scientist our goal is not to predict with perfect accuracy we're just trying
to extract what are the regularities under the surface that can explain some things of what we see on the surface but look put it this way you go to a suppose you're going to an academic conference well I don't know about Economist but if
it was psychologists or people in the humanities you go into the conference and everybody is wearing a suit and tie they're all very neat you look around you'd think I'm in the wrong room and you probably are um people who are conservative are what
what what um what Gosling found people are conservative they their rooms are more orderly and neat they have more calendars more postage stamps they're just better prepared to sort of be orderly and neat and get things done uh people on the left had more stylistic
elements uh more High Design Elements uh they had more varied books so in a variety of ways our our preference grow out of our innate temperaments so this is true in all mostly all cultures well that I couldn't say that I couldn't
been done the You' studied in Arisa India you've studied in rif Brazil you must have thought about the questions there and other places you've been yeah so you do find and look you see this if you look at ancient societies too Whenever there was an Empire um the
Empire always ran into trouble and at that point there are those who say our fortunes are because we have lost the ways of the elders the gods are punishing us for departing from the wisdom we need to return so those are the people I would bet who if you could
transplant them they would grow up to be more conservative they feel they feel the moral Decay they feel the loss of the tradition um other people say no no we need to March forward we need to radically change things so there are
certain there are certain psychological Dimensions that are Universal politics grows up around that but the way politics grows up in a in a in a open commercial secular society is just so different from say what I saw in Poland last year where you've got this like
gigantic neutron bomb of Communism so what it means to be on the left and the right in Poland is really different from what it means here because if you're on the left you're associated with the hated Communists so the dimensions of
psychology are Universal but the politics that grows up on it is very influenced by local circumstance would it be a partial test of your theory if we looked at a lot of different cultures and asked who are the people who dress neatly and who have a lot of calendars
and stamps and uh to measure whether those were typically the conservatives yes that would be a test that would be a tax to claim if it is true and here I'm drawing on Research by my NYU colleague John Jo and Sam Gosling and others if it
is true that the underlying psychological dimension of openness to experience and also conscientiousness if those are what underly political choices then the answer is yes to your thought experiment that would be great to test I'm interested in occupational choices
you've probably thought about this also oh yeah if you look at dentists they're pretty Republican doctors lean heavily Democratic superficially they're doing similar things they're taking care of bodies Motel owners lean Republican or
conservative but inke Keepers quote unquote being Democratic or liberal why do we see these regularities what are they showing um well to if you were to go to say India where there's a cast system you probably wouldn't see it very
much um but to the extent that the mo modern economies open up more and more choice for people to make career choices to express their values rather than acting on economic necessity you're going to see it so this is what we're what we have in what's called
postmaterialist societies uh you know my father made the choice to be a chemical engineer he was born in the depression he was poor uh it turns out he didn't like that he did make the choice to then switch to patent law but he and his
generation were very Guided by economic pressures and necessities and you do a job because your uncle has an opening for you but ever since you know know you and I went into universities we're teaching all these undergrads um they're thinking well you know what's right for
me what what's the right fit for me um and it's the same thing as we were talking about with the clothing if you are interested in um uh if you're interested in learning new things and trying to change the world and things like that you'll be more likely drawn to
occupations that have a predominance of leftwing people Hollywood is overwhelmingly left and that it it ends up perhaps there's discrimination after the fact but um it does create creative areas are almost always heavily left uh
police uh military um uh engineering there are certain things that that are more conducive to Minds predisposed to conservatism now as you know when one thinks about this problem there's a question of what gets put in the realm of morality what's a moral choice like
in Britain in the 50s do you are you mod or are you rocker correct okay but today that just looks to us like silly convention like who could get upset over that yeah we understand it's you know uh PC versus MAC that's really what matters
correct uh so what what are the forces which determine what gets put into morality and what gets put into convention oh boy that's a good question um things that involve things that clearly involve harm violations of Rights there are certain things that are
predisposed to be moralized but the genius of human beings is because we're so tribal we can moral ize anything that gets tagged as being predictive of what group you belong to or being part of them uh so you know it's funny we see
this in our politics uh ideas uh there was something in Obamacare the core idea of Obamacare was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation I think it was there was a I can't remember what it was was exchanges whatever it is the Mandate the
that's it the Mandate exactly so um so an idea uh so a mandate a mandate well that's interesting that would seem to be more of a a leftwing idea because the right in America tends to be wary of mandates but the economists there concluded there's some benefit to doing
this um so it came up as more of a from the from the right but as soon as it was then promoted by uh Obama in such a tribal and hostile time then it was tagged as bad um almost anything that take that anything that can be associated with an ongoing hot conflict
can be moralized let me ask you a very concrete question so I've had dialogue with people on the left and I've made a harm argument to them I've said based on work by Mark Paulie if you look at the people who are covered by the Mandate
they have to pay more for health insurance than it's worth actually most of them so Obamacare is imposing a harm on them now generally I agree with your characterization as the left is is more worried about harm but when I make this
harm argument there's a remarkable lack of interest in it now it could be the data are wrong it could be Mark Paulie's paper is wrong you know I would Grant all that but the Striking thing is they're not interested in hearing about the harm so isn't it the case that
people just slot in the harms they want so conservatives are very sensitive to some kinds of harms like a deserving white student who didn't get into Yale because of affirmative action and that to them is a focal harm and for the left
people not getting adequate health care because there's no Medicaid expansion that's a focal harm so isn't it more the split of what gets put into harm as opposed to yeah first of all uh the idea of the harm Foundation isn't just something has happened that is against
my interests it's that we have a visceral sense of seeing somebody physically suffering crying we feel compassion for this real this emotional suffering so simply saying this policy is going to work against your interest that doesn't really activate the harm
Foundation but the more important point is the one that you suggest which is once people have taken a position on something especially if it relates to Sacred values something that's become sacred to them they're pretty much
impervious to arguments at that point and so let's go back to uh to the basics of moral psychology in my book The Righteous Mind I boil it all down to three principles we've already touched on the middle the second one the first principle is um intuitions come first
strategic reasoning second so the basic fact about moral argument is that we're not really listening to each other we're not actually open to reasoning we start with our gut feeling or our partis and loyalty and at that point we become
lawyers we're really good at being lawyers and knocking down the other guys's arguments the second principle is there's more to morality than harm and fairness that's the moral foundations that we just talked about and left and
right while they all have all the foundations the left tends to focus more on the care harm and the fairness reciprocity not so much on the more tribal ones the third principle is morality binds and blinds and that's also relevant here that's the idea that
people are incredibly good at forming groups the the key idea to keep in mind is um the Arab proverb me against my brother me and my brother against St cousin me my brother and cousin against the stranger that's basic social psychology coalitional psychology so
once it's become left versus right over Obamacare uh it doesn't matter really what however good your arguments are I'm not listening uh I'm I've got my team and we are on a mission to defeat your team let's turn to some of your work on
campus and with this idea of political correctness I would say you're the person uh who's done the most in a good way to improve the quality of that debate and uh make campus life more tolerant or more open and I'm very appreciative of that uh but let me ask
you a question about how far this can go so let's take your vision of morality based on what you've called social intuitionism and this modularity where where things just just get triggered if I look at America today it does seem a
more tolerant place than the America I grew up with oh yeah for for very individuals not maybe not all minorities but many minorities uh this is very much a positive thing so if morality is fundamentally so nonrational or irrational in some key ways is it not
the case we're always either undershooting or overshooting the Target that we can never hit it just right so maybe for America to be more tolerant you need the Norms to be quite crude and blunt and overstated and we get this
political correctness and yes it's bad but maybe it's less bad than when we used to undershoot the Target so I I think you need to break it down in terms of what domain you're looking at it's unquestionably true that life in America is getting better rapid you know rapidly
for gay people in particular and over a long period of time for African-Americans um for every minority so the objective facts are getting better and better and better but campus is not America campus is a college campus is a very very particular
Community unusual community in a lot of ways so uh I've learned a lot about what's going on since so um thank you for your praise of of what I've done it's due largely to the fact that Greg luiana came to me with this brilliant idea about what's going on on campus how
the current campus climate is teaching students to think in distorted ways uh and so that Atlantic article happened to come out just before Missouri and Yale and other campuses melted down but you have to see college campuses as being U
institutions that were designed or intended to be placed is where people come up with against diverse ideas they're challenged uh and as in a Marketplace you know Monopoly destroys the a lot of the value of a Marketplace if you have a monopoly on ideas in an
intellectual Marketplace you kill the marketplace um so campuses are supposed to be places where nobody has Monopoly on ideas but they've become that in the last few years um so uh so even if things are getting better and better and
especially on college campuses will never there's a paradoxical sense in which the better they get the worse the protest will be and it's not coincidental that most of the protests have been at the most egalitarian left leaning School sure so
Yale Amhurst uh Brown These are among the most Progressive places and here we need to bring in this really wonderful article on victimhood culture uh by what Manning and Campbell are the last names um if if listeners just Google uh where
do where micro really come from they'll find I did a summary of this article it's this incredibly brilliant article which points out that despite things are getting better and better despite that fact that actually makes these M charges
of microaggression proliferate because it's only when you're the very Ealing group and you have Bure bureaucrats or institutions that will punish any sort of conflict then everybody's incentivized to plead I've been harmed I've been a victim or he's been a victim
I'm standing up for him so microaggression culture uh and the a lot of the current campus protests only emerges when you actually get really close to to incredibly egalitarian open Society let's say we take the military a very different environment the military
is not for profit it intersects with it intersects with corporate America but it's not itself a corporation it can at times be highly inefficient and we at least try to overcome this by building up an ethos which is in some ways L
homogeneous and it tells people to behave a certain way and there are strong group norms and a lot of sanctions and one may not like all of that but typically one sees something like that is needed in the military now if we take colleges and universities
they're big they're bureaucratic they're not for profit the incentives uh are not traditional commercial incentives could it be the case that for higher education to function well it needs these tight strict Norms tight strict norms will
expost always look in some way silly as they can in the military and maybe this is a semi second third best efficient way of running Academia yes or no no um so again you're looking at it like like you look at these giant systems and then
let's take that analogy to another giant system but you have to think about what is each system designed to produce so diversity is divisive there's a lot of social science research on this the more you make something diverse the less trust there will be the harder it is for
people to work to sure so if your goal if you're the US military any military um yes you in the 70s the Army in particular graced ethnic diversity and they did a brilliant job of it it's actually quite striking that the military has done things have gotten
better and better and better in terms of the racial climate the military and worse and worse and worse in the academy we can come back to that um but if you're the military you need cohesion and that's what they say above all unit
cohesion that's our we must have that so you want basically very racial and other kinds of diversity in a sea of uniformity you want to give people a sense of common Mission have common uniforms not trying to turn out classes of you know our graduating class will go
forth and they will all work together as a unit to accomplish great enough that's not what it's about we want clashing ideas we don't want uniformity and homogeneity we want the benefits of diversity But the irony is we have so
focused on racial and other kinds of diversity demographic diversity because of the political slant of the University because of the Sacred values of the campus left we have so focused on that kind of diversity and there's this wonderful line from George will uh in
some essay he wrote there's a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything except thought and that's where we are we now have almost a kind of uniformity the military has where everybody's on the left which gives us
cohesion but that kills the very function of the University which is to have diversity of thought so that we change our minds we challeng each other place of ideas in The Sciences this is not that big a problem that's correct except for environmental science but is
it at least possibly the case that we're seeing the greatest threat to intellectual diversity in some of the areas which matter least and when the stakes are high we we overcome it physics looks pretty good computer science looks pretty good no it's not
right there are two universities now but it's not which ones matter more and which ones matter less it's which one what is the sacred value so the sacred value uh the sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was
truth now it was not perfect but we all talk that way as though you know I mean look at the look at the motos of Harvard and Yale veritos Lux at veritos is right there on the motto Veritas truth so we made a Big Show and it was largely true
of saying this is what we're here for we're here to find truth but in the in the 1970s and 80s as we had a big influx of of of baby groomers um uh who were involved in social protest who were fighting for very good causes civil
rights women's rights um they fled into the academy in the 70s and 80s they get tenure in the 80s and 90s also in the 1990s the greatest Generation begins to retire and there were a lot of Republicans who uh who became professors after World War II but the 90s is the
decade where everything flips um at the start of the 1990s the overall Left Right ratio of the academy taking all departments was two to one just twice as many people on the left as right that's fine that's not a problem but by 2005 it
had gone to five to one five people on the left for everyone on the right and that's and those people on the right are mostly engineering nursing things like that if you look at the core the humanities and social sciences other than economics it's closer to 10 to one
or 20 to one in other words liberal voice I'm sorry uh right-wing or libertarian or social conservative voices have basically vanished between 95 1995 and 2001 so this has made us unfunctional but it's it's it's in the social sciences and Humanities where the
sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims that's the division one University in The Sciences still pursues truth the other university in the social sciences and Humanities pursues social justice let's say I'm a
Libertarian and I notice I suspect you would agree that Libertarians are somewhat over represented on the internet intellectual discourse because of the personality traes which you've written about yourself on the other hand the universities especially top universities
are more leftwing on net should I be happy with this tradeoff or upset about it no you should be very upset that your fellow Libertarians are wasting their time in flame Wars commenting on people on the internet while in the academy
where even though Libertarians actually have the highest IQ they are the best systemizing uh the best at systemic thinking they should be over represented um there's interesting research uh I think it's by Shields and D somewhere I
read this recently that as people with libertarian leanings go through undergraduate uh those who are inclined towards the academy end up concentrating in economics for a variety of reasons so there so there are a lot of Libertarians in economics I wish we had more in
Psychology I wish there were more in sociology and political science um so no you should be upset that um because because Libertarians would be the easiest easiest source of political diversity to spread throughout the academy it's very hard to find Social
conservatives in the academy here's a question from a reader at marginal Revolution as you Jonathan have delved into morality more deeply are there any examples of something you considered harmless before that now you think may
actually be harmful once second third Etc social effects are taken into account oh yes when I was younger uh I remember thinking oh you know know marriage isn't so important all that matters is uh you know that you course you need to take care of the kids but
you know people should be free to students to do what they want and and um uh I've come to see so I started off on the left I in fact I got into Political psychology in 2004 precisely to help the Democrats because I thought they were
getting their rear ends kicked by the Republicans who knew how to talk about morality whereas core and Carrie just didn't have a clue um so since I started researching uh conservatism and libertarianism um I've just found that they make a lot of points that as a
social scientist I have to agree oh that's a good point and so the overriding importance of family stability if you raise kids with fam Incredible family stability they just come out better in fact they're much more likely to rise economically than if
they're raised with any sort of family instability so I I think I'm more concerned about family Arrangements precisely because of these second and third levels effects let's see what else haven't I changed my views on drugs I still am barely uh still in pretty Pro
legalization decriminalization um I guess in a way become more libertarian but with a real sense of respect for what social conservatives say about family stability let's say people say harmful things or take a classic case there's a football team
called the Washington Redskins yeah and I'm pretty sure most of its fans the intent is not offense but there is an offense there for many people yeah uh and it's called a harm and there are some demands that name be changed and there is a a public or
social Dimension to the name that if certain groups are insulted enough times maybe there's a demoralization or other kinds of prejudice be become seen as more effective how do you think through whether the Washington Redskins should
be called the Washington Redskins and does this not mean that on campus there should be some political correctness yes no this is a great question and because these really are tough questions and um you know so just just two principles
here one is we should all try thought experiments to reverse the group and see if it matters and so you know I'm Jewish I think you're Jewish are you no mostly Irish okay um so you know suppose it was the Washington rabbis or though it's not
very Fierce sort of name but um you know and so or the Washington Jews or anything now if imagine a football game in which the fans of the Washington rabbis bring little scissors as though they're going to circumcise their opponents and that's their big chant
we're going to circumcise you and it just sort of makes the whole thing look ridiculous so I am sympathetic to some of these even though you know as the main thing I'm concerned about these days is political correctness the culture of microagression the Hy
percentage I'm very concerned about that um but there is some there is really something legitimate here to having your group be mocked and that I think might be the principle so the worst idea there God there's so many bad ideas one of the
worst and most ridiculous ideas is the idea of cultural appropriation the idea that if you wear you know if you go to West Africa and you buy a necklace or you buy a shirt and you come back and you wear it someone say you can't do that you're appropriate in their culture
that is absurd cultural Evolution requires us to exchange ideas but what about the actual mocks or semi mocks uh should private colleges prohibit them the private let's say you're your brown or Yale and students set up like a
lacrosse team and they call it you know the brown Redskins and they do some rituals which offend some people no matter what the intent would be should brown or you I'll step in and say you can't do that so there's a big big line between saying brown or yellow should
step in and tell people what they can so in general I think no in general um the idea no they shouldn't step in or should not step in okay we should be extremely limited when we say that authorities can step in and change things the very fact
of doing that encourages microaggression culture encourages students to orient themselves towards appealing to these authorities um the point of the microaggression article is that young people today have become moral dependence if somebody insults them they
can't straighten out themselves they have to go right to the authorities and this embroils everybody in eternal battles College used to be a lot of fun when I went now it's constant conflicts let me try another analogy on you mention mentioned the Army but take
private corporations and brown and Yale they are in a sense private corporations Harvard was originally I wouldn't call them restrictions on Free Speech I think that's the wrong phrase but if one's going to use the phrase that way there
are numerous restrictions on Free Speech within companies at the workplace if you went to the water cooler and set a number of offensive of things you would be asked to stop and eventually fired and I don't see anything wrong with that
right so if we think of Brownell or Harvard as like a normal company isn't there still even with all the nonsense a lot more free speech on campus than in actual companies yes and there should be again a company is organized to to be
effective in the world you you just like the Army where their priority is unit cohesion in a company your goal isn't to encourage everyone to express their values and and criticize each other your goal to get them to work together but
you need a lot of that in the University though right no you need basic civility you need uh people to be able to live with each other to critique each other's ideas and to not then file charges because they were critiqued companies live in fear of lawsuits and labor law
is encouraging this um more than ever before universities are very very different where did draine I think you know we're seeing now should the wiro Wilson school be renamed should Cal College be renamed and so I have some I maybe there are funny thoughts on this
but um here are a couple of principles one is that the name of your school or I went to El undergrad your Residential College is as part of your identity and so students at Calon College if they want to change that name because it's
offensive to African-Americans and to and to many people um um if they want to change that name I think that that's that they should have that right it should I think that's a good thing we just should have a process so that it's not just the loudest group in the space
of one year that gets to do it so there should be a process that says if you know three4 of the people vote to do it and you take that vote two years apart then it should be done now if it's a question of there's a statue on canvus
there was a painting on canabus you know Cecil roads you know you know I think it's Oxford um you know RADS was you know big donor rhs was a racist according to his writings a colonialist if it's that there's a statue on campus
that's a very very different matter because once we start saying we're going to put to a vote everything everybody gets to aine on whether we take down this take down this before you know it you're taking down everything because presumably religious students are
offended by certain things conservative students are offended by certain things um everyone's offended by something so um so you you have to have limits you have to have a process and at present we don't have a process we just have
outrage uh stoked by social media uh and then we have craving University presidents who can't stand up to to the protesters who say okay we'll do it let's say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale and you could more or less do what you thought
was best without constraint what would you change oh gosh I change a lot of things uh one thing that I would do um is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment and that means that I would look for
people who uh so Yale in particular but all of the top schools have a huge problem that they have basically social justice Warriors who are so empowered and so angry um that they dominate discourse and uh you basically have the IL the small illiberal left has
completely terrorized the larger liberal left so Yale right now is quite dysfunctional students there say they can't speak up they can't speak up in class they pressure to on Facebook if somebody sends around a petition for
some left cause they feel they have to endorse it even if they don't want to so Yale is a mess right now as a lot of schools are um that should be the top diversity issue is intellectual diversity I would stop admitting for social justice cred in other words if
you say oh I joined this I started this protest group and we got this overturned basically you know I think a lot of students know the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activists well top schools are now full
of social justice activists and it's no there're no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activist so you know what's that old show Doctor Hurt I do this well stop doing this they should stop admitting social justice Warriors
they should start admitting people who sure they've got the guts to disagree we now move to a segment of the conversation called underrated versus overrated I threw out a bunch of names or concepts you tell me if you think
they're underrated or overrated and why number one Sigman Freud um well he certainly was overrated for a long time in academic psychology his value was essentially zero uh so that might be underrated um in that Freud's ideas about development were completely
worthless um but he was a really interesting provocative writer should probably be read a little bit more um in Psychology um overrated in Humanities they still rely on him for as a as a psychologist in humanity so depends where you are and humanity is overrated
in Social psychology underrated LSD overrated or underrated um I would say underrated uh in that there are um I I did a lot of reading about about uh about drugs in my late 20s and I was interested to find that there are only a
few drugs that people make religions around I forget the name of the chemical class but it's whatever the the common compound is in LSD psilocin yag those things um those drugs have religions built around them whereas you know heroin morphine alcohol uh I mean
alcohol plays a role in religion so there's some drugs that ruin people's lives and there are other drugs that enrich people's lives um I think psychedelics have an incredibly positive track record in terms of enriching people's lives versus damaging them and
so um to the extent that they are rarely used and widely feared uh I would say that they are underrated and I'm basing this on the research uh that was done in the 60s and it's just starting now that when you do when you give people uh
psychedelic drugs and controlled settings be they cancer patients or uh criminals in jail um the therapeutic effects tend to be quite positive so I think the the moral Panic against drugs in the 60s through the 80s was uh too much and therefore psychedelic drugs in
particular are now underrated I've done one of these dialogues with Peter keal and he's a big fan of Rene jard and his theory of sacrificial violence do you have an opinion no many people have emailed me about him and I know I need to read him um if I think he's vaguely
durkheimian that is yes that so if he's durkheimian then I'm in favor of him by by that I just mean I don't want to sound too academic and obscure here just that if you look at what humans are doing so much of what we do is weird and
inexplicable but after you read durkheim you see oh we're trying to form communities we're trying to form moral communities that will give order punish deviant allow us to work together um so if that's sort of what Gerard is about
then I would agree with you Leo stra I don't know enough about him I know also on my T read list reading through a lot of your past work which I did to prepare for this conversation uh this struck me and I didn't expect it to be the case but at
times I was thinking more of Claud Levi Strauss the Anthropologist than I thought I was going to under or overrated um again I well I can't say because again it depends where you are so in symbolic anthropology I think he is still quite highly rated
outside of that I think very few people know about him I read a little bit of his work when I was a postdoc at Chicago with Richard scheder um and so what I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as uh you know people are making symbols we live in a
rich symbolic world a world of narrative uh we need to interpret those that I think is quite right and that's again what I love about cultural anthropology um is it gives you a way of of interpreting cultures where it then
leads you to deny that there's also a human nature that is based in our Evolution then it becomes a problem but I just can't remember what you know which part of those are is attributed to Levy stress so you're a trained psychologist in addition to your most
famous work you have a lot of other papers which are very well cited but less famous for other public intellectuals doing what you'd call traditional psychological research and here we have these economists they do what they call behavioral economics and
they tread into the field of psychology do they know what they're doing behavioral economics overrated or underrated oh um properly rated right now with one caveat so you know we psychologists have long felt oh you know those economists they're the only ones
that are ever consulted in Congress and they get you know they have all these high Prestige jobs they have a Nobel Prize nobody listens to us well you know some some economists beginning with Robert Frank and well Dan Conan uh dick faor um the fact that economists
have been listening to psychologists and making our work more welln of course Conan did a lot of that work um and he is a psychologist um so that's all good I'm I'm thrilled with the way that's going the only the only caveat that I
would put which I would say if they don't do this soon then they would be overrated is the behavioral Economics work um is an example of this wonderful dictum from uh from Robert z a famous social psychologist which is that cognitive psychology is social
psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero so to the extent that behavioral economists are saying look at a person shopping what influences their decision oh you know if it's if the if the apple is at at eye level so they're looking at like loan
consumers who are trying to make choices to optimize their outcomes that's great work but that's setting all the interesting variables to zero the interesting stuff is all social it's what does this say about me what uh uh uh you will I be ostracized from my
group um so if if you if if behavioral economics becomes more social which I think will be the next phase then I would say it would deserve ever rising market value and Thor and deblin that was his initial vision for it actually
was that it' be quite social and that the idea of a social reference class was Central to people's behavioral biases interesting so I think so you know I think a I mean again this is a critique from outside but what a lot of people
say which sounds right to me is that um you know the early economists were great social theorist I mean my God you read Adam Smith what a brilliant moral philosopher I me he know his story I mean they UND they thought so broadly and you tell me but it seems there was a
weird turn in the mid 20th century towards mathematics yes and that I think basically it made economists set all the interesting variables to zero anti- parsoni ISM underrated or overrated anti parimon well is have you ever heard anyone else say that other than me is
that no that's why I ask oh good oh well then of course I think it's underrated because I think so uh so parsimony is overrated um rather here's what I should say the pursuit of parsimony is a bad idea um it becomes almost a religious
Quest people think uh oh if I can explain this phenomena with one principle I have one I produced a better explanation uh and that's a disaster for the social sciences maybe it works in physics but again people are really
complicated much more so than matter so people who pursue parsimony scientists who pursue it and think that the simplest explanation is better than one that's a little more complicated that's a problem so I'm tring trying to advocate for what I'm calling anti
parsimony or anti par normatively you're a pluralist then and not like a utilitarian or no normatively I'm a pluralist yes and that means uh that there are many human values uh and this is straight from Isaiah Berlin there are many human values and if you take one
let's take Liberty extremism in defense of Liberty is no Vice wrong extremist in defense of any uh virtue becomes a vice it becomes sick it becomes something that leads to horrible inhumanity and brutality um so many people try to say
well all that really matters is care and compassion H but if you take that to its absurd extreme you get kind of close to what we have on canvas which is we will destroy anybody's rights in order to protect these seven victim classes some
of your core ideas in Psychology and also I would say anthropology if you had to pick a famous movie or famous novel or play that Illustrated those that you would use to teach some of your IDE what would you point to and what your oh boy oh my God I should have a great answer
to this question I am so poorly read my wife makes fun of me that I haven't read a novel since since I met her in in the year 2000 I've just been so busy reading non-fiction um let's see you know gosh almost any of these BBC epics anything
that illustrates I think sort of you know English Country Life English uh aristocratic life in the 19th century um illustrates a lot sort of a kind of a a rich morally Rich Society with hierarchy and all those things that have sort of disappeared uh from Modern morality um
so I should have a much better answer for you but I think just reading novels from non-western cultures and I would consider you know 19th century British aristocracy to be sort of a foreign culture now just can give you an idea of
um of of cultures other than our own final segment let me ask you some questions about your earlier psychological research because a lot of people aren't familiar about that but let me just start with a very direct personal question what is it that you
find disgusting what do I find disgusting these days I find illiberalism disgusting uh the idea that one person takes it upon himself to shout down or shut down someone else to decide I I or my group we get to tell you whether you can speak or not I find
this really disgusting uh and so this is I think one of the reasons I'm so upset by what's going on on campus um is that the the the the a certain group of of activists decides you know that somebody's going to come speak on campus
if you want to stand out and protest outside and hold up signs that's fine but how dare you go in and Shout them down so that people who come to listen can't hear I find that really revolting um so that's C some insects and serve them to you you know with with chili and
lme on top you'd be fine with that may not be your favorite but you wouldn't say oh this is disgusting might just be oh I don't like turkey sandwiches which is I don't like turkey sandwiches oh if you me so so so I mean one of my one of
my just little you know small moments of insight my studying disgust uh was when Paul Rosen and I were working with a Japanese colleague um sumeo imada and he brought a can of Honey covered grasshoppers from Japan into the into Paul's office in the about the year 1990
and I was a disgusted researcher and I thought okay good I've never eaten an insect before I'm going to try it and so you know I took a I took one I brought up to my mouth intending to eat it and my throat just gagged I've never had
such a clear gag response my throat said no way you're not putting that in um and I just like forced my hand into my mouth and once it's beyond the lips interesting once it's beyond the lips then disgust iser it's too late and so uh then I was able to eat it but no I
still find eating insects disgusting are all kinds of morality compromised in psychopathy uh all kinds we actually have some data on this um so the answer is generally yes because they have no moral emotions I think there are certain
kinds that they can understand a little better but you know it hasn't really been studied well enough because everybody's been focused on care and fairness as morality psycho Psychopaths have no sense of care or Compassion or
sympathy um they they're happy to cheat they don't care about fairness but I think people haven't really studied group loyalty tribalism hierarchy um my prediction is that all forms are compromised um I know there's a paper I think I I know I'm on a paper that say
basically has that as the title but I'm trying to remember how clear the data was on on all of those whether it goes beyond just the moral foundation's questionnaire so yes as far as I can tell Psychopaths have no real morality they do get angry if they feel
disrespected sometimes but that's not it you have some very interesting papers on moral elevation the idea that you can Elevate people and this is an important sympathetic relation actually Adam Smith wrote about this and you can induce them
to be more caring caring in the good way you can induce nursing Behavior you can induce all kinds of positive responses so if a student at say comes up and says Jonathan I would like to engage in some moral elevation on campus what would you tell
them to do um so moral elevation happens when you display virtues in a way that's really powerful virtues of caring and compassion and loyalty tend to be the ones that get written about um courage also can be quite moving um so gosh in a
really politicized climate uh what would be elevating standing up for principes standing up for people's rights to speak uh probably get your head cut off if you tried it um let's see what would be Mor morally elevating on a campus I mean
usually people would go for social justice kinds of elevation showing their their Devotion to oppressed groups but that's a kind of a moral signaling um so I don't know what I would advise that person I guess I would advise them um the research on the effects of elevation
is complicated I had originally hoped that if I simply showed someone an elevating video it'd be more likely to help others right afterwards and I didn't find that a few other researchers found it but it's a small effect because
when you're touched movement inspired it doesn't make you go out and take action it it's kind of calming you um you I think you have parasympathetic activation you're not prepared for vigorous action but I think you learn more I think you take in more and I
think it can change your values there's a big debate lately about a replication crisis or posed replication crisis in many fields but a lot of it's been social psychology right what's your view on that debate uh so uh I have good friends on both sides and and they all
make incredibly good points um I think Brian NOK who's been leading the the charge on the problems in Psychology um is largely right that our methods have been sloppy which has allowed us to um to engage in practices where we're just
more likely than we should be get a significant result and then of course that's more likely to get published uh so given that we find the same problem in cancer research and biomedical research in almost every field where it's been looked at um I think that the
replication P crisis is very real I think it should be a top priority for science um a lot of a lot of my work is on how we are not fully rational creatures we are deeply emotional and tribal creatures and so if you have this
idealized view of research archers and our our our our n hypothesis significant testing is based on an idealized view of researchers who are basically testing samples honestly and well you know this could only happen one in 20 times by
chance but we're not those creatures we want certain outcomes to happen we make certain choices unconsciously so I think we all have to up our game I don't think there's anything special about social psychology it's no worse than other fields but we have been the leaders at
actually addressing it and saying why is this why why are we not able to rep each other's work so much um so I actually am impressed that the Young Generation has really embraced this and simply committing to making your data available
if you know that other people are going to get access to your SPSS file or whatever your data file and they're going to be looking over boy are you're goingon to be a lot more careful so I think just by raising the crisis raising the alarm last year the quality of our
work is going to go substantially up I'm really uh excited by this what's the best replacement for religion in modern secular society oh boy the best replacement B question Derk Ian question yeah yeah you know I a few years ago I
would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it but given what's happened last year on campuses I'm really afraid of it because you might think well humanitarianism should do this we should all have a religion of
you know helping the poor helping each other now of course it's really important to help the PO it's really important to help people oppressed but once you make it a religion that means you are impervious to evidence you are committed to certain religious
rituals even if those rituals make things worse so for example I've been studying the research on affirmative action diversity training and as far as I can tell there's no evidence that they make things better and there is some
evidence that it makes things worse now it's messy I can't say for sure that they do but the point is um we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse U and the activists are largely asking for things that will
make things worse much more affirmative action much bigger racial preferences which which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom um which is going to inflame Prejudice not reduce it um so I think once you make something
a religion you then can't can't you're not open to evidence you you do really crazy stupid things so I think what I would say is let's not have a replacement for religion let's set things up so that there isn't um there isn't a big religion that unites us all
to take on our enemies um let's try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations but we don't have a big sense of national purpose last question to finish
up who is your best and most important critic in any of these areas and why boy it's hard to think because you know when you engage with in debates with people you tend to see what's wrong with them so uh so my colleague at myu John J um
has uh we we had a lot of good discussions together um and he critiqued critiqued me early on in ways that in fact that led me to formulate the liberty and oppression hypothesis uh Foundation um let's see Ronnie janof Bulman uh at University of Massachusetts
has pointed out that there's some gaps in moral foundations Theory um that we haven't taken account sort of the motivations behind social justice and social change movements um so I think there have been some people who have critiqued moral foundations Theory as it
is um um what's the best tell tell us again what you think the best criticism is even if you don't agree with it well the best criticism is just that we've left some things out which is surely true so what's been exciting is to see
that there haven't there's there's one critic Kurt gray who has said that basically morality is just one thing harm um and that has to be wrong yeah I just I just can't see the I mean he hasn't really put forth an argument as to why why we would even try to fit
everything to the procrastinate that I don't really see the advantage of that other than parsimony he's a parimon um so other critics have simply said well okay sure there must be something innate and okay there are probably multiple
things and if you agree with those two things then that's most moral foundations Theory and then of course that morality develops on top of those so it's Mo you know it's mostly critics whove said you left out this or or these
two things should be combined and that's the kind of really constructive criticism that we need because when we started the theory we put forth these five foundations and we didn't say well this is it we know these are the five we said this is our first pass you know
from doing a lot of reading this is our first guest but let's see let's see how it evolves and Campus Life your best critic um they haven't that's the funny thing that there really havn't been it um so when Greg and I when Greg Lan and
I wrote this Atlantic article you know it was talked about all over the place a lot of people told us privately that they loved it they were often afraid to say so publicly almost nothing was written against it it's the weirdest thing my wife was actually kind of
concerned that there'd be this Avalanche of criticism and there'd be a lot of anger directed towards us but really the only things that were written said oh well you guys are white males you're just Defending Your Privilege and that's
like most of the argument um other people said well you know trigger warnings actually are kind of useful even if they can also be harmful that's about it it's been the most amazing thing there's been really no coherent criticism of of of of what withana I
have said anyway Jonathan thank you for your time it's been an honor and pleasure always a pleasure to talk with [Music] you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app
and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show my next conversation will be with Camille Paglia on April 12th for more information visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music]